Also, I Write

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let darkness fall.

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


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

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

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



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

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

Collection

I failed to specify in my last writing post, that Elise Goldsmith (E. M. Goldsmith at Janet Reid's blog) was responsible for my WIP awakening. Janet liked my thanks to her (see the end of this post for a shark's warm heart). And so, again: my public thanks to EMG, as we sometimes call her, for inspiration.

2016 ... BCE. Here is a really interesting piece about historical fiction - on a Bollywood film taking liberties with the (hi)story of  Mohenjo Daro, one of the first cities in the world. "(T)hrow(ing) the authentic setting to the winds in favour of a better story" ... where does suspension of disbelief end and the Flood Myth begin?

On Rodrigo Duterte, who has so famously called our president an SOB. As bad as our candidates are, even Trump has never said anything (publicly) as vile as this.

(H)e recalled how a 36-year-old Australian missionary was taken hostage, raped and murdered, and how he reacted when he saw her body.
“She looks like a beautiful American actress,” he said. “What a waste. They lined up and raped her. I was angry because she was raped. That’s one thing. But she was so beautiful. The mayor should have been first.”
The crowd erupted with laughter.

Any questions on the existence of rape culture, worldwide, even at the highest levels? Whatever your feelings on President Obama, if you cheer about this sadistic, misogynistic Hat of Assness calling him names - now you know a little bit more about the source.

Another note for my kale-obsessed fellow Reiders: "It's a good idea to eat kale." Knowing that there are diabetes and retinitis pigmentosa in my family tree, and once having had perfect eyesight, the degeneration in my eyesight with age has been especially frustrating. Just today, I forgot to pack glasses in my Daily Bag O' Stuff, and though I *could* still read and function, it was much more difficult. So, marigolds, kale - get your lutein, zeaxanthin and meso-zeaxanthin.

And, finally - The Meadow Party is back. Beloved Bloom County, spiritual context, new hope, and pre-prequels. By the way, am I the only one who's noticed how much Donald Trump's hair resembles that of Quiche Lorraine? In fact, this article contains Berke Breathed's thoughts on current politics; and his look at the push/pull of absurdity is one of the best analyses of coverage I've read.

It’s comforting when the smart ass is confused, too.

Specificity, Magic, and Getting Lost in Cover Art

Talking with Colin Smith recently at his blog got me thinking about the subjective effects of good illustration. We were discussing those pieces of art inside a number of books, but I'm struck time and again by the impact a photo cover has on me versus good old fashioned paintings and drawings. Even a photo of a sculpture is not the same.

When I was a kid, you still saw matte painting in movies and television. Science texts sometimes employed artists for renderings of various objects of study - space, in particular, was fertile ground (so to speak ...) for magnificent paintings of detailed scenes, worlds away from our own, exciting phenomena rendered in bold colors and evoking intensity, heat, movement - danger! - beauty ...

For over a century and a half, there has been a lament that photography destroys art, that it is soulless, that it is unworthy of contemplation. Of course, this is untrue.

And yet, there is something about a photograph - not least the limited and terrifyingly recycled library of stock images used these days in book cover design - that lacks, in comparison with the inspiration of a drawn or painted image.

For one, there is the specificity. As a reader, I dislike being instructed by a book's cover with quite the concreteness a photo provides.

Colin and I talked of the ability to get lost in a simple oil pastel drawing or watercolor, and I remembered the million worlds of Richard Scarry as absorbing adventures that could hold me for hours.

There is also the charm of style. There are covers of books I read growing up I still remember. In histfic, ersatz portraits that took real-life inspiration and transformed old paintings into compositions and costumes that ended up more 60s or 70s in their vibe. Historical figures' new pictures paying homage to known portraiture, but presenting attitudes perhaps less formalized than such images. (Seriously, click on the link, Robert Dudley is kind of perfectly conceived - and not even headless!)

Then there are the comparative studies - the 80s cover whose male model I crushed on, versus the 60s extravaganza of Historical Epicness. Even the 80s one isn't just a straight photograph; its sky is a painted vista, its background a world like so many of those matte paintings I knew from Star Trek as a wee little nard.

Even the most specific, detailed painting or drawing is still in some way subjective, and therefore invites inspiration over being a dictation.

Photo book covers, for me, have all the appeal of an over-sentimental film score. Bad scores are didactic - telling me how I must feel, taking away from me the opportunity to come to an emotion on my own with a character or characters.

I believe in the transportive beauty of photography, but I literally cannot THINK of a photographic book cover that has ever taken me to a new world the way other graphic forms can.

And, again, there is the issue of the strangely limited stock of images publishers seem to use. There are websites and fora all over Teh Intarwebs sharing "oh look, this pic again" images of cover after cover after cover - following the extremes of recycling costumes or particular photo shoots, or even single images, again and again and again and again. Some of the costumes used forty years ago in Elizabeth R have had almost embarrassingly over-recycled afterlife in modeling sessions for cover photos for historicals.

Even if you don't know the provenance, where an image has been used but differently cropped or tinted a hundred times before, a photo (so often of the old headless-woman) has only so much power to invite exploration. It feels like photo design covers are by far more prone to anachronism and even inappropriateness. Amongst all those discussions of "this one again" covers online, there are many conversations about how inauthentic design choices are.

A particular floppy red velvet ruff bearing no resemblance to any actual piece of clothing from any period of history ever is notorious, having graced every kind of novel from the Plantagenet to Victorian and back again. Novels taking place in one century sport covers evoking another, or one culture in the world is plundered just to decorate another. Female models wearing makeup abound; everyone must be pretty, after all.

And, not that the covers I've linked are not cosmetically enhanced in their own ways, but at least the living and breathing reality of a girl tottering about in a bad costume and pouting her strong lipstick isn't slamming me out of a story with all the power of ... well, that book I've been reading in which yards and yards of lace have appeared in a time three hundred years before its existence ...

This may be the power of the subjective graphic forms. They don't look entirely "real" to begin with, so their deviations from authenticity are less concrete, less jarring than a photograph's quantified, concrete, recorded verity. There is something banal in the carelessness of recorded anachronism or inappropriateness.

And I know I've couched a lot of my blather in historical fiction, but it is, honestly, in historicals that photography grates *me at least* the most. Because the medium is modern, it feels wrong right at the start, and because so many of the photographs chosen currently seem to have little depth (never mind being threadbare from frequent use), there is no allure.

Like any human attraction, specificity can both amplify and kill it. Specificity - that adorable mole just in front of a lover's ear, or the way they breathe when they first see your face - is magic. But it is also murder - the zipper you can see on the Elizabethan gown, or the Elizabethan gown fitting poorly on the headless model for a Regency romp ...

Collection

“How do the breasts look?
“She was always very fancy.”
“I don’t have nothing to hide.”

So, yeah. Eep, the world ... ... ... but for now, there are puppies. Thoughts from E. M. Goldsmith (and a couple comments from me, too).

"23 shipwrecks in 22 days" is a lot of discovery.

And, because I needed MORE blogs to provide me perpetually renewing online TBR, Benjamin Clark on researching wet paper towels - and so much more!

EDITED TO ADD ...

Like Benjamin Clark wasn't bad enough, then I found Nate Wilson's blog and, on top of having the AbFab theme running through my head, now I want to write science haiku.

And finally, Stephen Parks' post on automation actually reminds me that the fiction he cites, fearing exactly the same things we fear now, is generations old now. Reassuring? Could be ... But I did think of the comments Jeff Sypek recently had regarding some of the less-observed socio-economic aspects of the self-driving car question.

Flashing

Some of my Reider community friends will have recognized the reason I posted the somewhat random thoughts on Pelelope  on Friday. For my first time, I've entered one of Janet Reid's flash fiction contests. The prompt words were:

        pinch
        nick
        lift
        rob
        filch

As a rule, these contests overwhelm me and I shut down and can't even contemplate entering. This time, I decided to take the plunge. Here is the result (a third try; I am tempted to share the first two I wrote and scrapped) ...


***


When had it shifted – from being impossible to see aught but the end of waiting, to being impossible to believe there was an end?

When she’d been robbed. When she’d gained weight and stopped holding in her stomach, when her skin had begun to crepe. When her mouth had become pinched, her brows ever harder to lift out of hatchet-faced gloom.

When the nick of the needle, as she sewed the never-ending shroud, had been pain not worth itself. When she found she wanted to be taken as easily as a pickpocket might filch a stranger’s gold.

Damn Odysseus.

William Golding

In 1986, I was privileged to meet William Golding. He had a family member living in my state, and during a health crisis the doctor somehow extorted from Mr. Golding the favor that he visit their child's school.

(Have I mentioned that I went to the most obscenely privileged school in the region at that time?)

So William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, was thrown amongst the children - a curious fate - and gave us maybe an hour or two of his wisdom.

Often times, high schoolers are the least likely to benefit from, care about, nor comprehend wisdom, but I was at an especially dramatic point in my life, and the heady opportunity to meet a writer whose work had graced my brown formica desk was enough of an impression to get my wee and paltry brain to pay attention.

The immediate impression of William Golding in 1986 was first of his smallness and second, notwitstanding girth, the inescapable association of his white hair, beard, and twinkling eyes with Santa Claus. It may not be he was so very jolly, but high schoolers are so little beyond Santa maybe I had few mental options to associate him with someone more appropriate.

... Golding, 1983 - not so unlike he was in 1986 ... (Image: Wikipedia, credit below)
"William Golding 1983" by Unknown - [1] Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 Bestanddeelnummer. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 nl via Commons

He was overwhelmingly generous to give us his time, and appeared happy enough to do it. And his intelligence was of the sort that does not loft above anyone, but lifts those around a thinker to their own level. Inspiring.

He discussed Lord for some time, and opened the floor to questions, and I managed to stand up, spiral in hand, and ask him "Why weren't there any girls on the island?"

This may have been an early attempt at feminism, or it may just have been the internal sensation of being left out that books (movies, plays, YouTube videos) engender in anyone who does not see themselves in their world. I could not tell you with any integrity, but it was my question. And Mr. Golding's answer was as abundantly generous as it was simply bloody smart. I remember it vividly, in two of the key phrases from a slightly longer response.

"Well, I've never been a little girl. And if you bring girls on, sooner or later dreary old sex enters the picture."

It was of course hilarious, and I felt that frission you get when you find someone brilliant responding to you as if you were valid, and they do so in memorably hilarious form.

Lord was not meant to be about sex, it was something else. He first sequestered his characters in a setting uninterrupted by reality, and then from influences beside his point.



He talked about the liberty and joy of just making shit up.

As a writer, he could have researched and checked his facts and created an island following the geological dictates of the planet Earth: but he built his own island, rich in pink granite cliffs he apparently later understood to be geologically impossible. He excluded from his world and his characters those things which would have brought him back to what we so carelessly call "reality" and he wrote and wrote and wrote.

He pulled the trigger, is what he did.

To this day, William Golding stands the end of my line when I begin to go too far down the rabbit hole of research. Sometimes: inspiration STOPS us, too - from doing that work that distracts us from doing the truly inspired work.

The signpost to stop researching and get writing: "If William Golding can get away with pink granite cliffs: I can stop researching after fifteen sources and just name this slave Glykeria."

I even made UP a Frankish name, writing The Ax and the Vase, and said so in my notes, and did not ever edit it out.

There is a need, in any fiction, perhaps most of all in historical fiction, for that pink granite cliff that will make a reader go "hm" and then go read history itself, and learn more, and go from there.


I can also still delete Glykeria - her name alone or her entire character, if I want to. This is where we are in the writing.



Some of what I do is making shit up. Research is a wonderful thing, but making up is even better (much as it is after a fight!).

Some of what I do is taking a trusting leap off a pink granite cliff.

I can assure you: it is OSUM.

The Rhythm of the Boogie the Beat

Janet's community has been at its best today, and inevitably it's all got me thinking. Thinking things like this ...

What a lot of us fail to see through our privilege is that "white is the default." I place that in quotes not for sarcasm, but because the words are not mine; they are at the base of #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the issues with diversity (not just in publishing, but I'm trying not to go off the rails here). I grew up understanding that whitneness is the signifying quality of American-ness, and never thinking about that. I lived in a suburb that was the product of white-flight, and went to a school named for a proponent of segregation and massive resistance. So-called "genteel racism" was (and even remains) not hidden.

THE major reason I decided to shelve The Ax and the Vase was that, no matter how good the writing is, nor even how interesting the story is: American publishing is not suffering from a dearth of tales of white dudes in power. There isn't a single POC in that novel, and I thought that was completely valid, and I WAS WRONG. I guilted about it, but didn't change it. The WIP is an entirely different matter.

... and this ...

Diversity is not an agenda.

Diversity is the reality of our world - in the past, where I write, in the present, in every part of the world, no matter what. There is diversity of age, of gender identification, of color, of religion, of tastes in ice cream, of economic/relationship/educational/class/intellectual status. We don't all have the same resources. There is no world without differences: yet many of us grew up not seeing that. Many grew up feeling invisible because "white is the default", and faces and voices of color were not proportionately seen and heard - even still, there's no money in it, as far as certain industries are concerned.

Dis-inclusiveness makes for poor writing. 

I write precisely because I want to see something of the word other than where I live. The inside of my navel would make an awful setting for a story. Story is for many readers not merely an escape, but a venture OUT - out of the day to day, out of what they already know, out of their own skin.

And diversity is not all about skin. Remember that it's much, much wider than "political correctness" or complaining about old white dudes. Old dudes need representation too, in cultures obsessed with youth.

Diversity is not a punishment for privilege, and it's not even the political rectitude so many who fear this punishment find so abhorrent. It's just the real landscape of the world we live in.

... and this ...

And too: diversity is not (only) about color/ethnicity.

I am mystified by those who can stomach Pandora bracelets or licorice or team fitness challenges. These things horrify me to a point it's hard not to think "You are doing it wrong" about those people who love this stuff. And I left out a lot - diversity in our health (mental illness and its challenges have been much on my mind of late), and stigmatizations that do not relate to ethnicity even tangentially. We "other" people for as many reasons as there are people marginalized or brutalized or CELEBRATED.

... and this ...

(D)iversity is not a quota system. There is no magic number to get all the people we're not to stow this talk of diversity.

Failure to include is the failure to reflect the world. ... I grew up in Downtown White Flight, but one of my closest friends was a Black girl named Holly. She wasn't invisible; she introduced me to the concept of Michael Jackson outside of The Five, and when she did Rapper's Delight, I damn near fell over in awe at the speed of her singing-speech.

Diversity is not a didactic directive that we all have to write about POC/disabled/young/old/mentally ill/poor/disenfranchised/licorice-loving/religiously alternative/gay/differently pinky-toed people. It's the distillation of the point that if we're writers, and if we pretend that non-us people are invisible, we are failing in our WORK - failing to reflect the abundance of the world we live in, or the one we're trying to build.

"I came that they might have life, and have it in abundance." Why would we want to revel in limitation?

***


My own final comment above brings to mind something that has always bothered me in production design most particularly, but does happen in prose.

Historicals are especially plagued with this - prop masters get so carried away finding JUST the right clothes or home furnishings or cars, or location scouts just the right place to shoot, that any other period than the exact year of their story is neglected. Nineteenth century homes contain nothing from the seventeenth or sixteenth; girls in 1970s productions wear only Dorothy Hamill haircuts and wedgies;

The picture-perfect past is only ONE single slice of the past, one instant's place on a timeline: when, in life, we all have a lot of our own past around us right now. Why would not *our* past have had *their* past about them?

It's a silly view, and it's poor world-building. It misses out on the beautiful English Georgian portrait hanging in the home of an early twentieth-century Australian. In my own home alone, thirty percent of my furniture would be gone - and the home itself - if someone reconstructed my "set" strictly in 2016 terms.

And so it is a silly view, that the world had no black people in it, just because I wrote a novel set in ancient Gaul - that only one woman was club-footed, and maybe there was like one miscarriage as a sub-plot, and everybody was intelligent and overall healthy and all the same color.

And so it is a silly view, that all the Black people in America were offstage in the 1950s, waiting for the Civil Rights movement and Jimi Hendrix and Oprah to give them stories to tell. It is a silly view, that Black people exist only in the context of cotton fields and The Cotton Club.

It is no view at all, and no voice. It is the brutality of non-seeing, of rendering people and lives invisible. Some of those people might be white, or rich, or men named William. Diversity is many things.

But a lack of it is only one thing: a bloody bore to read.


***


Edited to add this: PLEASE consider going to the link to Janet Reid's blog. It is not a short read, because today we commented unfettered, and the discussion was long. But the conversation is a glorious example of the best of human interaction, debate, conversation. It closes with thoughtful words from the lady herself, our hostess, Queen of the Known Universe (QOTKU) - and comments are closed. So the thoughts it will provoke: bring them into your world. Bring them here, too, I would love that.

But, for now, Lord, it is night. G-d rest you all.

Collection

Louisa Young at The History Girls has a short, lovely post about The Called One. Worth a click if only to discover the heartbreaking irony. "I will not leave you comfortless."

The History Blog looks at the Rijksmuseum's 400 year retrospective fashion plate exhibition and the birth of modern fashion magazines. "Historical fashion porn of the highest quality" ... well, what a recommendation! Ahem.

"Hi, lady ... Lady! Lady!" ... The occasional fear of being a woman.Welcome to it, Caitlyn.

On whether anachronism can be constructive in historical fiction/drama. I'm not necessarily persuaded - but thre are some interesting points here.

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!

Collection

Elizabeth Chadwick responds to a piece by Catherine Armstrong regarding the identities of the Marshall effigies in the Temple Church, London. Chadwick readers and English history buffs/students don't need to be told who the Marshalls were, but if you don't know, take a click (and read Chadwick's series). The fascinating discussion that is history as analytical science, and it shows in a concrete way the relevance and importance of the study of art for costume and equipage.

Also fascinating, if not dismaying, is a very different exchange exposing the politics of archaeology and artifacts. The History Blog explicates the American Institute for Archaeology's call for the St. Louis Society's board's resignation, after they sold documented artifacts. But wait: there's more. Click for the full merry-go-round, with links to direct sources.

The HB also brings us the story of the remains now up for study at Winchester Cathedral, where the pre-Conquest Saxon kings were left to rest in peace, but have not been privileged to do. Now, if only somebody would tell me how to pronounce some of the earliest names, and Ceawlin's too.

At an Age

Very recently, I ran across a talking head in one of those documentaries I so enjoy, discussing a historical figure at age sixteen.  She described the woman as being “at an age” where she would be highly self-conscious, while events played out in her life which would have been humiliating and difficult.

In a way, the point is valid; though we invented the teenager in the twentieth century, those things that cause humans genuine embarrassment and pain are not unique to any particular time period.  Yet I was struck by the implication of tortured adolescence.

The figure in question, hardly a personage famed for a typically twentieth-century persona (indeed, almost a symbol of precisely the opposite, when that time came upon her), is not one I would readily cast in the image of tortured adolescent, no matter what happened to her at age sixteen.  I also, as an amateur student of and writer about history, find the tendency to view the population of our past, no matter how far back, through the lens of the psychological and social expectations of the past century or so a little bewildering more often than not.

A part of my personal fascination with history is not just taking myself out of the present and an ordinary world I know, but also taking myself out of the present and ordinary mindsets and people familiar from my own life.  So when I see all-too-identifiably contemporary characters waving the occasional fan or scimitar or what have you, it is frustrating.

Let it not be said that I am any expert at honestly, fully, and accurately rendering a 5th-century Frank in all his glory, but I did what I could in relating Clovis’ story to address both the misconceptions about what “Barbarian” means, and to avoid, as much as possible, turning him into a corporate raider or king of the surfer dudes.

This goes beyond *not* modeling his character on anyone I know, but into an honest consideration of those things that make up the whole of who he might have been, given what I know.  I didn’t throw around a lot of self-consciously antique language, but did work hard avoiding anachronism.  I thought about the smell of the air in his cities, northern and on down to Paris, the quality of air containing different kinds of pollutants, the manner of food, the way time would worked and been observed.  One of the deepest dives I took into Clovis was the examination not only OF his religion, but its ultimate expression in the novel.

In sum, while I didn’t gadzook my way around the place, I did *look* around it, really consider motivations, remember that humans in every age are funny … and maddening … and go from there.

This. will. NOT. satisfy everybody.

There will be some who quite love a good gadzookering, and will resent not finding it in *Ax*.  There will be others who’ll find the voice alienating and foreign even without a thou to be seen.  And that is the world WE live in.  I’m too old to try to create one where I can make everyone happy.  It would take far more hallucinogenic drugs than I am capable of dealing with, and there’d still be some guitarist with commentary about the décor.

Not Because I'm Christian ... Because I'm a Writer (and a Viewer)

With the latest biblical video game coming soon to a cineplex near you, I’ve been thinking about storytelling as an author and as a moviegoer.  Biblical stories have lent themselves to embroidery and retelling since the beginning; perhaps not least because the stories themselves almost ostentatiously offer a paucity of detail.  Jewish scholarship for millennia have built upon the bare bones of the Tanakh (having grown up highly Judeo-adjacent, you’re not going to catch me writing the term “OLD Testament” thoughtlessly I hope), and gentiles have been in on the same game for centuries now.

Centuries ago, when I was a liddle-*liddle* kid, some of the first stories that caught my imagination were those of Genesis.  Because of those tantalizing voids in these stories, I became obsessed with backstory.  Not even “WHY, WHY?” – though these stories beg the profoundest of moral questions, given their fundamental position in the Bible – but “WHAT ELSE?”

These questions absorbed me, and once I got old enough for purty, midcentury modern aesthetics, diaphanous costumes, Anne Baxter, and movies to arrest my attention, “The Ten Commandments” fixated me to no small degree.  Its annual event-viewing at Passover and Easter time always stopped me in my TV-viewing tracks, even when I was too young to stay up past Moses’ banishment from Egypt.  (Much like Sound of Music, Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind, there were great swaths of this we-watched-it-every-year-when-it-aired movie I never knew existed.  Beyond Maria’s getting married, Dorothy’s beauty makeover at the Emerald City, and Scarlett being widowed, there were realms unknown.)

For me, that movie’s always been about Anne Baxter’s dramatic smoker’s voice, allure-as-evil, a fancy palace, exotic locale and time, and pretty costumes.  And Yul Brynner, who is OSUM and a biscuit.

That was really the cinematic point:  wish fulfillment.  Ten Commandments and every 1950s biblical/historical epic involving any amount of sand or religiosity (see also They Egyptian, a nonbiblical story but one so seriously Judeo-Christian it actually used sets and cast left over from Ten Commandments, and closed with a fascinating piece of 19th-20th century spiritual theorizing that captivated me at the time) was cartoonishly unrealistic, providing a great deal in the Booming Elocution department, even more in production design joy for the crew, and a curiously contemporary brand of fantasy most people find has aged amusingly in sixty or so years.

And yet, the current crop of setpiece dramatics, nominally Biblical stories, are very much the same.  Noah and Exodus:  Gods and Kings place an emphasis on CGI dramatics, the high-intensity visuals and action born of a generation’s ever more sophisticated video game aesthetics, and a manner of world-building (and, even sixty years on, STILL casting) having little to do with the people of Bronze Age and even pre- or quasi-historical Mesopotamia.  The new tellings just as lacking in story as Heston’s bombasity; only the eye-candy has changed and the spectacle delivered via a different state of the arts.


I like a good CGI popcorn flick – give me a Marvel film and I’m there, uncritical, ready to partake and ooh at the gee-whiz.  I’m a great, uncritical audience.  But.

But.  When it comes to Noah and Moses and tales which almost predate themselves, in terms of the cultural significance and enticing hints of ancient life in the Fertile Crescent … what wouldn’t I give for a quiet, intimate film, focusing on imagined *people* more than spectacle and thrill … ?  A movie looking at the strange and dark tales of the patriarchs, men (and those glimpsed women, as storied as the men) whose legacy seems to be revered not because they were moral but because they lived at the dawn of a spiritual civilization we carry unto this day.

I’ve learned that this is not necessarily usual – but, from my smallest childhood, the entire contents of those stories were taught to me in Sunday school.  The nakedness, the murder and polygamy and incest, the child and human sacrifice.  The special, spiritual morality of Abraham, who married his own half-sister, then used her beauty for gain and deceived kings through her, was lost on me and always has been – but, having gotten some age on me, the idea of his being a prophet of G-d intrigues me.  We’re all flawed, but all we know of Abraham is his flaws, all but unallayed by the assurance of his peculiar rectitude.  The binding of Isaac alone has provoked us intellectually, emotionally, and socially for thousands of years.

At bottom, it’s a queasy thing, really.  I was ENTERTAINED by this lurid stuff, this first literature I ever knew – Noah, having a bad relationship with his boys, Lot procreating with his daughters (after having offered them up as sexual sacrifices in Sodom), parent after parent scheming against each other due to favoritism amongst their children.  And Jacob, and his favoritism amongst his wives.

I never even got as far as the Midrash, where we are told those wives were *all* sisters, where we elucidate the idol worship bewilderingly present throughout the families (not just households) of the matriarchs and patriarchs.  Where the women unnamed take on lives and even speak.

Even for the sources who originally wrote down these traditions, always, there has been *more* …

And yet always less than we seem to come up with – the porcine performances (ironic, all things considered) and splashy visuals, the impressive story*telling* that omits human stories.



Tucked into the annual memories of my childhood, quiet amid the saturated brightness of movies shared every year, and my enduring fascination with Hebrew Biblical films … there is a false memory, one that cannot have happened (indeed, is not remembered at all by my mother), of one movie I watched with my mom one single time.  It is the memory of sharing faith and mother-daughter time, one couched in a generation’s depth of warm feelings – one I found, somewhere in my thirties, never happened.

For some reason, I recall it as happening upstairs in the bedroom at my grandmother’s house in Ohio.  I was unwell or perhaps just petulant that day, and on my own up there.  There’s this strongly affectionate recollection that we watched a movie alone together, that I remembered for years as being called “Ruth and the Bible.”  Its actual title, almost certainly, was The Story of Ruth, and – as I read about it today – I see that not only was the lead role played by an Israeli woman, but its reviews praise it in a noticeable way:  It was called “refreshingly sincere and restrained” and “commendably unepic” …

Now – one – this makes me highly eager to see this film again (probably to own it, to love it, to name it George – heck, I already renamed it once).

But, two, I am struck by the longing for a Biblical story to be told, to be portrayed, on a quiet, intimate level.

There is not much in the story of Ruth, which could be Blowed Up Real Good by Hollywood, and though there has been a surge in interest in the nature of the love between Ruth and Naomi (lesbianism seems not to have made it into the variety of entertaining sexuality within the Holy Scriptures), this does not beg for special effects, and so the only production-design hope for it would lie in a story of lushly attractive white girls getting their languid on in appealingly exoticized gauzy accoutrements, while Boaz stands by fascinated at this dynamic and perhaps sweatily drops a few grains for the gleaning.  Ahem.  He may not do this in Bitchin’ Velvet, but one has faith in the resurgent fashion for men in long hair, and that surety in Hollywood, the currently-sellable, pretty and white boy.

It could be done – and it could be done inexpensively.  But would it make any money?

One has to wonder.  And maybe order the DVD of that movie I affectionately recall sharing with my mom, in a time and a place it could not have happened.


The formative tales, too, could be told with this intriguing closeness, with attention to aspects other than the pyrotechnics of miracle and divinity.  Perhaps there is no other audience who would be fascinated to look into a world not peopled by obsessively styled white people, inhabiting a world in which NONE of our social assumptions holds – about family, about marital arrangements, about day-to-day life and the religion and superstition permeating an existence nowhere near so thoughtless and easy as the modern middle-class is today.  Perhaps there’s no money in world-building designed to explore, to understand – only production design and gee-whizzery.

Gee, but I’d give a buck to sink down into a movie like that.  Would you?

Imagine a World ...

... in which “My, how you’ve changed!” simply did not occur.  People did not change hairstyles with seasons or fashion, their wardrobes were not greatly variable – and, indeed, for poorer classes and perhaps those without the skill, time, or materials to sew, even alterations of what garments they did own might not be possible (leading us to those hilarious images of giant fat medieval men with tiny little coats).  A world in which most people saw the same smallish population throughout their lives, the only gaps in seeing someone perhaps arising with itinerant travelers or priests, whose physical appearance was largely irrelevant.  Imagine a world ... in which physical appearance was largely irrelevant in almost every context ...



... in which the measurement of time:  is not done.  Other than the sun and moon, timekeeping devices were extremely few and far between – ancient water clocks or sun dials being scarce and not always readily reliable in any case, there could be no expectation of meeting someone at two.  With travel being on foot (human or otherwise), traffic jams might be less an issue, however, the vagaries of stubborn beasts, broken axles, poor roads, or injury might turn a day’s journey to many, and even a “simple errand” into a more time-consuming affair.  Vagaries in a kitchen may also alter the timeline of any meal, and royal audiences were most likely to be cattle-call affairs, with little itinerary to events.  It would be typical for certain days to be reserved for certain business – at the civic level, criminal trials and hearings; the general annual schedule of an itinerant prieste, who could record for his communities the births and deaths for each year; market days and religious rites.

It was not a matter of time being measured at a different pace, but that pace itself was a concept without relevance, at least in the sense we contemplate time today.  It might well be important to get a thing done sooner than later, but “deadlines” were more along the lines of the best times to sow and reap, the most auspicious alignment of the stars for entering into a contract, the availability of priest or governor or hands to effect some change not just anyone might be able to take on.

Time was more spiritual, too, far more subjective, in a time where people did not have “nine-to-five’s.”  This may be the most difficult part of the different perspective of The Past for us to grasp.  We can stop and sit still, but not all of us have an easy grasp on – not only the spiritual, but on a spirituality, a subjective life and way of thinking, guided from the *outside*.

Free will has always existed, of course, and humand will employ it, scurrying little monsters that we are.  But the structure of a life lived not in a modern democracy, free will or no, maintains a different flavor in its very formation and expression.  We can’t be squelched, human beings. But we can be formed – and we can be disciplined (for good or ill) ...

Collection

I am late to post this, but please enjoy the book trailer for Elizabeth Chadwick's The Summer Queen.

Gary Corby hosts a post by Stephanie Thornton on the women of ancient Egypt.  And he has a note about one of his own old posts as well ... which leads me to say:  YIPES!

Donna Everhart has some of the best spam.  I have had ones like this, but for me the volume (given the relative traffic here!) is far lower!  I think the spelling one might be my favorite ...

So as to not load up this page with vids for you to load - AND to give credit where it is due (I have not linked Unleaded and/or Day Al-Mohamed for far too long), please take a click here and listen to the wisdom of Stan Lee on how to build a story ...  "You just have to keep interesting yourself while you're writing it."  Too true!

The Passion of Former Days strikes again (... and again?) with a visually arresting series of double-exposed vintage images.  Some of these are metaphorical, some are just interesting juxtapositions.  Enjoy!

And finally, for this lovely evening ... and for those Extra Special nights, when nothing else will do but to smell like a Viking ... Now you can! Yep, this is a thing now.  For reasons.

Building Castles in the Mind

Speaking as an author who's made up an unrecorded building or two in my world-building:  it's a pleasure to know there *are* buildings in the world (even quite large ones) which have gone unrecorded.  I give you the previously unknown Gallo-Roman edifice at Oise.

Okay, actually the BBC and connexionfrance.com do, but still.

Invisible ()

(Women, that is ...)

You hear about invisible men throughout the arts - but there are no invisible women - because nobody can see them.

One of the rarest creatures in fiction is the disabled woman.  I have one in Ax, actually, but she plays a supporting role, with very little time on the novel's stage.  The History Girls tells us about a truly intriguing character.  Ever heard of Lady Crookback ... ?  And don't forget to give the link I posted previously a chance.  It's a stunning story ... of a tragically visible woman indeed.

Scholarship, Authorship

Like many people, I fancy myself a history buff - but, for me, there is a distinct and a clear dividing line between my interest (scattershot, variable, and personal as it is) and An Historian.  It is likely I know more than any layperson needs to about pattern welding, horse breeding in Late Antiquity Northern Europe, grave goods, grave goods, grave goods, and grave goods - yet what I know is both ephemeral (once I've used it to my storytelling ends, I let it go) and deeply, utterly unprofessional.  I will never be the person to whom *anyone* should ever turn with actual substantive questions about the history of my periods and places - and I do not want to be.

There are history nerds and historical fiction authors all over, who would consider themselves competent to expound on the points of their personal interest in our past.  I am not one of these people.

For one, even years into the writing, I still must turn to a spot of research now and then, to reassure myself I've done something right (or that, in revising it, I won't do something wrong).  For two, I still occasionally find sources I did not find when work was in full force, and new ways of looking at the way I've treated the story myself.

And STORY is the ultimate key word.  Not history.

I came to Late Antiquity Gaul for a *reason* - I used it - I have spun out of it something both history and fiction ... and there is no soul less likely in this world than I, to tell you that historical fiction is remotely like the science of *history*.  I want only to tell a story.  It'd be nice for me, to keep all those guitarists off my back, to feel I've told it without too much glaring stupidity.  But, at the end of the day:  I am not rigorous.  I am not disciplined.  I am not a good source.

Gossamer the Editor Cat sez:
"I do not play guitar."

I have written nothing resembling the product of work and dedication and critical thinking which we like to think of as actual history.

I thought critically about what would make for a good novel.

I was dedicated to my writing.

I have worked, now for enough years I don't even want to tot the full duration up for you right now.  The next novels will not take so long.  I won't be educating myself how to write one (at an advancing age).  I won't be educating myself how to get the thing published.  But it's a lot of years ...


MY critical thinking and my work and my dedication - even my enthusiasm and confidence and - yes, I'll use the word - passion for The Ax and the Vase, are in no way the same thing as the scholarship and the work of a professional.  Not a professional historian, anyway - one hopes we'll be able to call it the work of a paid, published, and agented author.

If someone ever asked me about the costume of my period - the gender roles - the religions and the laws - I would hope I could at least provide some response.  But I would hope, simultaneously, that anyone asking me about that was doing so in the context of knowing my work - not as a student, nor expecting worthwhile instruction.  Conversations and considerations of history are fascinating and exciting.  But I will never be a resource for study.

It seems to me unlikely in the extreme that anyone will ever look to Diane Major as an authority of any kind.  Yet there are authors who like very well to participate in documentaries and studies of history.  I admire *their* confidence - and I know authors who do have the chops to expound (Elizabeth Chadwick, I'm looking at you).

Me, I fear the very idea of anyone trusting me that far.  I took what I needed, built with and built ON it.  If Ax feels authentic at all, that was the aim and intention.  That and my own fascination with the time, the place, the people.

But my tools are blunted, now the building is up.  They're no good for anyone else's use.

The tour through the edifice is all I care about now - people seeing what's inside, exploring, enjoying what I've built.  Not looking to me as a true architect.

Writing for a Very Specific Audience - and Other New Stories ...

Caroline Lawrence has a post at The History Girls today, about her work on writing for dyslexic (or reluctant) readers.  I find this a fascinating process *and* product.  A fresh and experienced eye is always good to have, but finding someone with the very particular type of wisdom one must have to produce works for audiences beyond the mainstream must be both invaluable - and very hard to find, if this is the sort of project you wish to work on.

There are probably guitarists who'd have a lovely good sneer about rewriting something like The Aeneid - and would faint dead away, clutching their pearls all the way down, about doing so in the spirit of Sunset Boulevard - but like the feel and the urgency of the passage Lawrence provides.  I can see how it would work - because it works on me - and isn't that the point, with *any* writing?

Honestly, I'd love to be able to find the editors she mentions, Ruth and Mairi - what interview subjects they would make, particularly Mairi, for the peculiar needs of a dyslexic revision.  The Night Raid will be released May 12 (though this is Amazon.UK, so our mileage MAY vary, on this side of the pond - see also, issues I'm having with the purchase of Tom Williams' His Majesty's Confidential Agent).  I may have to nab that one ... woe betide my TBR pile.

Breaking the Rules

In The Ax and the Vase, Clovis occasionally refers to his wife and queen Clotilde as “Cloti.”  Linguistically, there is zero defense for this – not least as “Clotilde” itself is a Romanization of a name pronounced with very little relationship indeed to the adaptation.  I’ve discussed Clovis’ own name (given to him, not by his father, King Childeric, but by his mother, Basina).  His own Romanized epithet takes us from a name more like “Hludo-vechus” to something more familiar to the modern eye, raised on two thousand years of Romance language and an affinity for clipped phonics.

As do many in the family and the dynasty as a whole—Chlodomer, Clotaire, Chrotilda, and so on—Clotilde herself shares the primary root of her bigeminal name with Clovis.  The Clo- root word derives from “hlud” – a cognate for fame, and most often translated thus – but it also is a cognate and shares kinship with the modern word “loud”.  This informs, in a way, much of the plot of Ax.  Clovis spends a great deal of energy on what we could call propaganda; he not only makes his own myth, but he tells a particular sort of story—a spectacular sort of story—in acts calculated for maximum shock-value and impact.

In Clotilde’s case, the root is, interestingly, most often translated as “bright” rather than “famed” – and that may be a gender bias dating back centuries which continues to be regurgitated, a feminine interpretation of a root used both for men and for women alike.  Where Clovis’ name is said to mean “famed warrior”, hers is given as “bright battle” (the latter root of which tends to beg the question, what is “girly” anyway, in the context of Germanic naming?).  I can’t cite hard data that this is a gender bias, but the consistency of the different meanings given for the same root for Clovis and Clotilde is striking.

Anyway.  To the point (yes, there is one).


And so I have an early Frankish king being cutesy and calling his wife either bright or loud, depending on how we look at it linguistically … and the point is that linguistics went absolutely by the wayside in this conceit.

I felt it necessary to evoke perhaps the solitary area of tenderness in Clovis’ life and heart, by expressing it in his words to his wife.  Humans are creatures of nicknames – but how an ancient Germanic reiks might nickname his wife, his queen, is frankly beyond my ken.

And so, without justification and I am sure without the slightest reality, I created a diminutization with abbreviation.

As false as it is by the rules, it’s authentic in terms of human behavior.  Today, name-shortening is the way we most commonly create pet names (and have for centuries … even if not the centuries in which Clovis and Clotilde lived).  It’s also a deliniation of how close an orbit is between two people:  there aren’t many people who get away with calling me Di, but those who do are VERY close to me indeed.  There is a brevity in affection which creates intimacy between us – if someone in my office calls me Di, they’re likely to get an eyebrow-raising wry smile.  But when X uses it, it is a sort of bond – he’s known me for so long, and he has earned the right to choose a name for me.  Oddly enough, a former coworker almost created a bond with me by calling me Lady Di – which bugged me so much I finally told him to stop it, and his utterly priceless response (you really had to know the guy to see how this could be endearing) was, “But I like it!”  He stopped it outright – and, in the end, I found I missed him calling me that.  And I still have affectionate memories of him to this day.

Nicknaming is a bilateral sort of leveling, a mutual sharing – and so, when Clovis speaks with his “Cloti”, it is a signpost of their unique rights to each other.  No other person would nor could even think of such a name for the queen.  And no other person would have the right to use it, either.  I gave him no nickname from her, but people sometimes share a thing only one of them actually wears, so to speak.

It is in things like this historical fiction finds its little freedoms.  There will be guitarists at the back of the bar of course, who scoff at such apalling license.  I’m not writing for those purists, apparently.

Every word I put down is translated through a modern mind which can never honestly nor completely capture the character, the period, the etiquette and protocol.  I can evoke them and study – but, being the product of the world I’ve lived in, forty-six years of hopeless modernity will inform the set construction.  On occasion, such as in this little license, I’ll use a screw, if it holds better than a nail – even if that’s not authentic.  If the wall stays up, and holds its own corner of the story, that is authenticity enough.  I want the story to stand.

I won’t write a feminist Mary Sue character, whose presence would outright tear the story and its setting down; but I’m not above allowing myself a bit of “modern technology” to get a point across.  If the ancient nails are rusted away, and there’s a Philips head and a screwdriver to be had … I’ll call my Queen-Saint “Cloti” in the bedchamber with her king, and apologize to nobody for it.

When looking in a Saint’s bedchamber, there is some license you can take … and some, of course, you really can’t.  All things considered, I hope I chose the right infraction!

LGBT History - and My Culpability

Tom Williams welcomes Christopher Hawthorne Moss for a very good post, looking at another "invisible" population in history (and contemporary historical writing).  One of the personal conflicts I had in writing The Ax and the Vase, along with the fact that it's yet another European royal, is that the sole glimpse of a gay relationship is pretty graphically negative.  I could have rewritten the pejorative legend of Ragnachar, I could have found another way to handle it - but ... I didn't.  He was an archetypal villain in all the sources, and as I felt my way around the limits of the "fiction" in my historical fiction, somehow I just did not find the time to redeem this character.

This isn't a small matter of passing guilt, either.  It's something I have contemplated for years now, and something I hope to be able to address and to face with readers and with the world I live in - both explicitly and by a more general example.  I also expect to find more freedom in future works, not least because (at least at the moment) I don't have any more novels which will be written first-person from the POV of a ... well, a bigoted white king.  Clovis had charisma - and I consider his story necessary and fascinating - but let it not be said he suffered from a gapingly open mind, by the standard I expect of myself.

Even as much as I believe in Ax, I believe that this part of it - that accepting the historical propaganda against the one character who indulged non-heterosexuality - is problematic, and I expect to answer for it as Ax comes out.  In the meantime, consider Moss's work - and Tom's.  And give me time.  If I don't redeem Ragnachar, maybe I can redeem myself with future works.