Tomorrow The Day Will Dawn...

As I half-expected, I’m launching into this novel two days ahead of schedule. I’ve done the reading I needed to do, gone through my source material, commissioned my map (actually made some updates today, found a better one), drawn my castle, and outlined my plot to the point that I think it is ready to go. The ending now works, and leads nicely onto the next one; I’m quite comfortable with the future plots of three more books after this one. (Right now I’m planning to do four, then see how things are going. I have other historical series in mind as well - Vikings, Romans, Greeks, so I’m not short on ideas in this genre.)

There were a couple of last-minute hitches. One of my plot points looked like it had collapsed this morning when a new book arrived, one that I’ve been waiting for, and it seemed to have invalidated half my plot. One panic and an hour’s thought later, and I realized that it had actually enriched it somewhat; I can’t go into too many details, but there is now considerable more chaos and confusion in the area than I had conceived, and with a little tweaking, all of it still fits into what little there is of the historical record. (The Siege of Saruj, if anyone is interested.)

I’m pretty much ready with my Ospreys. I say pretty much, because annoyingly, I only have one of them in PDF at the moment; the book is on its way, and has been on its way for a while. Hopefully it will be here tomorrow, it’s so much easier to flick through pages on the desk than try to skim through a file. Certainly it should be here well before I finish the book; my target end-date is August 7th. I should have the map before then as well, sometime around the end of the month, and though I’ve got one for working purposes, it’ll be nice to have the real thing to refer to.

Why not wait, you ask? Hold off a few days until these things arrive? Because when you reach the boil on a plot, the worst thing you can do is wait and start to second-guess yourself. Once you are ready to go, it is best to just go, to get on with it and write, get some words on paper and commit yourself mentally to the plot, the characters, the setting, the story. Even if everything isn’t totally optimal, I’m still close enough that I don’t anticipate any serious problems. I’ve got a lot of soundtracks on hand to play, and I’ve even run through a lot of them already, the notes are printed out, and I’ve written out my progress track.

So, at last I can, I suppose, tell you a few things about the book. It is set in the year 1105, on the Upper Euphrates on the southern borders of the County of Edessa, about mid-way between Edessa and Aleppo, two of the major cities of the region. The lead is a real figure, a man named William de Albin, and aside from his name, we don’t know a damn thing about him. (The only extant reference is that he fought with Tancred during the Crusades. I picked him because, well, I liked the name.)

It’s going to be around 48,000 words long, and I think that’s going to be the standard for the series - a little more on the length in a post I’ll make later, and will retail at $2.99/£1.99, with a release date of some time in September. The ‘frame title’ of the series is ‘Knight of Outremer’, and the four books I currently have projected are, ‘Sword of the Traitor’, ‘Sword of the Usurper’, ‘Sword of the Assassin’, and ‘Sword of the King’. That will constitute ‘season one’, if you like; I have some outlines for a sequel series as well. As to why it’s settled down at four books, I haven’t really got the slightest idea. Well, I can do a little better than that, I guess; think of it as a trilogy plus one - the first book to introduce setting, characters, concepts, and the next three books as an interconnected story. That’s part of the way to it, in any case. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out in practice!

Writing A Book In Two Weeks...

A while ago, I came across a very interesting piece by Michael Moorcock, ‘How To Write A Book in Three Days’. Legendarily, he was able to write some of his earlier books in a very short time - apparently one of the Elric books was written in a day - and this was nothing new. Some of the writers from the pulp days wrote ten, twelve thousand words a day, consistently, for weeks at a time. Now, I’ll say at this point that I don’t reach such heights. I have written more than ten thousand words in a day on three occasions, but two out of the three times I did it for a specific reason (big climactic battle scenes, and I wanted to keep the immediacy and the thread - and I knew that it would be a lot easier if I wrote them all at once.) On each occasion, I crashed out the next day.

While writing a book in three days is probably beyond me - though never say never, I guess - I do usually write fairly quickly, averaging four to six thousand words on a good day. The secret, as with everything else, is preparation - and I don’t necessarily mean highly detailed outlines, either. There’s nothing wrong with them on principle, but whenever I prepare one for myself, the book I am preparing never gets written. I think there is a little switch in my head that tells me that the story is ‘finished’, and I end up getting a block. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t prepare long in advance, but I tend not to go into great detail. If I get an idea, I write it down, just a few sentences, and leave it at that. It’s rare that just one idea will make a story; it usually takes a melange of half a dozen to come up with an intricate enough plot. So it was with this Crusader series; in one form or another, this has been years in the planning.

And that is the biggest secret of all. Do your thinking in advance, one way or another, so that you don’t get distracted while you are writing the book. You want to be working as fast as your thoughts will flow, to get that creative part of your brain into high gear and typing away. (At this point, I’ll say that fast typing speed helps. I’ve managed more than a hundred words per minute, though I usually don’t type at full speed. Fifty or sixty is more than enough. While most of writing can’t easily be taught, typing is not one of those things. Practice makes perfect.)

Everyone has their pet problems. Names were always mine, but there are lot of random generators and historical sources that can be useful. Don’t just bookmark a site - though know where you are looking if you need to - generate some names in advance and print them out, enough that you can stay ahead of the game. I’ve already used a couple of mine in advance plotting, but I’ll top them up before the fun begins. Have maps and source material ready. (For historical writing, Osprey books are fantastic - good, quick resources that you can have at hand when you need them, glossaries and images at the ready. I’ll be using four of them for this book.) Have everything at hand, and ready.

Then do an outline. Yes, I know, I know, but even I wouldn’t try and set out on a book without something to fall back on. The system I have generated over the last couple of years is to have a page of bullet points, one for each chapter, and then to break that down before I start each one, usually having a first pass the night before I am to write it, and then a second first thing in the morning before I start work. Nothing extraordinary here, just note down everything that is happening in that section of the book. ‘William fights the barbarians, rescues the princess, gets the quest.’ Or, perhaps, ‘The dame shows up at the office, drops down dead, letter in her purse, police at the door’. If you can’t make three thousand words out of those descriptions…

Once you’ve done the outline, get your writing environment set-up. Take some time to clear up all those outstanding jobs - tidy up the office, get a week’s shopping in. Make sure that isn’t on your mind while you are working, and moreover, make sure you can get some good momentum going on the book once you start. Resting your hands for a day before you begin is a good idea in any case - they’re going to get a beating while you work! (Time to cite good practice here - rest for a quarter-hour out of every hour at least. I tend to work alternate hours, using the other hours to clear my head, read source material, ponder the plots.)

Set targets. That’s important. Word count works well for some, chapters for others, I use both. My absolute bottom limit for a chapter is two thousand words, though for Alamo I average two and a half. For the Crusader series, I aim for three; different writing practices, different way of working. And two of them a day. With the length of book I’m aiming for with this, that means six thousand words a day for eight days.

I said, write a book in two weeks, though. I expect to finish the book in eight writing days, or two weeks. Everyone needs a day off. I budget for two days on, one day off, to clear my head, rest my hands, and consider where to go in the next portion of the book. As well as going back to edit what I have already done, potentially. It’s also sensible to budget for some ‘fail’ days as well - there will be mornings where nothing seems to come, where the words don’t flow, or you realize that the chapter just isn’t working. It’s inevitable. Two more of those is a reasonable allotment...so basically, eight days writing, six days not. That’s the two weeks. A big mistake is to think that you can just sit down and churn out the words non-stop - you can’t. No-one can, and you are setting yourself up for a bad time if you try. Set reasonable goals, and when you meet them - or even surpass them - you’ll be happy. I’d certainly like to finish this book in eleven days rather than fourteen, and it is not impossible that I’ll pull it off.

A trick I learned a while ago was to ‘write my first draft as if it was my last’. Now, I wouldn’t for a moment release a text that I haven’t gone back over as a finished work, but what this means is that you don’t let go any changes you need to make. If you see that your paragraph doesn’t work, write it again. Or your chapter, for that matter. Solve the problems as you find them, without leaving them for later - you’ll be giving yourself a far easier job when you go over the text again in the future. (Which it is usually a good idea to wait a little while before doing. Coming back fresh to the fray after a month - hopefully after you’ve written another book - is usually wise.)

I think the most important thing about writing is that you should do what works for you, not what someone else thinks you should do. There are no real rights and wrongs. I couldn’t imagine not writing to music, but there are others who lament the distraction. Some write in short bursts, others in long. Some outline, some don’t. The important thing is to experiment, to try new things, and see what comes as a result. You never know, you might be surprised.

More Mapping Madness...

Let me tell you about a book. Not the one I’m working on, but one written in 1890, by an English author named Guy Le Strange; ‘Palestine Under the Muslims’. This is one of three books, and whilst all of them are good, this has proven the most directly useful to me in recent days. (To the point that while I was using the version on the Internet Archive, I’ve actually ended up getting a hardcopy version.) This isn’t really the sort of book that you sit down and read - well, aside from the opening chapters, which provide an excellent description of the Levant as it was in the Middle Ages - but more of an encyclopedia.

But there is the internet, and Wikipedia, you say. Well...yes, but everything from those sources has to be taken with a pinch of salt. I’m not saying I don’t use them, because naturally I do, but this is an encyclopedia with a difference, in that it collates the writings of a large number of Muslim geographers, describing the world through their eyes. Whilst it does cover cities like Aleppo and Jerusalem, perhaps the greatest value comes from the lesser-known regions it covers.

Here’s one of my favourite examples, “Seven miles from Manbij is a Hammah (hot spring) over which there is a dome, called Al Mudir (the Inspector). On the edge of the bath is the image of a man made of black stone. According to the belief of the women of the place, and who are barren have but to rub themselves on the nose of this statue, and they will forthwith conceive. There is here also a hot bath, called the Bath of the Boy (Hammam as Sawabi), where the is the figure of a man in stone, and the water for the bath gushes out from his nether parts.”

Never mind a novel, that sounds like one of the sites for a great roleplaying setting - and certainly could bring about a memorable scene for a book (and likely will). The book is littered with these, and with it I have been able to come up with the outlines for a map to cover the setting. Not that I intend to attempt it myself; I have enough rough notes for the purposes of writing the book, but for purposes of publication I’ve commissioned one, which hopefully should be with me early in August; naturally, I will show it off here as soon as it arrives! It’ll be the first time that I’ve put a map in a book before, but I think it a requirement. I’m certainly eager to see it.

The plan, as I have indicated, is for this to be the first of a series of novels. I’m not sure how long I’ll run them for, but I have covers for three books, and a fourth in my head as well, so I think that will be the minimum - though I have a feeling that this one could potentially run for a while. As a result, I laid out the map specifications with room for expansion; I could have got away with only a couple of spots on it, though that would make it a pretty poor map - adding additional locations gives me more room to explore - and reading that book makes me anxious to visit some of them in any case!

It’s getting close now, the plot forming up rapidly in my head. Giving myself a ‘created’ site has given me a lot of freedom to maneuver when it comes to the basic plot itself, which is essential, though I have also been extremely inspired by the sites I’ve been reading about over the last few days. Who needs to create something from scratch when there are wonders aplenty to use, ones that haven’t been looked at before! I really owe Le Strange a lot; I think I’ll be picking up more of his books in the future, though for the present, I have what I need.

Well, the maps are either ready or soon will be, and in any case are out of my hand, so tomorrow it’s time to get back to the basics of the plot. I’m not far from starting to work right now, though I’m not sure whether it will take me a day or three. I have a couple more books to read first, and tomorrow I’ll talk in more detail about the research stage, though most of that I have already completed. (Which means I may actually start the book in one sense tomorrow, for it will include at least a short bibliography. I really do feel like I’m back at university!)

Building a Castle...

Building a castle, it turns out, is not as easy as it looks. I had hoped to prepare my map of the local area today, something else that is going to be rather time-consuming, but just mapping out the castle at Jerablus took so long that by the time I was finished, I didn’t have the time to do it properly. Not a serious problem; I’ll get to it tomorrow. It certainly was worth it, though, I think. I’m going to be living with this castle for a very long time, I hope, for several books, so spending a day getting the details right strikes me as an excellent investment.

Sword of the Traitor is set in 1104, only a few years after the First Crusade. One thing that is quite clear about castles is that they take time and money to build; ten years was a realistic time-scale, even if a major figure was personally arranging the construction. Having said that, the builders of this castle had a bit of an advantage, as there were plenty of ruins around - Byzantine, Saracen, even Hittite. The area is littered with the remains of old fortresses, which meant that a lot of the building material was on hand, and ready. There is nothing unusual about this - in the medieval period in Britain, many buildings were made out of the ruins of the other. Why quarry new stone if perfectly good stone blocks are already waiting around? This alone would have reduced the expense and sped the construction time - as well as giving the castle itself a somewhat distinctive appearance, which I considered was all to the good.

Nevertheless, this wasn’t going to be a large castle. Putting myself in the shoes of the builder, I reckoned that the first priority was a keep, with the outer buildings to come at some future date; nothing especially unusual about that. The Crusaders built a lot of towers, scattered around at strategic positions, and they were both faster and cheaper than the larger, grander castles of later decades. Especially given the material available, I reasoned that a small keep could be constructed in a year. There would be other fortifications, of course; a palisade to protect a stables, bakery, and a few other buildings, and this could be the layout of a future, larger castle. (I must admit that I kept in mind that a large castle would probably still be there today, whereas a single dunjon could have been lost in the archaeological wilderness, especially if it was constructed out of the remains of earlier buildings.)

Hitting the books with a vengeance - and having visited lots of castles myself over the years - I decided to make this a four-level tower. Three was far more normal, but if this was to be the setting of a series of books, I decided to make it a little larger to give myself more room. Not that the castle would be huge; I looked at smaller examples for my model, and came up with twelve by nine meters. Small indeed, but examples of this size have been found. The ‘ground’ floor would serve as the storeroom, the cellar, essentially, and have no way in or out. This was not uncommon with single keeps; the entrance would be on the first floor, and there would be a drawbridge connecting to a staircase a few meters away. Anything to help make it a little harder for someone wanting to take the castle.

So, the lowest level I designed with just three rooms - a oubliette (a little out-of-period, but not unheard of, and story has to win sometimes), a storeroom, and a treasury. Also, I placed a well on this level; I saw several designs with water accessible within the castle itself, and it seems logical if you are expecting a siege to ensure your water source. I figure that a second well will be dug outside, within the palisade, as well.

The next level would be dedicated to defence. A gatehouse, a guardroom, a garderobe and an armoury; the gatehouse is the first line of defence in the event of attack, with stout doors to the outside and equally strong to the interior of the keep, almost an ‘airlock’, if you like. The guardroom would be the living accommodation for the castle guards, beds, tables and some rudimentary cooking facilities, as well as a fireplace. And the lowest level of the toilet, naturally enough. Got to think of that; the garderobes in this castle are all in the same place, and go down into a pit that will still smell like many things died there.

Above that, things start to improve somewhat. There is a hall, a dining room that doubles as a kitchen, a larder adjacent to it, and a small chapel, the latter built over the gatehouse. And the garderobe, as well, naturally. This is where the social life of the keep largely takes place, where the banquets and the feasts happen, where any entertaining of other dignitaries happens. The chapel actually has a stained-glass window, as well; a meter across and three meters high. When it is finished, it will be lavishly decorated, but that isn't finished yet; this castle is almost factory-fresh, after all, only four or five years old at this point.

Finally, the top level is the lord’s and lady’s quarters; the Lord’s Chamber and the Lady’s Solar, as well as the Priest’s Room (with library - almost two dozen books!) the Servant’s Quarters and the ubiquitous garderobe, though they at least get to be at the top of the mess up at this level. There is an additional fireplace in the Priest’s Room - you can tell he had quite a bit of influence when the castle was built for that to be the case! Above, naturally, is a roof with the usual crenelations, perhaps even a couple of trebuchet; I haven’t decided yet. In terms of occupants, there will be around half a dozen guards, about a dozen servants, the priest, and the lord and lady. Say twenty people, give or take - though others will live outside the castle as well.

Hopefully, everything makes sense. Outside, in buildings that will likely be made out of mud-brick (and yet to be drawn; I ran out of time, so this has become a ‘tomorrow’ job) are stables, a bakery, a brewery, a blacksmith, and a few other scattered buildings for men like the bailiff, people of sufficient importance to warrant their own quarters. The beginnings of a gatehouse are taking shape at the moment, despite there being only a palisade. All castles were, to some extent, works in progress, but this is rarely depicted in the fiction; at the time of this book, work has begun on the gatehouse, with a mason on-hand supervising a work crew. And yes, the mason - one Leo of Neopolis - is a character in the story.

At least that is all now out of the way. Tomorrow I’ll map out the rest of the castle, palisade and all - that, at least, should not take long - and then work out what the local area looks like. Or at least, what it looked like in 1104...

Oh, you want to see it?


Preparing Sword of the Traitor, Day One

I’m getting very close now to starting work on the first of the Crusader series, Sword of the Traitor, and everything is at last beginning to fall into place. Over the last three weeks, I’ve shaped the plot into position, and though there are still a few bits I need to work out, I’m getting happy with the structure. Today I took the critical step of hacking a lot of pieces - including no less than three major characters - out of the story, and that seems to have finally done the trick.

What I intend to do with this book is something I have wanted to do for some time, and that is to chronicle the actually writing process on this blog - with daily (yes, I know) updates as I am in the final stages of preparation, and weekly updates afterward until the actual launch of the book, which is tentatively scheduled for sometime in late September. What I currently have in mind is to release it about a week after the next Alamo novel, with a pre-order up a couple of weeks in advance of the launch for once (which means I’m going to need to have all of my ducks in a row in good time.) The next book in the series, hopefully, will be ready to go for an end-October release.

I’ve broken down the final few days of pre-writing preparation into a series of tasks; this is a little more involved than the run-up to writing a new Alamo book for the simple reason that this is the start of a new series. It actually isn’t that much compared to some. I tend to be a pantser rather than a plotter, with fewer notes than is generally the case for most. I’ll say at this point that what works for me might not work for anyone else, and that people need to find their own path. Nevertheless, there is one thing that I believe pretty much anyone should have as a bare minimum before writing a book, and that is a list of names.

This, of course, requires at least some level of knowledge of the plot of your book. Even the most dedicated to the free-form writing style have some basic idea what they are writing before they launch, and that boils down to a list of roles, of greater or lesser importance. For this book, that boils down to about twenty - characters that have sufficient relevance to the plot as it stands now, important enough for me to have defined their characters at some basic level. If this was an Alamo book, I’d probably go to my US Census random name generator at this point, leavening it with some randomly generated Russian names, but that won’t work this time.

What I did instead was go to the Medieval Names Archive. This is a fantastic site, with pages and pages on names from different cultures, not just lists, but the meanings of the names as well, which is always excellent if you seek to work in a little bit of interesting subtext, a subtle hint for the reader, or even just a cue for yourself while you write. Naturally, the names need to sound good, sound realistic, and work on the printed page - which often rules quite a few names out as being a real handful. This took me most of the day, going through the lists, throwing away ones I didn’t want, keeping ones I did, until I finally worked out what I wanted. Along the way I worked out a few other details as well, filling in some gaps - working out the birthplace of a few characters, setting myself up for some real fun tomorrow…

Then, the next step was to go back to the site, and come up with a few lists of names. No detail required here, just lists. This is something I picked up from my role-playing days, running campaigns, and it still works extremely well now. Rather than have to break off every time I add a minor character, spend half-an-hour looking up a new name, it’s a lot more sensible to write down a few dozen names that I already like, male and female, from different backgrounds, and just drop them in where needed with a quick note on the printout where I have used them. This can be anything from ‘that guard in the corner who a character is ordering to investigate the noise on the roof’ to ‘new major character who suddenly is vital to the plot, who I decide I need while writing Chapter Two’. In any event, this is a big time-saver, and some of the names I came up with...let’s just say that the meanings suggest characters that I want to include. Zulaikha al-Sirr, for example...the Lady of Secrets. How can she not make an appearance!

Well, that’s the names taken care of, at least for the moment; when it comes to Book 2 I’ll be having to make additions and deletions of dead characters. (To note - three of the named characters I’ve done are already dead.) Probably quite a few additions; the next three books in this series have started to click into place in my head, and I’m getting a sense of where this is going in the longer term.

The next step comes tomorrow, when I do something that is going to harken back even more to my role-playing days, drawing maps! At the very least, I need to draw out the castle - yes, there has to be a castle - and the surrounding area, and while this is going to be an awful lot of fun, it’s going to be quite time-consuming! (And if I can get my scanner working, you’ll even get to have a look at what passes for my notes as well...I have a new pad of graph paper and everything!)

Battlecruiser Alamo: Aces High is on sale!


Once again the Battlecruiser Alamo is launched on an expedition deep into unknown space, but instead of a farewell party Fleet Captain Daniel Marshall faces an assassin's blade wielded by a mysterious assailant. With an unknown enemy facing them from beyond the frontier of the Triplanetary Confederation, one armed with a weapon capable of destroying a starship with a single shot, a deserted space station holding a deadly secret from an alien past, and a disgraced midshipman added to the crew at the last minutes, this time even the veteran starship might at last have met its match...

Walking Through the Cracks of History...

Working on what has turned into the ‘Outremer’ novel series - yes, it’s turned into a series of Alamo-length novels, the first one to be titled ‘Knight of Outremer’, provisional release date in October this year - I have been stumbling across a problem, and I think it is one that everyone seeking to write historical fiction will face at one time or another. To what extent is it possible to, well, make things up?

I think it was Scott Oden who suggested that if you are writing about events that take place more than few hundred years ago, you are effectively writing fantasy, as you have to make up so much of the detail that it becomes a matter of working within an established framework. Take the Crusades, for example. The source material we have is generally focused quite tightly on single people, narratives of those who were wealthy or famous enough that they were able to organize chroniclers. While there are a few more general histories, they are few and far between. Imagine writing a novel set in the Second World War, with your only resources being biographies of Churchill, Stalin, Patton, Zhukov and Rommel? You’d end up with completely the wrong picture.

Yet, the situation isn’t quite as bad as all that. There is ample archaeology to work with, though little is being done in that region at the moment, of course. Plenty of excellent histories have been written - I’ll give a shout-out to Sir Steven Runciman right here. My attitude is that the established facts must be in stone; the dates, times, places and people we have should be adhered to. There are so many gaps in the record that it shouldn’t be difficult to fit in whatever you want to add.

With the Outremer series, I faced two problems. The first was when to set it - the Crusader States lasted for two centuries, after all, and the second was where. The first proved relatively straightforward; I knew that my primary character was a second-generation Crusader Knight, and that I wanted to set the books when they were at their height, which suggested some time in the early 12th century, maybe fifteen years after the First Crusade. Somewhere in the 1110s, basically, the specific date to be anchored down later.

That was the easy bit. The second was a lot harder. I needed a castle, and a town, and I needed to have creative control over them - they are to be the heart of the setting for a lot of novels. Not hard to drop them into the map in a general sense, of course. That part of the world is littered with abandoned settlements going back six thousand years, and we know there are crusader castles unaccounted for. Here is something I don’t have any objection to from the sense of a reader; adding a few settlements here or there, as long as they stay within the established borders and territories, doesn’t seem to be that important.

And there lies the real problem. Making them fit. I’ve been reading Guy Le Strange’s ‘Eastern Caliphates’ lately, essentially a collection of writings by Islamic geographers of the region over about a thousand years, and it is a fascinating read. In the process, I became fixed with the idea of the Euphrates, one of the original ‘great rivers’ of civilization, and a key strategic point on the eastern borders of the Crusader States. One of the biggest problems that faced the Principality of Antioch and the County of Edessa was Aleppo, the major Muslim city of the region. It never fell, though Baldwin II almost managed it, and was a dagger pointing at the heart of both of the northern states. Key to this were the fords over the Euphrates.

At this time, the key crossing for Aleppo was at a place called Manbij, and control over this bridge and the fortress that controlled it was disputed. According to some sources, it was conquered for a time, others suggesting that its rulers were friendly with the Franks. Looking at the map, though - and taking at least a little advantage from my university education for ones, that War Studies degree coming in handy - I found another route to the north, at the ancient city of Carchemish, a settlement since the days of the Hittites. There is scant information about its fate in the medieval period, but we do know that it was in the borders of the County of Edessa - a crusader-controlled ford over the Euphrates.

My first assumption was that this was far too important to have been left to a minor lord, and I initially believed I was right. Access, the records show, was guarded by a great settlement at Turbessel, ruled by Joscelin, later Count of Edessa, among others. A look at the map convinces me that this is far from the whole story. This key settlement - and don’t get me wrong, it was definitely vital for securing the southern border of the county - is forty kilometers from the bridge. More than a day’s journey. It seems inconceivable that such an important location would be left to a fort that far distant.

Here is the gap, then. I find it impossible to believe that this location did not have at least some sort of garrison; yes, Manbij had a strong castle, and there was Turbessel, but I do not consider it likely that it can have gone unprotected. While it is true that there are no signs of Frankish building on the site, the surveys that have taken place there have revealed Byzantine and Arab remains - so someone built there. This suggests to me a fort that was taken over, rather than one that was constructed, or a fort built further away on the site. My inclination is a small Crusader fort, built on a position a little distance from the ruins, probably using some material from them. There it could oversee the town, the bridge, and the surrounding villages, and properly defend the vital route to Edessa.

That process has taken me the best part of four solid days’ work. As for the exact date, well, 1113 is obvious enough; around that time, the internal politics of the Crusader States were boiling over and they were coming under attack from all sides. Plenty of scope for drama. Which means that this fortress is wanted by the Count of Edessa, the Prince of Antioch, the Emir of Aleppo, the Emir of Manbij (who were not friends at this point…) and, well, a few others. I haven’t mentioned the ‘ruins occupied by Christian bandits’ I unearthed not far downriver, have I? Lots of fun…

Mr. Spock's Limp

If you watch the original pilot episode of Star Trek, ‘The Cage’ - and I’m going to guess that most of the people reading this blog will have at some point - you’ll notice something interesting. Spock has a limp. This was not because Leonard Nimoy had hurt his leg, not because it was some sort of character trait, but because of a conscious decision taken by Gene Roddenberry to indicate that the show was part of an ongoing saga. Yes, this episode had to introduce the characters and the style of the show, but it did not show their ‘first mission’. Spock’s limp - which isn’t really noted upon very heavily - was meant to imply that they had recently been on a mission that had resulted in injuries. We didn’t need to know how it happened, didn’t need a scene where he talks about how he twisted his ankle, it was just a little bit of scene dressing that created a wider universe.

This relates to two things I’m going to talk about today. The first is that ‘wider universe’, the idea that there is more going on in your setting than just the actions of the characters. I rate this as essential in order to make a setting convincing. If your characters are doing everything, then unless they are something truly extraordinary, it diminishes everything else. Yes, they are the focus of the story and the ongoing arc, that’s fine, but there must be more to life than just the adventures of half a dozen people.

Lin Carter advocated name-dropping as one way of doing this - referring to ‘Arcturian Brandy’, or something like that, and indeed this can be extremely effective if it is not taken to ridiculous extremes. We’ve all watched shows where every common item needs to come from somewhere exotic. It isn’t Vodka, it’s Martian Vodka. It isn’t a banana, it’s a Lemurian Banana. People don’t talk like that. The context needs to make sense, and it needs to be used sparingly. Have a character listening to old music, or use comparisons, “This place is worse than High Vegas.” “He served on the Gilgamesh before joining us at Spitfire Station, Captain Rogers seemed to think he was a good officer.” “Christ, not Bucky dropping his rejects again.” That’s how people do talk.

We don’t need to know details about everything. If a character has a scar, we don’t need to know why, unless it is actually important to the plot. Scene-dressing, sometimes, just is that. It can tell us about a character, it can tell us the condition of the surroundings, it can do a thousand things. If you are expanding the universe, it’s fine to do just that. (And make a note - you never know when you might turn it into a plot point at some time in the future.)

My main point, though, the ‘first book’. A first book in a series has to do an awful lot of things already - it needs to introduce the characters, it needs to introduce the style of the story, and it needs to introduce the setting. I suppose it is only natural to conclude that this book must be the ‘start of the saga’, that it must show us how everyone got together and moved on from there. I’ve done that myself, but it needn’t always be so. How many Superman origin stories must we have? How many times have movies shown us the ‘origin story’, only to end after only the first movie. (Superman especially. I’m going to guess that anyone going to see a Superman movie will know about Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, and Kryptonite already. With Star Trek, people know who Kirk, Spock and McCoy are. You don’t need to introduce those characters. Just tell your damn story already!)

Take James Bond, the movie version, for sake of this argument. Was Dr. No James Bond’s origin story? Did we see a long series of training montages, learn about his family, see the string of circumstances that turned him into a secret agent? No. That would have wasted more than an hour of the movie; instead we could get right into the plot. And that was a character that - at the time - was not in the public consciousness at all. Yet somehow, we’ve managed almost two dozen movies with that character.

Take Indiana Jones. ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ starts with Indiana Jones looking for a lost artefact, and that short sequence tells us everything we need to know about his character. Where we need to know about his background, it is woven in. (And as an aside - yes, prolonged exposition is not a good idea, but don’t be afraid to just use a line or two of dialogue to tell the reader something, rather than waffle for a page trying to work it in. Especially if it is key to the plot.) Did we spend an hour watching him train as an archaeologist, being recruited by Marcus Brody? Of course not. (Indeed, I must confess that the weakest part of Last Crusade was the start, where he seemed to pick up all his distinguishing characteristics in the course of an afternoon.)

The point is that the first novel in a series does not have to be the start of the character’s lives. It needs to start the story you plan on telling, but that doesn’t need to incorporate an origin story. If you need a wandering gunslinger dispensing justice throughout the land, just have one! The details can follow. We don’t need to see his village burn, not unless the plot is his quest for justice. (I cite A Fistful of Dollars as my ‘Exhibit A’ for this.)

This doesn’t mean that you can’t start with an origin story. For that matter, it’s quite possible to go back and fill in the details later on with prequels, though for God’s sake do a better job than George Lucas did. It does mean that there are other options that you can play with, ones that might enrich your universe. After all, if Sir Uther is fighting his first battle, his old enemy from a decade ago can hardly come back to haunt him in Book Two, can he?

Kindle Unlimited, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Amazon...

This is not the post I had intended writing today; my rave about Robert E. Howard and Harold Lamb will have to wait until tomorrow, I fear. Instead I’m going to do something I almost never do, and that is to talk a little bit about the business side of writing. A few posts ago, I talked about how the biggest lesson I ever had was that you should write what you want to write, and that it is a grave mistake to change your plans based upon transient business models. That is still my belief, and still my advice.

Anyone reading this post who publishes through Amazon will know that today was a major day in the Kindle Unlimited program, the program that allows readers to borrow essentially unlimited books for $9.99/month. This is actually an excellent idea, and I endorse it; I’ve kept my books in since it was introduced, while an awful lot of people decided to drop out of it, spreading their novels wide. The reason was this - regardless of the size of the book being borrowed, the writer received an equal share of the ‘pot’ that Amazon established. For me, that ended up being around 49% of what I received for a sale.

And you know what? I was fine with that. I didn’t count them in the same way. My analysis was that many of the loans would never have been sales, and ultimately, I’m in this business because I want to tell stories to people. Any way they are going to read them is fine with me. Nevertheless, it did seem rather unfair that a story one-tenth the size received the same amount from the pot, and as it turned out, Amazon agreed, because last month, they announced a big chance. Henceforth, rather than a single ‘borrow’, they were going to pay by the page.

Now this I liked rather more. Under the new system, the writer receives a payment for every page that is read, which removes the advantage that shorter works presented. (Yes, I could have simply switched to writing novellas, and I did consider a few ideas, but ultimately I found that I prefered the short novel format, and decided to stick with that. Chalk that up to all the old science-fiction and fantasy I read when I was a kid; I still prefer books of that length now. Although the short story writers were upset by this change, the general idea was that it was a good thing. This morning Amazon seemed - note that word, there - to burst that bubble.

An email was sent out that outlined the number of pages read each month - on the order of 1.9 billion - and the size of the pot for the same month. $11 million dollars. They went on to say that the pot next month will be at least - note those two words as well - the same amount. A little mathematics indicates that a page earns around 0.0059 dollars. That sounds bad, doesn’t it. I admit, it is a slightly shocking figure when you look at it like that, but it is misleading for multiple reasons. First of all, Amazon has adopted a page size measurement that I struggle to comprehend, but all of my Alamo books seem to be coming out at around 400+ pages. Second, Amazon has, every month since the Kindle Unlimited program began, increased the size of the pot. I don’t think that the amount stabilizing was an accident; they had a number in mind, and made sure it happened.

Looked at that way, if one of my books is read - all the way through, it must be said - I now get 85% of what I would receive for a sale. And that is with an estimate that I suspect is somewhat conservative; my guess is that it will be nearer 95% when it all evens out. Which is something that I would consider as being a very good thing. (Though admittedly, now I know how many pages have been read of each of my books, which is incredibly nerve-racking, I must confess.)

And yet. The sky is falling, and Chicken Little is on the run once again. The internet is full of people screaming that this is a disaster, worse than anyone could have imagined, and that they are immediately going to pull their books from the program and head for the metaphorical hills. This on less than twenty-four hours of data. Data from a system that has been a little glitchy - understandable enough on Day One of a rollout. We’re going to know a lot more at the end of the month about how many pages people read, and we won’t know until the 15th of August how much each page yields. Making any decision now is absurd.

Are there problems with the system? Certainly. I understand that children’s books have been severely affected, to the point that I would suggest that such books be placed in their own program. (Why not have a smaller subscription fee for children, to be divided among writers of children’s books, for example?) I’d be lying if I said I thought ‘shares of a pot’ was a great idea; I’d far rather know what I was making per page in advance, and given that it seems Amazon probably has a figure in mind anyway, telling us what that is wouldn’t do any harm. Do I think this system is, on the whole, better, though? Yes. Does that stop the jitters? No. And any author who claims that it does is lying through his or her teeth. Change is scary, it is in the nature of it, especially when your job depends on the results.

I’d been asked on occasion, ‘What makes a good novel?’ It’s easy, I reply. All you need is compelling characters, an intricate plot, and an engaging setting. Now those things, those are hard! And that has not changed! If anything, it makes it starker than ever, in that we can see what sort of a job we are doing with the borrows. If I was to give one serious piece of advice, it is simply this. A writer writes. That writing a novel is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration, and that nothing happens with any ideas if you don’t sit down at the computer and start to type. All I know how to do - at least, I hope I know how to do it - is to write a story. If I attempt to serve other masters than plot, setting and character, something will be lost. The something that I think people read stories for in the first place.

So, what am I going to do differently? Nothing at all. I still intend to release five more novels this year - three Alamo, two Crusader. They will still be at the 70,000-word length, because that remains the length that I feel most suited to. I will not change the plot, the character, or the story, and unless something drastic does change, I will not withdraw my books from Kindle Unlimited. Certainly not on the basis of twenty hours’ data.
Well, sorry for the divergence, there. Normal service to be resumed, when I discuss the respective merits of the First, Third and Fourth Crusades. From a story perspective, naturally...