Strange incident on Glastonbury Tor fires Newbury author's imagination
Fil Reid is a historical romance author local to Newbury and has written all her life, but only recently gained an agent, Susan Yearwood, and publisher Dragonblade Publishing.
“I discovered quite late in life that I have Asperger’s syndrome – after two of my sons were diagnosed – and that explained my lifelong obsession with King Arthur (and horses),” she says.
About 24 years ago she and her husband went on a visit to Glastonbury Tor and stopped on the way up for him to take some photos using a tripod and infrared film.
“He took four photos in rapid succession on motordrive and we then climbed the Tor.
“We saw nothing at the time that was out of the ordinary.”
But...
“That evening he developed the negatives and couldn’t believe his eyes.
“In the first photo all was normal, in the second the ruined church tower on the top of the Tor was fading, in the third it had vanished and in the fourth it was back.
“We wondered if in that infinitesimally small moment of time the camera had captured a glimpse back in time that the naked eye had not seen.
“And I wondered what would have happened had we been inside the tower when that happened.”
And so Fil’s idea for her first book, Guinevere: The Dragon Ring, was born.
It took a while to come to fruition though, but about four years ago Fil began writing it.
“I’d always wanted to write the story of King Arthur from the point of view of the women in his life, but I decided to concentrate on just Guinevere. Only she’s a 21st-century young woman (a librarian with an Arthurian scholar father just deceased) who falls back in time to the fifth century.
“I’ve literally been researching this time period and the legends and possible history of King Arthur all my life, and from the reviews I’ve had, I think this shows. I’ve kept on writing and there are six books in the series.”
In November 2020 Fil spotted a competition for historical romances and as it was free, she entered book one and then promptly forgot about it.
April last year came around and she received an email saying she’d made the semi-final list.
“I thought I’d better take a look at the publisher running the competition. What I saw convinced me I’d never win (think Georgette Heyer plus sex – I’m not dissing Georgette Heyer whose books I read in my teens, but you can see they’re nothing like a gritty Arthurian story) so I forgot about it again... until July, when they announced the winners on their Facebook page live. I won, and the prize was a three-book deal. Boy, was I surprised!”
Fil has had some excellent reviews on both amazon (US, UK, Canada, Australia, France) and on goodreads.
Read for yourself on
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59755007-the-dragon-ring
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60615155-guinevere
However, her publisher is an American company and so far Fil hasn’t succeeded in persuading them to make the books available to shops to order over here.
“So apart from the books I have myself, they can only be bought on Amazon as a paperback or ebook. Very frustrating. I have an amazing editor who loves my books and thinks they need greater recognition, but it’s so hard to get as a first-time author.”
