E.C. Ambrose's Blog, page 23

Dream Big, with Elephants!

One of the comics I have cut out and stuck on my board is a decade-old strip meant for kids, “Mudpie” drawn by Guy Gilchrist, who also does “Nancy.” I’m one of those who reads the whole comics page, whether I like the strip or not.  The “Mudpie” strip shows the two kitten characters playing and talking about what they’ll do with their allowances.  Sister plans to spend hers.  Brother is saving his to buy a circus.

A circus costs like a million dollars, she protests.  Yeah, he says, “If I’m gonna dream, I’m gonna dream big–and with  elephants!”

So when your book gets picked up by a New York publisher, you can’t help but dream a few of those big dreams.  And why not throw in some elephants?  You know what I’m talking about. . . NYT best-seller list.  USA Today, maybe?  I’ll settle for the extended lists.  And some great reviews–starred, of course.

Then the awards.  There is, of course, the venerable and still lovely Hugo award rocket ship, and the enigmatic Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award.  If you are a fantasy writer, like me, you have probably coveted what has to be the ugliest awards ever:  shown here, at the top of winner Nnedi Okorafor’s blog.  This is a post about H. P. Lovecraft (whose face the award represents), his racism and Nnedi’s mixed feelings about receiving such an image.  It’s a great blog about how to approach the creators of works we enjoy, yet whose beliefs are repugnant to us.

But now, thanks to Pat Rothfuss’s blog, I have a new award to covet: the David Gemmell Legend Award.  Which is an actual, honest-to-goodness ax.  As an award for fantasy, this is made of awesome.  I can use it to cleave the skulls of evildoers, ignorant reviewers, and internet trolls!  Or at least, to imagine that I might.  The Gemmell ax =  Made of Awesome.

Let the dreaming begin!

 

Hey–just wanted to post a little announ

Hey–just wanted to post a little announcement about my flash piece “Custom of the Sea” now live at Tenebris Press! http://ow.ly/evQdS

A Brief History of Gunpowder Weapons in 14th Century England

There are a number of timelines of handguns on-line, but most have only a single date for the 14th century (and not even the dates listed by the others).  Then I found this one, by the Medieval Combat Society.  Good stuff!  I won’t repeat it all below–most of these dates have come from multiple sources.

Current archaeological and textual evidence shows that gunpowder originated in China, and migrated across Europe, first by word of mouth, then in actual form, arriving in England by the late 13th c.

First, from the Royal Armouries Yearbook, Volume 1, 1996:

Graeme Rimer’s article “Early Handguns” compiles textual evidence from the writings of Roger Bacon, dating between 1257-1265 and referring to the making of black powder, and its use in toys.  The second source he mentions is Marcus Graecus, in Liber Ignium or “book of fires”, which certainly sounds like a  promising title!–and dates to around 1300, then there is the oft-noted reference in Albertus Magnus De mirabiibus mundi.  If he’s actually the author of this work, it has to have been written before his death in 1280.

One of the problems of textual evidence is that written references are often scattered.  People might not have noted the first time something was done, made or seen, they often wrote chronicles and other documents long after the date they are describing, making textual evidence notoriously difficult to pin down.

An illuminated manuscript of about 1326-7 made for Edward III by Walter de Milemete shows a soldier firing a small cannon. Though the detail is lacking, the image is unmistakable.  In this case, the cannon is firing an arrow (likely with a metal shaft and brass fletching).  One site I surfed stated that the English used cannon like this against the Scots the following year.

In 1340, the Battle of Sluys, an important naval victory for the English, ship inventories include references to firearms.

However, we also have archaeological evidence that gunpowder was being manufactured at the Tower of London by 1346, the same year at the battle of Crecy, during which the British are said to have used firearms against the French–theoretically, the debut of gunpowder in battle in Europe.  We know Edward III used them at the Calais the following year.  (Italian references show bullets and cannon being ordered for city defense in Florence as early as 1326–and in such a quantity as to suggest that their manufacture was well established.)

Gunpowder weapons don’t seem to have been a decisive factor in  these battles (that distinction goes to the much more efficient and effective longbow), although the guns at Crecy are said to have frightened a troop of Genoese mercenaries so badly that they fled the line.  By 1386, handguns are also listed in the royal treasury.

In order to make the decision to produce or procure these weapons, train the men to use them, and transport them to the front, the weapons must have already taken hold.  Handguns of the time are very like miniature cannon:  cast in bronze or iron, with a small touch-hole at the back, the barrel would have been strapped to a staff to be braced for firing.  I saw just such a weapon in a museum at Bury St. Edmunds, but was unable to find anyone to answer questions about it, and the signage was uninformative.  It looked very like the one in Germany I wrote about here.  Perhaps I have an enterprising reader in that area who wants to do some legwork on that.

Some sources:

English Weapons and Warfare, 449-1660, by A.V.B. Norman and Don Pottinger

Handgonnes in the Middle Ages, by Don Justinian Syke of Rakovec (produced by the Society for Creative Anachronism)

collections and publications of the Royal Armouries

Haven’t seen this one yet, but I’d like to:

Cocroft, Wayne (2000), Dangerous Energy: The archaeology of gunpowder and military explosives manufacture, Swindon: English Heritage, ISBN 1-85074-718-0 .

The Termite Queen is a friend of mine–and other things you don’t know about me

I wanted to give a shout out to Lorinda J. Taylor, a follower of this blog, who recently nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award.

You’ll find Lorinda’s blog here.  Lorinda reviews books, analyzes poetry and shares her own writing, which is, intriguingly, often from the point of view of termites.  You know that I’ve been thinking of POV lately, and her work offers a fascinating alien society by going inside of these insects.  Check it out!

She also pointed out that I haven’t said much of a personal nature on my blog, which is true.  Part of the VBA noted above is that I should share 7 things about myself.   So, in deference to the Termite Queen, here goes:

1.  As a child, I was deathly afraid of Praying Mantises.  I know they’re good guys in the fight against bugs (sorry, Lorinda!  not your bugs, of course), but they just freaked me out. At one time, I had a friend who claimed this fear meant I had been kidnapped by aliens, but didn’t remember it.  Apparently, the fear of Praying Mantises is common among abductees. . .

2.  I love astronaut ice cream.  Can’t explain it.  Perhaps when I was kidnapped by aliens, I was rescued by astronauts?

3.  I enjoy many outdoor sports, especially hiking and kayaking.  My trip to Germany for research made me dream of kayaking the Rhine.

4.  I have only one sibling, a sister, who is often one of my first readers for new work.  I also send her new books by other authors when I don’t get a chance to read them myself, and listen to her reviews before I do.  Come to think of it, when we were kids, I used to tell people that I *was* an alien, and that my ship had landed in a particular strange patch of grass out behind the elementary school.

5.  I am addicted to how-to books about writing.  Can’t get enough of ‘em.  Would like to find some good blogs about the subject–any suggestions?

6.  I hate talking on the phone.  I would much rather email people, even my family, who think this is a little peculiar.  I usually put off phone calls for a long time.  I once worked in a call center, dealing with angry customers.  Maybe that had something to do with it.

7.  When I was twelve, two men started talking to me, and–to my eye, obviously–had the intention of trying to kidnap me.  My parents arrived at just the right time, and the men disappeared into the city.  I still feel like we should have called the police.  Those two guys had probably done it before, and probably succeeded.  I still think I would recognize them anywhere.  Given the vagaries of memory, I am probably wrong about this.

. . . From a Certain Point of View

Hands up everyone who immediately recognized the source of my title quote?  Okay, that was an easy one.

In a post a couple weeks ago, I referenced the special difficulty of writing a book in a single point of view (POV), and suggested I might expand on that theme in a later post.  So here I am.  Single and multiple POV’s have different challenges for the writer, and different rewards as well.  One of my overriding notions as a writer is that every important element in the book should be a deliberate choice, and POV is one of the areas where many writers fail to make that choice.

You start out writing from the POV of an important character in the first scene, probably the protagonist.  In a chapter or so, you realize you want to include some other information that the protag doesn’t know, so you grab someone else’s POV and use that.  Then you think maybe you’ll build tension if you show some stuff from the villain, so you go over there. . . and that’s the people who aren’t head-hopping (when you jump between different POV’s from sentence to sentence).  There are some famous and wealthy head-hoppers out there–but for most writers, it’s just bad news. I would argue it’s a bad idea even for the famous and wealthy folks, but I doubt they care what I think.

Single POV has the supreme benefit of enmeshing the reader very closely with a single character. It creates a strongly intimate effect because you experience what that character does as he or she does it.  There’s no sense of divided focus.  The reader might be curious what another character is experiencing, but never gets to find out directly, so there’s no divided focus.

As the Game of Thrones readers out there can attest, the reader can quickly grow attached to anyone who has a POV presence in a book (hero, villain, servant, whoever). They get mad when you take away that POV, either permanently, or simply by not visiting the character for a while.  That can be a useful way to build suspense, but it can also feel like a tease–the author made the reader care about someone, only to toss that person off a cliff or into the next volume.  Not so with the single POV.

But it’s tempting to violate that single POV, when you want the reader to know something the character doesn’t, or when you want to create the tension of having the reader aware of things that the character isn’t.  This often manifests in lines like:  Joe turned away from the window before he saw the evil red eyes peering in.  Well, if Joe (the POV character) didn’t see them, who did?  It’s possible to manage that kind of floating camera approach to narration, but it chips away at the intimacy that the single POV excels at.

This is one of the cool things about writing historical fiction.  If you can reference the history, you can create tension about what the reader knows because the character hasn’t gotten there/then yet.  ”Sunset lingered over Pearl Harbor, on December 6, 1941, and Joe looked forward to the next morning. . .”

“Avengers” and the vulnerable superhero

I went to see “The Avengers” again recently. Don’t ask how many times I’ve seen it–I’m not an addict, I can quit any time.  Really.

The film got me thinking about the role of vulnerability in heroes.  Any time you have a sufficiently powerful protagonist, you have a couple of problems, relating to one of the overarching issues of fiction (or film):  how to show and raise the stakes.

In your average thriller or suspense plot, one or more lives are at stake.  You show the stakes by having someone get hurt or killed, you raise the stakes by placing people at increasingly close distance to the reader at risk also:  named characters, the protagonist and his or her family and friends.  For big books, you threaten a place people already know of and thus have reason to care about.

The threat makes the reader worry about what will happen to your protagonist and his world.  Higher threat = greater worry until, ideally, you have the reader on the edge of her seat.

But what happens when your protagonist is literally a superhero?  We already know these guys are better, stronger, faster.  Nearly invulnerable.  And that “nearly” is critical.  One of the things that Joss Whedon excelled at in the Avengers film is showing the vulnerabilities of his cast of supers.  Thor still cares about his brother.  Hulk fears the violence he might cause against others.  Ironman worries about the legacy of the company that bears his (and his father’s) name.  We can see each of these characters striving not only to prevent bodily harm, but to defend his personal stakes, the damage that might be done to values beyond the physical:  to love, to reputation, to self-respect.

Whedon and his collaborators display these vulnerabilities in part by playing them off of each other.  The scenes of supers attacking one another are not only fulfilling the Smackdown urge to see who’d win if Ironman took on Thor, they are allowing the supers to reveal and test each other’s vulnerabilities, to probe the wounds that each hopes the others won’t notice.  The existence of these wounds makes the superhero characters accessible to the viewer, and, more to the point, gives us reasons to be sympathetic–and to be worried. Can Hulk get hurt or killed?  Apparently not–but how would he live with himself if he caused such harm to others?  Ah–now, it gets interesting!

Guess in a PG-13 film, they can’t rag on the fact that Captain America is still a virgin, though. . .

No More Bad Villains!

During a critique session this weekend, a writer friend said she wanted to know if readers found her protagonist “too stupid to live.”  This is an issue we think about often in relation to our protags, but not often enough in relation to villains.

Right now, I’m revising a book in which I have set myself a very particular challenge:  it’s single POV from the protagonist’s view.  I didn’t fully realize the level of challenge involved (which is a topic I should cover in another blog).  At the moment, what I need to do is make it clear when and why my antagonist is reacting the way she does.  I need to find ways to show what she’s up to that won’t a) immediately tip off the reader and/or the protagonist before I want them to understand and b) make her seem like an idiot.

The setting of clues that will eventually add up to a complete picture is one of the particular arts of fiction.  It’s like tracing Nazca lines:  from the ground (ie, as you move through the narrative) you know there is something going on and you are excited to see what.  From the air (the climax of the book) suddenly it all becomes clear.  That’s the ideal of suspenseful plotting (hey–another blog topic!).  In this case, the protagonist should be able to add up the clues at just the right moment when the discovery will have the most impact–and just a little before the reader would be able to add them up.

But with antagonist story lines, unless you are in their POV, the clues must be even more carefully placed.  There are many ways to cheat at this.  The most blatant is, “So, Mr. Bond, you’re wondering why I’ve done all this–let me explain.  At length.  And it great detail, with numerous references to the narrative up to this point, and the occasional interruption from you or a minion to make this seem like a conversation instead of what it actually is: an infodump by an author who couldn’t come up with anything better.”  We all know that scene, right?

One alternative is to have the antagonist drop hints, but there is a delicate balance here as well.  Too many authors deliver the sort of arrogant, taunting villain who tosses off blatant clues because he or she thinks the protagonist will never be able to work it out in time.  What usually happens next, because the author wants the protag to reach epiphany not a moment too soon, is that the reader feels bludgeoned with the secret plan and can’t imagine why the protag hasn’t figured it out yet (see above, the protag too stupid to live).

So if your antagonist believes the protag is a worthy opponent, he would never willingly reveal the plan–he would not become the villain too stupid to live.  I am seeking the spot at which they can interact believably, the antagonist might be caused to reveal the sort of information that will later be shown to be significant, but at the moment is disregarded by both parties as irrelevant or unimportant.  This is the sneaky bit, the fun part.  Wish me luck!

In the meantime, authors, do your part to eradicate bad villainy!

Politics: from Poly (meaning many) + Ticks (Blood-sucking insects)

‘Tis the season.  Political signs are popping up faster than the leaves are turning and half my mail is propaganda.  Vote for this guy! Vote for her!  Don’t vote for them, for heaven’s sake!!  Freedom of speech, check.

But all the same, I am cautious about political signs on businesses, especially those where someone has taken the time to rearrange their advertising to promote a candidate.  On the one hand, passions are useful in driving someone to work for what they believe in.  Expressing support for a cause, helping to forward that cause, can be a force for good in the world, and for personal growth as well.

But certain kinds of passions are divisive–leading others to believe they know and understand us based upon that single opinion:  vote for _____   All it takes are those three words, some knowledge of the local (or national) campaign, and the proponent has already alienated a large number of potential customers, who now think they know what that business owner–and, by extension, the business are all about.  Do I want to support a business that supports ________?  It’s a useful question to ask when you understand what the considerations are. Do you support “green” businesses?  Business that are allied with certain charities?  That may be an important part of your decision-making process.

Both political parties would have the public believe that waving the flag of their candidate reveals some Deep Truth about you as a person and what you think the town/state/country needs.  However, the declaration of voting behavior is probably not a strong indicator of the individual at all.  He may be a single-issue voter who is so driven by some other passion that a candidate supporting that passion will always win the vote.  She might have concerns specific to this election cycle that she feels need to take precedence.  Our individual beliefs are much more complicated than a single name on a placard might imply.

Readers of this blog may think they know my politics because I have written about firearms. Or because I have discussed my concerns about torture.  It is one thing to develop a sense of someone based on the things they care about–quite another to judge based on support of someone else entirely, a political creature likely to change his stand the minute the voters seem to be turning against him.

Name-brand politics depress and often disturb me. I’d rather reveal myself through my choices than to mislead my public by claiming a candidate.

Review: A Thread of Grace

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mary Doria Russell is a favorite author of mine, but I hadn’t read this one until now. It’s a braided narrative about a cross-section of people invested in the Jewish refugee population in Northern Italy during WWII. Russell follows families who fled France as well as native Italians and a few Germans. With a few brief scenes she deftly brings this vast array of characters to life, and makes you care (including an introduction to Hitler himself that makes him chillingly sympathetic).

By using so many different point of view characters and sliding carefully among them, she heightens tension between the narratives, using what we know that some characters don’t to make the reader worry. Sometimes, we can follow a particular thread, a child who is separated from family, for instance, through the book while the family members never know what happened, making the title especially apropos.

The most engaging, and I would say central, character is an Italian Jew named Renzo Leoni, a disillusioned and damaged veteran of the war in Africa. It’s a constant delight to travel on his various adventures, with Renzo’s mad ingenuity escalating along with the ever-increasing risks he faces. (keep an eye on his aging mother as well!) In spite of the subject matter, I often laughed aloud when I came to a striking passage or moment of delicious irony–another sign of Russell’s genius, that she can focus on the gleaming hope of the human heart against a backdrop of terror, torture and misery.

I also had a bit of insider info that added to my interest in the book. I heard that Russell had gotten partway into the writing, establishing this variety of characters, then handed a list and a coin to her son and had him flip a coin for every name to determine who would die. She wanted the pattern of deaths to feel as random as it had seemed during her research. So I knew that her plotting was not necessarily tied to the narrative expectations of a traditional Western story arc–there would be moments when “once upon a time” would not equal “happily ever after” or even “poetically tragic”.

I did feel that a few moments in the book (which I won’t reveal as they are spoilers) were not handled with Russell’s usual strength. Perhaps this was a choice on her part to maintain that sense of randomness and non-traditional climax that she decided to de-emphasize a few key scenes that, to me, warranted a little more weight. If that was a choice, I found it a frustrating one as a reader–after spending so long with these characters, I protested the short shrift some are given toward the end.

But all-in-all, this work carried through with exceptional skill, a dedication to character development and transformation that I can only dream of emulating.

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Review: The Soul Mirror

The Soul Mirror by Carol Berg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Magic, deceit, necromancy–what’s not to love?

I had a little debate with myself about how to rate this book, but in the end, I went with my gut. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in this series and was a bit dismayed at first to find that this volume, set five years later, features a different protagonist, Anne de Varnese.

However, that change of perspective allows Berg to perform some delightful Evil Author Tricks–creating tension between Anne’s view of the events and characters of the previous work and what the reader knows. Anne is, after all, the daughter of the Great Traitor uncovered (but never captured) by the efforts of Portier in the first book.

This book layers secrets and mysteries, drawing the reader along with Anne into a complex and gripping web, not knowing who to trust. So why did I hesitate over my rating? Well, I did figure out the solutions to a couple of the mysteries rather earlier than I should. Ordinarily, that would result in my lessening the grade. . . if this book had not also made me late for work in my frenzy to finish reading it.

Y’know how many reviews or book covers will claim that you can’t put it down? In this case, for this reviewer, that was true. I loathed every minute I must be parted from this book. I knew some of the secrets, and I didn’t care–I was still enthralled, eager to read more.

Highly recommended to lovers of complicated, harrowing, character-driven fantasy.

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