Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "what-the-wind-brings"

Yesterday, I printed out the manuscript – 467 pages – of What the Wind Brings, the historical novel I was “meaning to write” for more than forty years. I sent it off to a top agent in New York. He is not my agent – I’m without representation again – but he will be if he likes the book well enough to represent it.

Here’s how it happened. In my mid-teens, I used to read a lot of historical fiction. I especially liked the novels of Lionel Sprague de Camp. The summer I turned sixteen, I started to write one, but didn’t get far. I’d read somewhere that Alexander the Great, after he’d conquered the world but before he died in Babylon, had ordered someone to take a ship south through the Red Sea and along the east coast of Africa. The idea was to circumnavigate what the ancients thought was a big island, eventually coming up the west coast and back into the Mediterranean at Gibraltar.

I never got beyond a couple of chapters, but from time to time after that I would poke around in libraries, trying to find any more information about the quite possibly mythical voyage. Along the way, I came across Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition, which mentioned a legend about a supposed tribe of white-skinned folks living down near the pointy end of South America. That legend could have played into a scenario explaining why Alexander’s explorers were never heard from again.

It was while I was trying to find more information about this probably apocryphal tribe that I saw a footnote in some book that mentioned that a group of African slaves, shipwrecked on the South American coast, managed to establish an independent polity that survived for generations. I thought, “That would make an interesting historical novel.” Thus began a desultory process of trying to learn more about these self-determining Africans.

I ran into some difficulty because almost all the scholarship about the events was in Spanish and published in academic journals in Latin America. They were hard to get and my Spanish was of the “¿Donde esta la pluma de mi tia?” variety. But I gradually began to get a picture of what had happened and where and when. And against that background I began to think about the characters – historical and fictional – who might figure in a story I would want to tell.

Years went by while I wrote all kinds of other stuff, years that turned into decades. Finally, in 2014, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded me a major grant to write the novel. I did some more focused research, established a proper timeline and got a good sense of what was happening in Ecuador in the middle to late sixteenth century. In 2015 I started writing.

Now it’s done. Three drafts. A big stack of paper. And it’s winging its way to New York.

Now I cross my fingers and wait.

But here’s the thing: I’ve written some thirty books of many different kinds over the years, and sold all but a few of them, so the experience of saying “that’s a wrap” is not new to me. Except this one feels different. I have a sense of having completed a long-running process that has been humming away in the background to my life since I was a very young man. It’s an odd sensation. Mostly, as a result of my strange rootless upbringing, I live in the moment. The past fades as soon as I take my eye off it, and especially now that I’m closer to seventy than sixty. But right now I’m feeling connected to that sixteen year old I left behind on some curve in the highway, long ago. It’s as if there has been a cord that tied us together but it was always slack. Now, suddenly, it’s grown taut. I can feel the me I used to be.

And I’m thinking, that Alexander the Great boat trip might make an interesting novel.

 

Looks as if I’ll be starting the new year on a promising note. I’m going to make a deal with Pulp Literature Press, an up and coming Canadian small publisher, for my big historical novel (with slipstream elements), What the Wind Brings.

This is a big deal for me, in that the novel is pretty much a life’s work.

It’s based on incidents I first heard about in 1971 or 1972, as a footnote in a university textbook. The core gist: shipwrecked African slaves melded with the indigenous peoples of coastal Ecuador in the mid 1500s, and together they fought the Spanish colonial power to a standstill, to remain independent, basically, for centuries.

After more than forty years of thinking about the story, I was lucky enough to receive a C$25,000 Canada Council grant to write the book. I did five drafts, which is three more than I usually do. It’s a hell of a story, my magnum opus, the one I want to be remembered for.

We’re probably looking at a summer 2019 release. I’ll keep updating on the process and trying to stimulate pre-orders. As I say, it’s a meaningful event for me — not financially, but in terms of my being able to think I’ve done something worthwhile.

Pulp Literature Press has set up a pre-order page for the hardcover limited edition of What the Wind Brings, my big historical novel that I waited more than forty years to write. There will also be a trade paperback and an ebook, down the road.

If you’re just tuning in, WTWB is a novel based on a series of events that happened in coastal Ecuador and the Andean highlands in the middle of the sixteenth century, when shipwrecked African slaves combined with the local indigenous people to form a new society. They fought off successive invasions by the Spanish colonial power and finally won their freedom.

I consider it the most important piece of writing I’ve ever done. It’s the work I want to be remembered for.

In about a month, Advanced Reading Copies will be ready to go out. George R.R. Martin, Bernard Cornwell, Cecelia Holland, and David Gerrold have all agreed to take a look at the book and consider giving it a blurb.

BTW, the cover is a placeholder. Pulp Literature Press has yet to commission the cover.

Here are the first 7,000 words of What the Wind Brings.

Caveat: the text is still in the editing process. No copy edit has been done yet.

Some fifty years ago, when I was a dedicated reader of historical fiction, I came across a novel by a young American woman. The title was Until the Sun Falls, about a general of the Mongol army in the aftermath of Genghis Khan's death. The book absolutely captured me, and I went looking for other titles by the author, Cecelia Holland.

I found plenty of them,, set in many different ages and cultures. I soon noticed that she had the ability to absorb and project the worldviews of people who lived long ago in lands far away. The truth of L.P. Hartley's famous line -- The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there -- came through, time and again. Cecelia Holland became one of my favorite historical novelists and remains so today.

I had the chance to meet her at a World Fantasy Convention in Tempe, fifteen years ago, and asked her advice about the big historical novel I intended to write some day. She kindly gave me some useful advice.

Well, now I've written that novel, What the Wind Brings, and it will soon be published by Pulp Literature Press. I sent an Advance Reading Copy to Cecelia Holland and asked her for any comments she night care to meet. The result: I have a cover blurb. She called it "a triumph."

Try to imagine: someone whose work you have admired for decades praises a piece of work that you consider the most important thing you've done. Wonderful.

Here's where you can pre-order What the Wind Brings:

Hardcover limited edition: http://pulpliterature.com/product/wha... $39.95 (US$30, UK£23)

Signed hardcover limited edition: http://pulpliterature.com/product/wha... $70.00 (US$52, UK£41)

A reminder: the hardcover limited edition of What the Wind Brings will be on sale at a 20 per cent discount -- C$39.95 in Canadian dollars -- for another ten days. On September 1, the price goes up to the regular C$49.95.

Here’s where to go to pre-order.