David Pilling's Blog, page 83

Belaying Pins and Pirate Kings...

...S.G. Rogers Sets Sail! Suzanne has the platform for this post, centred on things nautical and her spiffy-sounding new fantasy novel, Tournament of Chance - clew up the futtock shrouds, Ms Rogers, and Roger the Cabin Boy!
'Research poses many challenges, whether an author writes historical fiction or fantasy literature.  In the former, a writer must do his or her due diligence as part of the craft.  Although some readers might assume fantasy worlds are just completely made up, that’s not necessarily true.  For me, fantasy worlds work best when I can picture them clearly. As a writer, I try to have clear and concrete details available before I pen a scene. Since the setting for my latest release, Tournament of Chance, is Earth-like, the medieval-ish setting required a surprising amount of research. 
One particular area of inquiry involved maritime transportation.  The plot required the main characters to make two voyages in a two different ships.  My challenge was to describe the ships in such a way to paint a picture in the mind of the reader, but avoid immediate association with any particular nation.  Fortunately, as a fantasy writer, I’m able to fudge eras!
CutterI was looking for a vessel that was small, maneuverable, and could be sailed by a very small crew.  I chose the cutter, which is a single-masted sailboat. Although the ship in the illustration above (Louis Le Breton(1818–1866)) is a French cutter from the 19th century, it had the look I wanted and the generic name I needed. 

For the second voyage, I needed an armed ship manned by a larger crew, so I selected a corvette.
CorvetteThe vessel above is a type of corvette, which is a small warship about 40 to 60 feet in length.  The term dates back to the 1700s. I found this illustration (used with permission) on Rob Ossian’s Pirate’s Cove website, dedicated to pirate and nautical information: http://www.thepirateking.com/index.htmThe Pirate King has a wealth of information for authors and enthusiasts, from biographies of historical figures to rum reviews.
Although neither illustration appears in Tournament of Chance, I referred to them when I was writing the nautical scenes. I began my research on Wikipedia, by the way, and moved on from there. For attention to detail, I discovered beautiful ship models at The Art of Age of Sail: http://www.ageofsail.net
Writing a fantasy novel with historical detail takes a lot longer, but the results can be well worth the effort. My research in no way made me an expert in historical sailing vessels, but I have a much greater appreciation for them than I did before.  For example, I discovered a belaying pin makes a mighty fine weapon in a pinch.  Who knew?
~ S.G. Rogers
Excerpt:
Heather peered at Ariel. Despite his tough façade, the boy radiated loneliness and deprivation. “If you make it back to Ormaria, call on Lady Parker at the castle. Tell her Heather sent you. She’ll help.”
Ariel gave Heather a mistrustful glance. “Why should she help me? I’m nothing to her.”
“She’s very kind,” Heather said. “And you’re not nothing; you’re a person.”
Bast’s uninjured hand descended on Ariel’s shoulder and knocked him to the deck. “You’ve been told not to talk to Heather. I’ll whip you for this.”
“You will not,” Heather exclaimed.
Ariel scrambled backward as she stepped between him and Bast.
“Get out of my way, girl,” Bast roared.
“No.”
Bast shoved Heather aside and advanced on Ariel, who cowered in a quivering lump of fear. Heather plucked the nearest belaying pin from the pin rail alongside the bulwark and brought it squarely down onto Bast’s injured hand. He screamed in pain.
“Run, Ariel!” she yelled. “Hide in the cargo hold.”
Bast turned his murderous temper on Heather. The crystal around his neck flared, and she found herself tumbling through the air with the belaying pin still clutched in her hand. When she landed at the base of one of the four cannons, everything went black.
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In Tournament of Chance , a hunter’s daughter becomes the spark that ignites a revolution—in time.
 When a beautiful commoner enters the Tournament of Chance archery competition, her thwarted victory sparks a revolution in the oppressive kingdom of Destiny. Although Heather never believed the legends about the restoration of Ormaria, after three shape-shifting Ormarian wizards awaken from a long magical slumber, she joins their perilous quest to regain the throne. Heather battles vicious predators and angry trolls to free the wizards’ magic, but at a horrendous cost. She is unexpectedly torn from the arms of the man she loves and hurled back in time to fulfill a prophecy not yet written. The ensuing maelstrom tests Heather’s survival skills, wits, and endurance. Will she become an unwritten footnote in history, or can she trust the magic to lead her back to her one true love?


Now available in all e-formats from Musa Publishing HERE. Also available for the Kindle at

Sir John clatters to a halt...

 You just lie there for a bit, mate
...and finally gets to climb off his knackered horse, peel off his rusted armour (or 'harness', to use the historically correct term) and hang up his dinted broadsword over the fireplace. Yes, Sir John Swale's opus is coming to an end with 'The Wolf of Fairburn', Part Thirteen of The John Swale Chronicles, released at the end of this month by Musa Publishing. All loose ends will be tied up (hopefully), all wrongs will be righted (maybe) and all of the long-suffering Sir John's enemies and problems will be banished forever (almost certainly not).

Still, at least the poor man gets to take a break. He's had a hard time of it, what with fearsome outlaws, Scottish rebels, slaughtered kinsmen, ambitious kings and the general nastiness of 14th century life to contend with. My heartfelt thanks go to Musa  for giving me the platform to tell Sir John's story, otherwise it might have remained lost forever inside some musty old leather-bound chronicle.

Will he return? Maybe, though it might be best to let his ghost rest awhile. He does, however, have a daughter...

Martyrs and Traitors

I'm currently reading 'Martyrs and Traitors' by Marina Julia Neary, a novel about Bulmer Hobson, a member of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Republican Brotherhood and a key figure in the 1916 Easter Rising. This isn't a period of history I knew much about, and well out of my usual medievalisms, but I highly recommend it. Neary's prose style is informative without being the slightest bit dull or plagued by 'info-dumps', and she recounts events and personalities with a vivid, lyrical ease that I can only admire. Get It!!

http://www.amazon.com/Martyrs-Traitors-Marina-Julia-Neary/dp/0984651748/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348306532&sr=1-1&keywords=martyrs+and+traitors+Neary

A plot summary of the book is below, taken from Amazon:

'Dublin, Good Friday, 1916 Kidnapped and held at gunpoint by his former IRB comrades, Bulmer Hobson, the misunderstood antihero of 1916, denounces the ill-fated Easter Rising he had tried to prevent. While his captors joke about shooting him and dumping his body on the railroad tracks, his terrified fiancee roams the chaos-ravaged city in search of him. Fifteen years of political rivalry, international conspiracy, botched love affairs, and taunting promises of glory culminate in a bloody showdown. Once branded 'the most dangerous man in Ireland' by the police, Hobson is about to be deleted from history. Based on historical accounts, Martyrs and Traitors is an intimate glance into the conflicted and shattered heart of Ireland's discredited patriot.'

King Dickie lies buried in a hole...

 I'm not evil, alright? It's just a squint.
 …probably. The discovery of a medieval skeleton in the remains of the Choir of Greyfriars church has inspired a lot of excitement in recent days, for the bones could well be those of King Richard III, one of the most controversial figures in English history.
It almost seems too good to be true, but it certainly sounds like our man: Richard, as every schoolboy knows (or did, before they discovered the joys of happy slapping and crack cocaine) was said to be deformed, and was very definitely killed in battle against the ragtag army of the Welsh usurper, Henry Tudor, at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The man found under a council car park near a ring road in Leicester has an arrow-head in his back, pronounced scoliois or curvature of the spine, and a mangled skull:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-19575558
Just to be sure, a DNA test is now being conducted, with the bones being tested against the DNA of Richard’s living descendents, which will take about three months to complete:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-19561018
Whether or not the bones really are those of Richard III, what is undeniable is the emotional response from many quarters to his possible discovery. Despite being over 600 years dead, Richard has a great many fans and admirers, often termed ‘Ricardians’, and there is even a Richard III Society dedicated to cleaning up his rather murky historical reputation. Since the discovery of the bones journalists have been lining up to say nice things about the man and his brief reign, such as this, um, interesting piece in The Telegraph calling for a state funeral and comparing Richard favourably to ‘bloodthirsty maniacs’ such as Edward I and Henry VIII:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100180652/if-this-is-richard-iii-should-we-gave-him-a-state-burial-london/
Whatever is finally done with Richard’s remains – assuming they are his – it would be nice to think that his discovery and burial will lead to a more balanced assessment of a man who was neither hero nor villain, toad-like hunchback monster or maligned hero-king. It’s difficult to attempt a balanced picture of such a complex and divisive figure in a few glib paragraphs, but I’ll give it a try.  
King Richard III was memorably vilified by Shakespeare as a matchless villain who intimated his evil thoughts to the audience and slaughtered his way to the throne, mowing down Edward of Lancaster, Henry VI, his brother George, Duke of Clarence, William Lord Hastings, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers…and of course, his two nephews, the famous ‘princes in the Tower’, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York.
Of this rather impressive list of victims, Richard certainly had Hastings killed in a shocking and illegal fashion, and Anthony Woodville and his nephew Richard Grey were both seized and executed on Richard’s orders. There is no direct evidence that he had a hand in the deaths of most of the others, and none at all that he murdered the princes.
Various arguments and justifications have been put forward justifying Richard’s apparently ruthless and self-serving behaviour leading to his seizure of power in 1483. The pulse-quickening joys of contemporary documents such as Titulus Regius and the Stillington Precontract are often wheeled out in Richard’s defence as part of explanations for his actions, and in 1984 he was even granted a televised trial for his alleged murder of the princes (verdict: Not Guilty). It has also pointed out that up until 1483 he was a model subject, absolutely loyal to his brother Edward IV, and never showed any signs – unlike his grasping brother Clarence – of harbouring treacherous ambitions.
The man does not lack for defenders, then, but in this blog’s view none of it is enough to wipe his slate clean. The principal charge against Richard’s reputation, the murder of his nephews, may never be proved conclusively one way or the other, but at the time of their disappearance from public view in 1483 he had the prime motive and opportunity to be their assassin. Other suspects have been put forward – principally the Duke of Buckingham and Henry Tudor – but none, to my mind, are convincing.
Whether or not Richard was capable of ordering the deaths of innocents depends on your reading of the man. He was raised during The Wars of the Roses, during which time much of England’s baronage wiped each other out in an orgy of battlefield deaths and drumhead executions. Richard’s own father was killed in battle, and from an early age he was used to violent death and bloodshed: at the age of just 17, he took part in the treason trials of Henry Courtenay and Lord Hungerford, and at 18 he fought at the Battle of Tewkesbury, where the last Lancastrian army was defeated and butchered with a cruelty typical of the age. Thus Richard grew up in an atmosphere of murderous realpolitik and bloodstained paranoia, where a man learned to act in ruthless and predatory fashion if he wanted to survive.
Above all, he learned the importance of striking quickly at those that threatened him, hence his actions in 1483. Remarkably little sympathy is wasted on those that definitely did fall victim to Richard, and some effort has been made to justify his actions by portraying them in a negative light: Lord Hastings, for instance, in reality one of the most loyal and capable supporters of the Yorkist regime, has been depicted in fiction as a murderous paedophile. The fact that Richard’s thugs dragged Hastings out of a council chamber and hacked his head off, without waiting for even the semblance of a trial, is made much more palatable if Hastings can be vilified.
In the end, propaganda works both ways. Richard suffered from it for many centuries, and now it seems that some of those who wish to recast him as a tragic hero are prepared to exercise it on his behalf. The grim and unexciting reality is that Richard III was a competent, ruthless aristocrat, typical of his class and time, who got greedy and paid for it on a bloody August day in 1485.
Rest in pieces, Your Highness…

More bad news for the publishing industry...

...or is it? Two interesting recent comparative articles. One from the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/...

Pretty negative stuff, though one of the blog comments regarding possible uses for a Jeffrey Archer novel is amusing. And then there is a response to the Guardian piece from Mercy Pilkington:

http://goodereader.com/blog/electroni...

'Why I've paid to print my next bestseller...'

Interesting article on the Mail website by Graham Lord, a very established and succesful author who has recently found himself obliged to go the self-publishing route via Amazon Kindle Direct:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books...

Lord quotes some fearsome statistics: total book sales in the UK in April this year were down a quarter on the previous April, and overall UK sales of novels have crashed by 50% in the last two years. This is understandably making agents and publishing houses nervous of taking on new authors. This in turn forces authors to turn to other routes to get their work out in the big wide world.

Food for thought for all of us...much of it difficult to digest.

Cometh the hour, cometh SORROW...

Switching from historical to speculative fiction, Part One of 'Sorrow', the first of a series of mini-sequels to my fantasy novel, "The Best Weapon", co-written with my good friend Martin Bolton, is due to be released by Musa Publishing at the beginning of September.

The wondrous thing about writing fantasy as opposed to historical fiction is that the writer can just make stuff up, and not have to justify any of it to The Ricardian Society. "Sorrow" was a joy to write in that regard, as Martin and me (Martin and I? A writer really should know his grammar) got stuck into the fabric of the fictional universe we created between us.

Much of The World Apparent, as we called it, was created in London pubs when we both worked at the Tate Gallery, and the cities and oceans and continents first came to life scribbled on the back of beermats or in puddles of stale booze. The pub, as William Shakespeare might have agreed - he is said to have died after a mammoth drinking session with his mate Ben Johnson - has always been the hub of all the best in British creative thinking.

"Sorrow" takes place a few years after events in The Best Weapon. The World Apparent is still an unstable place, wracked by factions and vicious civil wars, and threatening to slide back into barbarism at the drop of a broadsword. Into the maelstrom wanders Sorrow, a mysterious little boy who everyone suddenly wants a piece of...

To give a better idea of the setting and background to all this, I thought the following review of The Best Weapon taken from Amazon might be useful:

 'To me, most of the sword and sorcery fantasies follow the same storyline. The Best Weapon, on the other hand, offers a new twist on the genre with a tale with an original plot. In this world, gods are petty, selfish beings more intent on their own position amongst the others. The Lords of Hell are twin demon brothers, two scheming, conniving beings. When the brothers perceive an approaching threat, their only recourse is to create two brothers out of clay and place them into the wombs of woman at opposite sides of the world where they will grow and mature until the demon brothers can make use of them.

One brother, Naiyar, is born into the Djanki tribe, a fierce, warlike people, bent on conquest. The other brother, Fulk, is born to a woman in the far north where the remnants of the Old Kingdom have taken root. Orphaned at an early age, he is taken in by the Knights Templar, and ancient order dedicated to supporting the rightful king. Or at this time, the infant queen, the king recently dying with no male heir. Through trials and tribulations, events point to the brothers meeting, but what they might do then is unknown.

The rhythm and tempo of the book flows well, despite bouncing back and forth between the two brothers and some assorted characters such as the Archpriest Flambard, the regent of the Old Kingdom. The character voice is appropriate, and the details of this world are well thought-out and logical.

One point I liked was the transformation of the Archpriest from a scheming, but not horrible man, to someone evil after being "touched" by one of the Lords of Hell. With only a few sentences here and there, the fact that this is a transformation out of the Archprinest's control is evident.

I also liked the fact that the various characters had their own individual voices and speech patterns. Too often, each character in a book speaks with one voice, that of the author. But in this book, I could read a quote and recognize the character. The two brothers, in particular, ahd their own identities (I wondered that as the book has two authors, if each one took one of the brothers and penned his dialogue.) Of course, by making them different, they came across differently. I felt that of the two, Naiyar was the more colorful, complete, and complex character.

William Mallet, the Master-at-Arms for the Templars was perhaps my favorite character. Initially seeming to be a callous tyrant, the authors gradually coaxed out a fuller picture of an honorable and brave man. We were never directly told this, but his true character was revealed by his actions.'

PIRATES!! (but no Johnny Depp...)

"Ende oec mede dese lede Crabbe,Warp oec in sine swabbe,Dese dede opt water grote scade,Hine dede niemene genade..."
No, I've not been overdosing on merry pills - these are the words of the Antwerp chronicler, Lodewijk Van Velthem, recording the antics of the notorious Flemish pirate, John Crabbe. Translated into modern English they read something like: "'And in addition to the harm these men wrought, Crabbe also contributed his share. He wrought great damage on the seas, showing mercy to no one. Now he appeared here, now there..."
Van Velthem signed off by saying of Crabbe and his associates that "Such is the evil company of robbers - they do not keep to what they promise; and in the end themselves are deceived."
John Crabbe, however, was immune to any form of deception. In a long and wildly varied career as a pirate and seafaring mercenary, starting in about 1305 and ending with his death in England in 1352, he enjoyed the kind of success that later small-time buccaneers such as Blackbeard and Calico Jack (the inspiration for Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, incidentally) would have killed for. He is also the latest villain to make an appearance in the ninth of my John Swale Chronicles, a splendidly amoral character, if little-known these days, and one I couldn't resist including. 
Born some time in the late 13th century in Muiden, a small town on the Flemish coast near the mouth of the Zwin, Crabbe had an inauspicious start to life. His surname was a fairly common one in Bruges and other places in Flanders - for instance, there was a Clais Crabbe recorded as living in 1347, and Crabbe's nephew, 'son of Peter Crabbe' (recorded as 'Crabbekin', possibly to avoid confusion) served as a pirate aboard his famous uncle's ships. 
John Crabbe's name first appears in connection with piracy with a robbery committed near the port of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay, in 1305. Here he and his crew forcefully seized a a ship called the 'Waardebourc'  belonging to one John de la Waerde, a merchant of Dordrecht. The pirates made a thorough job of it, snatching 160 tuns of wine and all the goods on board, torching the ship and holding the crew to ransom. De la Waerde appealled for justice and recompense to just about everyone, including Philip the Fair, King of France, but even with the help of the Count of Flanders it proved impossible to bring the slippery Crabbe to justice.
Nothing more is heard of the pirate for a few years, but in 1310 he struck again. This time he bagged an even richer prize, a ship belonging to Alice the Countess Marshal carrying a fortune in gold, jewels, expensive cloth, silver, and other items valued at 2000 pounds sterling. The ship was sailing peacefully in the Strait of Dover between Dover and Whitsand when Crabbe's ship, the De La Mue, descended on it. This time the King of England requested that the hapless Count of Flanders bring his wayward subjects to justice, and once again Crabbe slipped the clutches of the law. 
It turned out he had made good his escape to Aberdeen in Scotland, where he cleverly re-invented himself as a merchant and a soldier-for-hire, assisting the Scots in their endless wars against England. In his absence he was convicted of robbery, and condemned to a particularly nasty death - breaking on the wheel - if he ever returned to Flanders. But return to Flanders he did, many times, to sell goods from plundered English vessels in Flemish ports, and no Flemish official had the nerve to lay a hand on him. This is unsurprising, for by 1315 Crabbe had won fame and reputation as a tireless and ruthless freebooter, and not a man to cross.
Crabbe made himself indispensable to the Scots, advising them on the defence of Berwick-upon-Tweed when the English attempted to recapture the place in 1318-19. The Scottish chronicler John Barbour was moved to praise Crabbe in verse, saying that "John Crabbe, a Fleming was he, a man of great subtlety..." The pirate took advantage of such plaudits to wring favours from the Scottish government, and by the time he appears in my tale - 1332 - he was a respected burgher of Berwick, and in receipt of handsome payments for supplying the town with arms and stolen goods. 
He is, however, about to be pitched into a new war between Scotland and her old foe England that even John Crabbe, with all his experience and resourcefulness, might be hard put to survive... 
 

"A most marvellous thing happened that day..."

...or so said the Lanercost chronicler, describing the events of the 10th-11th August 1331. The chronicler's definition of 'marvellous' might not be everyone's, as he was enthusing over the great piles of dead soldiers that lay on the field of Dupplin Moor - "the pile of dead rising up from the ground was more than a spear's length in height", drooled the chronicler, clearly experiencing a tight little thrill of ecstasy at the thought. Well, a medieval monk in an isolated monastery had to get his kicks where he could.

Sir John Swale, the much put-upon knight of Cumberland and 'hero' of my series of historical tales - courtesy of Musa Publishing - is about to experience the slaughterhouse that was the Battle of Dupplin Moor in the forthcoming instalments of his Chronicles, "The Mercy of God" and the appropriately-titled "Dupplin Moor". Driven by his endless quest for revenge on the Scottish knight who murdered most of his family, and to rescue his sister from slavery, he joins the army of the Disinherited led by Edward Balliol, would-be King of Scotland. At Dupplin Moor Balliol's vastly outnumbered army finds itself squaring up to over three times their number of Scots, led by Scotland's regent, the Earl of Mar.

The reasons behind Balliol's invasion are complex. Son of John Balliol, the man remembered by history as 'Toom Tabard' or the 'Empty Coat' for his short and hapless reign as King of Scotland, Edward spent much of his early life in exile in France, dreaming of returning to Scotland to claim his inheritance. Evidently a proud and arrogant man, he refused to marry while in exile, for no French noblewoman (as he thought) was worthy to marry a future King of Scots.

His chance came in 1329, when Robert I of Scotland - Robert the Bruce of spider-bothering fame - died of leprosy and left his kingdom to his infant son, David II. David's right to rule was challenged by "The Disinherited", a group of Scottish and English nobles who had lost their lands in Scotland as a result of opposing the Bruce. After two years of scheming, Henry Beaumont, the chief of the Disinherited, sailed to France to meet with Balliol and plan for his much-delayed return to power and glory. With the young and ambitious King of England, Edward III, urging them on and offering covert military support, Balliol and his cronies started preparing for war...the results, as John Swale is about to discover, were unpleasantly gory.

The Peace of Elias

M'good friend and co-writer - as well as talented illustrator - Martin Bolton has written a rather wonderful short story, 'The Peace of Elias', now available from Amazon. I recommend everyone checks it out!

 
http://www.amazon.com/The-Peace-of-El... 
Elias is a poverty-stricken farmer living on a ridge over-looking the town of Arc-Stone in far Western Temeria with his only surviving relative, his giant mute son, Zia. Living on the fringes of society, their dilapidated farmstead sits high on the ridge next a dark, tangled forest, reputed to be haunted and shunned by the people of Arc-Stone. Elias and Zia are regarded by the townsfolk with a mixture of fear and pity.

When they stumble across the unconscious form of Cyrus, an arrogant young noble, he accuses them of robbery and plots their deaths. But Cyrus underestimates the power of the bond between Elias and his son, and Elias finds out what Zia has been doing in the forest...