Collection

Fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old me would have of course DIED of this piece of news, just because: Cornwall! Tintagel! There is nothing here, of course, even theoretically pointing to a young Arthur learning literacy and practicing at a windowsill. Still I would have come up with the dreamy idea.

Medievalist intercessionality.

Tony Mattera has a beautiful piece on patriotism and our times. A short, perfect read.

Women are perpetually asked to be the cops, the police, the bosses of their bosses, the judges of their judges; the ones held responsible for patrolling and controlling and meting out punishment against — or graciously forgiving — men who trespass. And God help us if we get it wrong.

The Cut has an eloquent discussion of the current Bill Clinton moment - which, as timesome as it is and he is, does bear consideration right now.

In related non-news, the Patterson brand and the Clinton/Patterson ghost(s) aren't great authors. Who knew? Absolutely everybody. Gary Sue, let'r rip. Two reasons I will not read this book - incidental and not even applicable anti-Muslim villain naming, and egregious use of the term Dark Ages. Y'all know how I feel about *that*.

Unfortunately, the title, “The President Is Missing,” depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is.
--WaPo

BAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA! Also: oh, SNAP.

Catastrophe! Hee.

Holy CATS, it is fascinating when science can tell a novelist their historical fiction may have been fiction in the historical documents themselves. I was happily reading along, this Atlantic piece about Greenland ice core sampling and how it correlates to the Roman economy and conquests ... when it casually BLEW MY WEE AND PALTRY MIND with an aside about the Plague of Justinian. Which just happens to be awfully important to my WIP's action, themes, even those aspects of my work which I literally don't even believe in.

The mention, in the article, of absence of evidence of Justinian's Plague in the ice record does not equate to evidence of absence. (Evidence of exaggeration? Always possible. Discoveries can indicate many things.) I am content to accept Procopius, amongst others. Lucky thing: I am neither scientist nor historian, and as a novelist of historical fiction, I need not dash down the twin rabbit holes of history *nor* science to justify my theories as to how the "Dark Ages" (I don't even believe in) began. Ahh, liberty!



Do you know, I do believe some authorial bits of my brain may be awakening? Well, my my my ...

Collection

Every now and then, Blogger stats provide an interesting rabbit hole, or at least a blast from the past. Today, I happened upon this referral link. This makes me smile bittersweet smiles - firstly, because I have not seen The Lady Herself in far, far too long. But also because she talks of our writing group, and a particular story prompt which has never left my brain. The story is above 3500 words, but I've never found a finish - though its ghost has teased me more than once over the years.

This is why my main/long-form writing is historicals. It's never so hard to find an ending! (Just titles.)

Yes, Donna, I am thinking of the conversation we had, where you have no problems with titles and I take years to find them!

(T)he legitimation of cruelty, prejudice, falsehood, and corruption is the kind of thing, one would think, that religious people were born to oppose, not bless.

It's not a short read, but it's *splendid* writing. As all the best writing is, it's open, intelligent, and honest in viewing shortcomings from the inside ... as well as the margins. Because those who were once in are out, in many ways, and no single outlook can be said to typify perhaps any label anymore.


OH NO, NOT MORE TBR. Both the paean and the lament of any reader, the song of More Yummy Delicious BOOKS. I must-must-must have After the Death of Ellen Keldberg, not least because it sounds like an awfully good book, but also because the cover is a grabber, and at the link above you will find some thoughts on its design. By way of The Caustic Cover Critic. "Enjoy the crocuses." Excellent advice.


Am I the only person who enjoys the heck out of a good scholarly argument? I choose "argument" over "debate" because one of the joys of This Theory versus That Theory is witnessing how partisan participants can be (and indulging the luxury of not having any interest in either side, thus being open to many arguments). Here we have a great example of the genre, in anthropology. Archaeological/anthropological arguments often provide the best enjoyment, because these disciplines after all tell the story of humanity, and we certainly do like talking about ourselves. This sort of thing, for me at least, provides great exercise in critical thinking, which happens to be one of my favorite things. And this particular argument, centering on a volcanic winter, touches on phenomena which actually come into play in my own WIP, wherein the plagues and climatic changes post-535 AD loom large in the plot. I don't actually, necessarily, fully buy into the Catastrophe theory. But it sure makes a good story.

Also, I Write

For my reader-readers, and my author readers, and anyone with an opinion to spare (it is, by the way, amazing to me how often it is possible to ask for opinions and not get them in blog world!), a question for you ...

If you were just geek enough to catch a nerd reference in a novel essentially unrelated to the genre of the geek-check, would it give you a grin that you were in with it, or would it throw you out of a story?

The reference in question title-puns a work by L. Sprague deCamp, Lest Darkness Fall. It's a seminal work in what has become known as alternative history, and happens to take place in the world (ish) of my WIP. This is the only commonality, but the fulcrum on which I wrote the line (it is the last of my novel, currently) is almost the fulcrum of the WIP itself, for me.

Everyone who reads here knows I am not a believer in The Dark Ages. I refuse to accept that the lights went out all over the world, as it were - pretty much ever. The very idea that any one age of humanity is actually any smarter (or dumber) than any other is not merely ridiculous, it's offensive to me.

So it came as a surprise to me when I found myself making the WIP about the dawning (dusking) of the Dark Ages.

As an author, I justify this by pointing to many excuses: "I am not an historian!" ... "This is a metaphor and doesn't have to answer to my IRL philosophy." ... "Blah blah blah 'redefining the term' blah blah blah."

I've actually even GIVEN the advice, "Follow your story" to other authors. But never thought I'd beget a story of my own that so directly contradicts my way of thinking. "There is no such thing as Barbarians/The Dark Ages/Whig history/human progress as a redemptive narrative OR degeneration" - oh and I'm about to write about the Dark Ages and make it a progression downward. I don't even believe in dynasty (please note, one of the most popular of these, the Tudors, lasted THREE lousy generations, kids) - and here I am writing about the end of one like it's a ... hey, a descent.

Dust had tamped the fire of the Great King, long in his cracked tomb and efficiently forgotten. There would be, there could be rest, and obscurity. The boy’s horizon had no sunrise. The man would walk alone, no burden but his own to carry.

Let darkness fall.

The major dramatic question is not so much "how will this ruling family survive - or die out?" it is "What is the point?"


de Camp's work was all about saving the world from the Dark Ages. Mine is about letting go and letting be. It's less a question of devolution, within the world and the pages of the novel, than of succumbing with grace to forces which have different meaning and priority over the course of generations.

THIS is human development: that the driving force of one person, or of one time, cannot sustain its power.

Is appropriating the *fear* "Oh dear, lest darkness fall" and overtaking it with a bit of Lord, it is Night resignation inappropriate and jokey (never mind the question of obscurity)? Does it betray a reader, or the story itself?



The fact is, the question is more intellectual than applicable. I don't expect this sentence to survive even one revision (with hope a more authentic ending will voice itself instead), and this isn't asked as a critique session. More an opportunity for philosophizing - on the appeal of "crossover" references. On the revulsion of smartassed irony. On callouts to external worlds.

On whatever aspect might interest you, reading this ...

"Dark" Times ... (?)

This morning, a thought wandered around in my head a bit, and I'm curious what some of you might think.

As a researcher and writer of a period in history at which the so-called Dark Ages were born, one of the issues I have with my work is the dearth of primary sources. It's difficult in the extreme to research some of the key aspects of my plot: could, or even *would*, a community's midwife become a nurse to a single household? At what age did children begin to to to Christian services? At what age would a king's child have begun to go, and was that earlier? What did the Arian service look like?

I can structure a day around liturgical hours known beyond Catholicism during sixth century Christianity. I can provide the shape of a night's segmented sleep. I can hear the echo of the hushed voices in the palace at Ravenna.

But I'll always be up against the damned Dark Ages. The lack of voices to tell me what they thought, had to say, even did, in most contexts of their lives.

The lack of primary sources.

There are not a few folks who fear we are tipping into a dark age right now. Brexit, perhaps, is worrisome. Name-the-outcome of the U. S. election looks to folks of all persuasions like the invasion of the Barbarians.

But my readers know, I don't believe in Barbarians. I don't accept that the whole world went dark and stupid for a thousand years. I don't believe there are, as a bloc, genuine heroes and villains at the national/imperial/tribal level, one entire nation of people good, another evil.

And the thing is: even the most partisan believer in these things will agree. The entire reason we call them "The Dark Ages" is because we don't know as much about the period.

That we know humanity was actually dumber for one thousand years ... I don't think any honest lover or student of history can say that with integrity.

So here is the thought that came picking about my brains today.

Whatever comes on November 8, whatever we despair of the loss of privacy and the uprising of technology that takes away our autonomy, even (perhaps) our individuality ...

Nobody will be ignorant of what we thought about these times, any century any time soon.

Nobody will look back at the early twenty-first century (or whatever era they name us to be in future - The Antrhopocene has some traction, but it's a self-given nickname, and those don't always catch on) and WONDER WHO WE WERE.

We are going to be a hard lot to lose in time, is what I am saying. We are not opaque.

Indeed, one of the possible tragedies of this age is its vomitous ubiquity. There is a wide swath of our culture right now dedicated just to photographing food before we actually eat it, reporting on it, commentating it.

Which either fascinates somebody I've never met, or reflects something deep and internal about the current generations of living humanity in a way that tells us about a lot more than that tasty churro shot.

Heading for destruction?

I don't know.

But I do know this: Rome never burned in a way catastrophic enough her legacy was obliterated. And my society, my culture - whatever it is, with all its good and its bad and its laughability and its heartbreak - is not a relief cut into the Earth that is going to erode easily.

What is beautiful about humanity right now is not going to disappear.

What is ugly, we've ensured will endure, too.

Do you think there can ever be a Dark Age again? Do you even believe there ever truly has been a descent of mankind, ever a period in history marked by the absence of redemptive qualities?

Time and Chance (Neither Sharon K Penman nor Ecclesiastes)

It is perhaps not the sort of admission a writer should make; but more, I suspect, than would like to admit it may find what I'm about to post familiar ...

The WIP began, as many know, as an inspiration early in the research for The Ax and the Vase. I was fairly successful, during my work on Ax, in keeping the WIP on the backburner - not using it to distract myself from frustrations with the first novel - and not letting it steal me away on its own impetus either.

And so, the WIP has been in gestation for something like thirteen or fourteen years now.

It was brought to the front burner a year and a half ago or so, but this summer I have allowed the demands of work and life and other such silliness as that to keep me from dedicated writing.



Now and then, when we're not really working on them, writers do at least pull OUT our work (or pull it up, as on electronic devices). We look at it, we pat it on its evil/cute little plot-bunnied head, we expect it to speak, and often it fails to. For all works of creative writing have a habit of acting on their own, especially individual characters, running off and doing things we had no idea were in them, creating unexpected continuity issues to resolve - they have an even crueller tendency NOT to do this when we sit and look at them, bereft of active ideas or plans.

WIPs, when you pull them out and expect them to develop themselves, will stare you down like sullen teenagers. Mute, un-forthcoming, inert.

And so, it was a surprise to me, today, when the sullen thing spoke to me.

I pulled it up just now. Peered at it a bit. Scrolled to the end, because I don't really know where it needs to end, or why it seems to end so far beyond where it begins.

I would be hard-pressed, in short, to tell an agent honestly "what is the crisis here, what needs resolving?"

As a historical fiction author, I am inordinately attached to the idea that telling the stories of history itself is important, worthy, fascinating. But where the fascination lies, I seem to be very poor at defining. Why tell it? Um. It's cool. See? Where the king goes Catholic, instead of Arian, and the entire future of Christendom - and Western Europe - is decided? Neat, hm?



Ya gotta have an MDQ. History is great, but a story isn't just the litany events leading from point A to point B, where there's a new chapter or we lose interest.

And I had no idea why my WIP was going on into three generations of women I think are each a study in contrasts, and whose lives deserve to be shared. Three is a great storytelling trope, but why was I going into character #1's mom and daughter, when it was #1 who drew me initially? What has it been, all this time, telling me that mom is necessary, that we can't stop without daughter, that #1 should *not* stand alone ... ?

And what is the title of this thing?

Titles are hard. And hard-won. Authors can be extremely attached to a title, emotionally vulnerable to the idea of changing one. They're harder to write than poems, perhaps. Or they ARE poems, perhaps.



So today, scrolling to the end, and then back to the beginning, when I caught sight of that moment when the character has just opened up our action by giving birth to #1, and she realizes she has not born a son ... one phrase caught my eye.

Time for posterity later.

But; there is no later.

And that was when it clicked.

What I am writing about - and THIS, I have known for a long time, is the events that lead us into that period so many historians used to call (and, gallingly, most of the regular populace still call) The Dark Ages.

I'm writing about dissolution.

I'm writing about the end of a dynasty, not only from the point of view of #1, the child who had the wrong genital equipment, but also from the point of view of #2 - a character more vivid than 1's mother and her daughter - the freedwoman who literally births the END of the dynasty; the midwife who, perhaps, has her hands not only on the labours of her noblewomen, but on the pangs of a new era emerging.

That part came just now, just writing that paragraph. Exciting stuff; bear witness, y'all.

So the working title (and I feel it perhaps bears the wrong tone; so this too may pass) has become, Time for Posterity.

And the question is: how does it end?

How does a dynasty end? How does an era end? How does darkness begin? (Do I even believe there was an age of darkness appropriately to be named The Dark Ages - well, no - but it makes a hell of a story, and it's been sucking at me like a vortex for thirteen years, I realize.)



So, yaaaayyyy!

I'm about to become the AUTHOR of the Dark Ages, and I don't even believe in them!

Neato-spedito, as my brother used to say.