A question of faery blood...

My all time favorite book is The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I read it in my mid-teens and pretty much converted it into my religion for at least a couple of years. Morgaine, the heroine, is a priestess of an ancient religion. It's a feminist retelling of the King Arthur myth. There's a scene in the book where she gets lost in the faery world, which has receded so far from the human world that time there no longer runs at the same rate as the human world. Morgaine can go to faery because she has a touch of faery blood. 

I decided that way, way back there must be faery blood in my family, definitely on my mom's side, but possibly on my dad's side, too. You never know.

A couple of years ago my husband and I went to England. The amazing man that he is, he didn't blink when I wanted to leave London to embark on a six hour journey involving trains, buses and endless English countryside to visit Avalon. I had visions of parting the mists and calling up the barge. I'd probably be in the real Avalon now if we hadn't gotten to Glastonbury at  4 p.m. on Sunday after everything was closed. We climbed the Tor, but it turns out the water receded a long, long time ago.

I'm just into the first chapter of my third book and faeries are definitely figuring into the plot. They turn out to be nothing like Zimmer-Bradley's faeries, but I'm still sure I've got a little spark of faery in me somewhere.

Here I am in London on that trip...

Here's the Tor:


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