From the Ground Up

My debut novel is now available. Launched on September 14, 2024, it’s the first novel in a new historical mystery series.

In Elizabethan England, stonemason Robert Smythson is hired by the tyrannical Sir John Thynne to rebuild the great house of Longleat after a fire. When a gruesome body is discovered, Robert must find the courage to vanquish secrets from his past, confront a killer, and reclaim his reputation in a world where secrets are as deadly as the tools of his trade.

Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google and through Ingram Spark.

Published by Glowing Log Books, 2024.

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Lacock Abbey – a building full of stories since 1229.

Our story begins with Ela, Countess of Salisbury. Ela became the 3rd Countess of Salisbury in her own right following the death of her father in 1196. She later married William Longespée, an illegitimate son of King Henry II and the brother of King Richard 1. The couple had eight children. While William was away on a sea voyage, it was reported that there had been a shipwreck.  A knight called Reimund then asked Ela to marry him, but she refused, not believing that William had died. She was right. He was recovering in a monastery and eventually returned, visiting the King to complain that Reimund had tried to steal his wife. Reimund was also at that meeting, and shortly thereafter, William was found dead by poisoning.

Cloisters at Lacock Abbey

Ela never remarried, but inherited the post of Sheriff of Wiltshire in 1227. She then founded the Lacock Abbey in 1229, eventually joining it herself as a nun in 1238 and becoming abbess in 1240.

Augustinian nuns lived and prayed at Lacock from the 13th century until King Henry VIII closed all the old religious houses, kicked out the monks and nuns, and took the properties and their wealth for himself. Lacock Abbey was then sold to William Sharington in 1540. Sharington was one of the self-made men of the Tudor period, who climbed the social ranks through connections and corruption. Associated with Sir Thomas Seymour, he benefited from the dissolution of the monasteries by acquiring land and properties. He was a merchant in the wool trade, and became under-treasurer of the Bristol mint, where he clipped the coins minted and pocketed the profit. When Sir Thomas Seymour met his downfall, Sharington fell along with him, but turned on his friend and ensured his own freedom. Meanwhile, Thomas Seymour paid with his head.

Portrait of Sir William Sharington

William Sharington converted Lacock Abbey from a religious house to a private home. Interested in architecture, as many of these rising men were, he recognized the beauty and craftsmanship of the cloisters and religious rooms and kept them intact. He turned the upper story of the building, which had been an open and drafty nun’s dormitory and refectory, into a comfortable home. He also added an octagonal tower and a large stable block and courtyard.

Although married three times, Sharington didn’t have any children and upon his death in 1553, Lacock went to his brother Henry.

Sir William Sharington’s tomb
Detail of Sharington’s tomb with his trademark scorpion

One of Lacock’s most romantic (?) stories is of Henry’s daughter Olive, who wanted to marry John Talbot, but her father didn’t approve. The story goes that Olive was determined to get what she wanted so she jumped off the roof of Lacock Abbey into John’s waiting arms with such force that she knocked him unconscious, and he was believed dead. Once John revived, Henry Sharington relented and let his daughter marry the poor man.

Several generations later, William Henry Fox Talbot inherited Lacock at the age of five months. Fox Talbot was a bright student with interests in science and art among other things. He is credited with the development of the first photographic negative, and his first successful in-camera picture is of one of the windows of Lacock’s south gallery taken in 1835. Today there is a museum of photography history at Lacock.

Lacock Abbey first came to my attention through the friendship of Sir William Sharington with Sir John Thynne. The two were friends with similar backgrounds and ambitions. While the events in my book From the Ground Up are fictional, the two did exchange stonemasons and other craftsmen. Thynne later added octagonal banqueting houses to the roof at Longleat, similar to the one on the tower’s top floor.

The octagonal tower at Lacock Abbey

The Abbey had undergone several architectural renovations over the years, but many of the original features remain. You may have even seen them. Lacock Abbey and village now belong to the National Trust and have been used as film locations for such productions as Pride and Prejudice, the Cranford series, Wolf Hall, and several of the Harry Potter films, among others.

Professor Snape’s classroom from one of the Harry Potter films.

(All photos by Katherine J Scott)

Posted in Architecture/stonemasonry, England, Longleat, Travel | Leave a comment

Creativity in the time of Covid

If you will give yourself to study, you will easy every burden of life, you will neither wish for night to come or for the light to fail; neither shall you be worried or preoccupied with other things.

Seneca

During this pandemic I have lived from my heart and my hands – I have been the emotional hub of our family.  I have cajoled, cooked, cleaned, and complained.  I have listened, laundered, and languished.  I have baked, berated, and bribed.  I have gardened, groused, and given up.  I have protected my sanity by walking mile after mile in my neighborhood, completing several jigsaw puzzles, and rediscovering the joys of actual phone conversations.

Like everyone else, I have swung widely from absorbing every piece of news to avoiding all news.  I have given in to fear and I have had moments of great faith.  The search for toilet paper transformed into the search for sanity.  I have reached out to those who live alone, and I have wished I lived alone.

But I have not lived from my head.  Hopes of writing were dashed upon the rocks of family frailty.  The emotional needs of my family triumphed over the emotional needs of my characters.  First I stopped writing; then I stopped reading all but the fluffiest of stories.  Creative concentration was replaced with carbohydrate consumption.

And then a friend asked me to focus on the story of Hezekiah.  HezeWho?  Part of my year long study of Isaiah, Hezekiah is the subject of Isaiah chapters 36-39.  Suddenly I had four books open, note cards strewn on the table, bookmarks and page tags everywhere, and I was happy.  I went from one translation of the Bible to another, from our study book to an ambitious and inclusive commentary by J. Alec Motyer.  I traced Hezekiah’s history and the role of Assyria through the book of Isaiah.  My mind found something to latch onto, and it came alive.  For a few hours, I was engaged in an academic pursuit, and the fog that had descended around me began to lift.

It continues.  This week I volunteered to lead the study.  Now I’m deep into the conspiracy of the true authorship of Isaiah chapters 40-55.  How could Isaiah possibly write about something over 100 years off into the future?  How could he name both the conqueror and the liberator of the Jewish people before any of it happened?  I sat outside reading and taking notes and listening to the birds around me, and I was happy.

I am an academic at heart.  Studying and condensing material down into digestible nuggets is my gift.  By combining ideas and synthesizing knowledge into a usable whole, I find meaning.  To avoid learning and studying is to atrophy.  And I cannot be the emotional hub of my family if my emotional tank is empty.

So… to that end, I will pick up my pen again and write.  I will write blog posts, essays, poems, fiction, anything.  I commit to 10-15- blog posts in the month of May.  No one may read them.  And that’s okay.  They are for me, and by extension, for my family. 

Write on…..

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Seek His face

When you said, “seek my face,” my heart said to you “your face I will seek.” Psalm 27:8

October 15, 2011.  We had just brought our cat Misty home from the shelter.   That night everyone went to bed, and I stayed up late with her.  She stood on my lap, put her paws on my chest and looked deep into my eyes as if to ask “is this real?  Are you my family?  Is this my home?”  She sought reassurance, comfort, and security.  I told her, yes, you are home, you belong here now, you are safe, it is okay to relax.  Seven years, two months and fourteen days later, I held her as she transitioned to whatever home awaits her next.  But during that time she was home, and she was a valued and loved member of this family.

Now, Eliot has entered our lives and our home, along with his sister Aria.  Everything Eliot does is done with intensity, whether it’s playing, eating, sleeping, or grooming.  Every morning, as I sit in bed with my coffee and devotions, Eliot comes for a cuddle.  He climbs up on my chest and demands attention.  He shoves his face into my hands, begging me to rub his itchy places.  His eyes hold love, devotion, and trust in them.  When he’s had enough, his needs satisfied for the moment, he scampers off or just moves down the bed to bite my toes through the blankets.

I think about these two cats who loved so easily and sought out assurance and security by climbing up into my lap.  Where are you seeking assurance and security?  Whose lap are you crawling up into?

In Washington, D.C., there are two laps which remind me of God.  The first is the Lincoln Memorial, where a larger than life Abraham Lincoln looks down towards the Washington Memorial and beyond to the Capitol.  In college I spent many evenings at his feet.  He watches over the city from his throne, formal, impersonal, rigid.  There is a presence about him, immovable and solid. 

The second lap is more approachable.  It is that of Albert Einstein.  He’s easier to miss, harder to find.  Tucked behind some trees on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences sits a bronze sculpture of a wise grandfather.  He’s slumped, slightly rumpled, and you can climb up and sit in his lap.  I have done it many times.

God is a little of both: full of awe and wonder, majestic and on his throne, and yet, also approachable, kind, and loving to those who seek his face or who dare to climb up onto his lap.

Misty’s fast and premature death showed me that time is one of our most precious resources.  How are you using yours? Whose face are you looking to with trust and devotion?  Whose lap are you climbing up into?  I pray that you seek the face and heart of God with the same trust and devotion as our animals give us.  Let God be your source of care, protection, provision, companionship and joy.  He wants to be all those things for us.  Seek his face.

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River of life

Water.

Critical for our survival, water is necessary for nearly every function of the body. The human body is made up of 60% water, and without it, we can’t survive much more than 3-4 days.

In scripture, water is often used as a symbol of life and of the spirit. Water is used for cleansing, purification, baptism. It represents the presence of God’s spirit. It quenches our thirst, both physical and spiritual.

So, what is the state of your spirit? I recently spent time by the Guadalupe River at Mo Ranch and saw first hand the various ways our life is represented in water.

Are you clear, calm, settled, reflecting the best the world has to offer?


Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. (Rev 22:1)

Are you churned up, spilling over, or falling down?


A flood will carry off his house, rushing waters on the day of God’s wrath.  Such is the fate God allots the wicked, the heritage appointed for them by God.” (Job 20:28-29)

Are you allowing yourself to be filled with trash and debris


Like a muddied spring or a polluted well are the righteous who give way to the wicked.
(Prov 25:26)

until there is nothing left for a scummy film over your surface?


Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” (John 4:10)

The truth is we are all of these things at one time or other, sometimes more than one at a time. There are times of calm and times of churning. There are times of obedience and times of trouble.

During a time of Israel’s disobedience, God spoke of judgement
“Because this people has rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah
and rejoices over Rezin and the son of Remaliah, therefore the Lord is about to bring against them the mighty floodwaters of the Euphrates— the king of Assyria with all his pomp. Isaiah 8:6-7

Yet to those who trust him and believe in him, he promises “rivers of living water will flow from within them.” (John 7:38)

For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’ ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ (Rev 7:17)

Take time to sit by the river of your life and assess its flow, its source, its destination. Allow the peace of God to calm your choppy place, picture the stresses of you life flow downstream, away from you, leaving you gentle waters. Go in his peace.

  • (Note: all scripture NIV; all pictures taken by author at Mo Ranch, Feb 2, 2019)
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