C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 55

Blogging Books

I haven’t paid much attention to technology this year, focusing instead on publishing, podcasts, and—most of all—history. I stopped because I no longer had much to say. By now, I can get around Facebook, GoodReads, Tumblr, Pinterest, even Twitter—although I’m far from mastering any of them. Since I don’t aspire to the status of social media guru, the basics seem like enough.

But this week I joined a new site, BookLikes, devoted entirely to blogging about books. So I am back to reading help files, instructions, usage policies, and FAQs while puzzling over this feature or that and wondering how best to take advantage of this new service. I’ll talk about BookLikes itself in a moment. It’s a nice site—run out of Poland, near as I can tell, and launched only in May 2013. But first, why did I join? Am I addicted to social media? Cursed with the attention span of a butterfly? A glutton for punishment?


Xü Xi, Butterfly and Wisteria (970 AD)
Source: Wikimedia Commons
This picture is in the public domain
in the United States because of its age.

None of the above (I hope—the butterfly charge sometimes seems all too apt).  The journey that led to BookLikes started on GoodReads. About two weeks ago, GoodReads announced that it had changed its terms of service to prohibit shelves, groups, and even reviews that focused primarily on authors’ behavior rather than their books. Its staff had already deleted some groups and shelves and would continue to check members’ content and remove any that violated the new terms of service. Five thousand messages and counting protested this decision and the way the staff communicated and implemented it.

This is not the place to discuss the ins and outs of the policy shift, on which I have mixed feelings. I did not join GoodReads to promote my books; at the time, I didn’t know that was possible. I joined because a fellow editor suggested it as a good place to find book recommendations. After joining, I did set up an author profile and claim my books; I have participated in giveaways and group reads, including one of my Golden Lynx; and I have joined a number of groups, taking care to read and observe the rules. I enjoy talking with readers—and with other writers, if they want to discuss books or writing rather than relentlessly promote. And on GoodReads as elsewhere, I try always to remain professional, which means never attacking or insulting anyone. So the change in GoodReads policy does not affect me personally. I will maintain my presence there even as I move (most of) my books and reviews to BookLikes.

The decision to move has less to do with GoodReads itself than with a recognition that the site may be over-saturated at this point: too many self-promoting authors, too many members in a plethora of groups too vast to track, too much corporate patronage. A small, emerging site seems worth exploring as an alternative or complement to the big, well-established one. Yes, BookLikes, if it succeeds, may one day be snapped up by a mega-corporation and develop the same problems that affect GoodReads. But that day is not yet, and if it happens, I can move on. In the meantime, I rather like the idea of being present at the beginning of something rather than jumping on midway.

So what is BookLikes? At its heart, it is a blogging site focused on books. If you have used Tumblr, you will recognize the interface. Each user who registers for a free account receives a personal site that includes a blog, which that user can use to review books, report progress on challenges, and comment on whatever s/he pleases. You can follow people (and block those who misbehave), as well as like and comment on others’ posts. You have bookshelves, which you can import from various other places, add to, and edit. You can synchronize with GoodReads, Facebook, and Twitter if you like your social media working together—or keep them separate if you don’t. You can customize your blog template and add pages to it. BookLikes verifies author, publisher, and bookseller accounts and assigns them a green checkmark that confers certain privileges. The staff seems a bit overwhelmed at the moment by a massive influx of new members, so the verification does not happen instantaneously, but that’s understandable.

The one thing that is missing so far is groups, although these are supposed to be on their way. There is a certain geeky quality to the customization, which includes editing HTML, a frightening prospect for the likes of me. Fortunately, the early adopters have written helpful tutorials, although I have yet to figure out why my custom-designed wallpaper, which looks lovely on a computer browser, moves to obscure the page list when viewed on a tablet. The import of my books, shelves, and reviews went smoothly, though, and the site is on the whole easy to use and remarkably polished for a place that has spent only five months in the public eye. You can follow me there as cplesley.

Bruised Hearts

Few possibilities terrify parents more than the loss of a child. Guilt, grief, helplessness, anger, and immobilizing fear mingle to create an emotional stew with a mix of ingredients that varies just enough from person to person to reveal the cracks in once-solid relationships, leaving individuals struggling alone—and often against each other. If the parents are, in addition, early twentieth-century missionaries in a great and ancient land hidden from them as much by their own cultural arrogance and misperceptions as by the unfamiliarity of the terrain, such a crisis raises additional questions: Has my God forsaken me? Have I sinned against Him? Is the husband I considered the master of my soul capable of guidance, or does he in fact require my assistance to find his way home?

Thus begins my blog post introducing my interview with Virginia Pye, about her debut novel, River of Dust. The podcast is now available at New Books in Historical Fiction.
 

When Grace Watson follows her husband, the Reverend John Wesley Watson, to northwest China in 1910, she does not expect a luxurious life. The Boxer Rebellion a decade before turned peasants against missionaries, and many Europeans died. Moreover, northwest China even in the best of times is a beautiful but barren land, and in 1910 the area has already suffered from drought for more than a year. Grace has miscarried at least twice and is struggling not to do so again when the story begins. But she and the Reverend have one beautiful boy, a toddler, and she trusts her husband to guide them and protect them in the unfamiliar landscape that is their new home. He is such a capable man, so charismatic and committed a preacher. Surely the Lord will uplift and uphold His dedicated servant, even in a place so unfamiliar to Grace.

Grace can see evidence of the Reverend’s concern for her and for their son in the vacation home that he has built with his Chinese servant and convert, Ahcho. The family has not even had time to settle in at this rural refuge when a pair of nomads swoop in from the distant hills and abduct Grace’s son. The Reverend immediately sets out in pursuit of the missing boy, leaving Grace behind to nurture their unborn child with the help of her nursemaid, Mai Lin. As River of Dust unfolds, we see Grace and her husband wrestling, within the limits of their individual natures, with the loss of their precious child. And as they push and pull in different directions, Grace discovers her own inner strength and realizes that the man she counted on to save her may need saving himself.



New Books in Historical Fiction now has an independent Twitter presence at @NewBooksHistFic. Follow us there, and like us on Facebook, to stay up-to-date on the interviews. I also post cover pictures and links on Pinterest as the interviews go live. You can find me on Twitter as @cplesley, on Facebook and Pinterest as Catriona Lesley, and on Goodreads as C.P. Lesley. For more information, see my website (http://www.cplesley.com).





Northwest China, Setting for River of Dust
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution/ShareAlike license
© 2005 author (no name provided)

Church and State

  The Teutonic Knights Force the People of Pskov to Convert, 1240
Alexander Nevsky (1938)
This picture is in the public domain.

In last week’s post, The Kremlin Beauty Pageant , I mentioned that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Russian rulers did not marry foreign princesses. I promised to explain why.

In brief, it was because of the Great Schism of 1054. Yes, I know, that happened long before the sixteenth century, but it had created two churches, each of which believed that it had a lock on the means of salvation. When the Eastern and Western churches split, their leaders excommunicated one another. That tends to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Catholic Church actually mounted a crusade in the east, converting Orthodox Christians as well as Lithuanian pagans at the point of a sword, wielded by the chivalric orders of the Livonian Knights and the Teutonic Knights. (The film Alexander Nevsky, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, is about one stage in this crusade.) The Russian Church did not forget.

So tensions ran high. Although today we have many Christian denominations and moving from one to another is not that big a deal, medieval and early modern Europeans took a much more serious view of the matter. A convert risked imperiling his mortal soul in the eyes of the denomination he left (while saving it in the view of the denomination he joined). In 1505, the Catholic Church was still a single entity in the West, but that would soon change. The resulting struggle at first raised the stakes even more, imbuing every individual choice with global significance—especially if made by a ruler. The religion of a prince or king still determined the religion of the realm. (Think Henry VIII.)

In the East, Byzantium had fallen to the Turks in 1453, leaving Russia as the last sovereign Orthodox power. Moreover, the Russians, to put it bluntly, were feeling their oats. They were just finishing up a successful campaign to reunite their disparate principalities under a single administration. They had launched a series of challenges against the Tatars, who had ruled their lands for  two centuries—some of which succeeded, if not always for long. And they had begun to claim the role of heir to Byzantium, itself the last remnant of the ancient Roman empire. Although the dating is murky and the provenance unclear, the phrase “Two Romes have fallen, a third [Moscow] stands, and a fourth there shall not be” nicely captures the attitude of the Russian government in this period.

The Russians wanted recognition, and they wanted respect. That included respect for their religion—which, like pretty much everyone else in the sixteenth century, they saw as the one true path to Heaven. If they sent princesses abroad, they did their best to guarantee that those princesses need not convert to Catholicism. If their rulers—or even the ruler’s family members—married princes or princesses from abroad, the church required those prince(sse)s to be re-baptized as Orthodox Christians.

But most foreign royal families felt just as attached to their own branch of Christianity as the Russians did to theirs. They didn’t mind marrying their sons to Russian princesses or their daughters to Russian tsars, but they wanted their rites respected as well. When the Russians demurred, the foreigners refused to cooperate; and the few who toyed with the idea had a tendency to renege on the deal.

As a result, from 1505 until 1698, Russian grand princes (later tsars) married young women raised at home. No foreign customs getting in the way, no worries about re-baptizing and secret pressures to convert, no troublesome squabbles between diplomats hell-bent on securing this or that alliance and clergymen worried about the state of the ruler’s soul. How this system worked is the subject of Russell Martin’s book and summarized in my last post.

But wait, I can hear you asking if you have read The Golden Lynx, what about Elena Glinskaya? Wasn’t she Lithuanian? Yes, she was. But first, many Lithuanians were Orthodox, including the Glinsky clan. And second, Elena’s immediate family had brought her to Russia when she was little more than a baby. So she was still, more or less, a home-town girl, picked through a bride show—although perhaps a tad more cosmopolitan than most.

The last question I’ll tackle today is: what changed in 1698? That’s an easy one: Peter the Great. Russia’s first self-proclaimed emperor had little use for the Orthodox Church and none whatsoever for Muscovite customs. He had married his first wife, Evdokia, in a bride show to please his mother, but they never got along. She believed in the old ways; he couldn’t wait to see Russia become a spiffed-up version of Sweden. When he returned from his Grand Tour of Europe in 1698, he barely let the mud dry on his boots before repudiating Evdokia and sending her to a nunnery. A dozen years later, he married his long-time mistress, scandalizing the court, and changed the laws of succession so she would rule after his death (as Catherine I, not to be confused with Catherine II, another “the Great”). Before and afterward, he arranged marriages to a foreign aristocrat for every royal personage he could get his hands on, basing his choices purely on his diplomatic aims and not worrying about the religion of either party, never mind the wishes of the bride and groom. Thus the Kremlin beauty pageant ceased to play a role in politics.

I had a great interview today with Virginia Pye about her new novel, River of Dust. That should be live on the New Books in Historical Fiction site early next week. So make sure you check back here next Friday to find out more. I’ll have the live link by then.

The Kremlin Beauty Pageant

Konstantin Makovsky, Choosing a Bride (1886)


I have spent the last week and then some reading about marriage politics in the Kremlin—no, not Vladimir Putin’s affair with the gymnast, but the political and administrative heart of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Moscow. As a result, my friends on Facebook and GoodReads barely hear from me, the unhappy side-effect of my having agreed to write an academic review of Russell Martin’s wonderful A Bride for the Tsar.

No matter. Soon I will have written the review and can return to social media. In the meantime, I am collecting stories to enliven future books in the Legends of the Five Directions series. The Vermilion Bird (4: South) looks like the best candidate.

But marriage politics already rears its head in The Golden Lynx, where it is in fact the central element driving the story. You might even say that marriage politics was the reason I set out to write Legends of the Five Directions in the first place. When historians recognized the importance of marital alliances and royal wedding ceremonies in early modern Russian society, it revolutionized our understanding of how the political system worked in the centuries before Peter the Great came to the throne in 1682 (or 1689, depending on how you count). But since that understanding has yet to find a reflection in most textbooks, I thought that writing a series of novels would be a great way to show marriage politics in action.

So what is marriage politics? Those of you who enjoy reading books about the Wars of the Roses, such as Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen—now a television miniseries—are probably aware that Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of King Edward IV of England and heroine of Gregory’s book, created a huge scandal by taking advantage of her position to benefit her relatives. She advanced the careers of the men and arranged good marriages for as many relatives, male and female, as she could. Her brother-in-law, the future Richard III, was supposedly so put-off by this behavior (and Edward’s lax morals) that he high-tailed it for the North and didn’t come back until appointed Lord Protector after Edward’s unexpected death. The Woodvilles did not rejoice at his return.

In an English setting, Elizabeth’s behavior was unusual, not least because English kings usually married foreign princesses—or at a minimum high-ranking aristocrats whose male relatives were already ensconced in power. But Russians would have greeted such behavior with a shrug. Political power in Muscovy (a common name among specialists for Russia from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries) can best be envisioned as a series of concentric circles, with the grand prince (after 1547, tsar) at the center. The closer you could get to the grand prince, the more influence you wielded—and marrying your daughter to the current ruler put you closest of all. This was the ultimate prize, and every family (boyar clan) in the inner circle competed for it. The family that won controlled all the goodies in the state; play its cards right, and it could continue to marry its daughters into the royal family for several generations—leaving the other clans out in the cold.

Constant squabbling does not make for good government. So in 1505 Grand Prince Vasily III (father of Ivan the Terrible) came up with a new idea. (Actually his Greek adviser, who just happened to have a marriageable daughter of the right age, seems to have suggested the idea, but Vasily grabbed it and ran with it.) This idea was the bride show. Rather than marry a girl from any of the insider families, Vasily sent a summons throughout the land demanding that his gentry servitors produce their daughters for his inspection. The insider clans then vetted the prospective brides for looks, general health (i.e., fertility), virginity, and—most important—genealogy. They wanted a girl from a good background but not so exalted that her relatives could challenge the clans at court, and one who came from healthy stock but not so healthy that she would arrive with a host of hungry male relatives looking for sinecures. Once the courtiers had narrowed down the available candidates to a dozen or so, the grand prince/tsar had his pick.

This system took a while to get off the ground. Vasily had to send out three or four rounds of stern letters saying things like, “I know you have daughters, so produce them pronto or I’m going to have do something mean.” Eventually he scared up enough candidates to choose a suitable bride, and he was happy enough with the results that when things didn’t work out with that one and he forced her into a convent, he used the same procedure to select his second wife, Elena Glinskaya—who, as the mother of and regent for Ivan the Terrible, appears in The Golden Lynx. By the end of the sixteenth century, it had become the usual means of selecting a bride for the tsar—and his male relatives, too.

Marriage politics Kremlin-style had a number of interesting features. First, women played a big part in the winnowing of candidates. The wives of high-ranking courtiers and the ruler’s female relatives were the ones who examined girls to be sure they were virgins, commented on their health and personalities, and so on. Elite women in Muscovy lived secluded in their households and did not associate with unrelated men of their own class, so the male courtiers and even the grand prince/tsar would see a candidate for a few minutes, perhaps an hour. If an aristocratic or royal woman announced that a particular bridal candidate was unhealthy or bad-tempered, that girl was out. The brides had no say in the process, but the older women had plenty.

Second, with the stakes so high, marriage politics gave rise to scenarios usually restricted to fiction. Favored candidates developed mysterious illnesses, died within weeks of their selection, fell victim to smear campaigns and accusations of epilepsy caused by their hair being braided (or their tiaras attached) so tightly that they fainted. Michael Romanov, first of the famous dynasty, saw the betrothed he had selected sent away in disgrace because she began vomiting, an illness that cleared up two days after she left the court. When he recovered enough from that experience to order a second bride show at what was then considered the ripe age of twenty-seven, his wife fell ill at the wedding and died four months later. He then held a third bride show, only to endure a screaming row with his mother before he finally acquired a wife who pleased him. Thus the limitations on the tsar “having his pick” of the candidates.

Yet the system endured until the gradual Westernization of the court in the late seventeenth century made it obsolete. The bride show became a symbol of Muscovy (if under-appreciated until Russ Martin came along), and as such it attracted the attention of some of Russia’s finest painters. I’ve attached two examples here by Konstantin Makovsky, whose work I’ve featured before on this blog. The one at the top, Choosing a Bride (1886), shows an actual bride show (the grand prince/tsar is the young man standing by the chair, with one of the candidates bowing during her presentation). The one below (1884) shows preparations for a wedding—not necessarily a royal wedding, but the bride having her hair combed looks so much like my Nasan that I just had to include her.

The pictures are in the public domain in the United States because of their age.


And if you want to know why Russian grand princes (tsars) didn't just marry foreigners as the English did, I will take that up next week.




Konstantin Makovsky, Preparations for a Wedding (1884)

Spinning the Web

Clipart no. 14848025

One thing you will not find me talking much about in this blog is marketing. That’s because even with two novels in print, I still haven’t a clue how it works. 

Seth Godin, whom I mentioned in “Speaking of Faith,” emphasizes the importance of identifying and appealing to your niche. Just today, I received an e-mail blog post from him urging his followers not to waste time trying to go viral, because chances are the effort will fail. Instead, he said, find a small community and focus your energies on that. Eventually, the word will spread, but it takes patience.

Patience I have in abundance, but with the current deluge of books published by authors, small presses, and independent presses I’m less convinced than ever that time alone will lift my books above the surge. Nonetheless, I have noticed the importance of “local,” whether we use that term to mean the independent bookstore that just opened up ten miles from my house or the Goodreads groups where I spend much of my time talking about books other than my own. The talk at the town library, the presentation at the Rotary Club down the street, the friends who recommend my novels to their book clubs—these are the venues where I have sold books. Even New Books in Historical Fiction has generated a sale or two. Altogether, the result resembles a trickle more than a flood, but it’s a reasonably steady trickle—enough that I can hope it will become a streamlet one day.

There’s more I could do, I’m sure, but that’s not the point of this post. Marketing has a learning curve, just like writing—and one I’m far less motivated to master. If Five Directions Press could afford it, we’d hire a publicist. Until then, each author has to do the best she can with help from the others.

But if we can’t control word of mouth, except in the obvious way of producing books worth talking about, we do have a say in how we present ourselves. Improving that presentation has been my focus this week.

The appearance of this blog has pleased me from the beginning. My website, not so much. I’ve tried half a dozen designs, and the best I’ve been able to say is that each one seemed marginally less putrid than the one before. But as the host of New Books in Historical Fiction, I do spend a lot of time looking at other writers’ sites. Finally, this week, I came up with a theory of why theirs looked so much better than mine. 

Fixing the problem took more than a little trial and error, with help from Photoshop and somewhat less help from Google Apps—which seems to assume that people have nothing better to do with their time than figure out where the controls governing various elements have hidden themselves this month. Still, I think I’ve come up with a design I can live with for a while, or at least until the next gorgeous site has me feeling like an amateur again. If you’d like to take a look, you’ll find the redesigned home page at http://www.cplesley.com.
 
And if you happen to stumble over the horizontal navigation controls, do drop me a line. (Joke: I did find them. Otherwise the site would refer to pages that no longer exist.)

Men at War

As luck would have it, I’ve spent the last four weeks reading novels about war. This is not my usual fare, but thanks to a variety of Goodreads groups I have been tackling a range of titles from the Song of Igor’s Campaign (as translated by Vladimir Nabokov, it reads much better than, and in fact bears only a passing resemblance to, the original) through Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad and Georgette Heyer’s The Spanish Bride to a pair of modern novels that I would never have picked up without the group recommendation. I just started Seamus Heaney’s wonderful translation of Beowulf. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, set during World War II, might be considered a side read, since the war acts as a backdrop rather than the novel’s main focus.

Although Goodreads provided the impetus, I would not have read the books for that reason alone. As I approach the end of my rough draft for The Winged Horse, I realize that my hero and his brother are going to have to come to blows, or the resolution will not satisfy even the most pacifist of readers. Moreover, book 3, The Swan Princess, has Daniil directly engaged in Russia’s 1534–37 war with Lithuania. He’s supposed to be a military officer and good at his job; he can hardly sit by on the sidelines while the other guys wave their weapons and charge the enemy. So I regard the war novels as research.

But research for what? The specific scenes of blood and gore, when they don’t turn my stomach, do offer some insight into how one conducts a fight to the death—although, of course, I can’t copy those authors’ descriptions. But what interests me in these books is their depictions of the warrior mindset. The heroic mindset, in the classic sense of men (and I do mean men, for the most part) who live to pit themselves against an enemy—whether that enemy is supernatural, as in Beowulf, or all too human, like Napoleon’s troops in The Spanish Bride or Daniil’s Lithuanians.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this mindset comes across in its purest form in Beowulf, that relic of the Age of Heroes, despite the filter supplied by its Christian narrator. Beowulf does not seek death, but he does not fear it either. Death comes to everyone, when and where it wills, so the manner of a man’s death matters more than the fact of it. A hero seeks glory and, not coincidentally, treasure—the reward and to some degree the acknowledgment of renown. Great deeds guarantee immortality, as bards sing the hero’s praises and his companions and heirs transmit tales of his courage from generation to generation. The hero may perform his feats to serve his own or another ruler, to assist an equal, to avenge an insult or the death of a family member (vengeance is better than mourning, the poet tells us), or to save his people. But what makes the warrior a hero is his willingness to sacrifice himself for something that means more to him than life.

That element of the hero remains in modern fiction, where it has expanded to include women (for example, Nasan in The Golden Lynx), but the motives driving the sacrifice have changed since Beowulf’s day. In the books I’ve been reading, I can see the change happen. In the Song of Prince Igor—supposedly a twelfth-century tale, although rumors of its inauthenticity persist—the old lures of glory and renown remain. Hadji Murad retains the theme of the blood feud, although the hero cares more about doing all he can to protect his family than on the obligations he will incur if he fails. The two modern books—Blood Eye and Strategos: Born in the Borderlands—reflect those older societies of Vikings and Byzantines and try to recreate the driving power of fame and vengeance.

The Spanish Bride, the most successful of these books in bringing its historical characters to life as fully rounded people, clearly reveals the shift of consciousness. Glory and sacrifice still matter, but vengeance has almost disappeared. The glorious sacrifice here extends from the individual hero to entire companies, even armies. In place of the blood feud, we see a determination to treat local populations fairly and a willingness to trade courtesies with enemy combatants whom the characters will later face—and kill—in battle. (Strategos includes some of these elements as well.) Death remains a harsh reality for the soldier to cheat if possible; fear is underplayed or ignored. Yet the ideals of the modern state have triumphed, and the successful officer dreams of promotion, not of immortalization in a saga. The triumph that was once so individual has become collective.

And where do my characters stand on this trajectory? I can’t yet answer that question. Not completely. But my sense is that Ogodai and Daniil exist somewhere between Strategos and The Spanish Bride. Part of Ogodai’s struggle is that he must find his place among people who still believe in the heroic individual, whereas his own training places him in the collective glory camp. Daniil has not so far questioned his military obligations—which, in any case, he cannot escape. Perhaps he will, during the course of book 3, if something shocks him enough. It would make a good conflict.
 
Until I find out, I guess I’ll be reading more books about war....


Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, “Battle Scene (1525–1550),” from a Shahnama (Book of Kings) by Firdawsi | F1954.4.

Account Books

One of my favorite lines in fiction comes from Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time: “Truth isn’t in accounts but in account books” (88). Tey meant that the most accurate information about whether something did or did not happen lies in sources that were not written to tell a tale—past, present, or future—but to record something that had meaning primarily for everyday life: a notation of birth, baptism, marriage, death, or burial; a listing of household items; a casual mention in a letter to a friend; a treaty. If a historian tells you Father X had no wife because priests didn’t marry in medieval England, but you find authentic records that say, “Three linen shifts for the priest’s wife, 6d.,” and the like, you can be reasonably sure that the historian in question got it wrong. Scholars living centuries after the fact interpret the data they find to produce an argument that gives meaning to the past. That is, to be blunt, the historian’s job: not simply to record facts like a computer but to sift and sort them into a meaningful story that will, of necessity, change from generation to generation and individual to individual as new interests and new questions and new sources of information emerge.

History writing is not so simple as Tey makes it out to be, nor are historians so gullible. Conscientious scholars try not to distort the record with their preconceptions and can become quite expert in perceiving and discounting the biases of their sources. Even account books can be cooked. And account books don’t begin to tell a historian, still less a historical novelist, everything that the author would like to know about the past.

Yet account books have a certain fascination for the historically inclined. They seem more real, more immediate, more “true” than the endlessly evolving images of ourselves that we humans so love to create and project. Hence I especially appreciated the discovery, during my preparation for my latest New Books in Historical Fiction interview, that Janet Kastner Olshewsky begins her story of her ancestor Noble Butler, hero of The Snake Fence, with the gift of an account book. This account book symbolizes the difference between Noble’s father, who gives the book to Noble to acknowledge Noble’s entry into adulthood but also sees the bookkeeping it should contain in purely financial terms, and Noble himself, who uses the account book to define his own values, to assess his own worth. What he writes in his book turns out to be the story we are reading.

As usually happens in these posts about my NBHF interviews, the text that follows replicates the introduction I uploaded to the NBHF website, where you can listen to and download the podcast for free.

Sixteen is a difficult age, lodged somewhere between childhood and adulthood. In 1755,  young Noble Butler has just finished his apprenticeship as a carpenter, and he wants nothing more than to undertake more advanced training as a cabinetmaker (qualified to produce the beautiful furniture characteristic of prerevolutionary North America). But no one in Philadelphia will take him on as a prospective craftsman unless he can provide his own woodworking tools, and for that he needs cash. Noble has no money, and his father has a clear vision of his sons’ futures: expand the family farm and save craftsmanship for the off-season, when the family will need it to help the farm survive.

But Noble has no desire to spend his life under Pa’s thumb. He sees a way out of his dilemma when Benjamin Franklin advertises for farmers to supply the troops fighting French and Lenapé warriors on the frontier. Presented with a moneymaking opportunity, Pa reluctantly agrees that Noble may volunteer and keep half his salary, so long as his older brother Enoch agrees to accompany the wagon. Pa doesn’t trust Noble, at sixteen, to bring the horses, wagon, and cargo back safely.

So Noble sets off along a war-torn trail that will test both his Quaker principles and his determination to define his own life, whatever his father’s plans for him may be.

The Snake Fence (Quaker Bridge Media, 2013) is the first Young Adult (YA) novel to be featured on New Books in Historical Fiction. For more information and a sample chapter, check out Janet Olshewsky’s website.

Hitting the Books

Short post this week—in part because I really have been hitting the books, as in researching nomadic life as I anticipate finishing my rough draft of The Winged Horse and starting on the major “culture run” that marks my first round of revisions (together with plot and characterization; style comes last). I’ve found some great books, mostly thanks to Sir Percy, my long-suffering spouse—who happens to have an ID card that lets him into one of the world’s great academic libraries, where I regularly send him with long lists of titles. But as fascinated as I am by the details of treaties between the Crimean Tatar khanate and the grand duchy of Lithuania in April 1535, I suspect others might be just a touch less fascinated. The relationship of modern-day Mongols to their herds? Probably not much better—unless you happen to be a steppe fanatic like me, of course.

But the main reason this is a short post is because I want to refer you to another, longer one somewhere else. Although somewhat of a dunce at marketing, as you may have figured out from this blog, I love talking about my books and my writing and even my research. I’ve been fortunate to encounter several good interviewers already, each with different questions and her own take on publishing and books in general—for those interviews, see the blogs of L.M. David,  Diane Mulligan, and Nicky Ticky. And now, just this week, Liza Perrat of Triskele Books interviewed me for the Triskele Book Club.

A Word on Triskele: I met Liza on GoodReads, the Internet book club. She tackled The Golden Lynx as part of the Historical Fictionistas group read there, and I returned the favor when Historical Fictionistas selected her book Spirit of Lost Angels for its next group read. She then asked me to do this interview, and I was happy to agree. But since we both belong to writers’ cooperatives—still a pretty rare thing in publishing—we decided also to exchange comments about that experience. Those posts are on the Triskele blog and, in a slightly different format, here: “Writing Alone and Together.”

So lots of material to read. I’d better sign off and let you get cracking!

Russian Noblewoman, 16th Century
Konstantin Makovskii
This picture is in the public domain.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commona

The Sands of Time

The Valley of the Queens
© 2007 Zureks
Creative Commons 3.0 license

Elizabeth Peters died yesterday morning at the age of 85, in her sleep, after a long battle with cancer. Barbara Michaels, the writer of Gothic romances, also died yesterday at the age of 85 under the same circumstances, because both Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels were pseudonyms of Barbara Mertz, an Egyptologist turned novelist who has given me and many others tremendous pleasure for the last twenty or thirty years. I am sad to read of her passing, and I extend my sympathy to all her friends and family.

As luck would have it, I wrote a post about Peters on this blog a few months ago. You can find it at “Crocodiles, Mummies, Ramses, and More.” As I mentioned in that post, the Barbara Michaels books were never my cup of tea; someone else will, no doubt, write that tribute. And since I did write about Elizabeth Peters so recently, I don’t want to repeat the same information here. Instead, I thought I would write a short memorial for her characters, now bereft of a creator. Dr. Mertz’s website refers to her using the initials MPM (for Mertz Peters Michaels), and I will follow that convention here.

CHARACTERS I WILL MISS

Amelia Peabody: Victorian spinster, who at the age of 27 inherits a comfortable fortune from her father and decides that, come hell or high water, she will fulfill her lifetime dream of traveling to Egypt. Proto-feminist Amelia relishes her personally designed calf-length skort and wields a vicious parasol against the many thugs and criminals who cross her path. She practices medicine on the expedition staff and its animals, whether they want her ministrations or not, and earns the sobriquet “Sitt Hakim” (Lady Doctor). Her diaries are the source of the stories in her series.

Radcliffe Emerson: “the greatest Egyptologist of this or any other era”—and not coincidentally the love of Amelia’s life. A master of archeological technique, intelligence, physical prowess, and the solving of crimes—irritated as he becomes each time an evildoer interrupts his work—Emerson does not suffer fools gladly. His irascibility costs him many a fine archeological site for his dig even as it impresses his staff, who call him “Father of Curses” in recognition of his impressive vocabulary. 

Walter Peabody Emerson, better known as Ramses: the precocious, fearless, and adventure-prone child of Peabody and Emerson and, in the minds of many readers (including this one), MPM’s most notable creation. Ramses never disobeys a direct order, but he has an uncanny ability to find the one outrageous deed that his parents have not thought to forbid and immediately engage in it before they realize that a prohibition is necessary. His relationship with Amelia, who insists she has no idea where he developed his verbosity and tendency to split hairs while demonstrating the same traits herself, is as precious as it is hilarious. Alas, Ramses grows up over time, as children have a tendency to do. The early books when he is young and roaming the deserts and pyramids with his cat Bastet are the highlight of the series.

Sethos: The Master Criminal with the hots for Amelia and a gentlemanly side he can’t quite shake, despite years of trying. Need I say more? No matter. I can’t say more, for fear of spoilers.

Vicky Bliss: a tall blonde of Swedish American descent who constantly battles (and sometimes takes advantage of) the male perception that she must be Marilyn Monroe on steroids. Vicky holds a Ph.D. in art history, which lands her a dream job at a museum in Munich and eventually brings her into contact with one John Smythe. As a sideline, encouraged by her boss, Vicky spends a certain portion of her office hours penning The Adventures of Rosanna, a glorious takeoff on bodice rippers that soon becomes, in her own words, “too improbable for publication.” Something about Rosanna hiding in a broom closet to avoid the attentions of Louis XIV while Genghis Khan’s hordes are pounding at the door….

John Smythe (an alias): the classic bad boy with a heart of gold and a mesmerizing effect on women, including Vicky. He’s been accumulating enemies since he forged his first check, even though—or perhaps because—he avoids crimes that cause bodily harm (“the penalties are so much more severe”). John’s speciality is art forgery, which casts suspicion on his motives for wooing Vicky. He also has a nasty habit of sloping off to avoid Interpol, sticking Vicky with the hotel bill, which does not further his romance. Yet somehow, when Vicky needs him, there he is.

Anton Z. Schmidt: the director of Vicky’s museum, always where he is not wanted yet invaluable in the solution of the problems that Vicky and John repeatedly encounter due to his past and her association with him. Schmidt loves food, the unhealthier the better, and he looks like an elderly Santa, but he never forgets a fact or a face. He is a constant reminder of why one should not judge by appearances.

AND HONORABLE MENTION

Jacqueline Kirby (aka Jake, never Jackie): middle-aged librarian for a small, Midwest college, divorced, distantly fond of her children, resistant to the idea of acting like a grandmother and to the persistent but seldom-rewarded James, a professor at the same university. A lover of bright colors and fine fashion, Jake moves into writing romance novels of her own while solving a mystery at a Romance Writers convention. I list her separately because the last Kirby novel that appeared was Naked Once More (1989), so she seems to have become frozen in time long before MPM herself passed on. My favorite of the JK novels is The Murders of Richard III (1974), a wonderful revisiting of the ground covered by Josephine Tey in The Daughter of Time through a different approach.

Characters long outlast their authors, even acquiring a certain immortality. Isn’t that why we create them, so that they will continue on when we no longer can? Amelia, Vicky, Jacqueline, and their associates will survive for as long as readers find them and fall in love with them, as I did so many years ago. But they can no longer grow, and for that I grieve. 

Enjoy the Valley, MPM. No one deserves it more. And thank you for the many hours of joy your books have given and will continue to give.

 “To see the molten orb of the sun lift above the eastern cliffs across the river
and watch the light spread across green fields and rippling water,
ruined temples, and modern villages was a glorious experience.
I had sometimes thought that if I were allowed to return to
the world of the living, this was the place I would choose.”
Elizabeth Peters, Guardian of the Horizon

From the tomb of Nefertari
This image is in the public domain
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Writers Alone and Together

We thought we were originals, but instead, turns out we are at the front of a wave but not the only surfers. Which is great—always nice to have a few friendly folks to share the journey with!

This post ran last week on the Triskele Books blog. I reversed the two halves, so that you could find out about them first, and edited the introductions a bit to avoid total duplication.


 TRISKELE BOOKS: QUESTIONS FROM FIVE DIRECTIONS PRESS

Five Directions Press: How did your publishing cooperative come together, and what made you decide to establish it? How many of you are there?
Triskele Books: There were three original members: JJ Marsh, Gillian Hamer, and Liza Perrat. We met via an online writing group and “knew” each other virtually for a few years beforehand, critiquing each other’s work. At the end of 2011, two of us had agents who were unable to sell our manuscripts, but none of us was keen on self-publishing individually. We got together and discussed the idea of a team collaboration, to make the process more feasible and less scary, and decided to form the Triskele Books author collective—a brand to promote our ideals of quality writing, presentation, and design. We have since taken on more members—Catriona Troth and JD Smith—so we currently have a core group of five with a few extras on the sidelines, supporting and promoting us. The other authors we met through the same online writing group.

FDP: Where does the Triskele name come from? Does a Triskele book have an identifiable style that sets it apart?
TB: Triskele comes from the fact there were three of us in the beginning. It has Celtic connotations, a tie-in with one of our author’s settings. The circles of the logo resemble three scrolls and represent the joining of these three independent circles to create something entirely new. As regards style, “location” is an important theme to our brand. All of us share an enthusiasm for “place,” and we try to evoke that in our stories. We all use the same cover designer and formatter, JD Smith, whose gorgeous matte-finish covers are praised by readers.

FDP: How does your setup differ from ours? How do you select a Triskele author? Do you interact in person, or mostly online?
TB: Triskele Books operates very similarly to Five Directions Press. Each author retains her own rights, is responsible for publishing her own books, choosing between e-books, paperbacks, and hardbacks, and commissioning her own quality design. We critique and edit each other’s work and comment on covers. We all employ a professional proofreader, as well as cover designer and formatter. We mostly interact online, via a private Facebook group, as we live in different places, from London to Birmingham, the Lakes District, Lyon, and Zürich. We get together in London every six months for the launch of the latest releases, which is always a great occasion for fun, chit-chat, and champagne.

One area which is hard work, but we consider a benefit, is that we constantly evaluate ourselves. We check we’re still going in the right direction, especially when new challenges throw up questions and we have to refer back to our fundamental principles in order to make plans for the future. This would be much harder if we weren’t (a) a small group, (b) communicative and (c) willing to listen to other ideas.

FDP: What books have you published, and what do you plan to publish over the next year or two?
TB: We have published nine books so far, with another three due for release in November 2013.

June 2012 releases
The Charter by Gillian Hamer
Behind Closed Doors by JJ Marsh (first in the Beatrice Stubbs series)
Spirit of Lost Angels by Liza Perrat

December 2012 releases
Closure by Gillian Hamer
Raw Material by JJ Marsh (second in the Beatrice Stubbs series)
The Open Arms of the Sea by Jasper Dorgan

June 2013 releases
Complicit by Gillian Hamer
Tread Softly by JJ Marsh (third in the Beatrice Stubbs series)
Tristan and Iseult by JD Smith (novella)
Gift of the Raven by Catriona Troth (novella)

FUTURE RELEASES
November 2013
Wolfsangel by Liza Perrat
Overlord I by JD Smith
Ghost Town by Catriona Troth

May 2014
The Crossing by Gillian Hamer
Cold Pressed by JJ Marsh (fourth in the Beatrice Stubbs series)
Overlord II by JD Smith

FDP: What is the situation in commercial publishing in the UK at present? Do you encounter the same problems in finding representation and publication that we do here in the US?
TB: We certainly did encounter the same problems finding representation and publication in the UK, as in the US. At the beginning of Triskele Books, Gillian Hamer and Liza Perrat both had agents, who were unable to sell their manuscripts despite much praise. JJ Marsh’s international crime series was said to be “too cerebral.” Basically, it was the same story: publishers liked our stories, but couldn’t see where to slot them in commercially.

FDP: How has publishing changed in the UK, and how do you anticipate it will develop over the next few years?
Gillian Hamer: To me, publishers in the UK seem slow to catch up with current market trends and they seem for the most part, unwilling to look at the opportunities the rise in indie publishing offers. A few are now starting to think about foreign rights and looking to utilize the work authors are putting in regarding self-promotion and marketing. Many of us have felt that agents have taken a very old-fashioned approach for years—for example, many still only accept written submissions as if email was something out of a sci-fi movie! I feel everyone involved in publishing will have to change up a gear and accept and embrace the technology around today. E-books are only the start. Those that don’t will lose opportunities and be left behind.

Catriona Troth: One change I have observed over the past ten years or so is that as so many of the smaller agents and publishers get swallowed up by big multinationals, much less time is given for debut authors to develop. For most traditionally published writers these days, if they don’t make the big time with their first book—or if they are very lucky, their second— that’s the end of their career. One thing that self-publishing does is to give writers the time to build a following gradually and organically—the way all writers could expect to, at one time.

JJ Marsh: UK publishing is similar to the US in that it’s marketing-led, in the main. Smaller presses, bookshops, and agents who are willing to develop authors are suffering from the heavyweights’ advantages. It’s interesting to see agents such as Andrew Lownie and Rogue Reader taking the agent-assisted self-publishing model, which seems advantageous for both. People are beginning to wake up to the opportunities offered by the DIY route and to realize that readers are highly discerning. Collectives such as Five Directions Press and Triskele Books, among others, have an opportunity here to act as a hallmark of quality.

Our thanks and best wishes to Five Directions Press for a successful career in indie publishing through the author collective. Books from Five Directions Press are available here.

FIVE DIRECTIONS PRESS: QUESTIONS FROM TRISKELE BOOKS

The FDP members—Ariadne Apostolou, Courtney J. Hall, Diana Holquist, and C.P. Lesley—answer questions about the rise of their author collective and indie publishing in general.

TB: What brought you girls together? And any particular reason why your collective is named Five Directions Press?
FDP: Three of us formed a local writers’ group five years ago and have met regularly ever since. Diana and C.P. have been writing buddies and friends for even longer. Diana has published commercially; she mostly writes contemporary romance under her own name and as Sophie Gunn. But her parenting memoir appealed to a different audience, and she decided to publish it herself. When we set up our own press, we invited Diana to join us. We reformatted and reissued her book last year.

The Five Directions Press name grows out of C.P.’s series, Legends of the Five Directions. In Chinese cosmology, which the Mongolians and Turkic tribes of Central Asia adopted, the center is considered a fifth direction that brings the four cardinal points into harmony. Since we have a range of books—historical fiction (C.P. and Courtney), contemporary fiction (Ariadne), and memoir (Diana)—it seemed like a nice image of unity derived from diversity. We don’t quite have five directions yet, but that leaves us room to expand.

TB: What factors triggered your decision to go indie?
FDP: In part, the difficulty of breaking into publishing as an unknown author, especially if one is writing books that don’t fit neatly into a commercial slot. We came up with the idea after C.P. had sent both her books to literary agents and reached the point where she was getting comments along the lines of “I love this, but I don’t know who I’d sell it to.” In the meantime, self-publishing was exploding. But if commercial publishing has too many gatekeepers who operate too rigidly, self-publishing has too few. So the four of us decided to pool our skills, work together to ensure quality control on each book, and set up the cooperative as an intermediary. Our hope is that Five Directions Press can build a long-term reputation for books worth reading. Of course, that will take a while.

TB: Like Triskele Books authors, do you each retain the rights to your own books, pay the costs of publication, and receive the full royalties? What elements are done collectively?
FDP: Yes, to all of the above. So far, because we are so small, we have an arrangement where no money changes hands. Five Directions Press is a name and a group website rather than a business. What makes it work is that we have a good combination of skills: C.P. has 20+ years experience in academic publishing, including copy editing and typesetting, so she handles the actual book production. Courtney runs a graphic design business, so she works on covers and website design (she produced our logo, for example). Ariadne is the best of us at spotting flaws in story structure and characterization. Diana has a background in advertising and has published commercially, so she brings that experience to our joint enterprise. So both the writing and the production are, to some extent, a collective effort.

TB: What do you see as the key benefits of being in a collective? Any disadvantages?
FDP: We really don’t see any disadvantages, so long as the people in the collective are positive and helpful in their attitudes. We were very lucky to find people who were a good fit from the beginning. We have learned so much from one another in terms of improving our writing. For the press, the main advantages are having other people to brainstorm with and having people who can fill in the gaps in one’s own experience. No one can be an expert at everything.

TB: Do you share a designer? And do you try and go for a shared look or feel?
FDP: C.P. designs the books, with input from the collective. Usually, we work together on the covers, although if an author wants to bring in her own cover, that’s fine. We would fuss only if the new cover deviated too much from the Five Directions Press style.

We do try to go for a shared look and feel. Most of the covers have a textured beige back (which contrasts well with our umber logo), and we strive for a consistent layout on the back cover and spine. The interiors usually use the same header and footer style and similar layouts, although fonts and type ornaments vary. All our historical novels use Garamond, for example—a nice old font with a long history. The modern novels use modern fonts (Minion Pro, usually). Display fonts (chapter headings and cover type) are individual to each book—although the Legends of the Five Directions series, for example, will use the same fonts throughout to establish a consistent look for the series.

TB: How do you know whether an author is a good “fit” for Five Directions Press?
FDP: Well, the primary qualification, besides the person having something to contribute (see next question), is to write well. Because we are trying to establish a reputation for the press as a whole, we need to involve writers who already have a solid grasp of the craft, even if their work does not appeal to a literary agent or commercial publisher for whatever reason. In addition, this is a “sweat equity” operation, so the person needs to be willing to put in the time, rather than approaching publication as a client, and have a generally positive outlook. Last, the book itself has to blend with the ones we already have, since the point of operating as a group is to achieve a certain level of cross-fertilization. Even though we have historical and contemporary novels, as well as novellas and a memoir, all our books can be considered some variety of women’s fiction. I don’t think there would be any advantage to us or to a prospective author to take on a physics textbook, but a historical mystery featuring a female detective would probably work fine.

TB: Are you actively seeking new members? And if so, what sort of criteria must new authors meet, to become part of Five Directions Press?
FDP: We are not actively seeking new members, but we are not averse to considering new members. At the moment, we have just one person to handle the copy editing and proofing; it would be nice to have another writer who has worked as an editor. Someone experienced in book publicity would also be useful, since none of us really has the contacts needed to publicize the books as much as they need and deserve. Publicity is our greatest difficulty, as it is for most independent and self-published writers, so that’s probably the area where we could use the most help. Hence the criteria would be those listed in my previous answer: good writing, good fit, willingness to participate, and skills that supplement those we already have.

TB: What are your plans for 2013 and beyond?
FDP: We have at least three books in the pipeline for fall and winter 2013. C.P.’s The Winged Horse (Legends of the Five Directions 2: East), is on track for release in November or December. Courtney’s Saving Easton should come out around the same time. Ariadne is working on a series of three novellas; we expect to release those one by one as e-books, then together in print, over the next year. We also need to get the e-book versions of Seeking Sophia up within the next few months. Beyond that, we have to see. But we all expect to keep writing, so there should be a slow but steady stream of books.

TB: How do you see the future of publishing generally?
FDP: It seems obvious that publishing is in flux. The current model, in which a few companies (five, here in the United States) control the bulk of the commercial market while millions of self-published books pour out through online and e-bookstores—most of them poorly written, edited, and designed; most of them unread—appears unsustainable. Some new system of gatekeepers will emerge, whether it is cooperatives like ours or review boards that can confer a seal of approval or an expansion of Amazon.com’s invitation-only publishing arm. As bookstores disappear, the advantages of commercial publishing also lessen, but the big houses still dominate access to premier publications such as The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. That will have to change before self-publishing and indie publishing can really take off. It’s also clear that people selling services to writers (editing, typesetting, marketing) are doing well and will continue to do well. Avoiding those expenses was part of the reason we decided to set up Five Directions Press.

Or (this is more of a doomsday scenario) Amazon.com will knock everyone else out of the market, at which point it may become much less hospitable to self-publishers and small presses like ours. On the whole, though, I think it’s a very exciting time to be a writer, because so many options for publication exist that did not a few years ago.

Our thanks to Triskele Books for initiating this discussion. We found it useful to have this opportunity to articulate our mission, and we hope that it will give other authors some ideas about alternative ways to get their work out in this new and rapidly changing publishing environment. For full information on these Triskele titles and authors, as well as UK links to their books, see the Triskele Books site.