Scott’s Comments (group member since Oct 24, 2012)

Scott’s comments from the Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy" group.

I need to find copies of the Holdstock books . . .

Greg wrote: "Wasn't skraelingr also used for the Beothuk and other indigenous peoples encountered by the Norse in North America?"

It was! Though in Icelandic, its original meaning was simply "foreigner". The conceit is that the Viking explorers called the North Americans something that was already in their lexicon, a word for something that disgusted them and made them uneasy at the same time, an atavistic memory of the kaunar.

Greg wrote: "I think I like that he's a badass! LOL I'm guessing he has some kind of Damascene conversion mid-way through the book which softens his character somewhat? If it gives too much away to talk about what happens, then of course you don't have to answer that. ;)"

It's not so much a Damascene conversion as it is a bridge of understanding between Grimnir and his human captive -- that they need one another in order to survive.

I can't share much, but here's a rough draft of the jacket copy:

He is called by many names. To the Danes, he is skraelingr; to the English, he is orcnéas; to the Irish, he is fomoraig. He is Corpse-maker and Life-quencher, the Bringer of Night, the Son of the Wolf and Brother of the Serpent. He is Grimnir, and he is the last of his kind – the last in a long line of monsters who have plagued humanity since the Elder Days.

Drawn from his lair by a thirst for vengeance against the ambitious Dane who slew his brother, Grimnir emerges into a world that has changed. A new faith has arisen, a Nailed God from the East, and against it the Elder World cannot abide. The Old Ways are dying, and their followers retreating into the shadows; even still, Grimnir’s vengeance cannot be denied.

Taking as hostage a young Christian to be his guide, Grimnir embarks on a journey that takes him from the hinterlands of Denmark, where the wisdom of the ancient dwarves has given way to madness, to the war-torn heart of southern England, where the spirits of the land make violence on one another. And thence to the green shores of Ireland and the Viking stronghold of Dubhlinn, where his enemy awaits . . .

But, unless Grimnir can set aside his hatreds, his dream of retribution will come to nothing. For Dubhlinn is set to be the site of a reckoning – the Old Ways versus the New – and Grimnir, the last of his kind left to plague mankind, must choose: stand with the Christian King of Ireland and see his vengeance done, or stand against him and see it slip away?

Greg wrote: "I wonder if you could adjust Grimnir's character by giving him a backstory with a more rough or violent youth and that the smoothing out of the rough edges is due to his age/maturity/experience/fatigue? "

It's actually very similar to this: at the start of the story, he's as unremittingly vile as one can be without kicking puppies and punching kittens; he's not evil, per se, just seriously self-centered and without any hint of human scruples. As the story progresses, he begins to understand his human captive (he kidnaps a young Christian to serve as his guide, kicking off a parallel story arc about redemption and faith), and his captive begins to understand him until they reach a moment of parity and mutual respect near the climax.

My editor's bone of contention is in certain habits and attitudes Grimnir has. He is profane, given to crude jokes, and makes an almost Gollum-esque sound that's somewhere between a cough and a curse. His only redeeming feature for the first half of the book is, as one beta reader put it, "he carries me along on badass alone". I prefer to leave him precisely like that.

Dan wrote: "You bring up several good points Scott. And I think most importantly regarding the discussion at hand is that, sometimes, certain creative control is out of your hands. If you want to be successful..."

This is a point we've gone round and round on, my editor and I. My initial manuscript has a kaunar protagonist, Grimnir, who is like a mix between Grendel's mother, Shagrat from LOTR, and Attila the Hun: interesting, but not someone you'd want to invite in for dinner. My editor wants the rough edges filed off him, to make him sympathetic. Now, I can do this or I can refuse . . . but my editor has 25 years in the business and more bestsellers under his belt than I can shake an elf at. It would be somewhat foolish to totally disregard his advice, so I'm engaged in smoothing the edges while still maintaining my vision for the character. "Smoothing the edges", of course, is editor-speak for making him more human (and, inexorably, more like a dude in an Orc suit). Tightrope.

Dan, this particular book is called A Gathering of Ravens and it should be available in January 2017!

The tightrope writers walk with the Orc is that they needs must make them unique enough to pique readers' interests while still retaining some vestige of what makes them Orcs. My own Orcs -- who do not call themselves "orcs", but rather "kaunar" -- are the spiritual descendants of Tolkien's Orcs, thus I listed out the traits of JRRT's creation, how those traits were achieved, and how those same traits might be gained if Orcs were a race found in Norse myth. For example, I went with the (now discarded) notion JRRT had that Orcs were created by Morgoth from captive Elves; kaunar, then, were dvergar captured by Loki and twisted by him in order to serve as minions for his monstrous children, Fenrir, Jormungandr, and Hel. They were decimated by the Aesir when the latter came for Loki's children and wound up on Midgardr, hiding in caves and deep in forests . . .

But also, I wondered how the kaunar might gel as a society apart from Mankind, but similar enough that Men might adopt a few of their traits. Hopefully, this makes the kaunar familiar-yet-different.

That's been the hardest part: making a race of creatures not inherently evil but decidedly self-centered, who has no use for Mankind, but who -- according to the edicts of my editor and publisher -- must be sympathetic to modern human readers while not being just a bunch of dudes in Orc costumes . . .

AlamoJack wrote: I want to play more Skyrim and blow off work.

I'm in favor of this! ;)

Greg wrote: Trying to kill a full blood orc is like trying to kill a A Cyberdyne Systems series T-800 Model 101 Terminator, which is why the half-orcs in this world became so crucial for the humans to reach somewhat of an alliance with them.

I so need to pick up a copy of this book . . .

In WoW (never played, and only read a couple of Orc-centric books) and Elder Scrolls Orcs strike me as "green human": noble savages who could easily be idealized human barbarians. I'm guilty of it, too. I've been toying with ways to make Orcs distinct in my own fiction -- mostly by changing the cadence of their speech to mimic that of someone whose mother-tongue isn't English, and by creating a unique social and religious foundation for them.

I'm currently arguing with my editor about the need to make my protagonist sympathetic. My position is I need to make him sympathetic *to other Orcs*, not necessarily to Human readers. He's afraid it will alienate readers, while my hope is they'll trust me and come along for the ride.

I read the free sample at Amazon; need to pick a copy of it up. I have a pet peeve: Orcs that act TOO human; for sake of discussion, why do you folks think so many writers do this? Is it to make their Orcs more identifiable for readers? More sympathetic? Me, personally, I like Orcs that are more than just humans in Orc makeup . . .

S.E. wrote: "No worries, Jack. Just another confirmation that you belong in this group. Funny how many orciphilles are here."

We are legion :)

I need to pick up your book this weekend, Ashe! Congrats!

For novel length works (between 65K and 100K words), the rates start at about $600 USD and go up to $1000 USD -- this is for copy editing, and some light (very light) content editing. For works over 100K words, it's negotiable.

Besides having written four books, I also spent a year working as an acquisitions editor for a small literary agency, which also included getting some of the more promising submissions hammered into shape.

I do, indeed, engage in a bit of freelance editing :)

Boom! :)

I hope very soon to make my research public, but over the last few years I've uncovered some exciting facts about Orcs. Tolkien did, indeed, assign the name "orc" -- though its etymology goes back perhaps to the Latin "Orcus" and thence to the Greek "Phorkys" (who, with Ceto, was the father of quite a few ancient Greek monsters). Tolkien's familiarity with Old Norse brought him into contact with some exceedingly rare documents that were found originally in 1643 by the Bishop of Skalholt in Iceland, as part of the Codex Regius. One particular document seemed to be an aborted version of Sturluson's Gylfaginning, but was later identified (by J. Rathmore at Exeter) as an entirely new cycle that charted the creation myth of a very Orc-like race called the kaunar.

I discovered a few more such documents, all fairly scattered, and a few descriptions of artifacts such as runestones and a preliminary dig report of a site in the Atlas Mtns of Morocco that lend weight to the idea that an orc-like creature or race was once well-attested (no great conspiracy in it flying "under the radar" either: WWI and WWII disrupted much of the research, and it was never published due to illness and death of the various persons working on it).

So, yes . . . Tolkien gave the name "orc" to the race, but he seems to have been working with older myths that have since fallen by the way side.

I'm in the process of recovering posts from the blogspot address before phasing it out. The wordpress blog will be their new home.

To most members of civilized society (and to a goodly number of adventurers along its edges) an Orc is an Orc is an Orc. They are all nasty, brutal creatures who bear no love for the civilization upon which they prey. The sole distinction is whether or not Orcs are the slayers or the slain. But, to an elite cadre of scholars, the study of Orcish affairs and taxonomy is a worthy addition to the corpus of Human knowledge.

Like Man, the Orc comes in a variety of shapes and sizes -- from the monstrous Greenskins of Azeroth to the spindly-legged Goblins of the Misty Mountains. But regardless of their relative size or locale, it is an unassailable fact that all Orcs belong to the genos Orco and can trace their evolution back to a common ancestral species, Orco archaeos. This species was first discovered and described by scholar and author JRR Tolkien. He postulated that Orco archaeos was a slave-race, beholden to higher powers for their will and focus; indeed, through his work on the translation and dissemination of the Red Book of Westmarch, Tolkien discovered copious anecdotal evidence to support his thesis.

But in the intervening years since Tolkien's discovery, other scholars and adventurers have added to the state of Orcish affairs by finding evidence of the existence of a myriad sub-species of O. archeaos. In 1976, renowned artists the Hildebrant brothers unveiled the first of many such sub-species, Orco archeaos varanidae (known in scholarly circles as Hildebrandts' Orcs). Based on sketches on indeterminate origin, the paintings showed creatures that were obviously O. archaeos in shape, but with heads that resembled a nightmarish marriage between a pig and a monitor lizard. Questions were raised, and much doubt was cast as to the validity of the Hildebrandts' discovery until the following year, when insurance salesman-turned-amateur taxonomist, EG Gygax, revealed that he, too, had come across a deviant branch of O. archeaos.

Dubbed Orco sus gygaxia, the Pig-faced Orc, Gygax's discovery spread like wildfire. It caused quite a stir in the salons and parlors of the world -- but that very same world benefited from Gygax's popularity; his influence, and that of Tolkien, spawned a whole generation of scholars. Interest in Orcish affairs soared, and soon new discoveries were being made.

In the early 1980s, in England, a discovery was made that set the scholarly world on its ear. In the cellars of a workshop in central London, workers unearthed a near complete skeleton of an entirely new species of Orc -- larger and hardier than O. archaeos and without any of the porcine features evidenced in O. sus gygaxia. After months of reconstruction and postulation, an unnamed member of the workshop declared the specimen to be Orco necans, the "killer Orc", of the variety known as chlorodermus, or "greenskin". Perhaps Greenskins were invaders from a distant land or world, who interbred with the local strain of O. archaeos; perhaps they were a parallel evolutionary species. Whatever their origins, the spread of O. necans chlorodermus was well-documented via findings brought to light in the latter part of the 20th century.

One of the defining features of O. necans over O. archaeos was not the propensity for hulking builds or green skin, but rather a shift in the mindset of researchers. Tolkien's treatise on O. archeaos emphasized their slave nature: they were servants to powers greater than themselves, footsoldiers as well as fodder; O. necans, however, often acted under their own agency. They were conquerors, tribal or clannish raiders prone to violence and only marginally intelligent -- though some scholars have proposed that strains of Orco necans who fit the classic definition of le bon sauvage must surely have existed (see C. Golden's work on the history of Azeroth). Between the two polarities, the slavish Orco archaeos and the headstrong Orco necans, dozens of authors and historians have staked their claim, from M. Howell's radical thesis that O. necans was a defeated and exploited race similar to the American natives of the 19th century, to S. Nicholls' translated journals of a freedom-loving band of O. archaeos. But, dim-witted or stoic, slave or free, the Orcish character remains intact and visible through their many permutations.

Over the next few years, we're poised to witness a new renaissance in Orcish affairs, with C. Pramas's unified treatise on the history of Orcish warfare seeing the light of day, along with S. Lauderdale's voluminous bibliography of all things Orcish nearing completion. And a forthcoming volume by A. Armstrong posits the existence of a new branch of O. necans chlorodermus. Add to that my own research into a heretofore unknown species of O. archaeos: Orco archaeos nordica, the Norse Orc, which is well-attested to in the fragmentary Lesser Gylfaggining . . .

In all, it's an exciting time to be a scholar of Orcish affairs!

(Originally posted on my blog in 2011, updated for this venue)

Goblins count . . . as a source of food and entertainment (not necessarily in that order).

Actually, here's a copy anyone can read, if they have a mind to. "Amarante" is my first Orc tale, set in the world of Tharduin -- where organized hordes of Orcs have put Humanity on the defensive. Here's a link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14...

Let me know what you think . . .