Life with Wulf would never be normal, but who cared? She’d have a Viking to love her for eternity.
* * * * *
Fiction Meets the Real World
I think reality is what gives fiction emotional weight. Many characters in this novel wanted to help the women of rural Afghanistan. The real world contains an organization that successfully does that, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. Every day, 22,000 doctors, nurses, midwives, logisticians, water experts and other professionals working for Doctors Without Borders/MSF provide emergency medical services to people caught in crises in more than sixty countries. They delivered more than 110,000 babies and performed more than 50,000 surgeries in 2009. By 2012, those numbers had risen to 185,400 babies and 78,500 surgical procedures. These medical providers are true heroes.
When my heroine was wounded in Afghanistan, her family stayed at a Fisher House in Germany. The Fisher House Foundation has built sixty houses (and growing) near military medical facilities in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. They provide free lodging for families of wounded soldiers, kitchens, space for children to play outside and a vital community of other families also supporting wounded warriors. At Dover Air Force Base, the Families of the Fallen Fisher House provides free lodging for families waiting to repatriate the remains of their loved ones. The United States’s fight in Afghanistan may be winding down. It may be out of the news. But the need for long and extensive medical care doesn’t go away when the logisticians pack up their last containers.
My family will be donating to both charities from First to Burn proceeds. If you want to know more, I invite you to visit the charities’s websites or AnnaRichland.com.
Acknowledgments
I became a writer on my own. I became a published writer because of Greater Seattle Romance Writers of America and its annual Emerald City Writers’ Conference. I could not possibly name everyone in my chapter who has helped me, but any list would start with Anna Alexander, Julie Brannagh, Eilis (and Mike) Flynn, Josie Malone and Shelli Stevens. Thank you also to the Starcatchers cheering section of the 2011 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Finalists, especially Julie Brannagh, Amy Raby and Rachel Grant. Thank you!
I relied upon the website Beowulf on Steorarume (Beowulf in Cyberspace) by Dr. Benjamin Slade at www.heorot.dk for the Old English in chapter 24. I also read Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, translated by Seamus Heaney, edited and illustrated by John D. Niles (W.W. Norton and Company, 2007) until the binding died. All correct references to the epic are possible because of these experts. Errors are possible because of me. For other research, I went straight to the internet’s Viking Answer Lady.
Several doctors provided invaluable help: Dr. Naomi Sullivan, who shared poster slogans and was never the weak link in any chain, army or otherwise; Dr. Stephen Buetow, the first Afghanistan veteran to read this; Dr. Crista McHugh, fellow romance writer and explainer of fainting; Dr. Elizabeth Moynihan, fellow college romance reader and explainer of symbiotic microbes, and Dr. Josh LaBaer, who figured out why my Vikings need Grendel’s bones. Thank you all!
About the Author
Anna Richland lives with her quietly funny Canadian husband and two less-quiet children in a century-old house in Seattle, Washington. Raised in Ohio, she’s lived on both coasts and visited more than fifteen countries, half of them courtesy of her former career as an officer in the United States Army.
She is thrilled to join the Harlequin family thirty years after she started smuggling romances home from the library. Her path from reader to published author led through law school, the army, a stint editing zoning codes and several years dodging small-child obstacle courses. The idea for a paranormal series based around the Beowulf epic hit while she was sorting picture books for a preschool Scandinavia-themed week. Under its former title, The Soldier, Anna’s first Immortal Vikings novel was a 2011 finalist in Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart contest and won the 2012 Suzannah Award from the North Louisiana Stars RWA Chapter as well as the 2010 Golden Pen award for Paranormal Romance.
Anna is busy writing the next novel in the Immortal Vikings series and editing a spin-off novella to be published by Carina Press in 2014. She looks forward to fan mail and book covers that will embarrass her children!