I've been on vacation this summer--mostly reenacting--and it has been one of the best seasons I can remember. However, today marks "back to work". First I'll finish the 3rd draft of "Marathon" and then I'll work through Tim Waller's (excellent) copy edit of "King of the Bosporus." And then I'll start a new novel...
That's a good day!
Last weekend, I ran a fairly large reenactment of the American Revolution at Fort George Ontario--about 800 soldiers and another 500 civilian impressions. It was my first opportunity to command troops from horseback--phenomenal how the horse improves command span (the distance you can project orders) and visibility--an essential tool of battlefield control. Which will show up in my future writings. To understand the warfare of the past, I think you have to DO it.
This week I'll be in the wilderness with more than a dozen people, using period techniques while exploring ground where, in effect, no one goes anymore--the Metcalf Lake area of the Adirondack Mountains. Again, using only period techniques for camping, fire building, warmth, etc. To understand the life of the past, I think that you have to DO it.
And then I'll go to the cottage for a week, relax, and be ready to start writing... with lots of new experience about which to write.
In a week, my new series is released in the UK with "Killer of Men" as the first book. It is my best work--not because I was lazy writing the Tyrant series, but because there is something about the events of the Persian Wars that seem to me truly epochal, and because the style of the novel allows me to say things--serious things--about the nature of war and the kind of men who choose war as a way of life.
The same weekend, I'll be running a reenactment at Fort George, Ontario--the largest I've ever run, and I've spent two years putting it together. If you are in North America, why not come and see our Fort George event. And buy a copy of Killer of Men, of course.
For more on Fort George, check out our website at Fort George 2010
Enough philosophizing about politics...
I'm a few pages from the completion of the Tyrant cycle. It felt odd, today, sitting at the Luna Cafe, at the same table where I drafted the outline for the series back in December 2005 (really? That seems like a long time ago).
A hundred pages or less from the end--well, it's the night before the Battle of Ipsus in 301BC, and everyone who's still alive is there--Leon and Theron and Coenus and Diodorus, Satyrus and Melitta, Stratokles, Crax and Andronicus... Abraham, Miriam, and even Lysimachos.
It's odd to be at the end. I comfort myself that I'll write a pre-quel about Kineas, and perhaps--just maybe--a twenty year's after.
But in the mean time--six books of Kineas and his people. It's been a great deal of fun. And I still can't decide just exactly how it ends...
But I guess I can sleep on it...
Are we no longer capitalists?
I'm not always a good capitalist. Sometimes I'm an Oligarch, and often I'm a monarchist, and occasionally I'm a Marxist. But by and large, I thought we'd all pretty much agreed on capitalism--with all its flaws and obnoxious greed--as the way that worked.
I've been puzzled--not by health care--health care I can actually see as the business of the state, if we agree to it--no big deal. I live in Canada, and guess what--it works just fine. It is much like military medicine in the US Navy--a little faceless and sometimes not very friendly, but totally competent and expert.
The bailout of the banks and auto companies threw me, though. I thought that the whole deal with capitalism--the thing that kept us from being socialists--was that businesses failed. When they succeed, the shareholders make money,and when they fail--well, the said shareholders lose money. And.... I speak as a mere military man, and not as a capitalist, because I've never made a dime on an investment--but when capitalists try to tell me how superior they are to say, the US Navy, two words they love to use are "efficient" and "risk." The one shows that they're better than the military because the RISK of failure makes them leaner and meaner.
Sounds good to me. Excellent, says I. No risk to being in the military, of course--socialized medicine, a guaranteed job. Oh--yes, right, you can DIE if you fail, and there's no government to come bail you out--heck, no. You are, after all, dead.
Now President Obama is "accepting responsibility" for the oil spill. This makes me want to use bad language in print. No, really! The responsibility, as I understand capitalism, lies COMPLETELY with the shareholders of British Petroleum. They--and other energy companies--spent a whole lot of money to get reduced safety margins--laws that would allow them to take huge risks with the environment. That may have been bad politics--but thank god, we're capitalists, so when they dick it up and create a giant bio hazard, NO one will expect the government to raise a finger--right? I mean, if there was a giant profit, they wouldn't voluntarily share it with US taxpayers, would they? Check this for me--possibly, BP has been voluntarily sharing profits with the US Government for years. No one ever told me. Someone check.
No?
In that case, LET THEM PAY. All of it--every fisherman who loses his livelihood, every hotel that's closed, every trailer park that no longer has tenants. I would wager--at very little risk--that they, and all of their insurers, will be broken--utterly extinguished. And their shareholders will lose everything, of course.
Ahh! That's excellent. In the military, we call that "the consequence of poor decision making." To me, it seems something that modern "capitalists" never seem to have to feel. So--let them eat their bio hazard. Let them fail. Make them pay--until they have paid everything--until there is not one asset left--and then and only then let the government step in.
Oh--wait. Better yet, let the government step in now--right now--with a stream lined civil liabilities trial system and judges borrowed from all over the US, so that every claimant can take BP to court as individuals, so that BP will have to fight 80 thousand individual claimants with no class action allowed. Stream lined to get through the whole process in a year or so. THAT would be worthwhile government assistance.
Even with such a Draconian action, the shareholders wouldn't die. In fact, they'd, most of them, still have health care.
And meanwhile, I invite "capitalists" to confess that "risk" and "efficiency" belong with "honor" as words they do not understand.
Is Athens burning?
I don't usually talk about the real world on this blog--but the events in Greece--and the rest of the western world--are asking for some commentary. In Greece, three people died--bank employees, killed by a firebomb thrown by protesters who see the banks, the International Monetary Fund and the EU as foreign forces seeking to control Greece.
It is stupid of them to kill bank employees--stupid, vicious, and morally indefensible. But their rage is totally understandable, because in Greece right now, the government is planning austerity measures which will make the middle class--and the lower class--pay for generations of overspending by the government--and the upper classes.
In all honesty, in every democracy, the rich control the government. I'm not even sure that that's wrong--history would argue that the rich often have the greatest stake.
But we're living through an attempt by the people who led us to failure--in Greece and elsewhere--to make us fund that failure. It is US taxpayers who are funding Chrysler and the banking system. European taxpayers will ultimately pay to bail out the errors of the past--errors that, at least as we've seen on Wall Street, are often the result of zealous soi-disant "capitalists" who want the government to ignore them when they make money and bail them out when they fail. Someone should explain to them that the system is not capitalism--in capitalism, failed businesses DIE.
Here in my own neighborhood, a local businessman is buying up the properties and putting in businesses of his own choosing--a process which will eventually render my neighborhood unlivable, at least by grown-ups with children. His actions have recently evicted the Square Fruit Market, quite possibly the best corner store in Toronto, and until now the subject of envy for every Torontonian who didn't live around here. Why?
More money. For him. Not a thought for the four hundred people who depended on that store.
Sometimes, I think that good old fashioned aristocrats--the kind who fought in the front rank in battle and had to keep a long view of estate management to be able to buy armour--can't have been worse. Athens doesn't need Perikles--she needs Phokion.
Maybe my neighborhood does, too.
BTW, if you want to see who's responsible for the fiasco in Greece, here he is--the banker who most Greeks blame. There's a Classical Greek word for people like him. They were called "idiotes."
I've started the next Tyrant novel; this one about Satyrus and Melitta and all of their comrades and Lysimachos. After this novel I'll be taking a break from the Hellenistic world for a year--perhaps two--while I write about the world of the Persian Wars, and quite probably at least one novel about Elizabethan Ireland and Flanders. But I will come back--I agreed in principle the other day with my (excellent) editor to do a "Kineas and Alexander" novel and, quite probably, a novel where Diodorus and Philokles are the main characters--the early Diodochi period.
So--in the fullness of time, there will be eight Tyrant novels. And if you folks keep buying them, I'll certainly continue writing them.
While on the topic of buying, I recently purchased an (Albion Swords) Liechtenauer, a sparring sword for the practice of 14th and 15th century longsword techniques. This superb training weapon is one of the finest recreated swords I've ever handled--and it is "merely" a sparring sword.
Recreations like this from Albion help fuel my writing and help recreationists of all kinds--martial artists, reenactors, performers--understand and "enter into" history.
And while I'm passing out praise... Guy Gavriel Kay needs none from me... but his latest, UNDER HEAVEN, was lyrical, meticulously plotted, never trite, always true to its culture and subject...
I liked it. Lots.
Recently, I've gotten book reviews from the Toronto Globe and Mail (bless them) as well as the Huddersfield Daily Examiner in the UK and a couple of others--all worth checking out (at least for the size of my ego... I find them worth checking out).
I also had a chance to do an interview in the highly respected and widely admired (hint, hint) blog of one Matt Heppe (Eternal Knight). Long term readers and reenactors may remember Mr. Heppe as the senior sergeant of the Company of Select Marksmen...
Finally, but by no means the least important, my friend Mike Bard passed away last week. Mike was a writer, a gamer, and a genius. Genius was not uniformly kind to Mike, but his unfailing courage and cheerfulness overcame any other difficulties he had. In honor of Mike, I'm going to start a fiction area on the Hippeis site called, I think, "No holds Bard" (nothing as satisfying as a good pun) for stories and short novellas. I hope you like it. And as my contribution, I'll write the long demanded Philokles back story...
This may seem odd to friends in the UK, but the book launch for Funeral Games is Saturday, March 20th at Bakka Phoenix Books, 697 Queens St West, Toronto (Canada). All are welcome. I'll do a reading from Funeral Games, and with sufficient encouragement, I might do a reading from Killer of Men, the first book in the Long War/Persian Wars series out next August.
Why do my books come out three months later in Canada? I have no idea! But I do promise a slice of Dufflet's cake to all attendees. If you don't know Dufflets, you probably live too far away to attend, anyway...
Authors are not supposed to react to reviews--much less the reviews we receive on internet sites. But I read them all--even on Amazon. Sometimes, I even agree with the criticisms expressed there--or here on my forums.
But there's a thread there that I have to speak against. This is not a personal attack--it's a combination of beliefs that I want to set straight.
First--I write novels. I read Classical Greek and Latin, and I know the sources, and I do some pretty meticulous research. But I am a novelist, and if dropping a month from the Siege of Rhodes makes a character work, I'll do it. (I didn't, but you get the idea). Patrick O'Brian, who I view as the best of the "Boy's Own" writers since Dumas, played with history in profound--but meaningless--ways, and so do I. So what if the year 1813 happens twice? His shipboard life is perfectly accurate. Right?
More importantly, however, there are no "facts" when dealing with Classical Antiquity (except those which can be dug from the ground, and even those are open to questions!), and when someone alleges that I have missed the "facts" in the conduct of a campaign--whether Alexander's Jaxartes Campaign or the Gaza campaign--I object. There is not a single first-hand account of either. All the accounts of these campaigns which we have date from tens, and sometimes hundreds of years after the fact, some based on sources which may have been contemporary, some not, and almost all of them propagandistic. Friends, I may make stuff up--but it is ALWAYS within the strict bounds of the available evidence. I feel that I need to remind the world that an Osprey campaign history is neither serious scholarship nor a primary source. Wargames guides are often wrong--often very wrong indeed, compared to reading the primary sources in their original languages. In many cases, honest historians have to admit that we aren't sure in exactly what year a battle took place--or whether some of these important battles took place AT ALL.
There--I feel better. And I encourage every one of you who loves these periods to read Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Xenophon and Thucydides, Plutarch, Cornelius Nepo, Arrian and Curtius Rufus in the original languages--or even in the extant English editions--and then, and only then, look into secondary sources.
Hey--I'm just the author and my titles seldom survive contact with my excellent editor, but Helepolis is what Demetrios (the besieger) called his enormous war machine. 50 cubits on a side, 9 stories tall, fifty internal war engines, bolt throwers and torsion engines.
The siege of Rhodes was probably the climactic event of the wars of the Successors. It lasted eight months to a year, and this is the longest book I've yet written. It's not easy maintaining tension through sixty-five separate military actions. Nor would I recommend that readers become too deeply attached to characters.
But I'm proud as a peacock of it. And it is done. 4 naval actions, 6 major assaults, war machines, ships, tides, storms, romance, disease, starvation, boredom, and meticulous equipment repair...
Now, tell me that doesn't appeal.
Perhaps no exclamation point is required, but Funeral Games is out in stores in the UK and Amazon is filling their orders--in fact, they're already out of stock. I'm on page 450 of the Tyrant novel about the siege of Rhodes and it is--well, I like to think it's excellent, but only time and your opinion will tell. But I do guarantee a new level in giant war machines...
I have just learned that Funeral Games, my Tyrant series release for 2010, is delayed. So if you pre-ordered, it won't be out Jan 21st, but Feb 4th, instead. This is purely a publishing issue and there will be no further delays... I deliver on time! Ask my editor.
It appears that both of the major reenacting events that I'm shepherding along--Ft. George Ontario in 2010 and the Battle of Marathon in Greece in 2011--are moving forward. ft. George promises to deliver over a thousand reenactors of the American Revolution--probably the biggest event of its kind this year in Canada, perhaps in North America. And Marathon--well, stand by for further announcements. The Minister of Culture in Greece is discussing it this week.
I've taken to recommending books and reenacting groups in this space; this week I'd like to recommend Douglas Cubbison's two latest books; "The Artillery Never Gained More Honor" (Purple Mountain Press) about the Royal artillery on the Burgoyne Expedition, and "The American Northern Theater Army in 1776, The Ruin and Reconstruction of the Continental Army" (McFarland Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2009). It's not at all about ancient Greece, actually... Both are excellent studies of the Northern campaigns of the American Revolution.
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