Times A'Changing

Eleven years and as many days ago, I tackled Blogger for the first time. Titled “Confessions of a Befuddled Author,” that initial post expressed my very real confusion about the blogoverse as a whole and my own place in it, combined with the awkwardness of writing about the sixteenth century while being expected to master twenty-first-century technology to promote my work.

The issue was not then and is not now the technology itself. I actually have a well-developed inner geek. I love trying out new software and solving those bizarre problems that computers throw our way from time to time. I spend much of my day hunched over my trusty Mac and my evenings reading on a tablet. I’m a whiz at Adobe InDesign, Affinity Publisher, and Word—not so much with Photoshop or its equivalents, but I can at least get around without bumping into walls. And after eleven years, I have become quite comfortable with Blogger and its quirks.

In other ways, I am wildly out of touch. I rarely watch television; I haven’t kept up with the latest movies, pop stars, or trends. I discover new slang most often while scratching my head over crossword puzzles. My characters, living as they do in the 1530s and 1540s, are clueless about emojis, and for the most part so is their creator.

Yet however much I resist change, I realize that at times it is necessary. For years, my blog lived at one site while my website was hosted by another (Wix), but a couple of months ago Wix decided that it would no longer link directly to Blogger.

At first, I let it slide, hoping the policy would change. But then I realized that my own site is secure, whereas Blogger is not and that without the weekly blog posts my site updates very rarely, which discourages attention from search engines. So I gritted my teeth and decided to switch. Since the beginning of June, I have posted everything in both places, but that is about to end.

I have not abandoned Blogger entirely. Since I started the blog on June 18, 2012, I have made almost 600 posts, which have attracted more than 420,000 views, including almost 10,000 this past month. So for as long I can, I will keep those older posts available to view at http://blog.cplesley.com. But for future posts and updated news of all sorts, please check https://www.cplesley.com/blog. Look forward to connecting with you there!

 

Agony Aunt for the Ages

As someone who’s kept a weekly blog for coming up on nine years without interruption, I’m always looking for good ideas for the next post. The New Books Network interviews help fill the void, as do the increasing number of written Q&As that I host for authors I can’t fit into my podcast schedule. I have bookshelf lists once a quarter, updates on my own books or comments on the craft in general, discussions of historical research and its place in fiction, and occasional posts about individual books or series that I enjoyed.

Even so, there are some weeks when I wake up on Thursday morning desperate for good ideas. I wish I had thought of this one, but the credit goes to my friend and fellow Five Directions Press member Claudia Long, who has created a time-traveling advice columnist willing to read and answer questions from fictional characters. Meet Madam Mariana.

So, what kind of questions does Madam Mariana field? Not surprisingly, the first two in the series (it only started a few weeks ago, so this is definitely one to revisit—and worth signing up for the author’s updates) address issues raised by characters in Claudia Long’s own books. Another Mariana from a work in progress, fifteen and living in Cuidad de Mexico in 1586, seeks advice on how to deflect her mother’s marriage plans. A widowed journalist in San Francisco, heroine of Long’s The Harlot’s Pen, wants justification for her pursuit of an artist in 1933—and writes back two weeks later revealing that perhaps she’s not a widow after all.

Most recently, a young woman in Ancona, Italy, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Mirelle, the heroine of Beyond the Ghetto Gates, by Michelle Cameron, whom I interviewed for New Books in Historical Fiction last year) has watched the man she loves head off for Egypt with Napoleon’s army and fears he may never return. Like Lucy of The Harlot’s Pen, Mirelle gets into a back-and-forth with Madam Mariana. It’s all tremendous fun, as well as a convenient way to find out about titles you might like to add to your reading list.

 And yes, Darya Sheremeteva,  heroine of Song of the Sisters (2021), will be seeking advice a couple of Thursdays from now. So if you don’t check before then (and you certainly should), do go to the blog on May 6. I don’t know what Madam Mariana will say, but I suspect that Darya may be quite shocked at the advice she receives!

Image: Konstantin Makovsky, Noblewoman Stitching (1890s). Public domain because the artist died in 1915.
 

Interview with Natalie Haynes

The Iliad and The Odyssey—those great male-dominated, war-oriented epics attributed to Homer and now close to three thousand years old—have became so intertwined with Western culture that it is hard to imagine a world without them. Who cannot recall Homer’s “wine-dark sea” or recognize the Cyclops and sirens, golden apples and Helen’s “face that launched a thousand ships” (a quotation not from the original but from Christopher Marlowe) that were the products of his imagination? Who hasn’t heard of the Trojan horse, now a reference to a type of computer malware?

But the Trojan War was more than a pair of epics that managed to survive for millennia or even a series of cultural tropes. In its time, it was a far-reaching catastrophe that ended and upended lives. And it affected not only warriors bent on securing eternal glory but wives and mothers, children and servants. Natalie Haynes, in her new novel A Thousand Ships, explores this Trojan War through the experiences of the goddesses, princesses, Amazons, townswomen, and captives who in some cases drove it forward and in others suffered the consequences. Read on to find out more.

A Thousand Ships is your third novel, but even beyond the novels you have a “presence,” for lack of a better word, in Classical Greek Studies, including a BBC4 radio broadcast and two nonfiction books. What drew you first to this aspect of literature and history and then to writing fiction about it?

Yes, I have made six series of a radio show for BBC Radio 4, called Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. I think people were pretty surprised it found an audience, but we get about 1.6 million listeners per episode (my country is a lot smaller than yours!). And now it’s available as a podcast, and has found a whole new audience there, which is wonderful.

I have been a classics nerd since I was eleven, when I started learning Latin. Then I began studying Ancient Greek aged fourteen. I was really lucky that my high school had these options: most students don’t get that opportunity. I did my degree in Classics at Cambridge. So ancient history and myth grabbed me at a very young age and have never really let me go. It took me a while to get around to writing fiction about it—I spent twelve years as a stand-up comedian first, which I know isn’t the obvious route into writing fiction set in the Bronze Age. But it has made it fun to tour a live show off the back of each book.

And why retell the Trojan War from a woman’s perspective—or, more accurately, many women’s perspectives? This decision, too, has classical precedents, including Euripides’ The Trojan Women.

I had already told the story of another Greek myth from the perspectives of two of its women in a novel called The Children of Jocasta. I love Greek tragedy, and I wanted to retell the story of Thebes (whose most famous son/husband/father is Oedipus) and see what happened if I shifted the focus to its women. But that is a much more focused narrative. I’d been building up to doing the Trojan War for a while before I began A Thousand Ships, I think. I wanted to take on a big story, an epic, with a huge cast of characters, like having a whole set of tragedies in play at once. I was certain the war could be told through the eyes of the women whose lives it affected (not least because it is goddesses, over and over again, who cause and dictate the direction of the war).

I had written and spoken about Euripides for years before I really thought about how extraordinary it is that all but one of his Trojan War tragedies have women as the title characters. We’re used to thinking of war narrative as male-focused, because they so often are (ever since Homer’s Iliad). But Euripides realized that the drama of war (because he was writing plays, rather than epic poetry, so that was his focus) is not always on the battlefield: it’s also in the build-up to a war, or the aftermath of one. It’s where the women are. If he knew that 2,500 years ago, it’s odd that we forgot it. But I felt like we had.

Is there one character who particularly stands out for you?

I love Cassandra. I think she suffers one of the cruelest fates in Greek myth—cursed to see the future but never to be believed. She’s so isolated, because her future is so terrible: her city, Troy, will fall to an invading force; many of her relatives will be killed or enslaved; she herself will meet a woman with murder on her mind (I’m not saying any more in case I spoil it for readers!). So the future she sees is incredibly bleak and terrifying, but there is no one she can speak to about it, because no one believes her. She must have felt mad—like those awful dreams where you’re talking but no one can hear you or understand you. And yet, of course, she was completely, horrifyingly sane.

Cassandra always feels like a woman out of time to me—trying to tell people what to do to save themselves, but helpless to stop them from careening toward their own destinies. I often feel like her, to be honest.

The women of Troy, whatever their standing before the city’s defeat, face an uncertain and uninviting future. Why is that?

The sack of a city in the ancient Greek world was usually brutal. The standard response was to kill all the men and enslave the women and children. You could wipe out a whole culture with incredible ease—kill a city’s men, take its women and children away, repopulate the city with your own settlers. The women would be divided up among their conquerors, so separated from one another. How long can we imagine it would be before an enslaved Trojan woman learned to speak Greek because there was no one for a hundred miles in any direction of her new home who spoke anything else? How long before she forgot her own language or dialect? As Euripides shows us in his play The Trojan Women, even the women of the royal house of Troy end up waiting around to be chosen and taken away by the same Greek warriors who had killed their husbands and fathers and sons. Their powerlessness is devastating to witness. Although his play Hecabe shows that sometimes women with no agency at all can nonetheless engineer one of the most grisly revenges in all of Greek tragedy.

Not all the women whose points of view are included in A Thousand Ships actually went to Troy. Clytemnestra appears, as does Penelope. What perspective do they add?

With this book, I wanted to tell the story of the whole Trojan War, not just one side of it. So there are chapters from the perspectives of the goddesses who want the war to happen, as well as from the mortal women whose lives it destroys. There are chapters focusing on the Trojan women who lose their city and the Greek women who lose their husbands to the war (temporarily or permanently, in some cases: not all the Greeks come home, after all). There is a chapter for Penthesilea, the great Amazon warrior who fought at Troy. There are chapters in the voice of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, who is responsible for all these large-scale war stories. The war is focused on one city, but what happens there ripples across the whole Greek world. I wanted to tell it in such a way that the reader would see that a war like this has no winners, really. It’s not a game.

Without giving away the endings—plural, since each woman has her own—what in particular about Andromache made you decide to end with her? (Do briefly identify her, for the sake of our readers.)

I’m not sure I can answer this without giving away the ending! Andromache is the wife of Hector, who is the favorite son of Priam and Hecabe, the king and queen of Troy. Hector is the city’s great defender, but there is an extraordinary moment in book 6 of Homer’s Iliad where his wife tells him that he needs to be more careful when he fights, take fewer risks, etc. He rejects her advice (though the whole conversation is beautiful—loving, respectful, full of care for one another and their city, and the people who depend on Hector to defend them). As the poem plays out, her advice turns out to have been painfully true: Hector feels he has to disregard it, but everything she fears will happen does then occur. Andromache has one of the most awful experiences of any of the Trojan women, and it was extremely painful to write the scene where that happens. But in the end, she finds a sort of peace, and I wanted the novel to end on a more hopeful, bittersweet note. So she gets to finish it.

And what comes next—another novel?

I have a nonfiction book, Pandora’s Jar, also coming out with Harper Collins in 2022, I think. But it’s already out in the UK, so that can only mean one thing: I am late starting the next novel. Which tells the story of Medusa, one of the very first survivors of sexual assault to be monstered (literally and metaphorically). The planning is going ok so far, but I need to get writing; my fingers are getting itchy …
        
Thank you so much for answering my questions!
 

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She has published three novels: The Amber Fury, The Children of Jocasta, and A Thousand Ships, as well as the nonfiction studies Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths and The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. She has spoken on the modern relevance of the classical world on three continents, from Cambridge to Chicago to Auckland.

She writes for The Guardian and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, including through her show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. Find out more about her and her books at https://www.nataliehaynes.com.

Looking Forward to 2018

The first week in January, everyone has plans for self-improvement, or at least tasks they would like to complete in the new year. I’m no exception to this trend. 

So, in addition to the usual—ditching the four pounds that attached themselves to my waistline between Thanksgiving and Christmas (blame the breakfast bagels and desserts), maintaining a regular exercise program, getting lots of sleep, drinking plenty of plain water, reading some of those books on my “never quite got to them” list, etc.—here are my writing and publishing goals for 2018:

(1) completing my Legends of the Five Directions series with the publication of The Shattered Drum;

(2) producing a rough draft for Song of the Siren, first in my new, probably four-part series—also set in Russia and the neighboring lands but in the 1540s—which explores individual women’s lives, told in the first person, mostly outside the traditional boundaries of marriage and motherhood;

(3) conducting twelve New Books in Historical Fiction interviews;

(4) typesetting/proofing, producing e-books, and in some cases editing the Five Directions Press titles scheduled for 2018—Chains of Silver, The Falcon Soars, The Shattered Drum, and A Holiday Gift, more or less in that order;

(5) maintaining my website and the Five Directions Press website—which means keeping track of the “Books We Loved” posts, expanding the number of authors and titles available, and keeping the news & events page up to date;

(6) posting to this blog every Friday; and

(7) staying active on social media as a way of connecting with and supporting other writers, especially the authors associated with Five Directions Press, as well as reaching readers.

As always, you can check back in December to see how I did. I should be okay, as these are pretty modest goals. No three-hundred-book reading challenges or doubling my number of interviews or aiming to write four books a year in the mix. Most of them are things I’m doing anyway, or have to do if I want to see sales for my books. But that’s the secret of keeping resolutions, right? Cut them down to size, make them essential, and the chances of meeting one’s goals leap dramatically.

The holidays are over, the tree and outside decorations will soon be memory (although the weather looks to remain frosty for a while), and alas, my lovely writing vacation is over. But I still wish everyone a splendid new year, with love and success and happiness galore!


In other news, you can find my suggestions on how to find great books to read (especially helpful if you just received an e-reader or gift card as a holiday gift) on the Triskele Books blog. And make sure to stop by next Friday, when I will be hosting a written interview with Bernard Cornwell about his latest novel, Fools and Mortals.

Image: Clipart.com no. 109382488.

2017 Revisited

At this time of year, although I eschew formal New Year’s resolutions about losing weight or exercising more, I do like to conduct a brief review of what I planned for the year and define a new set of expectations for the year to come.

For 2017, I had the following goals:

(1) completing The Vermilion Bird and seeing it in print;

(2) starting The Shattered Drum, the last of my Legends of the Five Directions although I also plan a spinoff series set in Russia around the same time;

(3) conducting twelve New Books in Historical Fiction interviews;

(4) typesetting/proofing, producing e-books, and in some cases editing the Five Directions Press titles scheduled for 2017—Rewind, West End Quartet, The Falcon Strikes, The Vermilion Bird, and A Holiday Gift, more or less in that order;

(5) maintaining my website and the Five Directions Press website—which means keeping track of the “Books We Loved” posts, expanding the number of authors and titles available, and keeping the news & events page up to date;

(6) posting to this blog every Friday;

(7) maintaining and strengthening my relationships with fellow writers; and

(8) continuing to improve my grasp of marketing, on both my own behalf and that of Five Directions Press—including finding more ways to get reviews.

I actually did pretty well this year. I finished The Vermilion Bird as planned, and Five Directions Press published it in December 2017. I also finished The Shattered Drum—a surprise—except for one set of comments from my writers’ group. Once those come in, I’ll do another revision and read-through, then off it goes to typesetting. Most likely it will appear in print and e-book sometime between May and September 2018, depending on what else we have in the pipeline. And I have begun work on Song of the Siren, set in 1541–1542 and the first book in my new Russian series, Songs of Steppe and Forest. Siren has a long way to go: right now it is a full set of story events and main character profiles plus about two serviceable chapters and some scenes, but with luck, it will reach first draft status sometime in 2018.

So much for my own work. Five Directions Press did bring out five books, although The Duel for Consuelo replaced A Holiday Gift, which will come out next year. I did conduct a full set of interviews, from Helen Rappaport talking about her companion volume to the PBS miniseries Victoria, now entering season 2, in January to Heather Webb discussing her Last Christmas in Paris, co-authored with Hazel Gaynor, in December. In between we traveled to the US South, Shakespearean England, early twentieth-century Egypt, World Wars I and II, and Viking-era Norway, as well as other times and places. My thanks to all the authors who spoke with me, and I’m looking forward to a new crop of guests next year.

In web-related things, I did manage to maintain my blog schedule and stay up-to-date on the Five Directions Press site; I even updated my own site for the release of Vermilion Bird, although it lay pretty dormant until then. I did my bit on social media, including running two book teaser campaigns (the second still underway) for Five Directions Press and lurking in various GoodReads groups whenever possible. So between that and the interviews I can claim to have done reasonably well on Goal 7. As for marketing, I’m not sure I will ever really get a hold on it, especially since the techniques that work seem to change without warning every few months. But my limitations in that area aren’t for lack of trying, more a result of having only so many hours in the day.

Check back next week, and I’ll have a new list of goals for 2018. Meanwhile, I wish you all a safe and joyous New Year!

Image: Clipart no. 110076193.

Writing All the Time

There’s an inverse ratio, I find, between working on a new draft of a novel and blogging. With the happy coincidence of Martin Luther King Day this Monday and my source of income being located in DC, where the university decided it was easier to close than deal with the insanity of requiring staff to navigate past inaugural events and protests, plus a relatively quiet week, I have focused every spare moment on The Vermilion Bird.

The good news is that I have thirteen solid chapters, eight of which have already survived the scrutiny of my invaluable critique group. A fourteenth is slowly unrolling under my typing fingers; with luck, I can finish it and get a sketchy form of chapter 15 out of the way by Monday, when work again returns full force. If I hadn’t needed to research the layout, appearance, and lifestyle characteristic of the early sixteenth-century Kremlin (on which, see “Fortress City”), not to mention the position of Tatars within and immediately outside the city, I could have made even more progress, perhaps to two-thirds of a novel instead of one-half.

The “bad” news—although it’s not really that bad—is that I can concentrate on the dialogue and actions of my imaginary people or detour to write a blog post. So this week I decided to settle on a quick progress report and save the good stuff for next time.

Happy reading, and—if you write—happy writing. Rest assured that I will return just as soon as I stop, in the words of my standard auto-response message, “chasing phoenixes in sixteenth-century Moscow.” In the meantime, you may want to check out the monthly “Books We Loved” post at Five Directions Press. Because you can never have too many books to read …

And if you missed last week’s interview for New Books in Historical Fiction, give that a listen, too. Three million viewers tuned in for the first episode of the Masterpiece Theater miniseries Victoria, and here’s your chance to find out about the history behind the program as well as a bit about life behind the scenes. All loads of fun, and it’s free!

Image: Ivan Bilibin's illustration of Prince Ivan catching the firebird, in the public domain because it was published before 1923, via Wikimedia Commons.

Webs and Wings

As you know from last week’s post, I moved my author website from Google Apps, where it has lived since its inception, to Wix.com. At the time I posted, I expected it to take me much longer than it did to migrate the site address to the Wix servers after clicking on the button that said “Publish.” For this unlooked-for simplicity, I have Google to thank—although, as is not uncommon with Google, finding the right button to click required far more raw luck than one would expect from a site that markets itself as user-friendly.

Still, I didn’t, in the end, have to deal with logging in to GoDaddy, where I don’t actually have an account except through Google, a detail that has caused me endless angst every time I’ve had to modify the directional settings for the site. Oddly, Google still threw up a user ID and temporary password for GoDaddy (that’s where finding the right button became a challenge) before I discovered the magic link that switched me to my own Dashboard and let me type in the server numbers provided by Wix. The same Wix that had promised to handle the connection for me if I could only provide my GoDaddy ID and password, which GoDaddy then refused to recognize.... This is why I will never give up the humanities for a life in tech.

But no matter. The new system is much easier, and I know what to do next time (meaning if we decide to move the Five Directions Press site as well—I’m sure that if I ever need to relocate my own site away from Wix, the procedure will have changed again). My blog is still where it was; I did discover, eventually, that there is a way to convince the website to pick up the RSS feed, or even to set up the blog as a subdomain on Wix, but by then I had repurposed the blog page on the new site to host a collection of excerpts, including audio clips, and videos. I was also, shall we say, wary after the last broken promise. So what Wix thinks is a blog actually does something else, but if you land on that page by mistake, you will find a link to the real blog posts. (Confused yet? Never mind, so am I.)

Most important, I love the professional look of the new site. Visiting it makes me happy. You can visit it, too, at http://www.cplesley.com, and I hope you will. I have even figured out how to add an iTunes button so that people can subscribe to my New Books in Historical Fiction podcast directly from my site.

All that happened last weekend. More good news followed. On Tuesday, I learned that The Winged Horse had made the first cut for the M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction. If you’re interested, you can find out more about the award at the committee’s website, including a list of the semifinalists. This is the first time I’ve entered any of my books in a contest, so being selected feels like a real validation. The short list will be announced in mid-April, but I am already delighted. M.M. Bennetts, a specialist in early nineteenth-century British history, wrote novels set during the Napoleonic Wars and was highly regarded for the quality of her writing before her tragic early death in August 2014. The committee seeks to commemorate her by selecting for compelling, well-told stories. I feel honored to be included in the list of twelve.

Perhaps best of all, I am finally through with the many tasks that have kept me away from Legends 3 for almost three months. This weekend—tomorrow!—I reenter my time machine, bound for the Russian North in 1536 and the world I have abandoned so long while still (half-)created. Are those swans I hear flying overhead?


Image: Shelf with M.M. Bennetts books, © Andrea Killam

The Year in Review

Time for the annual roundup, as I write the last post of the year. Hard to believe 2014 has already gone from Christmas Future to Christmas Past (and I hope yours was lovely). So, what do I have to show for another year on the planet?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. I completed my two challenges for the year, reading fifteen pure history books (actually more, but I stopped counting at fifteen) for the Sail to the Past History Challenge and twenty-six books from my To Be Read pile to sit atop the summit of Mont Blanc for the Reduce the TBR Mountain Challenge. Of course, I added two books to the TBR pile for every one I took off, but that’s what it means to be a bookworm. And doubling the number of books required for the status of historian in the History Challenge seems just about right for an actual historian. Most of my colleagues were rolling on the floor at the thought that anyone would read a mere seven full-length historical studies in a year.

In addition, of course, I conducted thirteen interviews for New Books in Historical Fiction, for which I read at least sixteen books. I published three of my own: The Winged Horse in June as planned, followed by a spur-of-the-moment decision to revise and release Desert Flower and Kingdom of the Shades to test the new Kindle Unlimited (KU) program introduced by Amazon.com in July. The last two books came out on August 29, just before Labor Day, and did very well their first month—while many people were using their 30-day free KU trial, I suspect. Since then, they have languished. Even my recent attempt to run a Kindle Countdown Deal on them was a flop, although this result seems to have more to do with the effects of KU than with me personally. Many authors are complaining of dramatic declines in their earnings from books enrolled in KU since October; for one example, see this post by M. Louisa Locke. In a similar vein, Countdown Deals unaccompanied by pricy ads apparently don’t do well.

Nonetheless, Desert Flower has garnered some good reviews, the whole thing was an experiment, three giveaways of The Winged Horse went much better, and my novels as a group sell slowly but steadily, so I have no inclination to complain. For the moment, I intend to wait and see what the next year brings. Meanwhile, Five Directions Press is growing: it now has eight books by four authors, with Courtney J. Hall’s Some Rise by Sin complete and ready for production in January. We hope to expand further in 2015.

With Winged Horse in flight, I turned to Legends 3, The Swan Princess. It took a surprisingly long time to get going, in part because I needed to research medieval medicine and certain specific medical conditions that play a part in the story, but more because I needed to figure out what the emotional story was. I knew which characters I wanted to feature from previous books, and I had an idea of what they should do, but I had a much harder time figuring out how they had grown since I last spent time with them and therefore what they next needed to learn. As a result, I spent months tweaking an outline that, as usual, I abandoned (except for the general direction) within twenty pages. But thanks to my inestimable critique group, I’ve more or less figured it out now, and with two lovely weeks of writing vacation to work with, I’m hoping to turn my initial four chapters into twice that by the first Sunday of the new year—at which time work returns with a bang.

Last but not least, I have written fifty-five blog posts since this time last year, including this one and several guest posts on other sites. I won’t say that has been my greatest triumph, because the interviews are fun and having five novels published and a sixth underway makes me feel pretty chuffed. But I do love these weekly posts, and I hope to keep them up throughout 2015. (For more goals, check back next week.)

Wherever you are, thank you for reading my ramblings for another year. May your holidays be merry and bright. And now, where’s that egg nog?

Image © 2009 Michael Wade, via Wikimedia Commons. 
Creative Commons Attribute 2.0 Generic license.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

As noted on Monday, Pauline Montagna was one of the three writers whom I tagged in the writing process blog hop. Alas, she has had to pull out—due to circumstances beyond her control, as they say. The same circumstances have forced her to postpone indefinitely her guest post on “The Art of the Sword.” Nasan is terribly disappointed, but I’m sure she will adjust—with time. We wish Pauline all the best.

My third “tag” is now Marie Macpherson. Marie gained a Ph.D. in Russian Literature and took up creative writing after retiring from an academic career. Now the rich history of her native Scotland provides the inspiration for her fiction. Set during the political and religious turmoil of the early Reformation, her first novel,  The First Blast of the Trumpet, published by Knox Robinson Publishing, is a highly entertaining account of the life of the Scottish reformer, John Knox. (I can vouch for this, as I read the book last year and am eagerly waiting the second installment.)

Marie’s prizes and awards include the Martha Hamilton Prize for Creative Writing from Edinburgh University and the “Writer of the Year 2011” title, awarded by Tyne and Esk Writers.

You can find out more about her book at The First Blast of the Trumpet. And listen to me interview her on New Books in Historical Fiction. Take it away, Marie!

In addition, I thought it might be fun to update you on my two challenges for the current year. In History Challenge 2014: A Sail to the Past, I have achieved the rank of historian by reading seven books. (Duh! I am a historian!) I still have at least five to go for this year, but I am currently wending my way through Mark Brazil’s The Whooper Swan (wonderful book—I am so grateful he wrote it), as I gather details for Legends 3: The Swan Princess, so I will get back to those soon.

My Reduce the TBR Challenge is currently stalled at 11 of 24 books, but I expect to start working on those again in May and even to raise the endpoint to 36 books. Stay tuned!


This is also, officially, my 100th blog post. Never thought I could do it, but here it is!

Writing Process Blog Hop

As I mentioned on Friday, a few weeks ago I accepted Gillian Hamer’s call to take part in the Writing Process blog hop. The hop has just a few simple rules, including that you publish on a Monday the week after being tagged (hence my off-calendar Monday post) and link back to the blog of the person who tagged you in a kind of a tip of the hat. I’d also like to mention here how much I enjoy and recommend Gill’s novels. I still have to find time to get to her Complicit and Closure, which I have on my e-reader. I posted my review of The Charter last year—first in a new category of “Hidden Gems,” which tells you what I thought of it. She is definitely a writer to watch.

So, on to the questions:

1. What am I working on?
The Winged Horse—my third novel, second in the Legends of the Five Directions series—is with its beta readers. Two have responded; two are still working on the manuscript. I’m hoping to have all comments back by early May so that I can go through the text once more and have the book out on schedule in June 2014. In the meantime, I’m doing the preparatory character and story work for The Swan Princess (Legends 3: North). I love all the stages of writing, even revisions, but story preparation is particularly fun because I can let my imagination range as widely as I like. The reining in comes later, when I realize there’s no way I can cram all these ideas into one novel without it ending up longer than War and Peace.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
The genre of my work is pretty broad—historical fiction. My first novel, The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, doesn’t even quite meet that requirement. It could be considered a time-travel romance, but it doesn’t involve actual time travel–just a computer game—or a real past, just a fictional one. It’s also very tame by the standards of modern romance. The Golden Lynx and its sequels are genuine historical fiction, but they differ from the rest of their kind by their location—sixteenth-century Russia and the surrounding lands ruled by the descendants of Genghis Khan. I blend real history, slightly altered history, and Turkic mythology in these novels. I use a historical note to deal with the deviations from historical fact and the mythology to reveal characters’ states of mind; I don’t intend the books to be historical fantasy.

3. Why do I write what I do?
I’m a practicing historian, specializing in pre-eighteenth-century Russia. I use the Legends novels as a way to reach people who otherwise have no reason to pick up a book on a place that seems too long-ago and faraway to have any relevance to their lives. If, by reading my novels, people want to find out more about this fascinating time and place where I have spent most of my adult life, so much the better!

4. How does my writing process work?
I use what could be called the modified snowflake method. In the snowflake method, the writer creates a rough outline, which s/he adjusts while writing. After two novels that took forever—because I had no idea where they were going until they got there, so I had to do a ton of rewriting—I have learned to make up an outline and ensure I have a story before I begin writing scenes. I use the exercises in John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story for that purpose. But I am a natural seat-of-the-pants writer who discovers her characters by throwing them into situations and watching them squirm their way out, so five pages into any story, the plot starts veering off in directions I hadn’t anticipated. Even so, the outline helps keep me on track and away from some of the more bizarre side paths.

It’s a modified snowflake method because once I start, I don’t bother to revise the outline beyond plotting out a few particularly thorny chapters. I just keep going and aim to end up more or less where I decided in advance.

Last, my job is to introduce you to the three writers who have agreed to continue the blog challenge.

Ruth Hull Chatlien has been a writer and editor of educational materials for twenty-five years. Her speciality is U.S. and world history. She is the author of Modern American Indian Leaders and has published several short stories and poems in literary magazines. The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte is her first published novel. 

Courtney J. Hall spent her formative years writing mediocre short stories and angst-ridden poetry before turning to novels and finding the critique group that saved her literary life. Her first book, Some Rise By Sin, is historical fiction set at the tumultuous end of Mary Tudor’s reign. Some Rise By Sin will be published through Five Directions Press in mid-2014. Courtney is a member of my writers’ group, so I can promise you that historical romance fans will love Some Rise by Sin.

Pauline Montagna was born into an Italian family in Melbourne, Australia. After obtaining a BA in French, Italian, and History, she indulged her artistic interests through amateur theater while developing her accounting skills through a wide variety of workplaces culminating in the Australian film industry. In her mid-thirties, Pauline returned to university and qualified as a teacher of English as a Second Language, a profession she pursued while completing a Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing. She has now retired from teaching to concentrate on her writing. As well as The Slave, she has published a short story collection, Suburban Terrors. 


For more on Pauline’s writing, join us for her guest post on May 9, “The Art of the Sword” (Nasan has already set aside a piece of her precious writing paper to take notes).

And once again, many thanks to Gillian Hamer for this opportunity! Talking about writing is almost as much fun as writing itself.

The Writing Process, Mine and Ours

This is my regular blogging day, but not my regular post. Having let Gillian Hamer talk me into joining the Writing Process Blog Hop—okay, she didn’t have to twist my arm: I volunteered before realizing that meant I had to find three volunteers, at which point my eyes got that deer in the headlights look and I began whimpering softly—I committed myself to posting on Monday, March 31. 

Being a Scot and naturally thrawn (which, to quote my mother, is what your friends call you when your enemies call you pigheaded), I would have gone ahead and posted on Friday anyway, except that it was a rough week at work and I haven’t had time to answer the questions. I did manage to find three lovely writers who agreed to continue this exercise. Some of them may now be whimpering in corners, but I’m sure they’ll get over it and find three victims of their own. I’ll announce their names, tell you a bit about them and their books, and link to their blogs on Monday as well.

Meanwhile, for reading on your Friday, may I suggest a post uploaded yesterday by my buddies at Triskele Books onto the Writers & Artists site. “The Rise of the Author Collective” looks at the value of group input in creating great books at all stages of production, from writing through publication and beyond (and mentions Five Directions Press and Writer's Choice, as well as other writers’ cooperatives). If you’re considering a cooperative as an alternative to traditional or self-publishing, you’ll find some good tips here. If not, you’ll be alerted to what we hope will become the next big thing in publishing.

Either way, if you’d like to know more, look for The Triskele Trail, put out by the same group of authors (Gillian Hamer, JJ Marsh, Liza Perrat, and JD Smith). The Kindle version is already available on Amazon.com. A brand new, spiffed-up print version will be out in the summer, with an updated Kindle version available even sooner. Stay tuned for updates!

And please check back Monday for my full “Writing Process” post.

Writer’s Choice

If you have been following this blog, you already know that Five Directions Press is not the only writers’ cooperative in publishing today. Indeed, when authors confront the array of tasks associated with self-publishing—editing, cover design, typesetting, marketing, and the general need to produce and upload files in multiple formats—it would be astonishing if people did not seek out like-minded and amenable souls to share the journey. I discovered Triskele Books—a group of writers living in the UK, France, and Switzerland—on GoodReads, the Internet book club, and engaged in a blog conversation with them last year. Their “how we did it” guide, The Triskele Trail, is available on Kindle and will soon be revised for print. If you think you might like to start your own cooperative, The Triskele Trail offers lots of useful information on what does and doesn’t work.

As a sign that this is indeed part of a broader trend, Joel Friedlander, whose The Book Designer should be on every self- and small-group-published author’s blog list, hosted an article on cooperatives by Jordan Rosenfeld a few months ago. It provoked a lot of comments and not a little interest among readers.

Just recently, I came across another coop, also through GoodReads. This one is Writer’s Choice, based in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Like Five Directions Press and Triskele Books, Writer’s Choice grew out of a critique group—in their case online—at the point where the writers involved had full novels that were getting good responses from agents and editors but, for one reason or another, no contracts. So they banded together and decided to take advantage of the new publishing environment. For the moment, they have three authors, each with a book in print, and more on the way.



G. J. Berger, South of Burnt Rocks—West of the Moon
Chosen as Best Published Historical fiction of 2012 by San Diego Book Awards, winner of the BRAG Medallion.



After three great wars, Rome has crushed Carthage. Now the undefended riches of Iberia beckon—gold, tin, olives, wine, and healthy young bodies to enslave.

Lavena, last child of the strongest remaining Iberian tribal leader, confronts the Romans who plunder and loot her land, at times helped only by her father’s favorite dog and a special horse. Guided by spirits of earth and sky, she strives to unite her people and oust the Roman menace. Based on real characters, places, and events, South of Burnt Rocks recreates that shadowy history—and eternal human nature rubbed raw.


P.D.R. Lindsay, Tizzie
 
There’s no slavery in the Yorkshire Dales—not in 1887, not ever. But loving families use artful schemes to enslave the innocent. Twenty-nine-year-old Tizzie is such an innocent. She has worked herself down to skin and bones as a dairymaid on the farm of her dear brother, his Scottish wife, and their three boys and one girl—Agnes.

Expert at many things, though not in spotting conniving entrapment, Tizzie longs to see young Agnes escape her own spinster fate. In trying to help Agnes find an education and avoid a life of drudgery in their male-dominated world, Tizzie begins at last to suspect her family’s treachery.

Soon she discovers it plans to enslave and use up Agnes, too.  With only her wits to guide her, Tizzie tries to right years of wrongs and set Agnes free.


Sharon Robards, Unforgivable (2014)
Bestselling author of A Woman Transported

Australia, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Sylvia, without a husband to legitimize her pregnancy, has no choice but to wait for the birth of her child in St. Joseph’s Hospital, managed by the Sisters of St. Anthony on behalf of the Catholic Church. No girl has ever walked out the front gate without leaving behind her baby. Sylvia intends to become the first.

In the great religious and social upheaval brought on by Vatican II, amid a thriving adoption industry driven by society’s fierce disapproval of unmarried mothers, a determined teenager battles with the nuns to save her child.




And on a different topic, I’m happy to report that my interview with James Aitcheson (Sworn Sword, The Splintered Kingdom, and Knights of the Hawk) went off without a hitch—or a cough. So stay tuned for the link to that podcast, which should be live by the middle of next week.

The Wonders of Wikipedia

After two years of running circles around me, The Winged Horse is finally off my desk and whinnying at my long-suffering beta readers. With any luck, they won’t find too much wrong with it, meaning that I can unleash it on the world in June as planned.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning on Legends 3, The Swan Princess. It’s a huge, soggy mess at the moment, little more than a bunch of disconnected ideas, half of them tossed up by my subconscious for reasons that remain unclear. So when not pushing myself to complete the exercises in John Truby’s Anatomy of Story, my go-to book for the beginning of any novel, I’m doing research. This is not the kind of in-depth, years-long research I use in writing history—although my mix includes books written by scholars, and even books written in Russian by scholars. Instead, it’s research to spark the imagination, to woo balky characters and tame a plot that threatens to have more branches than a holly bush, some of them every bit as prickly.

And my preferred site for that kind of research, or indeed any kind of research that is at a quick and dirty beginner level? Wikipedia.

Among scholars, such an admission is, shall we say, frowned-upon. And it’s true: Wikipedia articles can only skim the surface of their subjects and sometimes contain errors, despite higher standards imposed in recent years and enforced by the input of dedicated page editors. Even the Russian version, Vikipediia, which tends to have longer and fuller entries on the kinds of obscure topics that interest me—Islam-Girei Sultan of Crimea, the Venerable Trifon of Pechenga, the fortress of Ivangorod (Sebezh), and so on—can go only so deep.

But as a place to start, Wikipedia is marvelous. Most entries have pictures, public domain or Creative Commons, and maps and links to other, more informative sources. The entry for the Pechenga Monastery (where, readers of The Golden Lynx will remember, a certain character has been exiled to ponder his sins) led me to a small book in English, hosted on the digital Internet Archive, not only describing what remained of the monastery in the late nineteenth century and what was still known about its history but also recording legends associated with the monks themselves, including its founder, Trifon. It would be going too far to say that Trifon’s legend is historically accurate, but it is historically attested. And since I’m writing a novel, not a history, historically attested is more than good enough for me.

In other cases, a brief survey of current information addresses my needs. This tends to be particularly true of medical, geographical, and biological information. A list of symptoms, a map showing the range of a particular type of plant or animal, a description of topographical or species characteristics, even dates and the spelling of a name in Russian or Tatar can be invaluable. I go online, read the entry, print it if necessary, and I’m back in my scene. Even for work, if I’m checking the spelling of a name or the date when some event happened, Wikipedia is most likely to have the information I need readily accessible, front and center.

Last but not least, those pictures are precious. I’d love to visit Pechenga, but the chances of that are small. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons, I have at least an idea of what my antagonist may see as he gets ready to wipe the ice of the monastery from his fictional feet. I have downloaded views of the Sura River, Tatar dogs, flags and banners, ancient fortresses, flowers and animals, shamans and their instruments, and much, much more. All these enrich my understanding of the world my characters inhabit, even if they do not appear on my blog or on the covers of my books.

So let’s hear it for Wikipedia. It’s an example of the Internet at its most creative.  And even if you don’t choose, as I do, to support the site during its annual fund-raising campaigns, it’s a project worth celebrating.

Speaking of images, Photos.com, which I mentioned in a long-ago post, “Images, Images Everywhere,” is closing down as of March 10, 2014. The site owners will move existing accounts, including any unpurchased downloads, over to ThinkStock, owned by Getty Images as is Photos.com. Unfortunately—and perhaps not coincidentally—ThinkStock prices its images appreciably higher, at the same level as Shutterstock. So Photos.com is no longer a mid-level solution.



Maybe something else will come along to replace it. We can hope, right?

Konstantin Korovin, St. Trifon’s Brook, Pechenga (1894)
From Wikimedia Commons
This picture is in the public domain because of its age.

Bumps in the Road

The Concerned Cat as
the Coughing Started

Last week, I posted about Jessica Brockmole’s Letters from Skye. What I didn’t want to write there, because it would have taken away from her wonderful book, was that I spent the entire interview praying that I would make it through without collapsing in a coughing fit that would have done a tubercular nineteenth-century literary heroine proud. I almost made it, too. Forty minutes in, and not so much as a tickle. Then all hell broke loose. Poor Jessica—stuck on the other end of the line while her interviewer gasped for air.

I suppose it was fitting, in its own weird way, that I should be suffering from a chest cold on the day scheduled for my virtual trip to the Isle of Skye. Skye is—or was, the last time I visited it in reality—the kind of place that prides itself on thatched crofts heated only by peat fires and drafty castles perched on crags, a place where fishermen down oatmeal with salt, not sugar, and their wives take time away from doing the laundry by hand to walk the hills in a gray drizzle. On Skye, everything closes on Sunday, even the ferry and the bus, and when car meets sheep, the driver had better be prepared to throw the gears into reverse.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Skye. The island is beautiful, wild, and surprisingly remote for a place within sight of the mainland; it exists in its own temporal dimension, like Avalon of legend. And it comes through, with remarkable clarity and richness, in Letters from Skye. You can get a hint of the place in that gorgeous book cover. So, too, do Edinburgh—a city of such architectural harmony that it can give even Skye a run for its money—and the flat-as-proverbial-pancake prairies of the North American Midwest. Jessica has spent time in all these places, and to populate them she creates a set of characters who will stay with you long after you set aside their letters and move on to other books.

Jessica is great in this interview. But just about everything else about that morning was an exercise in Murphy’s Law. We persevered through the thunderstorm that no one in the local media had bothered to forecast (it sounded as if it broke right over my roof). I managed to head off my first bout of coughing; the New Books Network editor has removed all traces of the second, severe enough to wring a meow of concern from my Siamese cat. Do interviewers on NPR disappear for minutes at a time into what sounded even to me like a recurrence of last year’s bout with whooping cough?

Maybe they do, and we just don’t hear them. The audio equivalent of Photoshop has much to recommend it. Meanwhile, my belt marking “everything that can go wrong in an interview” has acquired another notch.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. It was a fun and informative conversation despite the hiccups (and whoops), and the more mistakes I make, the less I worry about making another one. Not that I could have avoided this one, having already taken all the medicine I could find, but the point is the same.

If you happened to catch the interview before the editing took place (yes, thanks to a communications glitch, that happened, too), just download it again. It’s fixed now.

So a big thank you to Jessica, for grace under fire. And here’s hoping that my next destination arrives virus-free. Although the Norman Conquest sounds like an even less accommodating location than Skye. Maybe I’d better get a smallpox booster, just in case....

The Press Kit

Sometime ago—the spring of 2013, I think—I read a recommendation that every writer should include on his/her website a tab for the media. Unfortunately, I no longer remember the source, but in any case, the idea was to put in one place, clearly labeled as “Media” or “Press,” the information that reporters might need: author bio and picture, book descriptions, reviews—in short, a press kit. The advice suggested putting the information in both readable format on the web page and in PDF format for download.

Even though my books, published by a small press, had made so little splash in the media that preparing a press kit seemed like hubris, I figured a media page with information on me and my books couldn’t hurt. Alas, I had never seen a press kit. I put together the information in a single document that ran about 15 pages. 

Luckily for me, no one downloaded it. But on the off-chance that some of my readers may never have seen a press kit either, I thought this post might prove useful. Even traditionally published authors are asked to provide information for their own press kits, although they can expect to receive more guidance than I did.

My woeful ignorance changed when I became the host of New Books in Historical Fiction. Publicists began sending me press kits together with review copies of the books whose authors I planned to interview. After a while, it dawned on me that I could use these as models to spiff up my own miserable efforts, a task now mostly complete. So what did I learn? What is a press kit? I’ll use the one I created for The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel as an example (but keep in mind that others may—and probably do—have a better grasp of the form than I do).

First off, a press kit is a single page, printed on both sides, or at most three pieces of paper. It focuses on one book. Typically, it starts off with quotations from reviews—the more prestigious the issuing publication, the better. In my case, because my publisher is so small, I used one- or two-sentence excerpts from reader reviews, chosen to give the widest sense of the story’s tone and impact.

The next most important element is the book cover and information. I chose to run these side by side, in a template that I am developing for all the Five Directions Press books. The book information includes the title and author’s name, the blurb from the back, the publication date, ISBN, price, format, number of pages, and contact information for me and for the press.

Then we have information about the author, including a picture, which often appears on the back of page 1. Since I am a relatively unknown author, I kept this short and put it on the front, then used the other side to give some background information on why I wrote this book. For The Golden Lynx, I used the same format but provided historical information on the entire series. 

And that’s it. If your book has won awards, add them to the first page and move the author’s information to the reverse side. If you have many books reviewed in important places, you can add a second page to cover the gamut of your literary fame. If your book relies on specialized knowledge—understanding agoraphobia, the cultural climate of eighth-century Central Asia, what led to Zelda Fitzgerald’s confinement to an insane asylum—you may want to add a second or third page to convey the basics, so that a reporter need not look them up. But keep it short. And the fewer credentials you have, the more modest the press kit needs to be. Only comedians want to leave journalists laughing hysterically at their claims.

As always, it pays to edit, edit, edit and to find someone who can put a bit of thought into the design—and who owns the software that makes that design look professional. But the good news is that the press kit is much easier to produce than I originally thought. You probably have all the information in various marketing materials. My discussions on the back came from the mini-essays I wrote to fill in the review space for my books on GoodReads.

So go for it. It’s not difficult. And if the press does knock on your door. You’ll be ready.

If you’d like to see more, you can find the press kits on my website.