Picking and Choosing

Scenes come to me when they will. The term "pantser" doesn't appeal to me, but I am not an outlining writer, and the idea of composing a novel in order confounds me. I follow the research first, and the inspiration second. Usually because the latter doesn't precede the former, and I have a harder time capturing it.

Not long ago, I was working on that quiet moment, knowing what has got to come after it. The scene stands alone (though I do still need to get rid of that research-y bit about natron), but really there's no novel if anything does that. And so I must proceed.

Eventually.



I don't want to write the pogrom. And that is what follows, there.

Writing one of the first riotous, violent religious purges in the storied history of Christendom all but makes me long for a battle scene. And I hate writing battle scenes.

But even to contemplate this is so much worse. The only redemption before me is that I will not write from within the perspective of the murderers, the looters, the rapists, the cruel. But it is little consolation; knowing one is only surrounded by looting, rape, and killing doesn't take away the looting, rape, and killing.



So, today, I got back to the murder scene.

It's strange how preferable this is to writing the pogrom. It is smaller in scale, of course, and so I have more control, more ability to move through the mechanics of each moment - realization, sensation, progression.

It also takes place with a character who has come to a philosophical place of relinquishment. She's lost enough to eschew the rest, and life appears all but pointless by this moment. Losing everyone else was hard; losing herself, even painfully, may be a relief.

I've watched this relinquishment, of course. I've been witness to plaintive, righteous begging for death. It's hard, but great Christ do I understand it.

And so the crux of this murder is that it becomes manumission; the killers will free this woman, and she will accept escape at last, if only when she sees there is no other choice.


Thematically, of course, this links to my post from yesterday. So I had to go to this scene. (That is my excuse, and I'm sticking with it.) I had to find the sensations of the ground under her toes, the air down her throat, the sweat of her skin.

It's got me thinking of another death scene too. A character I can scarcely bear to see die, but who eventually must. A person can only live so long, and in the sixth century CE, even less than we tend to expect now.



When I emailed the manuscript to myself last night, as I do periodically as a kind of backup - the chronicle of my "versioning" (and progress) - I put a subject line on the email: "What good is this life edition" ...

There is an ancient religious philosophy - not only in Western schools of faith, but certainly predominant in Europe for centuries - that this life is a vale of tears, and the only existence worth contemplating is the eternal destination of the soul.

Think of Heaven. For kings and peasants alike, this was the mindset encouraged by so many aspects of so many ways of life.

Even as kings needs must strategize every single day.

Even as peasants must tend and bring in the harvest, the flock, the catch. Must learn how best this is done. Must feed the body, for letting it die - no matter how useless this life may be - was still a sin.



All these contradictions.

I'd rather write death than massacre.

Writing. Like everything else, it comes down to choices.

So. How's YOUR writing going?

I'm not sure whether this is amusing or not

I'm a writer, so let me tell you a few stories.


Somewhere around fifteen or sixteen years ago, I'd been rocking a longer-haired Bettie Page thing for a while. It amused me - all it takes to "get Bettie'd", as I used to call it, was having brown hair and cutting bangs. But after a while it bored me, so I decided to grow out my bangs.

In those days, I hung out at a blues bar a lot. Enough that I was apparently a fixture - perhaps more than I had realized. One of the resident drunks, a woman I was acquainted with, but not particularly friends with, commented on my hair one night, and I told her I was growing out the bangs. She *wigged out* on me. "But you're our Bettie!"

Needless to say, this rather cemented my resolve than made me trim the fringe.

The fact that I shortly thereafter met a guy online who literally wrote the (crappiest-reviewed-on-Amazon) book about Bettie didn't hurt, either. This was, by the way, pretty much a complete accident. We only dated for four months (four too long), but my divorce from Bettie-ness was complete.

...

Then there was the time I went as Clara Bow for Hallowe'en. I got a little wig, wore a drop-waist, hankie-hem satin dress, threw a couple strings of pearls down my back instead of down my front. I under-painted my lip line, over-painted my eyeshadow and liner, and tweezed my brows to nothing.

Some time later, when I had photos in costume, I happened to see one of my aunts. She peered at the pics, and SWORE that was not me.

...

One of the few moments from my middle and high school years that sticks with me was the time one of the more popular kids said to me that my hair looked different every single day. It's a throwaway thing to say, it doesn't have deep meaning, but it has always somehow informed my self-image. I liked being a human mood-ring, or whatever it is that meant to me - and maybe still means. Certainly, I don't want to be the same thing every day, even if that were a pretty thing - how drab, never changing.

...

For years now, my hair has been the same day in and day out, 95% of the time. Maybe for decades. This is "not a good look" as the kids really don't say these days.

Right now, I have a new hairstyle every five minutes. Short hair can be awful versatile, kids.

Amusingly, one of the first impressions I had of my new haircut, after the stylist made it sort of big and round, was that it resembled Clara Bow. I remembered my beloved late aunt and laughed a bit.

Then, after I'd emailed mom a few pics so she could have and share them, I heard  that another of my aunts, and my uncle along with her, were saying, "That is NOT Diane!"

(I wonder - if I put on a pair of glasses, would they call me Diana Prince, maybe? It *was* my dream, lo these forty years ago ...)

Let it be said, none of them, including mom, seems to have noticed I got a second piercing in my right ear, the short side of the asymmetry. Observational skills, y'all. (SCIENCE! WOO!)

I was a long-haired person most of my life. After the initial tug-of-war (usually literally, with a hairbrush) with my mom over hair length, it just became a battle of wills, and I internalized long hair. Mind you, I've always loved it. I loved having a living cape, I loved playing with it, I loved the way it felt. I like long-haired men quite a lot, too.

It's been many years since I found my long hair to be pretty.

And I wasn't playing with it so much, and never had it down anymore, to feel it.

Hmmm, sed I.

But you know how that post goes.

Collection

Janet Reid quoted me at some length in this week’s epic edition of her Sunday Week in Review …

DLM had some very wise words to our questioner:

(I)t's in no way my place to tell another author their vision must be blinkered, but I can at least speak to the necessity (sometimes) of putting away a novel. And it does not come lightly.

OP, I spent ten years learning how to write a novel, and writing it. Some of those latter years, I queried. I learned I had more work to do, I did it, I queried again. What came out of that was a VERY good novel; a good read, a fascinating look at a little-regarded piece of world history. And a book I cannot sell.

It's been a year since I first allowed myself to even conceive of the idea of putting this work away. But I quickly realized it was necessary. Years of my life. A story I still love. All those dreams. And the universe's answer was "no."

Believe me when I say, I know how hard it is. I know how heartbreaking.

But I also know this: to put that firstborn book away, to let it rest, to stop asking more of it than the market can realistically yield ... is LIBERATING.

I’ll be honest, it’s hard not to think (though she has never said as much to me) she agrees with the reasoning by which I came to retire The Ax and the Vase.

Speaking of which:

Something I said to someone today, about The Ax and the Vase … “It's a GREAT novel. But right now, the he market is not dying of need for novels about The Ultimate White Dude in Power. … I hated losing those years of my life. I hated putting that novel away. And I know it's been the right thing to do, and I'm even glad. Clovis' voice isn't the voice we need to hear, not right now. It hurt like hell, but I learned and grew and what I've gained from the experience I would never give up.”

Tom Williams and I were talking recently about the new image header on his blog, and he said it helped to inspire his most recent work. I can remember falling into cover images when I was a kid, coming into the world of the book – or, perhaps more often, a world of my own making, and finding universes filled with tales. It seems a good time to write from an image. Unrelatedly (?), I’ve also read a little, of late, about Tantalus and Sisyphus. And the Caustic Cover Critic led me, a moment ago, to this. Stay tuned for a short piece, born of these things. I’m thinking world-building of my own …
Unless the short stories I've been posting are throwing off the blog content? Opinions welcome.

The History Blog has given me a few chances lately to get out of the usual Western European and/or American groove.

In a once-inaccessible cliff tomb in Nepal, we find the tantalizing possibility that The Silk Road circa 500 AD had a much more southerly route than has historically been believed.

An excavation at a museum which once was a priory turns up a tiny Arabic chess piece. There is a speculative piece of background about Cardinal Wolsey’s guests at Wallingford Priory that provides some lovely opportunities for stories about someone losing a piece of a game with which they traveled, five centuries ago, but I perhaps will not be the one to write that story. For me, the truly interesting part is what a bishop’s mitre has in common with a war elephant.

Another evocative find is the jewelry treasure which may have been hidden to save it in a period of upheaval: “The National Museum of History experts believe the cache of silver jewels was a family fortune buried in the turbulent days of the Chiprovtsi Uprising in the fall of 1688. Since almost everyone in the area was killed in battle, executed, enslaved or fled, there was nobody left to dig up the treasure.” Difficult not to imagine the desperation in this poignant hidden silver.

Back in my English groove, the photos of this  13th century mosaic floor at Somerset is a gorgeous look at a period when decoration was marvelously bright and bold. When I first became familiar with 13th-15th century European and English architecture and furnishings, I was astonished by the exuberant and high-contrast graphics and bright colors. Modern preconceptions tend to color everything in The Past (and especially the so-called medieval period) a bit of a faded sepia tone, but five minutes’ perusal of any variety of heraldic design should put paid to this notion, and heraldic design is dominant in this rare sample of a noble’s expensive tiled floor. Glorious!

For an idea of the vividness of a medieval interior, take a look here.

If you were interested in the Silk Road story, or my own obsession with historical costume and conservation/preservation of textiles, this seventeenth-century find is a STUNNING rare piece, colors still tantalizingly present and the cloth in excellent condition. From a *shipwreck* no less!

Collection

Jessica Faust at Bookends Literary Agency takes a look at the downside of #MSWL, or the Manuscript Wish List many pre-published love to pore over, hoping to find someone who'll represent our work.

The Arrant Pedant has a great post for those Americans coping with taxes this season: on the task of taxes and axing about the history of etymology. Also, I learned a new word today - palatalization. Not sure when I'll get to use it, but I like it anyway. Syncopated.

Speaking of great words: I'm always a sucker for palimpsest. Not least because, as artifacts, the things are wells of curious information and questions. The History Blog looks at a palimpsest in which the Battle of Thermopylae gets an "all killer no filler" description. Never let it be said the History Blogger is not a History Nerd.

The on-demand economy – or old-fashioned temping? I gave up temping myself twenty years ago, because being pimped is no way to make a living. Gee, and it turns out there are others who don't want to work that way either. Duh.

Dense, or Encompassing?

The work in progress has begun to insist to me that I have to work on a riot in which the citizens of my main setting burn down the synagogues.


Growing up, most of my closest friends were Jewish. My oldest friend, TEO The Elfin One, is not merely Jewish, but a teacher - a rabbi - as is her husband. I have known *about* anti-semitism all my life. But I have never KNOWN it.

To face this aspect of historical fiction, to know it must be a part of my own work, is not exactly difficult for me, but it is of course distasteful.

I've blogged before about how much I dislike writing battle scenes.

But writing what is, essentially, one of the earliest pogroms in what isn't even "Christendom" at this period ...


Ugh.


And it's not merely the content that daunts me, it is the wider prospect of the scene, as a part of its world.

Mr. X and I were emailing yesterday, and he was (as he has always been) one of my favorite readers, all "ooh and ahh" that I wrote the atheism post in like 15 minutes (I had been thinking about it for a day - if not, in some form, for months or years beforehand), and discussing the WIP and generally being that guy and that brain who ruined me for all the other guys' brains, and he said that this scene was going to be dense stuff.

And I thought about that.

And I realized that, if it were dense, it might almost be easier. Something that is dense is, perhaps, also self-contained. It has a shape, and boundaries ...

And this scene is encompassing, instead.

I need to contextualize this scene, this moment, this city of Ravenna in the year 519. It needs to be clear to see, in its place within Theodoric the Great's rule, and alongside Italy itself in this period ... when an old king has taken it on as his kingdom - and has no heir. It needs to have a view to Constantinople, which was becoming the new Rome, and where the Nika Riots would follow soon enough. It needs to find its place and focus in the larger picture of what people will insist upon calling the "Fall" of the Roman empire - and its connection to the imperial structures of Rome and of Constantinople, and also the so-called "Barbarian" cultures flourishing just to the north and west of Ravenna.

I need, too, to see the finer grain - to set this moment in the lives of my characters, and the marshy port city they occupied, to understand the weather and the moment and "why here"/"why now" ... The divisions between the minority Ostrogoths and the diversity of this place - the very scent of the wind, and the heat of the day ...



It's scary stuff. And not least because it is a riot, a racist mob setting fire to houses of worship.

And then comes the question.

How do I set this in the picture of the world I live in, myself?

Late Collection

With the events in my country this week, I missed - and simply did not feel up to - history nerding about the 200th anniversary of Waterloo. Here, a bit late, are the best links - pretty much as always from The History Blog (on the sale of Wellington's cloak from the battle), and of course Tom Williams, taking a look at the "wreck of the battle" ... its pathetic litter and deaths from neglect of care.

New Release!

The recent lull around these blog parts, while I’ve been working on the WIP and generally losing myself in the extreme bliss and satisfaction (hee) that is my enviable life, has seen a shortage of me yipping around, pointing out neat archaeological things and geeky historical clothes (or writing screds about same) … and also a shortage of my linking to neato books you can buy.

And, at this 200th anniversary year of the Battle of Waterloo, I have been noticeably short on links to the many articles and posts looking into the events leading thereto.

AND, I’ve been remiss in ushering you, dear readers, toward wonderful literature touching on this subject.

It is with apologies for the lax housekeeping here that I offer up forthwith the wonderful news that Tom Williams’ latest, “Burke at Waterloo” is available now! Yes, even on the west side of The Pond. Take a peek (the Look Inside function is available) and see if it’s not worth a full read. Like me, he has hopes of ever having to work in the insurance industry again; and making a dream come true by reading a book means bonuses all ‘round!


Some time soon, I’ll be back with my usual gritching about historical terminology or gooping about my best-pets-in-the-history-of-ever, or perhaps a shoe style I’m drooling over or something about my dad sure to make you laugh and cry. And definitely stay tuned for the bit about the squirrels, because that is going to be epic.

For now: hooray for reading!

Effective Professional Communication: The Approach

To all the people who have to make endless calls, trying to get on executives’ calendars – look, I get it. We all have our scripts to follow. Mine is “time is at an extreme premium” when you call me – and that is not a joke. Yours is “I’d just like to get a few minutes with him to introduce him to our company and what we can do for yours.” You have to do this over and over again with the same unresponsive people, and if you think I don’t know that, you underestimate my ability to recognize your phone number on my caller ID. I know exactly when you call, I know you do it on a repeating schedule. I GET it.

Most of you recognize that I am The Gatekeeper, and you behave accordingly, attempting to schmooze me (pointless) or tell me “He said he’d meet with us” (it worked ONE time, when I was new, and man do I have those guys’ numbers – and they will never, ever get in with my boss, ever) or actually behaving with friendly professionalism (the only viable approach). I entertain these varying gambits with exactly the responses they deserve, always professional, but pretty much hermetically sealed against the jerks who try to get one over on me, and impervious to anything but friendly professionalism. The ones who recognize, we’ve all got our scripts to follow: that, basically, we’re all in this together.

Make it unpleasant for me, and I will return the favor by making “progress” outright impossible for you.

So don’t refuse to speak with me when, instead of asking you “would you like to go to voice mail?” I say “Is there anything I may do for you?”

Don’t fail to realize that, if you want calendar time, I’m the person to ask for it; not my boss.

Don’t try to bypass me by snubbing me with a “Just put me in voicemail” and then leaving a message for my boss which (a) starts out with about twenty seconds of egregiously badly recorded music and (b) then segues into “I am so and so and I am FIGHTING to get a meeting with you.”

It turns out that the music was the Fighting Illini fight song – actually a commendable-ish piece of personalization, not that it actually changes the calendar any – and the “fighting” message was an allusion to that. So, okay, so he didn’t intend to make me look bad.

But this guy has been calling for a long time now, and my boss and I both recognize the number when it comes in now, and he’s never tried to talk with me, never left a message, and – cute as the personalization is – it doesn’t TELL US ANYTHING.

If he’d ever once actually attempted to speak with me like a all-growed-up professional, he could have introduced his company and himself, he could have gotten some information to me (and, that way, possibly to my boss – or, perhaps, even someone else more relevant to his needs), he might conceivably have made some sort of progress. Instead, what we have is enough weeks of calls from the same number that my boss and I both know a number is endlessly pinging us – and nothing else. No skin off of us, but it doesn’t make a GOOD first impression. And zero net effect for our fighting friend.

Who, to be honest, isn’t fighting all that hard, and who is strategizing his battle not. at. all.



It’s impossible not to be brought to mind of querying and trying to get an agent.

We all have our scripts to follow, and whether I personalize or not goes by the wayside if I make a lot of noise, without ever conveying the least bit of information ABOUT MY NOVEL. Or even that it is a novel. Or why I think it’s relevant to Agent X, Y, or Z. Or even make it clear that what I am attempting to do is to query something.


I called myself The Gatekeeper above, and would imagine most of my readers who are writers or agents (they do crop up!) would agree, the gatekeeper analogy in querying/publishing does nobody any favors.

But querying is a professional communication, we all agree on that. And to conduct professional communication in the way my fighting foe above has done would be unthinkable.

(Even now, I suspect Janet Reid, Jessica Faust, and hundreds of other agents are/would have to disagree – they probably do get EXACTLY this approach, from geniuses who’ve found the office number, and wish to treat agents to their honeyed words directly, bypassing slush with their pristine and special snowflakes. We’ve heard about it, and there are countless agency sites exhorting that authors NOT call them directly for a reason.)

It is for ME, and for all my wise and wonderful authorial readers, this would be unthinkable. Of course.

It seems so basic to me – yet I have worked in a fairly stereotypical office setting or another for nearly thirty years. Not all authors do, nor could stand to. And so baseline assumptions for effective professional communications are not there. And, given the creative nature of our product, we may think a creative approach is best in getting it out there.

That can work. But even the most unexpected innovations in getting our work out there, in the successful cases, still maintains essential professional respect. It doesn’t involve stalking agents to find out their alma mater and subjecting their voicemail to extreme lo-fi (do the kids know what low-fidelity means anymore, by the way … ?) fight songs. It involves getting attention without demanding it personally and invasively. Maybe by canny support in service of self-published work that stands the test of marketing success and the expectation of future revenue etc. Maybe in the unique voice of an unexpected character, translated into a simple, ordinary query. Maybe in a hundred ways I can’t think of because I am stodgy and dowdy and doing things the old way.

Not by calling incessantly for weeks, with no message.

Not by FIGHTING for time un-earned, while providing no reason it should be given.

DABDA

There may be five stages of grief - but many of us linger on one stage or another. Denial is popular, Anger is overwhelming, Bargaining is a cruel temptation ... Depression may be more powerful, even, than anger. Acceptance is the elusive one.

I'm considering it right now.



The Ax and the Vase is a great novel.

It's been my teacher and my child, something that ushered me into the world of an author, as opposed to a writer. I'm proud of it, and it's a hell of a read.

But. It doesn't seem to be a a viable product.

It's been a couple of months now since any agent even requested a read, and - good as it is - frankly, I just believe it's got an uphill battle in store in publishing, and ... if my plan is to be published, I have to provide the best possible material.

Ax is ITS best possible self, but it is not a market mover right now.

I haven't entirely decided to retire it; the fact that there are more agents to query is either a problem or a tempation.

But work on the WIP has become compelling, and though my faith in what Ax IS is unshakeable, if I'm not realistic about the industry, I'm not its best steward. And that's what I want to be. So I'm thinking it may be best to concentrate elsewhere. I'm opening myself to that possibility.


Anyone who's read me much knows I'm not very precious about my darling, special work, but they also know how much it means to me to have this consideration on my mind. My commitment to Ax is not minimal, nor is my confidence. But the odds are speaking to me, and I can't pretend not to hear. That would not serve Ax and would also hobble the WIP and the rest of my works.


This way of thinking has come on me a little suddenly - but, thank heavens, it's also coming at a time when my excitement about the WIP is building. I can't say there's no intentional connection there, either. If I have the WIP to sustain my hope, letting go of Ax would be ... not less difficult. But possible.

And so - I am considering possibilities. Feedback welcome, but most of my readers here at the blog have not been beta readers of the novel itself, so I understand if the comments stay quiet or theoretical. :)



Sigh.

Hero

One of the more striking features of human culture is the consistency with which we enshrine scoundrels as heroes. Without fail, literature across the world describes as holy or laudable men whose only acts of which we know are violent, promiscuous, greedy, deceitful, and even almost stupid. What we know of some is only as much as that they supposedly ascribe to a certain faith, or are monarchs, or born of divine forbears. Virtue as many of us prefer to view it is rarely in blazing evidence, but we are always assured, this man is the elect of G-d, the sacred head of his people, the savior hero to venerate.

This isn’t over, of course – see also: Captain Kirk, and the fact that even as a decades-long and sincere fan, my pointing out he was all but a sociopath would draw ire (if not blood) from those who worship him as The Best Captain. We can’t forgive a pretty and demonstrably media-whore-ish newscaster for saying he was in a combat situation on a helicopter once, but venture to point out that Shatner played an overcompensating neurotic and you’re in for trouble.

Of all the things I’ve been concerned about in writing The Ax and the Vase – lack of diverse characters, bigotry in profound disagreement with my own philosophy, writing about the royal guy rather than “real people” – portraying a king with expansionist tendencies on the grandest of scale and someone liable to dropping axes into skullbones as a heroic main character is the least of my qualms.

I hate battle scenes, always have, but have taken that with a wry kind of backward-gratitude as the ultimate demonstration that we as authors do not choose our subjects; they come to us. Meeting the challenges of this work may have been the perfect learning material for me as a novelist, and I’ve never made life too easy on myself.

But Clovis’ extreme ambition and the potential ugliness of his character, viewed *outside* the first-person? These issues don’t get me losing sleep.

Maybe that is the challenge for my readers. Maybe it’s the way I justify focusing on the rich king – he hardly gets to sit on a pedestal, though the POV throughout presents him absolutely straight-faced. The guy is all about glory and his own power, with attention to his faith and his family always filtered through expediency. His love and his conviction may be perfectly genuine, but they always SERVE something beyond the spiritual or emotional.

Clovis is little different from any modern politician or head of state who got there by any means possible, and who gains ever more using every tool available. Other men, negotiation, and the sword – these are all office supplies, and their utilitarian ends are not intrinsically praiseworthy. Nation-building and origin stories are not in themselves honorable, myths not necessarily hagiography.

Was Rome’s ouster from Gaul a moral, a necessary – a GOOD – act? We understand it to be; the story of Clovis’ first great battle, and the execution of the Roman Syagrius, is one of triumph for the Frankish people. But was the triumph of one king, was his consolidation of what became the modern nation of France, a fine thing? We receive a tale of destiny and incredible success – but this is the success of one man, one royal court, one burgeoning country; it does not preclude the possibility any other fate might have been better for Gaul in that generation … or in the many, many generations since.

We receive the tale of the Decline of Rome – sometimes viewed as a wistful inevitability, Barbarians at the Gate and all – sometimes viewed as the triumph of native peoples reclaiming self-hood from an empire. The truth is, one conflict or another, one hero or another, Gaul might have become one under some other king’s banner … or some other faith. Would another outcome have been as magnificent?

Almost surely, if the authors of some alternate history had voices to sing their own praises. And they would have been just as Clovis himself was; expedient, sometimes violent, sometimes lovingly human, always serving some ambition.

Beautiful Princesses

For all the poets who’ve extolled beauty since the beginning of song and the written thought, beauty is not what keeps the human race alive.



It’s not a new fact, but an interesting one, that quite a few of the hallowed standards of feminine beauty are also indicators of lives of ease.  In Europe, for centuries, “fair” or pale skin was an explicit description equating to prettiness.  Obviously, there’s a powerful racial element here, but the main point of whiteness in a largely white world had to do with reflecting a life lived not working in fields but protected and at leisure relative to the peasantry.

Soft skin, white skin, shining hair, healthy teeth, clear eyes – even youthful looks – these appearances may be cultivated in the life of a noblewoman, as they cannot in lesser social strata.  A peasant girl who starts out plump-armed and pretty deteriorates  more quickly if her life is lived on a farm or in a factory.  But a princess, who may have duties and learning to do, is physically protected from elements and exertion to the effect of preserving these things rather better.

When you read descriptions of princesses and queens, beauty comes up an awful lot.  Most sources have one form of political agenda or other – decrying one woman for being physically lovely but morally bankrupt, or praising to the heavens some saintly paragon.  Wealth, as we can see even today on any television set, predisposes many to fulsome praises of a lady – even if only through her clothes.  Wealth can also purchase some approximation of whatever signifiers appear to represent beauty in a given day – certainly in rich garments, jewels, and hairdressing, but also in cosmetic applications, shaping devices, and profounder bodily modifications, culminating in today’s booming plastic surgery industry worldwide.

Returning to the ethnic aspect –for many in the west, the main exposure too many had to any skin color other than their own was predominantly to those in servile positions, including slaves.  What to us is ugliness in a different sense, was once ugliness in its social-definition-of-beauty sense.  This continues to this day, with women of color suffering discrimination for wearing their natural hair, or religiously observant clothing, and subjected to demonization or sexual exotification simply for being Asian, subcontinental, Pacific Islander, Black, and so on.  Asian women who personify – or “fail” to – the “China doll” standard of allure fight a constant battle just to be seen as human, or professional people, in the face (har) of men and women alike seeking to find in them a mystical kind of beauty that goes beyond their own faces, and sinks into all manner of cultural prejudices, expectations, and lurid fantasies.

“DON’T YOU EXOTICIZE ME!” an early contestant on America’s Next Top Model, YaYa, once famously said.

I never forgot that, because – frankly, I realized I found YaYa quite exotically beautiful.  Like an awful lot of white folks, I had always thought my finding Black beauty so arresting and powerful … as some sort of enlightened attitude.

Take a LOOK at it for a second.  “Oh, look at that beautiful little Black child” – “Oh look at that beautiful Black woman or man” …  It’s all about the eye of the beholder, it’s the racial equivalent of The Male Gaze – in which finding some woman attractive is considered to be the ultimate compliment to her, and still misses completely that she’s a human being and in fact someone’s attraction to her is almost certainly irrelevant to her real, full life in every possible way.

Looking at a strikingly elegant and dazzling Black or Asian or Indian or multi-ethnic woman in admiration of her beauty is not a dynamic about “I find beauty even outside the Cultural(/Corporate) Norm! I’m so open-minded!”, but about failing to SEE humanity because we’re too busy LOOKING at it, staying outside, gazing as if the object gazed upon:  is an OBJECT.

YaYa was right, and it’s the most important thing I ever learned thanks to Tyra Banks, of all people, whose own investment in a career as the object of a gaze is a whole ball of wax we won’t get into.  One wonders about YaYa’s being ON a show dedicated to objectification, particularly as a platform to say, “I am not an object”, and going on to a career in acting, one step to the left of modeling in terms of the gazes of strangers.  But she got a point through my privileged head, and that was what she meant to do.  Success.  Go YaYa!

Anyway, princesses and prettiness.

Perhaps the key element in the fact that beauty is defined by parameters so well connected with a pampered life, is that above all it demonstrates that a girl PROTECTED is somehow the ideal.  Purity, even , is something of an indicator here – virginity.  Girls who are protected are often “jealously” protected.  Preserving not just youth and nice skin, but sexual inexperience, inevitably feeds into this ideal, and becomes one of the most powerful aspects of the theme.  This girl is so protected that her skin is unmarked, she is wealthy enough to enjoy physical luxury and health, her diet is of the best foods, her teeth and bones are preserved, her nails and hair are strong and pretty.  And this girl is so protected she’s not even a woman (you’ll notice my word choice throughout this paragraph).  She is so thoroughly safeguarded she’s untouched – but, even more, she may also have been “protected” from ever even learning anything about sex at all.

Obviously, we reach a point where the ideals of beauty not only contradict the biological basis of attraction – sex – but where beauty is meant actually to be a denier, even as it’s supposed to also be an inducement, of sexuality, of sexual allure.

And so, in the finest Not all men tradition, we have a world populated by people who no longer even can subscribe to “beauty” – and this is where things get truly interesting.  We rebel.

It is not possible, either in the binary of heteronormative humanity, or in all our glorious permutations between, for “all men” (or all women, or all hooloovoos) to conform their actual, real attractions to what we’re told is “beauty.”  Probably never has been – so feminine beauty, and masculine charm for that matter, are not necessarily linked to *attraction*.  Plenty of men find strength irresistible, and there are those amongst us (I’ve known a few) who are carried away by scars, or features which might stack up as weak against the going standard of a time.  Me, I’ve got a thing for a crooked tooth or two (blame David Bowie, whom I’ve never forgiven for getting braces several years ago).  My brother loves the look of women with natural grey or white hair.  Once I have “enough” white in my hair – and it won’t be long – I’m hoping to emulate a kind of Erica Orloff style.  Tell me that isn’t beauty surpassing the “standard” …. 

So, it’s a funny thing.  Feminine beauty has been systematically removed from what biologically “does it” for us, is and has long been another thing – and not just in American or Western culture, either.  Almost universally, feminine beauty is a signifier of a different kind, that speaks to very literal *value* in a market distinct from sexual attraction, yet inextricably linked to procration, over millennia and across cultures.

And, really, left entirely to the hormones, what human body wouldn’t prefer to just get what they physically desire – without having to worry about money and eternity and politics and family and warfare and religion, and all those things we have attached to marital alliances throughout history?  Henry VIII is the most famous example, perhaps, of the contradiction between honest urges and subjective consequences we’ve adopted as “necessities” …

Which leaves us with the problem and the ideal.  Princesses being a major commodity – they had to be beautiful, to be desirable in a way ultimately practical, but which we felt an emotional need to tie to the spiritual and artistic.

Most of the “ugly” people in the world have managed to pair off in their lifetimes, even if not in a standard lifelong monogamous bond (though, perhaps predominantly, in that form after all).  Certainly, sex has never been limited only to the rich and rarefied flowers, protected from human experience and retarded in physical deterioration as much as possible.  Indeed, over the past century or so, a mythology has built up around The Pretty Girl who can’t get a date, or a mate.  Wide swaths of the television and movie industries are dedicated to telling this story over and over again, and lucrative game shows reality shows make millions in reinforcing, without ever actually exploring, the perplexion of the telegenic girl who can’t get a man – or who can, but only for the span of such time as it takes for her to lose a competition and/or to whore her life out to participate in it.



Over time – even over my lifetime – feminine beauty has become a stranger and stranger phenomenon; always building on the same ideals we set up generations and centuries ago, yet ever more distended and rarefied.  Just as fashion has nothing to do with attraction and sex, really beauty doesn’t anymore either.  The pneumatic ideals set forth by designers, surgeons, and advertisers are ever more removed from human impulses, subverted and appropriated by concerns less and less human, and less and less individual.

If Anne of Cleves’ first job was to marry and enchant a king, now the princess’ job is to persuade the masses she embodies, and lives, in fairy tales that never existed in reality, and she’s now tasked to realize.  Ever-more preposterous bodily features and architecture and clothing and (ugly) jewelry are deployed to represent fantasies further and further removed from personal appeal and ever more heavily invested in making somebody a buck or million.  To age is unthinkable, to do so naturally an outrage.  Fiber-intensive extruded “food” products exhort us to obsess over our excretions in order to attain thigh gaps and acceptable waistlines.  “Luxury” brands emblazon their logos on remarkably shoddy, ethically dubious products so that discount stores can pretend to be secret distribution streams for items theoretically exclusive to the elite and wealthy.

Even in an economy enduring one of the longest and most profound depressions in history, the beauty industry booms – as it always has.  Some say this is because women feel the one thing they can indulge in bad times is a foolishly expensive lipstick, which makes them feel good.  Others point to the investment value of primping, as a poor girl looking a certain way might parlay appearance into a lucrative alliance, or professional livelihood.  Watch a single episode of The Bachelor and see if one or the other of the feminine competitors doesn’t mention “fairy tale” or “princess” at least two or three times in a single episode.  (Apart from “this journey”, “connection” and the personal pronoun, these two are the most frequently used language in any example I’ve ever seen of ANY such show.)

Do you conform to what industry calls “beauty” right now … ?  Do you want to?  Can you imagine bedding anyone who does?

Where and how does “beauty” (by standardized terms) live in your life, day to day?

Queen Saint Clotilde's Life

I have not neglected to post about Clotilde, but I have failed in one thing, and that is to point out that she was in her time a VERY long-lived lady indeed.

In The Ax and the Vase, I placed her marriage to Clovis I at about age nineteen in 493 CE.  She was married to him until his death in 511, and so they had a little less than twenty years.

Given that Clotilde lived about SEVENTY years, it’s difficult to put her marriage into perspective.  All of the history touching on her centers upon the marriage, and even the tales of her life as a supposed bloodthirsty revenge-machine after his death, inciting war over decades-old other imaginary murders, tend to be brief in comparison with the hagiography of the saint who brought a king to Catholic Christianity.

The history of Christendom focuses heavily on Clovis I, First Catholic King in Europe – and, to be sure, I have myself framed The Ax and the Vase as exactly that story.  Clotilde’s role is venerated, and she earned her entire fame in history by being the importuning wife who brought a king to the Church – yet she herself is rarely examined except through the lens of her husband, her sons.  We have no tales of her alone, outside the context of the marriage and her children.  And that’s not the exclusive case of Frankish women in history.

Clotilde is, if we take what sources we have at historical value (we shouldn’t), the catalyst, the instigator.  It’s clear her personality was strong – and yet, the person passed down through the centuries is never her own.  Always the daughter, the wife, the mother, Clotilde is in some ways obscured by the very act which brought her the greatest power and the enduring fame of fifteen hundred years’ sanctification.

If Clovis was the first Catholic king in Europe, the mighty precedent of a faith and tradition which set the very course of western history itself after Rome’s “fall” …

Clotilde is the woman, the heart, the impetus, the persuader – who made it happen.

Clovis tends generally to be cast either as a Christian of the Arian faith – or, more often, as an outright pagan.  Historians and enthusiasts squabble enjoyably about “what kind” of pagan he was, but there is no question, his coming to Catholicism was both unexpectedly nonconformist in his day, and an epochal event in Gaul and, eventually, beyond.

If it had not been for the will of his wife, it’s quite possible Clovis never would have come to the Church.

Now, think about that.  Really consider – the course of European life for a thousand years, until the Reformation, the rebellion against that church, the extent and influence of the Catholic Church in most people’s lives and expectations, for so many centuries.  Think about the complexion of the world if he had been and remained a non-trinitarian Christian.  If he had never converted, and the Church grew, but never quite integrated with the royal houses of Europe as it was able to partially thanks to Clovis’ precedent.  The feudal world would have looked very different – the material world would have, without cathedrals and basilicas coming to represent and to attract the wealth and trade of cities.  Consider the increasingly-bound ties, through generations and centruies, of throne and mitre, of money and influence – and the very morality and way of life of such a vast swath of time and humanity.

Imagine that one of the fundamental precedents that set THIS world in motion, never occurred.  That Clovis never looked critically at the Roman Church – spiritual scion of the Roman empire he had assisted to *extinguish* in Gaul – that he remained Arian, or pagan, or perhaps that he did convert, but was never so powerful a monarch as he was to become.  Imagine a Catholic king surrounded by Arians and pagans, who succumbed to defeat at their hands, or who stayed at three small cities in Belgium, and was no tool for a growing Church to gain greater influence and power – and followers.

Because the followers – that is perhaps the greatest key to Clovis’ conversion and baptism, and their eventual effects and influence.

Clovis came to power by the CHARISMA of his blood.  And the stories of the thousands who followed him in ecstasies to the Catholic faith are consistent, whatever else we may say of the veracity or dependability of sources for Late Antiquity.  So are the tales of new converts who lashed out against Arians and pagans in the wake of the fervor accompanying the massive acceptance of Catholicism.

It is Clotilde, a woman Clovis may in part have chosen to marry precisely because of her religious connections, who brought him from friendly correspondence with bishops, to actual submission to her faith.

It is Clotilde, who lived seventy years – nearly three decades after the death of her king – whose influence on one man rendered so many more susceptible to conversion, to baptism, to the Church she had in fact importuned upon him for many years before he accepted.

Clotilde baptized their first son against the will of Clovis – and that son died.

Clovis resisted her testimony, her witnessing, for years – until, on the field of battle, he finally is said to have laid himself in HER G-d’s hands, and gained victory.  Became the king he did become.  And forged his relationship with her Church.



The thirty years after Clovis’ death seeem almost to bear no relationship to the foregoing tales of her conviction, her purity in faith.  The character left to history devolves to a vicious queen out to right ancient family wrongs, in revenge for her father’s (purported) murder – bringing Burgundy to war, and setting her sons to acts of bitterness and revenge which seem not only out of character with the story of Clovis’ life, but out of character with her own youth and queenship.

It is puzzling, in any research (or just causal reading) of a period, to come across a character so lionized and so demonized all at once, yet it is hardly uncommon.  Just as the saint and queen, depicted in her youth and matronhood as the highest ideal may become a crone obsessed with long-gone wrongs … a young woman of power and hope may become a poisoner, the tool of a story meant to illustrate sin and the worst in her gender.  For that matter, even the young warrior may become, over years of propaganda and lost human motivation, the scapegoat vilified for liking little boys, dissipated in wine and shame for a new king to conquer and damn him.  Ahem.

Over the years and years I have spent reading about all the figures of the time, I’ve found reason to doubt almost all the worst tales told.  Propaganda plays an enormous role in The Ax and the Vase, and anyone who reads it should keep in mind both that and the fact that the novel is told in first-person.  I consciously set Clovis up as a somewhat unreliable (and, in that bargain – *incomplete*) narrator, just as I make explicit every piece of propaganda he set forth – the making of his own legend.

The result ends up being that, though I feel her character has blood in her veins and flesh on her bones, Clotilde is done little more justice as a figure in history itself than she is most anywhere else.

None of us lives our lives with great attention paid to our posterity.  Those few who do often rotate around an axis of vanity; and personal forms of propaganda, at that – the well-chosen selfie, the stories told or posted subjectively.  Whether self-aware or not, we’re all writing our own life’s stories, and to author our lives with consideration far beyond how we look in the immediate is close to unheard-of.  So I couldn’t really write a novel in first-person, by a husband often frustrated by his queen – by a *man*, who could not see the woman in his bed as a saint nor a part of history – and DO her that justice.

I hope my readers do her a little better, and see beyond the constraints of creative narrative.

I know some, surely, see beyond the saint and the bitter dowager.  And see a remarkable woman, long-lived, and more than the sum of her husband, and her children.

Author's Notes - This Is the End

The final entries in the gloss:  starting points, sites of conquest, and money money money money.



TOXANDRIA
The realm of Childeric I, foederatus and King of the Franks (childerici regis).  Located within the area referred to by Rome as belgica, modern Belgium, it was ceded to the Franks by the Roman emperor Julian in 358 CE

Childeric held Arras, Boulougne (Bononia), and Tournai, the city representing here Clovis’ first capital.  The domain was not the backwater I have presented it as being; Childeric appears to have been extremely wealthy and perhaps not only in thanks to his position as an ally of the Empire.  Trade and travel throve here, and the art and fine craftsmanship of both Roman and Frankish entrepreneurs were all to be found within the area.


VINDINIUM
The city now known as Le Mans, mentioned by Gregory of Tours as having been ruled by Rigomer.  It did indeed have an amphitheater, which is still visible today; but the thermae, or baths, were demolished in the Imperial Crisis of the third century CE.  The city’s walls may be among the most complete surviving Gallo-Roman town fortifications.


VOUILLE'
The Battle of Vouille’, 507, was one of the greatest gains of actual territory in Clovis’ career, after Soissons.  With this fight, he subdued the Visigoths and likely completed an estrangement from Theodoric and the Ostragoths, and amassed Aquitainia and the major southern expanses of the sum of his consolidated territories, roughing out the outlines of what eventually we came to know as France.


WERGILD
Reparation money exacted for the murder of a member of one’s community:  the literal cost of taking someone’s life, or irrevocably compromising it.  Wergild might also be assigned for crimes other than murder, as in the rape of Tetrada, or for the death of livestock or catastrophic loss of property.  Interestingly, the wergild for a woman of childbearing age was extremely high; though women might not have held a position the modern mind would think of as powerful, their value to a community was undeniable, and their treatment was not strictly that of chattel.

The system of wergild valuation was formalized, and laws in existence at the time, as well as the lex salica set down in the final year of Clovis’ life and reign, address specific situations/personages in some detail.  The concept originally saved those in government—and many families—from having to deal with the alternative of blood-for-blood, thereby acting to control feuds and civil strife.  Where we might find the literal pricing of a person’s value … “barbaric” … the function of these laws was actually meant to reduce violence and provide deterrent to crime.  The hierarchy of wergild values provides an anthropological window into the society as a whole, and once again underscores the ultimate values in the Frankish system:  freedom and family.

Tetrada’s wergild would be thrice that of a male under twelve or over forty, or anyone else not a soldier in his prime.



As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.

Author's Notes

As we near the end of the Author's Notes series, it's interesting to observe how the glossary sort of fell out in an order that lent itself to this format in terms of theme and content.  Today's subjects:  places, places, and more places!



THURINGIA
One of the territories known to have been gained by Clovis, but not always firmly under his control, Thuringia was the font of allies and family for the king.  It was his close relation to the people of this region which both justified his claim upon it, and horrified because of the manner of his staking that claim.  Basina, Clovis’ mother, was a Thuringian queen before she scandalized the Franks by leaving her husband Bisinus (who had provided refuge for the exiled Frankish king) to marry Childeric.  Thuringian land occupied the eastern borders of those domains making up a part of Clovis’ story, situated north of Odovakar’s realm.



TOLBIAC
The Battle of Tolbiac, 496—site of Clovis’ conversion (most widely reported/accepted date).  Called Zulpich in many sources.  The “place-name problem” often prevalent for a British writer was a lesser issue for European/Roman geography in Late Antiquity.  For no reason better than accessibility for the unfamiliar reader, I’ve chosen Latinized forms of both personal and place names almost universally.


TONGEREN
Tongeren is one of the oldest cities in Belgium, predating even the advent of Julius Caesar.  The city was a Roman administrative center, and housed one of the first Catholic dioceses in the area, but was likely sacked in 451 by the Huns.  Chararic’s placement at Tongeren is a fiction, but the area is a likely one for someone associated with Clovis as early as the victory at Soissons, and places him in proximity with the smaller world of Clovis’ Belgic origins, as well as in a believable kin-geography.


TOURNAI
Clovis’ first capital, and the main of three cities held by Childeric in the province of belgica secunda, Tournai is also one of the oldest towns in Belgium.  Tournai lay east and slightly south of Bononia, with Arras between the two, farther to the south.  Tournai was and is situated on the Scheldt river, a conduit for trade and sustenance dating at least to the Roman period.



As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.

Author's Notes

Today, a look at princes and non-primogenitive inheritance.


SUCCESSION
Much has been made, over the centuries, of Salic Law, not least Title LIX, Concerning Private Property, which addressed the prohibition of feminine inheritance:  of Salic land no portion of the inheritance shall come to a woman: but the whole inheritance of the land shall come to the male sex.  Looming far larger at the time of the Merovingian dynasty, however, was the division of inheritance—a habit, at the royal level, which led to the perceived degeneration of Clovis’ descendants and their power.

Clovis’ decision to divide his kingdom in the manner of a patrimony, rather than to enact the now-familiar practice of primogeniture, has fascinated and frustrated historians and scholars for generations.  However, at the time, such an action was commonplace and unexceptional—and, of course, led to the notorious wars and factions so much a part of the dynastic history of the time.  The problem is another more applied by modern perspective than one which would have been recognized at the time.  As the sun comes up in the east, so the tradition was the tradition, and if it contained inconveniences, and even the seeds of strife, that was not the matter for a father (nor even a king) to presume to rectify.  Primogeniture was not merely foreign, it would have been inconceivable, in the sense of not occurring to those with estates.  If it obviously became conceivable to those inheriting, then the actions were as they were, and were as much accepted consequences as the tradition itself was accepted.


THEODORIC
454-526; King of the Ostrogoths (488-526), ruler of Italy (493-526), and regent of the Visigoths (511-526).  The name means king of the people (theud), and may be tied to a form of rulership referred to in ancient Germanic nations as Thiudans, a spiritual level of authority in contrast with reiks, the military or blood ruler.  This name, of course, unites those aspects.
Theodoric made much of his (possibly fictional) descent from the venerated Amal line, and varied his approach to Clovis and others with their value or threat to his position.  His queen, Audofleda, was Clovis’ sister; though the alliance forged by this marriage was not made of stern stuff.  Theodoric and Clovis, though they never warred directly, remained wary and at times antagonistic regardless of the relation.


THEUDERIC
484-533/534(?); inherited Austrasia, Rheims, and Metz.  First son of Clovis, whose mother was unrecorded but seems likely to have been a concubine/friedelehe.  Little is recorded of him before his father’s death, and there is no indication whatever that he was in any way  unhealthy.  His “palsy” in this story serves both as story arc for his character and also as the physical manifestation of unspoken conflict between Clovis and himself.  Much of what I have created for Theuderic’s character is utter fiction.
Early in his own reign, Theuderic sent his son Theudebert to battle the Scandinavian King Chlochilaich (better known, from the poem Beowulf, as Hygelac) who had invaded his realm. Theudebert defeated and killed Chlochilaich.  See the note on Theodoric for etymology of the name.    (Variations:  Thierry, Deitrich)



As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.

Author's Notes

Today will be brief and miscellaneous.  Stay tuned tomorrow, for a look at ROMANIZATION!



RICCHAR
Not noted by sources as a king, Ricchar was brother to Ragnachar, and little discussed except as one of many minor rulers whose domains were usurped during Clovis’ career.  He is variously described as having been killed with Ragnachar at Cambrai, or with their other brother, Rigomer, at Vindinium, during Clovis’ unification of Frankish territories.


RIGOMER
Like Ricchar, a brother of Ragnachar and not noted as a king; likewise little discussed by sources.  However, Rigomer is noted in relation to Vindinium, so it is possible that as a Frankish prince he had some governance over the city.  He was killed between 508-511 in Clovis’ Frankish unification campaigns.


RIPUARIAN/SALIAN
The distinction often employed by historians to discuss Ripuarian (river-dwelling) and Salian (sea-dwelling) Franks was not employed during the period of Clovis’ rule, though the latter term can be found in ancient histories—outside the context generally understood today.  The designation “Frankish” appears to be a later development as well, though francia and francisca may have been in use, and have long been connected with the people of Clovis as, respectively, designations for their land and their totemic weapons, the battle-axes which figure so prominently in this tale.



As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.

Author's Notes - Latin, Lover

Today we have a couple of the Latin terms used in The Ax and the Vase most frequently ... and a look at Clovis' friedelehe, lover, first wife - the fictional mother of his first son, Theuderic.

COMES
Companion, comrade (plural:  comites).  The Germanic concept of comitatus, described in Latin by Tacitus, describes a wider relationship with the special connotation that comrades in this relationship would never desert one another on the field of battle.  A king’s comites were the most trusted companions, but as seen here this is not a hereditary/noble title.

This sense of the title illuminates the extent of betrayal and cowardice in Chararic’s failure to support Clovis on the field; as well, perhaps, as the extent of punishment it was for Clovis to renounce his kinsman and comes, Ragnachar, for all to see.  The term evolved into the modern title, comte’, or Count.  It shares a root with the words committee and constable.


DOMINE
“My lord.”  I wanted to use a title clearly illustrating subjection, in the sense of a kings’ subject, without evoking too-medieval a tone.  Here again, as I adopted the theory (oft questioned) that the Franks of Late Antiquity, and Clovis himself, were heavily Romanized, I borrowed from Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, and adopted this address.  It is intended to both evoke a certain tone, but also stand apart from terms used in much fiction of this genre and period.  It has been perhaps the greatest asset in my attempt to avoid too much “antique-speak” in the tone of the manuscript, while still contributing to the world-building of this alien time and place.


EVOCHILDE
FICTIONAL.  Though it is known that Theuderic I is not the son of Clovis’ queen, Clotilde, not a breath of evidence testifies to the nature of Clovis’ relationship with Theuderic’s mother, nor who she might have been.  The name Evochildis does appear fleetingly in some sources, but even this is unreliable.

After the cautionary example of his voluptuous father, Clovis’ sexual behavior is notably unremarked by sources.  It seemed correct to simplify the king’s amatory adventures in the form of strongly bonded relationships and, to some extent, silence.  Theuderic’s birth is recorded as having occurred in 484, well before the advent of Clotilde.  I saw no reason to complicate matters with towering romance, nor to dismiss the emotional importance of a first love either.  A friedelehe who dies in childbirth fits the timeline.  It also explains Theuderic’s clearly estimable position with his father, explains the absence of any other documented concubine or lover alongside the queen, aligns with the position Clotilde herself eventually seems to have held with the king, and finally, simply, reflects the realities of the time.  For a man to love a woman might easily have meant, in this age and for many thousands of years before and since, to kill her.  As, “to be the queen, she agreed to be the widow”, so both parties in sex, for centuries before our time, always knew:  to be a lover might be a bargain with mortality.



As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.

Author's Notes - MC Edition!

Yes, we are here at last - and, as luck would have it, the king and queen are right next to each other in The Ax and the Vase's Author's Note.  Enjoy!


CLOTILDE
475-544/545.  “Illustrious battle”, from hludo (fame, illustrious—the root also gives us the descendant “loud”) and tild (battle).  Much of the legend of St. Clotilde relates to the Burgundian wars, romanticized for centuries in songs of betrayal and blood.  A significant portion of these appear to be only that—legend—but the saint would have almost certainly have been a woman of some will, and records of Frankish royal womanhood are vivid; the tale of “choose your blade” is taken from real sources, though not attached to Clotilde.

Clotilde’s greatest accomplishment according to history was the conversion of her husband; certainly a significant event.  I felt the relationship here had to be contentious (the tale of the arguments surrounding baptism of the children, before Clovis’ own conversion, is taken from sources), but definitely loving.  I worked from the background of Clovis’ apparently profligate father to build the portrait of a marriage both befitting her sanctified repute and suitable to partner a monarch and a man as overwhelming as Clovis.  (Variants:  Clotilda, Clotildis, Clothilde, Chrodchild, Chrodegilde, Chlothilde von Burgund)


CLOVIS
466-511.  The name derives from the roots hludo (fame, illustrious—the root also gives us the cognate descendant “loud”) and wig/viga (war, warrior, battle).  Clovis’ exploits may have rested on a greater legacy from his own father than is sometimes assumed, and many of his timelines, motivations, actions, and legends are disputed.  Regardless of his real history, he makes for an irresistible story, and quite a subject in himself.  I was blessed to bump into him via the etymology of my own middle name, and overjoyed to encounter him at a time when productivity as a writer had become more than something to put off for later.  His legend has remained either wonderfully (for me as a writer) or sadly (for the millions who’ve never heard of him) untrodden in English, and has been an exciting tale to relate.

The sarcophagus of Clovis, interred at his church of St. Peter and Paul—later rededicated to St. Geneviéve—is said to have remained intact until the French Revolution, when revolutionaries broke into the church and desecrated his remains.  An interesting end for the king who was a kind of French beginning.  (Variants:  Chlodovech, Chlodovechus, Chlodovacar, Chlovis, Chlodwig, Hludowig, Hlodowig.  Gave rise to Hludowicus, Hludovicus, Ludovicus, Louis, Ludwig, Lewis, and, of course … Louise.)



As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.

Author's Notes

CHLPERIC II
Clotilde’s father, son of King Gundioc, thought to have lived 443-480.  Gundioc’s sons, Gundobald, Godegesil, Gundomar, and Chilperic, inherited a divided kingdom, and Gregory of Tours condemns Gundobald for murder and usurpation in a bid for Gundioc’s entire inheritance.  Chilperic’s daughter Chrona was said to have taken the veil and later founded the church of Saint-Victor, and Clotilde was exiled, eventually marrying Clovis (and supposedly setting her husband and even her sons against the traitorous Gundobald and his son Sigismund).


CHLODERIC
King of the river-dwelling Franks, killed by Clovis in 509.  Chloderic was the son of Sigibert, and called The Parricide, I saw in one source an undoubted typo referring to him as “the parasite”.  This was just appealing enough to use anyway, and informs what character he’s allowed to display in these pages (little enough, as it happens).  Clovis used Chloderic to achieve the murder of Sigibert, who had fought beside him in multiple battles—and then used Chloderic’s crime of betrayal to then remove him also from the picture.


CHLODOMER
495-524; inherited Orléans (Poitiers, Orléans—Aureliani, the city of Aurelius—Tours).  Eldest surviving son of Clovis and Clotilde, he is most closely involved in the legends of Clotilde’s (likely fictitious) lust for revenge against her own family in Burgundy.  He was killed at the Battle of Vézeronce in Burgundy, having assassinated Sigismund of Burgundy and both of Sigismund’s sons.  His widow was married, possibly without her consent, by Clotaire, who then murdered Chlodomer’s children, excepting the youngest, Clodoald, who escaped and gave up his long hair, emblem of his royalty.  Clodoald was canonized Saint Cloud.  (Clodomir, Clodomer)


CHOLWIG
FICTIONAL.  As with Pharamond, Cholwig is a piece of imagination.  He fills the role of sage elder for Clovis—indeed, he is almost the only member of the preceding generation who makes up Clovis’ court from the beginning.  He represents the sole tie to the old ways, to Clovis’ ancestors, and takes on the literary position of surrogate father to the king.  He is Merlin and Mr. Miyagi, Spock and Mickey Goldmill.  Completely imaginary, but for the way I found this novel developing, completely necessary.


CHROTILDA
Sole daughter of Clovis and Clotilde, born 506, between his conversion and eventual baptism.  The name Chrotilda is cognate with Clotilde; she was named for her mother.

In the years after Clovis’ death, given in marriage to Amalaric, she was “rescued” by her brothers after, according to legend, she sent a towel stained with her own blood to her brother Childebert, who brought an army to defeat the Visigoths and retrieved his sister, only for her to die on the journey homeward of unrecorded causes.


As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.

Author's Notes

CHARARIC
One of the kinsmen Clovis is famously said to have disingenuously bemoaned no longer having, toward the end of his life—thanks to his supposed bloodthirst against his own relations.  I’ve given Chararic the seat of Tongeren, an ancient Belgic city it seems reasonable to consider a ruined one during the period of Clovis’ reign.  It was destitute, but not without potential; and, as with many of the gains I have written through Clovis’ career, he enjoyed battle, but also the prospect of territories the assets and advantages of which he felt could be more greatly exploited for power, wealth, and profit.


CHILDEBERT
496-558; inherited Paris.  Second son of Clovis and Clotilde, later in life he led the liberating army for his sister against the Visigoths and her husband, the Arian Amalaric.  More religious than his brothers, Childebert was also more successfully expansionist, and involved himself in more foreign wars than Chlodomer, Theuderic, or Clotaire.  Founded the monastery of Saint Vincent to house relics of the saint he had won in battle at Zargoza.


CHILDERIC
437-481; King of the Salian Franks; foederatus, belgica secunda.  The heir, though not certainly known to be the son, of Merovus/Merovech, who was said to be son of a sea god, and who gave his name to the Merovingian line founded by Clovis.  Childeric ruled 457-481, possibly with a great deal more power and wealth than are indicated in many siources and certainly within this manuscript.  His adult life and reign are documented, but subject to debate.  He was said to be so dissolute his own people rejected him, but after his restoration his rule appeared to be uncontested and fairly strong.

Possibly the most valuable legacy of Childeric was discovered in 1653, when his tomb was uncovered in Tournai at the church of Saint-Brice.  The riches found therein are legendary, in spite—or because—of being plundered in 1831 and lost to us.  Byzantine coinage, a signet ring reading Childerici Regis, the famous crystal head of a bull, and riches of jewels and gold abounded, along with the possibility of equine sacrifice over a period of many memorial years, and on a fairly grand scale.  Most famous are three hundred golden bees, each one attached by embroidery upon a rich Roman robe of silk and worked in garnet cloisonne’ with the backs of the stones incised in an identifiably Merovingian style.

Childeric’s bees have been subject of fables and fantasies, their symbolism discussed in the most fascinating interpretations.  Napoleon had them embroidered onto his coronation robes.  The metaphoric possibilities are tantalizing, and include wonderful tales attaching to the fleur de lys, symbol of France, as well as spearheads and animal lore of varying significance.

Clovis’ succession after his father was not, in his time, the entrenched guarantee royal primogeniture eventually became (partially thanks to Clovis’ own Lex Salica).  His election informs the quotation used after my title page:  rex ex nobilitate, dux ex virtute - king through noble birth, commander through right of virtue.  Like many Germanic cultures, it was the raising on a shield by a people’s commanders which elevated a prince to a throne; the right of inheritance was neither presumed nor automatic.



As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.