Well, and wasn’t it a man’s world?
Excerpt…
Woman should gather roses ere
Time’s ceaseless foot o’ertaketh her,
For if too long she make delay,
Her chance of love may pass away.
A FEW LADIES looked askance but Johanna proved she knew her audience well when the opening verse was greeted with a roar of male approval. Well, and wasn’t it a man’s world? Certainly it was best to let them think so.
Dana sez–
And so they lived happily ever after.
More or less. Some of them did, at any rate.
Posting these excerpts from Silk and Song reminded me yet again how much fun I had writing it, and researching it. I went to China! and saw the last, westernmost fragment of the Great Wall, a lump of red mud bricks melting slowly into the Taklamakan Desert. I went to Turkey and visited a caravansary like the ones Jaufre and Johanna would have stayed at. I went to Morocco and rode a camel into the Sahara at sunset, and again at sunrise. I went to Venice, poor dead city, and tried to reimagine it in its heyday as the most important city on the Mediterranean. I went to England and drove those infernally narrow roads around western England, where the green fields roll ever on and on and the sheep outnumber the people.
I hope you enjoyed reading Silk and Song as much as I enjoyed writing it.
