Why This Children's Book Blog Accidentally Became a Medieval History Blog

When I launched The Good Knight blog, I had a plan.

The plan was this: write honestly about the journey to get five picture books published. Share what it's like to write something you believe in and then spend months trying to persuade people in offices to agree with you. Talk about the mission, getting more dads reading at bedtime, the 42% statistic, the ten minutes that makes a difference. Build Jack's world in public. Be vulnerable. Be real.

It was a good plan.

Then I wrote a piece about Humpty Dumpty being a cannon.

And then one about giant snails in medieval manuscripts.

And then medieval knights versus the Mongol army.

Today I wrote a blog about when unicorns were first discovered (400BC in India by the Ancient Greeks if you are asking).

And somehow, without entirely meaning to, I appear to have become the internet's most enthusiastic middle-aged amateur historian of the medieval period.

I want to address this directly.

The history posts were not the plan

When I set up this blog I had three things I wanted to write about. The journey to publication, the submissions, the waiting, being ignored by agents/publishers, the inevitable rejections that I knew were coming - it is part and parcel of the industry, you have to expect it. The world of the books - Jack, Fire Pud, Princess Charlotte, Sir Percy, and the increasingly detailed internal logic of a fictional castle that exists entirely in my head. And the mission, why it matters that more dads read at bedtime, and why I wrote five rhyming picture books to try and help get dads ROOOARING to their children at bedtime (I'm sure mums will thank me for that).

Personal. Honest. Occasionally uncomfortable.

Then my four-year-old asked whether there were any real dragons in Essex and I wrote 1,000 words about medieval dragon mythology before I'd even had a second coffee. And turns out it wasn't a dragon it was a crocodile anyway.

And then there were the nursery rhymes. And the mythical creatures. And the genuine historical investigation into why medieval illuminators kept drawing knights fighting snails (still not fully resolved, the scholars can't agree, and I find this enormously satisfying).

The history posts are, I am now prepared to admit, significantly easier to write than the personal ones.

The thing about putting yourself out there

Writing about whether Genghis Khan changed the global climate is, it turns out, considerably less frightening than writing about the Sunday afternoon I sat at my kitchen table and wondered whether any of this was going to work.

Medieval history does not require me to be honest about anything in particular. It does not require me to admit that there are days when submitting five completed picture books to literary agents feels like standing in a very large, very quiet room and banging my head against a wall not knowing if they will even look at the manuscripts they've been sent. For the blogs I am just researching and writing about what has happened in the past - for Jack and co. that is something that I've created and is up there to be judged.

Medieval history just requires me to look things up and get excited, which I do naturally and without any encouragement whatsoever. Tonight I wanted to start a blog about where giants first appeared in folklore but instead I wrote this.

The personal stuff is harder. Putting yourself out there to fail, genuinely, publicly, in front of people you know, is harder than any amount of research into the military tactics of the Mongol Empire.

I am aware of this. I am aware that the blog has drifted. And I am also, if I'm being completely honest, aware that I have been letting it. I also enjoy writing those parts of the blog. Medieval history is rivitting. Castles are awesome.

The Confession

I am a middle-aged man who is, apparently, a Middle Ages nerd.

I don't know exactly when this happened. At some point between reading a bedtime story and researching whether medieval people really believed in dragons (they absolutely did), something clicked that hadn't clicked before. The medieval period is funny and strange and surprising and full of things that make you say "wait, what?" out loud to an empty room. It is endlessly, genuinely interesting. And I can no longer pretend I don't enjoy writing about it more than is strictly necessary for a children's picture book blog.

So. There it is. No more hiding. I am a nerd.

What comes next

Here is the part where I make a promise I intend to keep.

The history posts are staying. The mythical creatures, the castle visits, the investigations into things my children ask me at breakfast, all of it stays, because it connects to the books and to the world of The Good Knight and because I enjoy writing it and I hope you enjoy reading it.

But the other posts are coming too. The ones about what it actually feels like to be trying to get something published. The ones about why dad's reading at bedtime matters more than I can say in a statistic. The ones about Jack, and where he came from, and what I want him to mean to children who read him.

Those posts are harder. They take a lot longer, They're the ones where I'm the small knight at the start of the quest, not sure the outcome is certain, stepping forward anyway.

Which is, I suppose, the whole point of him.

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