"Does This Battle Scene Make My Butt Look Big?" ...

... or "The Perils of Taking Advice TOO Seriously"

The key revision work I am doing right now includes:  making Clovis more immediate, intimate - bringing that much-discussed charisma to a much more prominent position in the character.  Tightening the plot - though I have been cogitating some ideas on how and where to do this, it is my readers I shall trust for advice on this - this is perhaps the point on which I need the most objective, and savvy, advice.  Finally, working on my first battle scene.

The very very very first draft of that scene was of course extremely different.  I *hate* writing battle scenes, of course - as, I believe, I have mentioned.  Heh.  So the first go at this one consisted of little more than the comment that "this battle happened" with my personal stance of "ew. ick." unstated, but probably pretty obvious.

The essential critiqe of this first mention was, "Um.  Battle scene, please?" - and that was as correct as the current requirement.  Ya can't really have a SCENE without, say, verbs.  Maybe even a noun or two.

So I set to work in creating a setpiece, and the battle scene which had been offstage, came on.  It got big.

Taking advice is great, but one *can* still take even good advice too far.  "You want battle scene?  WE GOT BATTLE SCENE, MAN."  Pow.  Boom.  Crash.

The thing is, I'm not sure the scene as it stands is all *bad* per se - but there is just rather a lot of it.  I've already deleted a good bit, but am aware it still needs to come down.

Ahh, there's nothing like showing your enthusiasm for critique by overdosing on the point at hand.  I said it myself, basically, in that post I linked above:  I held my nose and plunged in.

Bit too deep.  We're working on that.  Working on, actually, quite a number of small things.  Details are coming to me - inspirations - intimations, immediacies.  Good things.  A glint of light on steel, a blur of anticipation in passion, the work of remembering a boy is not a man.  Power, and closeness.

It's been a good week and a half or so.  I love it so much when, being a writer:  I find myself actually writing.

Battle Ass

The armies lay encamped on the low slope of a wide, open hillside. Two thousand men, the force my father could muster from his three cities, were joined by King Odovakar’s equal host of Romans. Even with such a multitude, it was nearly silent in the darkness. My breath came hushed, a dangerous secret I needed to keep.

This is the easy part.

This is the part where a boy is waiting.

And this is my opening sequence. Clovis, fourteen, is still a prince in waiting ... and he awaits an enormity even his clear ambition can't encompass. Clovis enters the field of battle for the first time.


***


I don't pretend to know what it is to be a boy, fourteen years old. I don't pretend to know war - or battle, as war once was - nor even its strategies, competently. But this is my job. I set myself the task, and Clovis had expectations of me (the character ... if not the real ghost of a king), and the task was clear, cut-and-dried.

My first opening sequence was meant to introduce the story of Clovis and his wife, (the later Saint) Clotilde. I wanted to tell an epistolary romance. I was having one of my own. I felt I had special understanding.

What I did instead was nothing of the kind. Clovis and Clotilde didn't come to know each other by letter. Her persuasion of him into the Faith was not managed so tidily, nor so progressively. She fought him, and he fought back.

And Clovis' life was fighting.


There was nothing for it. I was going to have to write the whole damned thing. Even - especially - the battle parts.


***


My premise for the first scene was that life consists of waiting. The waiting before the fray begins was the obvious place to start. Yet even once battle is met, Clovis waits. He is held, he sees, by a strategy not putting him at the fore. He is hemmed in, too, by an enemy less obviously strategic. The strain is one of heat, one of anticipation not met. The intensity of expectation, the most powerful thing of all, in any of the great events of our lives.

Steel cleaves bone - even Clovis' flesh is hit - but much of this battle scene is spent on the struggle of *unmet* struggle; the drain, the intensity of frustration.

It seems right thematically - yet also it seems right at this place in his career, in the book itself. We are in chapter one, so the setpiece is a big one - and yet it doesn't lead to glory. It mires in the banality of learning the unknown, the immediacy of baffling losses and the distraction of oppressive heat, the power of accumulated mundanity piled into doses so massive nothing is clear, nothing is victorious - and nothing feels much like defeat, either.

I may be no boy, but I know what it is to wait. I know endurance. I know the shock of coming to understand the profound, or the hideous.

And I knew what my job was. To put down words which would be believable.



It can't be apparent from reading my blog, but I have an eminent capacity to learn my characters. Kent Dixon taught me that I had to divest myself of feminine skin and try on someone else's. He also taught me I was the one who had to teach myself HOW to do that. The most crucial piece of writing advice I ever had, shedding myself, was that, "A guy is not going to describe a girl's sweater. He's going to be looking at her ass."

I re-wrote the story. And he used it up to retirement (which should be coming soon). I wrote that twenty-three years ago, or more.

I take my lessons well.

I also read.

Reading Mary Stewart's Arthurian novels taught me the first fundamentals of battle, and I learned and learned.

It came to my attention, around the age of thirty or so: I am an excellent learner - when I care.



I have cared for little, in my capacity as a writer, more than I did about inhabiting Clovis.

(My companion)’s was the armor I clashed with most, and all our action merely jostling in the press of men and horses. There were more allied haunches than enemy weapons at hand, jostling and turning in a dizzying sea of motion.

Out of the cold darkness of earliest morning and the stark brightness as we’d begun fighting, a humid red mist of blood, clay and battle sweat grew and enveloped the field in smoke, stink and heat. The light rose and grew wider above us, and finally the thicket of horses and men loosened. The miasma grew thicker, almost choking, the only air there was to breathe. As our mobility loosened, the way before us bristled with a profusion of steel; weapons in every direction, thicker even than the density of flesh had been in the beginning. Visibility was challenged in one way or another throughout the rest of the long day.

I began, too, to know the heat of battle. Every pore of my skin perspired, and I was glad of the clot of fabric rimming the inside of the helmet. Even with it, my eyes were full of stinging sweat, and inside the gloves protecting my hands and wrists, my palms were slippery, my grasp unsteady and touch frustrated.

As our lines loosened into dozens of individual brawling combats, cohesion in the flanks was giving way altogether: the center was spreading.

I hacked, and moved forward; hacked, and moved forward.

I wrote, I edited, I moved forward. I focused.

I learned that I don't need to have my uncle the Army Man read me for accuracy. I learned that I produce good product. I had readers read, and learned that their trust is more important than my education. *Authenticity* is the key, and the magic of that is that I managed to find it. You have to find your own; and you will know it when you have, when you read it back to yourself (out loud).

This post seems like I should be offering some sort of step-by-step on that, but I don't believe in steps for myself, and would be suspect of any attempt I could make to offer them to anybody else. All I can say is this:

The guy wouldn't be describing the girl's sweater.

Look at her ass. That is where the truth is to be found.

Writing Battle Scenes

There are times the work of writing really enthralls me.

My subject at hand is a warrior and a royal (aren't they all? I know, I know, and I've addressed the question: just buy the book when it comes out, I'm not here to defend it; ironically enough, given the four words preceding the parenthesis). I do not know squat about how to be a king, and less by far about how to be a dang general. And I've studied a lot of things in the name of writing this novel--researched everything from ancient brickmaking to horse breeding, early Christianity, and pattern-welding steel--but even with reading (as little as I could) about battle formations, and my own specific battles, the deeper dive into actual psychology and what it's "like" to be a fighting man (never mind a strategist) has never quite happened.

I've taken shots, so to speak, and found accidental inspirations. When I'm forcing myself to write battle scenes, I do find some internal logic. But the level of fiction here is really so complete I have to admit I am BS'ing par excellence.

I hope it is par excellence.

The wonder of it is that it even *feels* that "right".

I have, and not long ago, thought about running this or that by my uncle, a retired Army officer with Vietnam combat experience. He's busy right now and I'd hate to distract him - and in any case, how selfish can one be?

I've told myself time and again, Diane, you have to look into this stuff.



I always, of course, end up half-baking it, talking out of my, er, elbow, just plunging in like I have a clue in the world. I really don't. But I find myself responding to the cracked junk that ends up coming out, going 'wow, where'd that come from', and thinking, actually, it's kind of believable.

I've read a few battle scenes in my day, it's not like I have to actually produce a documentary.

Yet even with the allowances I give myself, and the remote possibility a reader would do the same, I still think I score a pretty solid B on these things, and that really pleases me. I come up with one idea, I run to do something about it, and other stuff comes crawling around, crab-style, from a completely bizarre angle--and *boop* I've got a battle scene.

After battle scene after battle scene ... Ugh.



Never disbelieve an author who tells you the old cliche', "an author doesn't choose the subject, the subject chooses the author."

Now, far be it from me to presume I am of any use to the old Frenchman I've mired in my millions of keystrokes ... but I do have to say, even if I'm not obvious, I've turned out not to be a disgraceful scribe for the fellow. His fights don't get short shrift--plus, he's intelligent, funny, wonderfully violent and insane, and the women who dig him the most aren't half bad.

Well, apart from his mom, of course--but no spoilers here.



The point is that the process of writing is mystifying stuff. I am a complete dumb-idiot, and a bit of a girl when it comes to war and stuff. But dang if I haven't written this whole historical novel and produced some serviceable combat. And shorter bursts of pretty spectactular violence (and temper) too. Where it's all come from I cannot imagine - and, as we all know, fella babies: I'm conceited, and more than willing to take credit for my talents and smarts.

This, I never will understand. I can't say it's automatic writing; I know I have some role in all this. I know I've put forth (over four years now of) effort. It's not like I'm disclaiming responsibility here.

But credit is hard to take, at the same time.

It's weird and it's inexplicable, and I love it, and I don't think I'll ever get it. I'm grateful as hell, and the closer I come to finishing ("February! February!!"), the more bizarre it seems to me.

I'll be interested to see how the not-a-sequel-exactly decides to turn out.

It's all about women. Powerful, booty-kicking, Ostragothic women. Rock on.

Researching Clotilde

Like her husband, Queen Saint Clotilde's name is rooted on the term hludo, a root which also gave us the word loud, and which means famed.  It is often translated as "bright" or "shining" - but, for modern ease of understanding, I think "famed" makes more sense for precision and the intellectual transfer we must make for mental translation.  The cognate term loud explains the resonance - fame can come from a great noise.  But brightness, though I can understand why it is sometimes used, doesn't link to that cognate word (loud) and so doesn't create the chain of meaning quite the same way.

Clotilde, though ... maybe "bright" is a feminine term in my mind, maybe "shining" just captures some aspect of this woman in the same terms as the character I came to know, writing her ... I like the flash of light this translation represents.

Clovis - hludo and wiga - famed warrior.

Clotilde - hludo and tild - bright battle.

Each of their names carries a deep resonance for me as the author of characters inspired by these real people.    Battle might not seem an apt name for the Catholic saint who brought the first king in Gaul, the first king in Europe, to her Church.  Yet she did mount a campaign, and Clovis' conversion in the end has been marked as her victory.

In many ways, too ... relationships - marriages - are a battle.  I don't say that in some pejorative sense, nor the shallow-brained manner people affect, making unfunny jokes about opposite genders, or reducing lifetime commitments to battles of will.  Clotilde, as I encountered her, is more than capable of pitting our king to just such a battle.

But marriage is work.  Is now, was then, always has been, between people who want more of it - from each other - than exactly those shallow stereotypes I deny employing just above.  And if a couple are required to work together, at times it will engender clashes inward and outward as well.  Clovis and Clotilde come against one another from time to time (even as their relationship is durably powerful emotionally and physically), but also find themselves called to stand together and face challenges as well.

Bright battle.  Shining saint.  Remarkable woman.  This is my Queen ... Saint Clotilde.

60 Pages of Ugly Fat

I am so HUGELY grateful to Leila right now - she showed me where Ax REALLY begins.  It's a beautiful thing having writing partnerships you can trust, and it's an even better one when a fairly profound piece of critique means you can slice off SIXTY PAGES of a manuscript without extreme issues with continuity.  At this moment, The Ax and the Vase opens in 481 AD, at the point where Clovis' father, Childeric, is fighting beside Odovakar  at Angers - a setpiece where Clovis draws (and loses) his first blood.

Leila, though, tells me in reading the manuscript, where her excitement truly came into play.  And it makes sense: the story of a king doesn't start with his first battle.  It starts - obviously - at his crowning.  This is the point at which Clovis becomes CLOVIS - becomes Clovis I.  The point at which he becomes king.  This novel is about the king - not the prince.

This novel begins, not with the setpiece of a battle - a battle which, it must be pointed out, is in fact a minor one even in the career of a then-obscure Frankish scion of minor royalty not even yet proved - but with the point at which this character gains his power.  And begins to exert it.


Thank you again, Leila.  And, yep - I am excited to start carving!

Motivation, Intent, and Tone

Here we have a very interesting post indeed, considering my own recent thoughts about horror and violence. Something of a gamer's eye view of the same things I was on about, with a more big-picture perspective, which is good to see too.

It's not so much the violence. The violence is a symptom. It's the blatant fear of ideas in the face of financial risk.
--a perfectly-stated point from the post's comments section

My old barbarian - a warrior king, after all; and a historical one, yet - fits in the category of a mindless sociopath, but his perspective on the requirement of violence is unfamiliar to my mind, my context, my ability to personally justify. It was easy enough to see the reasons the *character* would and could do as he did; yet to spool it out, to produce the words describing it (in first-person, no less), to get all the scenes of murder and battle out, was a trial for me nonetheless. I put off writing certain of my battle scenes literally for YEARS, out of dread of having to do them.

I hate battle scenes, as we know; as I chide myself for committing to in the way I have and did. The ones I've created were more than a necessary evil; they were a story actually important to tell.

This really makes me wonder, then, how they read. I invested myself in the character - and in the first-person - with honesty. I have re-read these scenes perhaps more than others, because I'm aware I need the most editing and scrutiny in these things I have such a hard time writing in the first place. I put a lot of work into ... I don't know what the word is to use here. Verissimilitude seems best, though it dissatisfies me. Satisfaction, in its way, is better actually. The violence is "satisfactory" in the sense that it doesn't read as if a forty-two year old wimp of a hausfrau in modern Virginia was filtering through all the shock, yuck, and goo to produce them.

I produced them, let it be said, in a fairly workmanlike way - and, once I'd had useful feedback on a false start early on in the going, with pretty decent first-go results on the products themselves. I tucked my head down, took deep breaths, plunged in, and got the job(s) done.

Reading my own violence, as I've said, I have little visceral response, though emotionally I do follow pretty well, and I think the "read" works authentically in terms of what it is meant to evoke in a reader. But even with the control one has over reading, as opposed to other art forms - the way we can slow down (or perhaps rush) through certain passages, and manage our experience of them - they pack the punch they need to.

Video games can't be as easily modulated as books, slowing down or speeding up the pace of our reading; lingering or skimming, even physically holding the body - or the book - in some particular way. Sure, there are pause buttons, but play determines its speed, and immersive experience is the best way to do best, so "backing off" mentally is less of an option for the gamer ... or, at least, so I believe from my experience of gamers. My experience of actual play is nonexistent. But I know how much willing suspension of disbeief it takes just to watch a movie. And I know that it takes even more than WSD to participate in a game. A lot more.

So I segue from thinking of the effect my own violence has, on those whose responses to it I can guess, on those I can identify in one way or another, to the universal and popular question of "what media does to us" - and of course the answers always seem to make me queasy.

I justify my own contributions. I justify my own consumption. But I still find the whole a less enjoyable part of the culture than real storytelling, real human interaction, real *entertainment* (by, admittedly, my own definition of the term), real enjoyment of life. I question whether what I've done is art, or merely creativity designed to sell to a sick(-ish ... ?) society.

I tuck my head. And write the next scene of sudden gore.


As Vonnegut says. So it goes.

*Sigh*

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.

Axing the Ax!

I was struck and amused at some of the ideas I'm bouncing off my SBC readers, and thought it was worth sharing, if only for the realization I came to in the final line of my note to these wonderful ladies ...

By the way, if you don't like having opening chapters of a novel "spoilered" - well, then, this contains spoilers. However, nothing of substance beyond the first few dozen pages will be ruined by this post.  If you're interested in "process", though - read on, because this is full-on authorial sausage-making!  (Note:  "Cloti" is my nickname for Queen Clotilde.  Other characters named are a mix of historical and fictional, mostly the latter.)


***



Kristi, to catch you up on brainstorming last weekend, Leila helped me to see that I could cut the character of Clovis’ older sister, Lanthechild (and her traitor husband, Gaianus) out of the novel.  Just because she existed doesn't mean she needs to exist in this novel!  This weekend, I decided I probably need to ditch Clovis’ own mini battle with trichinosis, too.  That thread doesn’t do anything but demonstrate Cloti’s administrative expertise, and I don’t think evidence of that is so short those scenes and their aftermath are worth preserving.  Your thoughts?

I’m also shifting the opening progression to move straight from Evochilde’s death to the battle with Syagrius, eliminating all the talk of horse breeds and cousin Wedelphus, and prep for five years, to tighten the progression of events.  It’ll be coronation, mother’s banishment, death of Evochilde, big battle, with very little exposition and blah-blah in between.  Any character I can eliminate, I need to - so if you think the little scribe boy, Merochar, needs to go, for instance, tell me.  For now, I’ve kept Mero since he does provide an ongoing thread through the novel - but he may not be essential, so throw ideas around there, too.

Pharamond’s parents may get to keep their names, but I may also eliminate the scenes where their deaths occur; it doesn’t add anything to the action, nor Clovis’ character (their deaths don’t even do much for Pharamond’s character, textually speaking!), so that will probably go.

Funny, how I can feel so “fertile” as a writer, coming up with so many darlings to kill!!

Trek/Wars

Note to J. J. Abrams: as MUCH as I love the movie you made, the funny thing about my consumption of Star Trek in general, and my consumption, even, of your Star Trek movie in particular, is that I didn't really buy into it for the Star WARS excitement you're on about so much in the extras.

I'm not one of those Trek fans who goes particularly rabid about the whole Trek-versus-Wars thing (which I wasn't even aware of until I was like thirty or thirty-five, this is how disinterested I am in SW really). But the point, for me, is that Wars never got me. It never hooked, me, I can't generate interest in it, in the same way I can't generate interest in watching televised sports. I just don't get IT, myself.

People go on about SW's mythology - and I am a mythology geek from way back - but, oddly enough, the mythology thing is actually my problem. I don't mind reading myths, because in reading one's brain can backfill and create character, setting, and one's own interests. For a movie, that's served up concretely - and yet character doesn't get looked to, all too often. So SW, for me, is as rarefied as myth is without the production assistant in my brain - but without the depth of character, and investment in them, that reading allows me to create. So I see SW, and I see amazing visuals peopled (and aliened) by carboard cutouts. Meh. It's better than golf, but even the syndicated Stargate series feel to me more accomplished with characterization.

Not long ago, out for an evening and talking with some Wars nerds in between dancing with my friends, one guy brought up the point that Trek, since it consisted of so many series, and since it was served up in our homes, and since it contains such a range and depth of storylines, some episodic and some more overarching, has simply more *material* to get one with. I'd say that's fair, leaving aside anyone's inevitable argument that if one really gets into the whole media universe of material for both - because, in the end, the starting points, what is served to us without our having to go out and really seek "more" than is major-released, or weekly-broadcast, *do* come in different proportions. Everyone with any exposure to much pop culture at all has grown up with one or half a dozen series of Trek beamed constantly into their homes - even those luddites among us without CABLE, for goodness sake, have access to syndicated versions of Trek in its many iterations; whereas, really, Wars is available pretty much via the movies, in terms of stuff we don't have to go look for. The sheer hours-to-hours proportion of what's been produced in Trek versus Wars is pretty massively Trek-intensive. I grew up with Bones in the background. Lando I'd have had to go out to find. So, easy peasy. I became a Trek fan, if even out of sheer laziness/inertia (or lack of the latter).

And, of course, being a contrarian, I would naturally have always been one to resist the whole "saw it five hundred twenty-seven times" thing Wars had going for it in a way Trek only generated much later. The repulsion from that was built in (and not least because, seriously, Wars had WARS in the title, which was a very real turnoff for the nine-or-whatever-year-old GIRL I was when it came on the scene.



This brings me to the point of why I should have become a Trek fan at all, and that just having it piped into the house, available, hardly explains this.

And, to be sure, when I was really young, Trek probably annoyed me. It was all boys, but for Uhura, and of course she was a woman of science, of extreme articulation, of all those things I found most intimidating and impossible to even aspire to when I was a little girl. She didn't attract me, she barely registered with me, all I saw as a kid was guys and fear and dreary old hollering and fighting.

When I was little, Bewitched was my thing. I Dream of Jeannie. Elizabeth Montgomery was more of a Barbie (as lovely a woman as she was) - she was pitched right at my level, my interests. She was easy, she was remarkably beautiful. I wanted to be her, and I wanted magic powers. Like Dollhouse much later, these shows about women were fantasy stuff. I wanted to be gorgeous, magic, and possessed of a fabulously mod, funky apartment like Jeannie's bottle. Heh.

Trek was always around; my brother must have watched it, though he was no more of a big fan than I was, and certainly isn't now (in those dark-ages days of the 1970s, kids, there were only three channels; one tended to take what there was, and syndication allowed ubiquity in those days). I got older, got into M*A*S*H. I got older, I became an Arthurian nerdling.

I still remember exactly the weather, the day in spring, the visit to my Aunt L., when just she and I went to a bookstore in Northern Virginia, and I found "The Crystal Cave" and "The Last Enchantment".

Now Arthuriana is some intensely male-oriented literature. Guenevere-schmenevere, this stuff was all about boys. And Mary Stewart ... a woman ... wrote from the point of view of a MAN! A boy, then a man, then an old man. All about men. And I loved it.

Blame Mary Stewart, then, for my becoming a woman who writes first-person male warrior kings, I guess.

Anyway, it has got to be Arthur who opened me up to male entertainments ... and battle scenes.



Okay, and d*mnitall to heck, I STILL just loathe battle scenes. Seriously. It's ridiculous. I have worked hard to make them the best - perhaps my adversarial attitude toward them makes them my own personal victories to win - but I will never genuinely "appreciate" them, not in the sense of enjoying them for themselves. I don't fast-forward through them in movies, and I don't skip pages through them in books, but that is because I am a completist, and have certain OCD tendencies in my entertainment consumption habits. It's not because I have warmed to battle scenes.



All right. Anyway, so Merlin opened me up to the reading-entertainment possibilities with male characters. How I ever went beyond that into the viewing-entertainment possibilities of men, I genuinely don't know. It took me a long, long, LONG time - and doesn't even owe to the men in my actual life. My dad was a James Bond guy, but never into Star Trek. My brother wasn't action/adventure oriented particularly. I did have guy friends, many of whom by high school were certainly Trek geeks, though that was not much of a draw; it stayed in the background. My friend Mark got me into Douglas Adams, so maybe that's a start.

However it happened, Trek seeped into me only VERY slowly. By high school, still not really a fan. In college, maybe it was in syndication again; I know I consumed Little House in those days, almost as if it were tolerable stuff (it really wasn't, but it wasn't the news and it wasn't kids' programming - and, again, only the three channels, and FOX, back in those days).

But, too, in college, The Next Generation also came along. I guess that must have really been the grabber, for me. Women were much more prominent by then, and the universe was interesting to see. I still remember the pilot episode, watching the world they were creating.

And *that's* really the thing. The world building. I was fascinated enough, by then, by the process of writing - even not understanding it - that this finally, fully "got" me. And TNG's world had kids, politics I finally understood, palatably presented, exciting makeup of course, and of course ongoing storylines. I was readily addicted.

Even still, I wasn't much surrounded by other fans. Fitting in with my contrarianism, and my preference to consume entertainment either solo or only with those I am most intimately connected with, I finally became a Trek fan all by myself. My boyfriend-then-fiancee'-then-husband was no more a fan really than any previous men in my life, though he was happy enough with my becoming one. Neither one of us much noticed as it was happening.

And so, I was twenty-five or so by the time my geek- and fan-dom were really established. As E put it when we went to the movie, it had always been "part of my DNA". But pulling it deeper into my makeup was a longer process.

I have, here and there, tried to get into Wars - though fairly passively; watching it if it was on, and just the once going to the theater (ohh, JarJar ... not an auspicious first actual attempt, that one).

But it's Trek I do care about. Call part of myself. Squee over, become excited about - invested in.

So, J. J. ... nice as your commentaries and things are (and there are some cruddy ones out there, it's not like I don't know - see also "Nemesis" - ugh), please shut UP about Star Wars. For those who just don't care (and, yes, for those who actively dislike Wars, from the loyalty/competition between the two universes), it's actively distracting. We came for a Trek flick. Maybe let's focus on that, when discussing it. Eh?

All righty then.

Establishing Shot

It's easier to write a scene with an establishing shot.  In film, a few moments spent gazing at rolling hills and a small hut with a tendril of smoke rising and a contented beast of burden outside munching on grass, or the ubiquitous pan across a city's skyline, tells you where you are about to be placed, as a story begins (or a new scene).  Where it once began, The Ax and the Vase spent a few pages introducing characters and a battleground before the opening setpiece, the battle itself.  And even now, opening in an entirely different point in Clovis' life, there is half a page or so of scudding clouds in a milky white vault and a very quiet stockade before we learn that king Childeric, Clovis' father, is about to die.

Thanks to a discussion at Absolute Write (my participation there is nowhere near as great as it is at HFO, but my visitation is exactly as frequent), I'm looking at butterknifing the opening page.

Beginning in media res is tempting.  Some authors can do it, providing all the necessary knowledge, without seeming to "tell" it - expositing so well and in such brevity it's almost painless.

I have a few things to tell, in my opening scene.  Its core is the core conflict both of a prince and a king - the battle between ambition, the desire to inherit, and the impiety of wishing one's own father dead.  This is the first building block in Clovis' character as king, and it is also the curving, circling threat against it:  as he becomes a king with four sons of his own, all of whom will inherit (primogeniture was not the habit of Frankish succession).

This is an incredible tension, the seduction of desire forced against the guilt of its only means of fulfillment.  Imagine living your life with the understanding that you have one purpose ... and that the only means of attaining that is someone else's death.  The intellectual parricide, every day, of *wanting* the throne you know will be yours, the throne everything has taught you to aspire to, the throne that represents - not just power, not just wealth - but the very purpose in your having been born at all.  You can't be fulfilled without gaining it.  You can't gain it without your father dying.

Not all parental relationships, to be sure, are like mine with my dad.  But even so, in the Frankish community, family was the basis of everything.  And there is much reason to suspect that in Clovis' time, at his level of nobility - in him personally, indeed - filial piety ranked high among the personal value system.  His life is an example of this expectation of his own sons, and there seems no reason to imagine he would not have valued his own father, Childeric, very highly.

And so the opening scene - this moment of realization that he is about to become everything he is meant to be ... and how - is emotionally very powerful.

I'm going to give it a go in media res, even though I swore the butterknife was down.  Maybe just for myself, maybe as a real edit.  If I feel it works out, I may post drafts, or the finished scene, as a new excerpt page.  (Those who have been watching carefully may have noticed - I took down all my excerpts about a week ago, except the Author's Note page.)

We shall see.  But I am interested in the possibilities.

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.

Women Writing War

Recently, I've seen a number of blog posts, articles, and marketing blurbs focusing on women who are writing stories set in or directly putting their characters into war or battle sequences.  This is spanning from WWI and back to Alexander the Great, and if the attention I'm seeing indicates market viability (can't help but think it does) it certainly won't hurt me once I have revisions completed and begin querying again.  Take a look at this piece, which shows a nice breadth of examples.

Interestingly, some of these works are marketed not by their settings (martial conflict) but by their characters (women's stories) - but it looks like, more and more, that trick is trumped by the fact that some women are writing from the point of view, or centering on, male protagonists.  Alexander was Mary Renault's subject starting over thirty years ago, women's prominence in this type of historical fiction is gaining, and in fantasy women have been able to increase their presence for at least the past decade or so.

Hooray for women!  *Working away on those revisions*

When Ignorance was reviewed, Roberts noticed it was not described as a story about war, but a story about women. It is this critical misapprehension that Roberts suggests has led to the perception that women don't tackle war in their fiction.

"Jane Austen is often attacked for not being interested in the big issues but when I read her novels, I see she is writing about the battle of Waterloo, men coming home from war, and how middle-class women are dependent on these men."

Lady Audley's Secret

Don't ever let anyone tell you that Victorian novels aren't pretty hilarious.

Every object in the quiet sitting-room had an elderly aspect of simple comfort
and precision, which is the evidence of outward repose.
"I should like to live here," Robert thought, "and watch the gray sea slowly rolling over the gray sand under the still, gray sky. I should like to live here, and tell the beads upon my rosary, and repent and rest."
He seated himself in the arm-chair opposite Mrs. Barkamb, at that lady's invitation, and placed his hat upon the ground. The elderly terrier descended from his mistress' lap to bark at and otherwise take objection to this hat.

I've been reading "Lady Audley's Secret", a sensation novel from 1860, at Project Gutenberg, to pass away those lunch hours I haven't been spending on my own writing.

I must-must-must get an actual hard copy of this one. Even aside from the terrier, this is a keeper - the author is a woman, and some of the social and personal observations of the time and of the writer are almost indispensably interesting. Take this item:

There must be a battle, a brave, boisterous battle, with pennants waving and
cannon roaring, before there can be peaceful treaties and enthusiastic shaking
of hands. Perhaps the union between France and England owes its greatest force
to the recollection of Cressy and Waterloo, Navarino and Trafalgar. We have
hated each other and licked each other and had it out, as the common phrase
goes; and we can afford now to fall into each others' arms and vow eternal
friendship and everlasting brotherhood. Let us hope that when Northern Yankeedom
has decimated and been decimated, blustering Jonathan may fling himself upon his
Southern brother's breast, forgiving and forgiven.

For someone reared in the Capital of the Confederacy, that alone is quite the corker.

The "sensation" of the novel's genre is almost beside the point. Its secrets are laid bare within the first chapters; anyone who's ever read a book in life (or ever seen any one of the squillion "Law and Order" series) can see who-done-what, and even why. What is wonderful about this book is its precision of language - even with the inevitable tangents and philosophies of Victorian literature, the expression of these ideas (and they *are* fascinating ideas, considered on their own - and in the context of the author's gender) is clean, engaging, and immediate. It has, as my dearest writing friend TEO once said of me, very kindly, a "there-ness" which makes the progress from clew to clew a great deal of fun.

Plus: awesome, oudmoded spellings, like "clew" for "clue" - and that indispensible Victorian trope; subtextual (but barely, in this case!) homosexuality.

What could be more enter-taining?

The there-ness in this case involves the diffident main character, a well-to-do layabout who slowly turns himself into Matlock in the best possible sense. He's a gas, and his own mental monologues are frequently pretty funny - but he's also one of the best DEVELOPED characters I have read in some time. He actually develops. He grows, he gets somewhere.

Read this book. If you're not experienced in nineteenth-century novels, it's a really nice place to start, and not so well-traveled you'll have to endure much cultural baggage - funny as this work is, it's not a towering piece of pop-culture history. If you DO have some background, but haven't been impressed with the written legacy of Victoriana (or if you've been abused by Louisa May Alcott's "darker" sensational pieces), this might be a lighter hand than some of the heavier ones to be endured, out there.

Also - seriously. The terrier. Awesome.

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.

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.

Clovis Brownie Points and A Heckuva Game of Croquet

My incidental reading today appears to be archaeology themed - and I like it. Long before I ever knew a jenya-wine archaeologist personally (or, at least, before he *became* one professionally), my folks brought us up PBS archeaology shows and National Geographic, right along with Scientific American (so cool) and all the REST of the PBS we slurped up, nerds that my family so blessedly, wonderfully are. I still remember an article in NG, showing the bone of an ancient man, and explaining how it taught us how he had lived, how old he was when he died, how tall he stood, and what diseases he might have had.

Now we have "millet wasn't typical of the local diet, so we got an invader here, son" - which I just think is so incredibly cool. Little creepy - I can admit to slight neuroses going a little beyond the old-fashioned injunction to wear clean underwear in case of an accident (and don't eat anything you'd be ashamed of having found in your gullet after you're DEAD!) - but overall, just kind of cool.

Was this bashed-in collection of skulls an indiction of an ancient battle? Well, we have the non-indigenous diet indicators, no signs of healing on some pretty impressive wounds, and no signs of ritualized burial.

I'm going to say, "Battle, Alex; for two-thousand."



Oh. And I'm also going to say: Clovis points ARE cool. But ... I'll give it to the crescents, yeah.

More Collecting

Elflandia brings us two posts on the absolutely gorgeous illuminations from the Visconti Hours.  I'm brought to mind of the time my older niece said medieval art is "lame" ...  If we go by these images, lame must mean exquisite, and so detailed as to draw us almost into falling into each letter, each piece ...

The new addiction to Arrant Pedantry proves its worth again - irregardless of the fact that I still don't like the word.

A Doll's House.  And a small fortune.  Actually - not all that small, really.

Richard III in threes.  First, a painting of the Battle of Bosworth.  Second, the first story on the judicial tangles of his burial.  Finally, "but wait, there's no more" on that judicial review.  The fun never ends for the long-dead.

3D technology, Framlingham, and Henry Fitzroy's tomb (Fitzroy was the illegitimate son of Henry VIII, whose early death, like those of his uncle Arthur and later younger half-brother Edward, had not only an effect on Henry VIII's mania for getting a male heir, but of course on the history of England itself.)  At least this burial needn't suffer the indignities of that Plantagenet monarch displaced by his own grandfather.

Time Team brings us still another case of "but wait! there's more!" in the ever popular discussion/debate on the site of the Battle of Hastings.  I'd watch the special if only for Tony Robinson.  BALDRIC!!

Have you ever heard of Santa's problematic sidekick, Black Pete ... ?  And there we have a kettle of fish.

The dictionary 100 years in the making.  Wow!

Yayyyy!  Vintage snowmen!

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?

Salic Lawdy

The recent hard-hitting news regarding the laws of succesion in Britain offer me the excuse to expound a little on one of the more substantial choices made by Clovis I.

Clovis was the guy who laid down the law a millenium and a half ago.  The codes resulting were a formal recording of traditions both ancient and diverse:  Clovis ruled a domain comprised both of his own people, the Franks, and Gallo Romans - those people in Gaul who were a part of the imperial legacy, then beginning to wane (Clovis' first battle, in The Ax and the Vase, is fought in alliance with Odovakar, who deposed the last Roman emperor), but boasting still a significant local population in what became France.

There was a vogue in any case, at that time, for codification.  The Visigoths had done it, Alaric II having laid down a breviary, and certainly Roman influence had its power.  For Clovis, too, the stipulation of legal terms served to this advantage:  to unite in common policy a disparate set of peoples.  Under Salic Law, the Franks and Gallo Romans were treated as one - both using the ancient northern traditions of his people as a template, and by innovating within those practices.


Salic Law has become a synonym, over time, for male primogeniture, and has been cited for centuries both with fervency and with loathing as the cause to withhold estate from women.  The Plantagenets were born after The Anarchy, a long and bloody war which arose for the sole reason that a woman was given to inherit.  Henry VIII's incomprehension of even the idea of a female HEIR rewrote Clovis' own Catholic legacy in western history.  There's rather a long and delicious post about the irony in that, come to think  of it.

But to my point.  Clovis's code, or the central tenet as contenporary history now sees the phrase as centering upon, is about to be rewritten in Britain.

Maybe.

Of course, it will take the many commonwealths and pieces (again ironic) of a definitely-waned empire to ratify this.  But female primogeniture may at last be legitimized.  Assuming natal legitimacy itself, of course.


***


I think about the generations and centuries since St. Clotilde swayed a husband ... and I think about the life I live, one and a half thousand years later, and sometimes I see similarities.  Yet the power I own (greater by far than any woman who EVER could have sat on England's throne, or indeed ever has) is unimaginably distant from hers.

More terrifyingly - the autonomy I claim is scarcely a hair's-breadth from the chattel-leine.  From the queen subject to a husband by divine right - and from every one of his thousands upon thousands of feminine subjects, unable to inherit, bereft of personal agency.  From the factory working mother, or daughter, chained up within the Industrial Revolution.  From my grandmother in her own factory.  From the secretary of sixty years ago.  From my mother, who with her coworkers colluded never to let one of their number be alone with the boss in the bank vault.  From even myself - a secretary because, even when I was coming out, there was still a degree to which typing was the way to make money.

My fingers fly now - and I am recognized - and I love what I do.  I no longer apologize for my occupation.

But I know that the impulse is there precisely because its obsolete echo is "this is what a woman can do."  Just because I can write a novel now:  doesn't mean I didn't get this skill as a backup to that interest in theater my parents were nervous about.  I didn't want to be a teacher.  I became a clerical worker.

There are millions of women my age who did "better" - but that is because what I do was anathema.  Terrifying.  I am that same hair's-breadth distant from being a nurse, a housewife, a mother, a whore.  I wonder whether others who entered fields as traditional as secretarying is harbor the same awareness of the conflict of "tradition" in this context.  There ARE still women who become teachers not out of vocation, but because that is the acceptable way for a woman to make enough money for her family to live - because it looks good at church - because mama and daddy said - because they feared to reach for "more" ...

... who feel guilty for not getting a "better" job, because, after all, they are so darn bright.

Who couldn't THINK of anything else to do even in the milieu of college.  Distracted by theater nerds, English classes, and the repulsiveness of business and marketing degrees.  Intimidated by science.  Unable to find the right entry point in history.


I am so much closer to the thousands of years, hundreds of generations of women who make up the history of the world - and whom Salic Law (and those ancient traditions so like it, replicated the world over) prevented inheriting.  Prevented power - by money.  I'm part of the nineteenth-century dust, the primeval red clay, the centuries-old winds of my old-fashioned hometown - my old-fashioned family - my anachronistic (in both directions) self.


***


And yet.

I have come into ownership.  I am laden with gratitude - and larded with blessings.  Power my mom even marvels at a bit.

The memory of the first time my granny ever visited my house - walking around the lot with her, going around the front yard - when she asked me, "How many husbands do you mean to marry, to keep a house like this?" - and did NOT mean, how will I get myself supported:  but how much of a harem of men would I have, in my beautiful estate.  I remember her glee, and her beautiful nervousness.

Granma had the most luminescent nervousness.  And nothing quite cowed her like accomplishment.  You could see the wonder in her, sometimes - at the extensive family she and my granddaddy amassed, generation on generation.  I remember sitting with her at her 90th.  "Look what you did grandma."  Her amazing smile.  When she was most excited, she was a little bit afraid.  "How many husbands will you have?"

Not a one, Granny.  But not for lack of loving.

I'm soclose to powerlessness.  I'm still just a secretary.  I'm an underachiever at heart.

But ... in action ... I am something so much greater.  Somewhere along the line, that hair's breadth came into existence.  I may not be far from the long history of women in subjection.  But I am not a part of it.  The hair's breadth isn't a wide barrier.

But it lies between me, my mom, my granny.  It lies between me and Clotilde.  Between me and every English queen - regnant, or not.

My grandmother used to exclaim, "Oh my lands!" and it meant something different.

But I have my own land.  I have paid it off, alone, and own a significant swath of a beautiful, enviable lot, a good patch of a cheering, lovely home.  Oh MY lands.

And women will inherit from me.  Only women - my nieces, when they are grown - a fantasy of perfect joy, imagining the women THEY will be.

And they are salish dwellers, themselves.  Like Saint Clotilde.  We all make a circle.

And now  we can own what we all encompass.  It's only a hair's breadth.

It is enough.  In my case - in the end - a bounty.

Your Thoughts?

I'm so tired right now, I don't honestly know how bad the synopsis over there >>>> actually is.  So here is tonight's re-work.  If you aren't more tired than I am right now, and feel like reading both ... your feedback is most welcome!


At the age of fifteen, Clovis I is hoisted on his shield and acclaimed king of the sea-dwelling Franks.  It is 481, and Rome still rules in Gaul.  Fighting beside his steward Cholwig, and two cousins, Ragnachar and Pharamond, by the age of twenty, he has deposed Roman rule.

This is only the beginning.

Clovis falls in love with Evochilde, who becomes his concubine.  Dying in childbirth, she leaves behind the sickly prince Theuderic.  He battles—and negotiates—for ever-greater territory, and negotiates, too, the treacherous course of a growing court, full of intrigues … and disappointments.  Ragnachar, his first friend, slowly becomes his greatest burden.

In 493, he takes a wife, the Catholic princess Clotilde.  Clotilde becomes Clovis’ queen and his passion.

She makes a formidable mate, but importunes him constantly to accept her Church and her God.

At last, in battle once again, struck by the power of spiritual fervor, gaining a difficult victory … Clovis converts to Christianity on the field.  Because of this moment of inspiration and political savvy, he prospers beyond even his own ambitious hopes.

And yet, as he rises before God and his ever growing peoples, Clovis cuts down his own kinsmen one by one—including, at last, his former commander, Ragnachar.  He unites all the Frankish kingdoms, and the Gallo-Roman populations from Burgundy to the kingdom of the Visigoths.  Theuderic and Clovis’ three sons with the Queen will inherit as patrimony the territory we know today as the nation of France.

He sets down the code of the famous, infamous, long-lived Salic Law, and is the first Catholic king ever to call a Council of the Church.

At last, his legacy immortalized, Clovis dies at forty-five.  He has ruled thirty years, and set a course beyond even his own comprehension.

Clovis’ demonstrations of authority—and revenge—become legend, a tool of his provocative power and charisma.
He was the founder, the first king, of France.