Here's a thought--practice arete for the holidays. Refuse to be annoyed by bad driving and thoughtless, selfish behavior. Be cheerful to all, be unfailingly kind and generous, offer hospitality whether you receive any in return or not.
It is interesting that from Achilles to Jesus to Lancelot, the model of good behavior remains the same, isn't it? Well, except that Achilles and Lancelot had a rather different approach to dealing with rudeness...
I hope that you all enjoy your holidays.
Despite having the flu, I have had a great month of reading and learning about history. Hmm, maybe that's BECAUSE I had the flu. At any rate, I read some good stuff. James Davidson's "Greeks and Greek Love" is a great read, although it required me to go and get caught up on my structuralism and my Deconstructionism. It's also a very thought provoking book, not just because it's largely about sex and sexuality, but because it's about how history gets written. It is easy (and wrong) to say that winners write history. Twenty-five hundred years on, academics write history. It can have interesting consequences.
Speaking of "great" and "thought provoking," check out www.comitatus.net which is one of the best reenacting websites for any period out there. Comitatus is a group dedicated to Late Roman Britain, and is led by John Conyard. They recreate cavalry, infantry, and artillery, military and civilian, and they do serious experimental archaeology, living history, and what we here in North America call "trekking." One of the things that makes this group so spectacular is their dedication to reconstruction with an eye to supporting academic historians and researchers.
And while I'm on all things Roman, I'd like to suggest that everyone get a copy of Graham Sumner's book "Roman Military Dress" (History Press 2009, and you can get a copy here). This is not another Osprey book--this is careful research and real information for the re constructionist and the material culture historian.
I have a new computer, and getting this essential tool ready for writing has forced me to learn a little bit about computers. I've even learned to move and manipulate profiles and .msl files in Thunderbird, so I have all of my e-mail stuff back. Life will now go on.
Makes me laugh, because when I was a junior officer in 1989, I was the squadron computer geek. LOL.
Of course, I'm still suffering from the aftermath of the flu. Hope all is well with all of you. Don't get the swine flu if you can help it... that's advice for all of you who thought you might just try it..
I'm back to work on Destroyer of Cities, my working title for a novel about the Siege of Rhodes. I'm around page 100.
I'm very pleased (proud as Pilate?) that noted Classical historian Adrian Goldsworthy had nice things to say about Tyrant on his blog. I own quite a few of his books, and I'd be delighted to tell you all how good they are--except that's something like telling you my opinions on Shakespeare.
But... I can't help it. His biography of Caesar is the best yet written, and his "The Complete Roman Army" is what I reach for when I need a Roman Army text bite. Hence... proud as Pilate.
Finally, this isn't a "real" blog and I don't usually use my bully pulpit to comment on the "real" world, but this Remembrance Day put my teeth on edge and I have to vent. First, because CBC played a piece on how bad a general Sir Arthur Currie had been and characterized his decision to continue on his Mons offensive in November 1918 as unfeeling and even brutal.
Crap. Bad history, pandering to the desire of under-educated people to believe that somehow WWI was fought by brave men under the command of idiots. The sort of mythologizing that creates a false underpinning to subsequent belief systems about the military. I'm not even remotely a conservative--but there's more to life, and history, then gross oversimplification. CBC should be ashamed of themselves.
Later that morning I was at a popular local restaurant at mid-morning. I stood at 11AM local time for the two minutes silence. The vacuous local Light Rock station played "last post" and then went silent.
Four middle aged people at the next table complained about having two minutes of their lives wasted by this "pompous nonsense." No one else was silent. A little later, one of the waitresses asked me why I was standing up.
Sigh.
Now back to the ancient world.
The third novel of the Tyrant series (Funeral Games, with due apologies to Mary Renault) is on my computer in final Page Proofs this week.
A writer gets many different looks at a book. Every writer has a different approach to creation, outlining, plot--and just writing. I write outlines and character synopses, documents which often bear no relationship to the finished product whatsoever--but still a useful exercise.
At any rate, after I write a couple of drafts, I send the manuscript in to Orion and my editor (Bill Massey) looks it over and tells me what he feels could be changed. I trust him--an essential element in writing, trusting your editor! So I take the manuscript back and change a few things,and then the book goes to a copy editor--in my case, to a really great copy editor in the UK, with whom I've worked for more than ten years, and who can correct English and Greek, too. He delivers me a set of "comments" which usually run about 250 line items--bad grammar, repetitious word choice, misuse of a Greek word... I do all these things, I fear.
Then my editor looks at it all again and it goes to page proofs, which is a sort of "final check" and we add in maps and acknowledgments and get the final page count--and by that time my readers (those people who get a credit in the acknowledgments--Matt, Bob, Jenny, and Aurora--have finished the book and have comments, which I try to incorporate.
And then the book gets printed. Of course, the editor and publisher have a hundred other titles to worry about each year, too. And the process takes months--up to a year, even.
So--Funeral Games is now done--and in a month or two, you'll have a copy. I mean, if you want one...
The SoAs mass market edition comes out in UK stores this week. As that happens, I'm finishing the last touches on Funeral Games (Tyrant 3) and Steven Sandford is completing my maps--and a nice picture of a trireme, as well. Why a trireme?
I was, after all, a sailor. So I guess that it should come as no great surprise that there's naval action in Funeral games. About time, I'd think.
Once again, when writing about action under oars, reenacting has leaped to my aid. I never got to row on Olympia (more's the pity) but I have rowed 28, 36, and 42 foot bateaux--and seen what it's like to steer them, to get oars up and down, in and out--and the process of avoiding collisions actually seems instructive in the fine art of ramming...
and then there's the time we rowed so fast we left a wake in a no wake zone...
Every time I start a new book, I have this frisson of fear--what if I've lost the ability to write? To think out scenes? To imagine characters? Luckily, so far, writers block is something I hear about--my dad suggests that writer's block is something that happens to writers with no bills to pay.
The Marathon 2500th is now two years away. Our Plataian reenactment group has 32 members and 11 fully kitted hoplites. The Greek government with whom we've negotiated may fall in the autumn election and leave us to start all over again.
Canada is also headed for an autumn election, and I was intrigued to hear a Francophone intellectual bemoaning the lack of a reenactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Yes--it is too bad.
At any rate, I started a new book on September 2nd. Wish me luck. it seems pretty good so far. And the main character is still alive...
Every year, in August, a bunch of us go off into the Adirondacks on what we call "The Trek." We go in 18th Century kit as the Company of Select Marksmen (and various loyalist and native allies) and we try to cover the kind of ground they covered, and spend 5-8 days doing it. Period kit, period camping, no cheating.
This is year 17 of this for us.
So, in 17 years, I'd say we've learned a fair amount both as reenactors and as historians. We can live quite comfortably--so comfortably that most of the veterans will camp as willingly with their trek gear as with any modern equipment. The equipment of the past was in many cases as good--sometimes superior--to what we use now.
But as a writer, what I've learned is beyond price. I've had a chance to really, really watch people--people I know well. In some cases I've watched them grow up. I've watched at least one person conquer fear and learn bravery, and I've watched others discover adulthood and other fun and exciting things. There's pressure and adventure and long evenings watching the sunset (or the incoming storm...)
Anyway, my point is that my books are full of things I've learned and seen on the trek. And with my friends. Sometimes they say "Hey, I was THERE" about a Kineas scene, and we all laugh.
Heh. The names are changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. And no one character is really any one person. But if you can't write about your friends, who can you write about? Strangers?
Anyway, I'm off to the trek in a week.
It's odd, writing a blog. It's odd because it's so easy to make it utterly self-absorbed--sort of like returning to age 17. At the same time, it's SUPPOSED to be about me, I guess... or at least, about those aspects of me that impact on writing my books... So... I got my nose broken fighting in Greek kit--shield rim to the helmet. Mind you, it would have been much worse without a helmet. But it was a very instructive injury, in that it reminded me of the extreme differences between the chances you take in sport-fighting and the chances you'd take in real combat. I was leaning way forward--almost lunging--to cut at the back of my opponent's knee. Not worth doing in real combat, as the injury illustrates!
It also reminded me that a very minor injury could lay you out flat--and if no one cut your throat, you might be back on your feet in five minutes or five days. Altogether, very useful for the books.
I'd still rather not have had it happen. And I'm glad it was me and not someone I was fighting. Pain is still better than guilt...
I spent most of the last three weeks making kit and preparing (with all my friends) to do our first Ancient Greek reenactment. You can look at pictures here.
I think that we did pretty well, even by our Rev War standards--but we have a long way to go. Still, as an author, it was remarkable how much I learned in a couple of days, and I find the experience of wearing the skin, so to speak, to be unbeatable. I'm covered in bruises and abrasions from fighting in armor--an experience I've had before, but a useful reminder that no one came off an ancient battlefield unscathed. And we ate period food--including lots of barley and barley bread.
It was wonderful. I recommend it to all of you. Want to come to Marathon?
Travel broadens the mind. It's a fact. It also tans the skin and it's good for kids, too. My five-year-old has climbed the Athenian acropolis and the acropolis in Skala Eressou, on Lesvos, too. She's looked at Turkish and Genoese castles, and learned a little about pottery and archeology and roof tiles, and how to meet kids in a foreign country...
My wife and I had a nice time, too...
Greece is fantastic, and I hope my next books are all the richer for my getting a new dose of Boeotia and jasmine and Greek wine fresh from the presses, the faces in the shops, the people on the street, the color of the sea, and every other intangible that informs a book.
One downside. The new fascism--not just a newspaper article. It's there. it's there in the way Europeans discuss their "immigrants" and use careful code-phrases and not-so-careful ones for skin color and cultural superiority.
That said, though, there's a few areas of real cultural superiority--at least, over North America. One is the close involvement of every age group in social life. When everyone promenades at 8PM, and all the adults (read, everyone who's married) gather for a glass of wine in the Taverna while the kids run around (after dark) and the teen-agers neck (within 50 feet of mama) and make eyes at each other... where their parents can see them.
Yeah. I grew up in a small town that wasn't very different. But it's harder and harder to find here. Not in Greece. Not in Italy, last time I checked.
Enough social commentary. Back to planning for Marathon and making kit... and writing...
Oh, and thanks for reading my books. I met a surprising number of fans while I was away and gosh, I'm, uh, shocked and pleased. And Phil, if you read this, drop me an e-mail!
I'm leaving for Greece on Sunday, May 10th, for a research trip that is also a trip to help foment a 2011 reenactment at Marathon.
I'll be visiting Plataia and Athens and hopefully Mycale and lots of sites on Lesvos.
With luck, I'll have plenty of details for the further adventures of Kineas (retrospective, of course) and his friends. And perhaps his ancestors as well!
Sometime, I'll write a book on trying to help with a reenactment at the remove of a continent, a language, and a culture.
Sigh.
On to Marathon!
I finished my latest writing project two weeks back. Since then, I've been doing research and making scales--bronze scales--for a scaled thorax. you can see the whole 90 hours so far of the work in the "online agora" section of the site.
It's all research for the next book, of course. And there's no substitute for making something to understand it--but, of course, you have to make it correctly.
Time will tell.
According to my agent, Tyrant is now available in Spain--in Spanish.
By a near complete coincidence, the Hoplologia website is now available in Spanish, English, Greek and French. The core of each is done, and the sites expand every day, as do the translations.
In addition, we have the "Taxeis Plataion" site very close to start-up, and then our whole support structure for the upcoming Marathon event will be done. At that point, some of the functions on this site will vanish--after all, this site is devoted to my books, and Hoplologia and the Taxeis are not-for-profits to support history and public education. The Online Agora will continue to support all the websites.
Now back to our regularly scheduled series of rants.
I'll be at Bakka-Phoenix in Toronto on April 4th (Saturday) from 3 until Christine kicks me out, launching Storm of Arrows in Canada. And recruiting hoplites for Marathon. feel free to come by--there's cake!
On Saturday, the Plataean Hoplites (a few of them, anyway) had a chance to do some mock combat with our many new aspides and various spears and swords (all safe and padded).
After several hours of this, I have a bruise on my shield shoulder that makes my wife (a very tough woman) wince every time she sees it. Other than that there was a great deal of learning about the life of the second rank--relatively immune, the second rank fighter can "snipe" with his spear while being protected by the front rank's locked shields.
Simulating combat leaves out most of what makes combat what it is--fear, terror, frenzy, horror, numbness--but it is still instructive. And I recommend it to every reader who wants to know why Homer refers to the "Storm of Bronze."
And the shields really do make a distinctive noise as they bash together.
Less is more--that's always been my view about writing about sex. Sure, it's essential to have characters your readers care about--and then, sex should only offer comment on character. Right? I mean, why describe sex at all--or at least, keep it to a minimum except when it informs a scene--otherwise, it's pornography. Right?
Hmm. But when writing about violence, be as graphic as the audience can handle. Hmm again. Or looked at another way, if I have a character for whom violence is expression, then it is suddenly okay to describe violence in enormous detail, right?
Or is this more about perceptions of taste than about good writing?
I just wrote a sex scene. Those of you who've read the first two books know that they're not exactly laced with sex. People have sex, but who wants to watch? Right? This book, I seem to have gone outside that box. Is it just spring?
I find all this funny--funny ha ha--because we're told that we should write what we know. Well, I know I've never been in a battle with elephants, but I suspect, due to the existence of my daughter, that at least once...
Why is this so hard? Because it is hard. And it's making me re-think how I write about violence, too.
I doubt anyone who stops to read this blog is unaware that a bunch of us are working really hard to prepare a reenactment group to go to Greece for Marathon in 2011. In preparation for all that, a bunch of us are reading a lot of history.
Okay, I spend quite a bit of time reading history, anyway. It's true...
Reading history--both primary sources, like Hesiod's "Works and Days" and complex secondary sources, like Judith M. Barringer's "Hunt in Ancient Greece," which attempts with some success to use period imagery and literature to "unpack" the messages of hunting, warfare, and emerging democracy in the period--the two together have reminded me of why I'm a novelist.
I like to theorize. I like to guess, sometimes wildly, at how things worked. In the process of reading some thousands of pages of history in various journal articles, I've run across quite a bit of theorizing, and I have to say that there are articles out there in academia that might better have given rise to historical novels. Equally, however, I've started to learn that didactic essays on how history "worked" have their place, and the place is not in my next novel...
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the line between essay, article, and historical fiction is often thinner than it may appear. Oh, I recommend Barringer to anyone interested in the subject. Beware--she's popping some balloons. But they deserved to be popped!
If you aren't a reenactor, it was probably easy to miss this news item--a major recreation of the events of the 7 Years War in America was canceled this week by various levels of Canadian and Quebec government, ostensibly due to threats to disrupt the reenactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
In a world where Holocaust denial is increasingly popular among those who wish to pretend that fascism offers a real solution, it strikes me as fitting that a few ignorant people in Quebec should decide to ignore their history and pretend that the Battle at Quebec in 1759 never happened.
Anyone who understands the history of the day ("Je me souviens") will know that the conclusion was fore-ordained from the moment that the government of France abandoned her colonies and declined to send her fleet to reinforce Montcalm. It is unlikely that even the most resounding military victory by French forces at Quebec would have saved Canada for France. And that leaves unasked what the consequences of French victory might have been--for the peasants, for the church? For the last functioning seigneural system in the New World?
History is a mass of cultural assumptions, and, at one remove, is all too often written by the victors. But--at least to me--history does involve some facts, the the recreation of those facts should never give pain to anyone. If the citizens of Richmond Virginia can accept the siege of Richmond, if the Dutch can celebrate the Canadian liberation of Holland, surely Canadians can watch and learn from the reenactment of the Plains of Abraham?
Apparently not.
It is a commonplace--war is hell. We all pay lip service to this notion, and anyone who has been near one will agree. And yet we keep buying books about it, reading about it, looking at pictures of it--and writing about it.
I could bore you with some ideology, but instead I'll limit myself to a few comments about my experience of war and how it influences writing. I saw organized warfare from 30K feet over the Iraqi desert, in a plane so far from the AAA that it was unlikely to ever draw fire. I pressed buttons and found some SAM sites. Then my plane landed on a flight deck (the most dangerous part of the whole sortie) and I had a burger. This sort of warfare is as far removed from Kineas's world as could be. There's very little to "inform" my knowledge of war besides the tension, the vague fear, and the desire not to show any of these things in front of my shipmates, which I expect are constants throughout history.
But later in my military career, I was on the ground in Central Africa during a "humanitarian relief crisis" which translates into tens of thousands of people dying of dysentery in an arid forest. No bullets required--although, in fact, this time there were a few. Tribal militias poured rounds into the sky while their people died of dehydration and such glorious stuff.
This, too, may sound far removed from Kineas's world, but it was much closer--first, because we walked twenty to fifty kilometers a day (one day I walked a hundred) and camped around fires at night--second, because the "danger" was present all the time. Sometimes, it was fun. Often, it was sad--so sad that we'd just "turn off." What remained was the camaraderie of the camp fire, and the desire to "get it done" and go home.
Against my own experience of war--none too glorious--I have to put my experience of other men's wars through meeting them. Sometimes, through talking around the camp fires or MREs of modern war, and sometimes around a coffee table or at the fire of a reenactment unit. And what I learned is that, like my small unit in Africa, men often become habituated to war, so that it becomes their life, and it is the ocean in which they swim. Because it is intense, and because the day-to-day struggles of bill paying, or getting a license for your dog, vanish--and all you face is the divine simplicity of life or death.
Men and women often show their best in a crisis. Almost no one is a coward, and few are found wanting. It is a pity that we need conflict to make us heroes, but we do, whether we face other men and women, or flame, or financial woe, starvation, any of the woes that filled Pandora's box.
So--as a writer--I'm always interested in how war creates character. I prefer the heroic and the epic to the anti-heroic, at least in part because that's what I saw--heroes. When you see a refugee woman carrying a five-year-old, consider whether she deserves the title "hero." Pick up a five-year-old and carry her a block. Now consider a hundred kilometers.
Back off, Achilles.
Storm of Arrows is out in stores in the UK as of today. I hope that you like it.
The release date for Canada will be the last weekend in February or the first weekend in March. I'll do a book launch at Bakka-Phoenix in Toronto. In the mean time, if you are desperate to have a copy, feel free to press the "get the books" link above and order one from Amazon.
The whole Chaeronea story is now posted to the site--all sixty pages of it. It is NOT a view of hoplite combat, as some people requested; I'll save that for Tyrant III, which has some quite extensive scenes of hoplite fighting, informed by all the stuff we're experimenting with in Toronto. As usual, character and motivation kind of stole the scenes, which often happens when I write--and now that I know what the Chaeronea prequel is about, I may go back and tinker with it to refine my ideas about Kineas's growth as a leader--and a thinker. Single combat--well, I just read an article about the prevalence of single combat and it seemed to me relevant. As late as Roman and Byzantine times, men issued challenges and accepted them before the main combat began. Insults were hurled, etc. See what you think. And really, on this day, it doesn't seem possible to write a blog entry without congratulating President Obama. The hopes of millions are pinned on him--mine included. I don't believe that he can possibly live up to the ludicrous expectations that have been forced on him--so I wish, hope, and pray that people allow him some time to be fallible and human.
A surprising number of people (fans? I have fans?) have requested the story of Kineas at Chaeronea. For those not "in the know," Chaeronea was the battle in which Philip of Macedon (Alexander's dad) won Greece from a coalition of the not-very-willing, including Athens and Thebes. Despite Macedonian propaganda, it does seem as if the Athenians almost pulled it out. But they lost--and lost badly. It was mostly the end of Athenian power.
Anyway, I've finished about half the novella today, and I'll complete it next week, as I promised. It may not be the novella you were expecting--so far it is mostly about participation in Athenian democracy, and about the deepening divide in class structure. About the concept of duty--even when you disagree with the course the state has set.
Hmm. I better write a good battle scene, or no one will read this...
Click for all entries for: 2008 2009 2010
Click for all entries for the last 60 days
Underlying journal software copyright by David M. Swan. Do not distribute without permission. You can contact the software developer at henry_mac@thescholarsgarret.com.
The author may be contacted in the Online Agora.
Any questions or issues with the site should be reported to the webmaster.