Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 84

Explaining research to a non-writer

Every time a feature film set in the past is released, it doesn’t take long for the press to start finding research gaffes from minor stuff like cars on the street before they were made, songs being sung before they were released, and then major problems such as battles being fought in the wrong country and world leaders showing up after they were dead.

It’s hard to explain how such things happen to our readers and viewers. Hollywood, of course, is more of a problem because so many people are involved with each production. Major authors have multiple editors and fact checkers. Small press authors usually have to roll their own research and hope for the best.

When authors write novels, they are primarily concerned with the storyline and the characters. Yet, as one writes, there are dozens of things to check:

The characters, such as my protagonist in Fate’s Arrows drive cars. Okay, what makes were they and when were they available?My protagonist is an archer. What kind of bow did she use  and what kind of damage would an arrow inflict when it hit a person?My protagonist, Pollyanna, was a Marine who learned Karate in Okinawa like a lot of other soldiers at the end of WWII. So, what techniques will she use when attacked back in the states?Most people know little or nothing about the Korean War. Fortunately, I had a good source book and that allowed my character to mention things that happened, along with the exploits of the forerunner of the CIA.In the novel, she’s auditing the books of a small grocery. Fine. What products are in the store?And since the KKK is involved–this is Florida in 1954–that means reading more about that group than anyone would want to.

Basically, if somebody coughs in your novel and grabs for a bottle of cough medicine, you have to find out whether that cough medicine even existed when the novel was set.

If you were around at the time and place your novel is set, you can’t even rely on your memory.  Most people don’t remember nitty gritty specifics. They know they grew up listening to a song on the radio, but do they know what date it was released? Probably not.

When we write our novels, everything is open to question even though we’re writing fiction.

—Malcolm

I could’ve been a sheep rancher

When my wife and I moved to Atlanta from North Georgia in 1980, we were having trouble making ends meet. I suggested Montana.

What would I do there, she wondered. I said that I’d hire on at a sheep ranch and/or drive concessionaire busses trucks in Glacier National Park.

She didn’t think either of those jobs sounded like the real me. Plus, she had no intention of living in Montana.

As it turned out, I was writing a book about sheep ranching and had a folder filled with everything one needed to know to get started–or to stay solvent if one had already gotten started. Fortunately, I didn’t become a full-time sheep rancher: the Montana wool business has been in decline for years.

The more one looks into the ranching biz, the more one discovers there’s a lot of down-in-the-muck stuff going on that we never saw on “Fury” or “Bonanza.” I didn’t mention this to my wife.  Plus, Montana’s high range isn’t very hospitable to humans who grew up in the South. My wife already knew this so there was no way I could spin the weather situation.

She didn’t know that ewes, as Bill Stockton tells us, let gravity drop the new-born lambs out on the ground. Or, if that doesn’t work, they spin around and sling them out. This information was not in my wife’s “need to know” classification.

One thing I didn’t know at the beginning was that my wife’s allergic to wool. That much pretty scuttled the sheep rancher “dream.”

—Malcolm

Several of my older novels are out of print, but my sheep rancher can still be found in “Mountain Song.” It is the tamest of my sheep books.

B&N finally decided my address is not an APO

As I wrote on this blog recently, my wife and I had a B&N gift card for $50 that would allow us to buy three books. But B&N’s site was screwed up. A message on the checkout screen kept telling me that B&N doesn’t ship to APO or FPO addresses.

So what?

But they thought that’s what I had even though I’ve had B&N books shipped to this address for ages. Finally, the last of the books I tried to order is on its way without any explanation about the checkout screen error.

I would rather order from B&N or Powell’s or Bookshop because I think Amazon is pretty close to being a monopoly. But if alternative websites are screwed up, there’s not much I can do but go to Amazon again. This time I couldn’t because I had a B&N gift card.

The support reps kept telling me to enter and re-enter my purchases again and again in addition to clearing my cache and using another browser. Finally, the company decided to have its programmers look at the problem. I spent a lot of online chat time before B&N decided to do the obvious thing: FIX THE BUG.

So, I’m not in a rush to go back to B&N and put up with all this hassle again. That bothers me because I really want B&N to give Amazon some serious competition.  But this won’t happen until the support reps take customer problems seriously and focus on fixing the bugs instead of asking us to re-enter everything on our account multiple times as though that’s going to fix the error.

Seriously, B&N, do you want to beat Amazon or do you want to allow the bugs on your site to ensure that you will crash and burn?

You have a serious problem if your software “thinks” a street address is an Army or Fleet Post Office address. Fix the thing instead of making your customers jump through hoops.

—Malcolm

Notions on reading ‘Shuggie Bain’

My ancestry is mostly Scottish, instilled in me at an early age by my father and the books I found on our shelves when I was young. I am surprised, though, at my comfort level in reading Scots and how soon after reading a book written in Scots my speech takes on that unmistakable lilt. It’s somewhat embarrassing actually because people think I’m putting on airs.

I have argued for years with authors writing about highlanders who are presented as speaking Scots, a lowland language, rather than Highland English which is influenced by Gaelic. It comes down to the notion, I think, that Americans think all Scots speak the language of the lowlands but exhibit the fiery passion of the Highlanders which, some say, is characterized by sex, fighting, and drinking.

Shuggie Bain, the Booker Prize-winning novel by Douglas Stuart, is altogether another tin o’ worms. If you’re planning on visiting Glasgow, I urge you to read this book first so you’ll be used to not only the profanity of choice but Glaswegian often called “Glasgow Patter.” If you have trouble with it, consult 100 Glaswegian words that prove you are from Glasgow.

The article notes that Glasgow patter is a language of the streets, and that’s certainly true of the characters, speech, and lifestyles you’ll find in Shuggie Bain. In “real life”–unless we travelled to Glasgow and ended up in the “wrong” part of town–most of us would never meet such people, forget wanting to know them better, much share a strong lager with them.

Critics have called the novel “dark” and they are right. They’ve also called in a masterpiece, and the farther I read, the more I’m convinced they’re right about that, too. I have always thought that the Brits, in general, are a lot more earthy than Americans–perhaps demonstrated in such common expressions as “oh bugger” and “sod off” that we wend to avoid on this side of the pond. This earthy tone is clearly prevalent in the novel and would be viewed in the States as over-the-top chauvinistic, if not misogynistic.

But the writer in me wants to know what makes this novel a masterpiece and what motivates its characters. So I will continue, often with a smile at some of the things people say and do, to keep reading even though I might be totally scunnered by the time I get to the last page.

Is anyone else here reading the book yet?

—Malcolm

Writing about a high-speed chase on a mountain road

Since it’s cold and rainy here in north Georgia, I spent the day writing about a speeding Harley Davidson being chased by a ranger along Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun road. In “real life,” that highway is covered by many feel of snow in February that will take many weeks to plough before the summer season begins in June.

Fortunately, the Google Earth views and the Google Maps street views–as discussed here were taken in the summer. So, what I see looks like this photo:

My keyboard almost has no room on my desk due to the stack of paper maps, guidebooks, and place name guides cluttering up my space. If this were a fictional road or some random road in the middle of nowhere, I might get away with a little artistic license. But Glacier National Park has over three million visitors a year and most of them want to see this road from their cars, from a red bus, or from a park shuttle.

So, there’s no room for mistakes. That’s a bit daunting. On the other hand, I hope the fame and beauty of the setting will help draw people to the novel to be called “Weeping Wall.” Here’s what the real weeping wall looks like, compliments of Wikipedia:

 

If you’re westbound in one of the convertible red tour busses, you’re going to get wet. All of that water comes from snowmelt higher up on the Garden Wall. There’s less of a torrent here late in the summer. Weeping Wall will be the third in my “Mountain Journey’s Series,” following The Sun Singer and Sarabande.

The most difficult task hasn’t really been getting the landmarks right. It’s been getting the background from the earlier novels in the series correct–and then some of the characters also appear in my Kindle novels Mountain Song and At Sea. Co-ordinating all these stories was something I never wanted to face–until now. I think I’ve gone nuts.

But, it’s a fun kind of crazy.

—Malcolm

I invite you to enjoy my two earlier novels in the series, “The Sun Singer” and “Sarabande.” Both of them are contemporary fantasies set in Glacier National Park, Montana.

 

Happy VD. Come on, people, stop saying that

Several days after my ship was in port, hundreds of sailors ended up in what was referred to as the VD line. People thought maybe they caught something at a sailor bar in town and wanted to get some penicillin from the doc at sickbay.

So, I tend to do a double-take when people shorten Valentine’s Day to VD. Were these people born yesterday or did they grow up clueless? But, as usual, I digress.

My wife and I had talked about celebrating Valentine’s Day by getting COVID shots. However, though the news mentions yet another new vaccine gaining FDA approval almost every week, there don’t seem to be any doses available.

Odd, do you think?

One sees various articles about how screwed up the United States’ vaccination program is. Some say the rich are first in line. Some say, no, it’s hookers who are first in line. My comment is this: I have yet to see any lines, VD or otherwise. Meanwhile, others are saying they won’t get the shots because they don’t know what’s in them, to which a Facebook joker said, “Well, you eat Chicken nuggets and hotdogs without a clue what’s in them.”

So, it appears that my wife and I will kiss each other, get some pretty flowers, and say, “COVID be damned.” The sucking-up-politicians group said people as ancient as we are should have gotten our COVID shots already. Since we haven’t gotten them, we’re being offered free penicillin shots in case we “caught something in town.”

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Cambell is the author of the comedy/satire novel Special Investigative Reporter. When one reviewer said it was an excuse for wine and sex, he nailed it.

Do as Diana Gabaldon does, not as I do

Those of us who were members of the former CompuServe Literary Forum witnessed the birth of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. She uploaded snippets of the work in progress, encouraged discussions about them, and later when she became a successful author continued to support the forum and answer our questions about the art and craft and business of writing novels. Her gracious support of other writers included her writing a blurb for my novel The Sun Singer.

In our craft discussions, she and I disagreed on one thing. And that was, should the author stop writing while completing a gap in the research, or should s/he continue writing and fill in the correct information later?

She said: “Keep writing.” I said: “Stop writing.”

She argued that when the author was on a roll, stopping to fill in historical or other information would simply derail the flow of the novel and the author’s daily writing process.

I argued that writing while something is still unknown could very well send the novel down the “wrong road” and necessitate a lot of needless rewriting later.

She preferred to put a “placeholder” in the manuscript, reminding her that she still had some facts to verify before submitting the book to her agent.

I preferred (and still prefer) to know the facts–whether they apply to history, geography, customs, or whatever–before I write the next scene or chapter.

It goes without saying that her Outlander series of books–and their spinoffs–have been infinitely more successful than my novels. So, I suggest you follow her advice and keep putting words down on the page even if you’re not finished verifying your information.

The fact that I’m eight years older than Diana doesn’t mean that I have more wisdom. It simply means that I’m eight years more set in my ways. I’ll freely admit that as I continue pausing my writing while checking my facts.

If you’re not set in your ways, putting a placeholder in our MS is probably the smart thing to do until you have time to look up what you still need to lookup.

—Malcolm

My novel-in-progress, “Weeping Wall,” sat for several months while I verified the geological information I needed in the first paragraph.

Saints and Sinners

The New York Times used to highlight the good and the bad of recent issues in a publication for employees only called “Saints and Sinners.” As a journalist, my father got a copy which I always enjoyed. That said, I’ve stolen the title for my own list of saints and sinners:

Sinner: Proud Boys. So far, they have nothing to be proud of.Saint: Sarah Thomas officiating at the Super Bowl. First lady to do this.Sinner: Jazmine Sullivan and Eric Church for singing a ramped-up, styled-up rendition of the National Anthem at the Super Bowl rather than what Francis Scott Key wrote.Saint: Amanda Gorman, for using poetry to inspire us all.Sinner: U. K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson for stonewalling another Scottish independence vote and for not bothering to comb his hair.Saint: Dr. Fauci for trying to keep the national response to COVID on a realistic, science-based track.Sinner: Rand Paul for running and serving as a Republican rather than as a Libertarian.Saint: Helen Mirren just for being who she is.Sinner: Various “anchors” on Fox “News.”Saint:  Elizabeth Kolbert for writing Under a White Sky.Sinner: Government of Pakistan for banning the Oscar-hopeful film”Zindagi Tamasha”Saint: Hope, the SUV-sized UAE mission to Mars.Sinner: Myanmar’s military coup that placed the country’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.Saint: The New York Times for a new documentary titled “Framing Britney Spears,” which has aired in the US.

—Malcolm

Writing about a place that’s far away

Writers with a big advance from their publishers can often travel to faraway places, take pictures, and do research. Most of us can’t do that. Fortunately, Google Maps and Google Earth can help.

I live in Georgia and am writing about a speeding motorcycle on Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road. I’ve been there with family but wasn’t taking notes. I can’t afford to go back, even if there weren’t COVID restrictions. So, how do I learn more about the road from far away?

I’ve picked a popular tourist destination. So, for almost every trail, a section of road, or mountain in the park, there are going to be “How to” guidebooks easily found via my search engine. The best of these give you plenty of information about hiking a trail, climbing a mountain, or sightseeing along a highway.Fortunately, Google Maps has “street view” activated for Going-to-the-Sun Road. Using that, I can see the road from a driver’s point of view, including points of interest visible from the highway such as trailheads and parking lots. In a sense, this allows me to “go there” and see what my characters will see. Hovering over the visitors center at Logan Pass. Once I’ve done that, I can switch to Google Earth and set my search terms on Logan Pass and go straight there, first as though I’m seeing it from a satellite view, and then–better yet–as though I’m looking at the road and the visitors center and the nearby mountains from a helicopter. I can hover as close to the road or the mountains as I want or gain some altitude and see many miles of highway or trail at once.

It’s better to go there, of course, but using these tools, I can gather enough information to make the novel work.

—Malcolm

My novel “Mountain Song,” set partly in Glacier Park, is free on Kindle February 8 through February 10.

Giveaway: ‘Mountain Song’

My Montana novel Mountain Song will be free on Kindle for three days, February 8 through February 10. Previously called The Seeker, the novel is the first of my two David Ward novels. At Sea is the sequel.

Description

David Ward lives in the Montana mountains where his life was impacted by his medicine woman grandmother and his utilitarian grandfather. Anne Hill suffered through childhood abuse and ultimately moved in with her aunt on the edge of a Florida swamp. Their summer romance at a mountain resort hotel surprises both of them. But can they make it last after the initial passion wears off and they return to their college studies far apart from each other especially after an attack on a college street changes Anne forever?

Background

This novel is set in Glacier National Park Montana where I worked for two summers as a resort hotel employee. It’s also set at a fictional Montana sheep ranch and at a real Florida Panhandle swamp. The characters move around a bit, one might say. The mountain on the cover is named Heavy Shield, previously Mt. Wilbur, and can be seen across Swiftcurrent Lake from Many Glacier Hotel on the east side of the park.

You can find information about all of my books on my website.

–Malcolm