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My mother told me about Tales of Byzantium by Eileen Stephenson, after hearing I had been reading P.M. Prescott’s historical fiction. It is a collection of three short stories, all set in medieval Byzantium. One is a romance, one is a war story, and one is essentially a piece of characterization.

Stephenson is a very versatile writer. Each story has a distinct tone to it that is appropriate for the genre of each. Personally, I liked the war story “The Red Fox” best–though that is only a personal preference matter. As Mr. Prescott can attest, I tend to prefer war stories to romance. All the characters are very well drawn and differentiated in each story.

“The Red Fox” has the most complex narrative structure of the three stories, and I think it is the most effective. It begins with a military commander arriving to tell the Emperor about a bold gamble he has made, then flashing back to recount the events that precipitated it, and then concluding with the emperor’s response. It is well paced and I liked the plot.

The final story “Alexiad” may not work as well if the reader is familiar with the historical figures involved; but I found it to be a nicely done story of the evolution of a personality. That said, the ending felt slightly rushed. It seemed like there was a lot of a build-up for a payoff that, while satisfying, could have been taken more slowly. Of the three, I think “Alexiad” has the most potential to be expanded into a longer tale.

The only quibble I have is one quite common in historical fiction: the clash of esoteric terms with modern ones. Since most of Stephenson’s characters speak in modern English, it is jarring to occasionally have ancient words like “Exkoubitores” interspersed. Obviously, this is a necessary conceit of the genre, and Stephenson was wise to avoid adding pages of parenthetical definitions, but even so it has the effect of taking the reader out of the action.

The other slight problem is occasionally plot developments are conveyed by telling, rather than showing. This is particularly an issue in the middle of the second and the beginning of the third story. It’s a problem every writer faces at some point, and it’s especially hard to overcome in historical fiction, but I felt that certain things that could have been explained in dialogue were instead simply told in omniscient narration.

However, these are minor issues, and the book is extremely enjoyable on the whole. It is very carefully edited, which is a plus–many self-published books suffer from sloppy proofreading. Not this one.

I suspect someone with a more thorough knowledge of Byzantium would get more out of the book than I did, (though it may also ruin some of the surprises) but from my layman’s perspective, it was very good indeed.

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One of my publisher’s core values is that their products–be they apps, books, or what have you–never collect user data. This is, on balance, a very good thing, as many users find it intrusive to download a product only to find that is collecting their personal information.

There is only one drawback to this policy, and that is that I never know who has bought my books. Which would be awfully nice to know, because I want to show I appreciate them. I know Barb Knowles of saneteachers is a recent customer, and I can’t thank her enough for her support. But, thanks to her, I’ve seen a real uptick in sales of The Start of the Majestic World lately, and I want to thank all my new readers for their interest. I hope you enjoy the book!

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Via Paul Graham, a WSJ article on teaching kids to write by banning them from using certain “boring” words, such as “good” “bad”, “fun” and “said”.  To quote from the article:

“There are so many more sophisticated, rich words to use,” said (or affirmed) Ms. Shelton, whose manual “Banish Boring Words” has sold nearly 80,000 copies since 2009.

Her pupils know better than to use a boring word like “said.” As Ms. Shelton put it, “ ‘Said’ doesn’t have any emotion. You might use barked. Maybe howled. Demanded. Cackled. I have a list.”

This reminded me of novelist Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing, one of which was: “Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue.”

And people wonder why kids have trouble learning to write.

So then, who is right: the teacher or the novelist? My answer: it depends.

There are times when using something other than “said” is appropriate.  This is especially true with humor–saying “burbled” is so much better than “said” if you want people to laugh.

That said, you can go too far with it.  And since Leonard’s goal was to make the writer “invisible”, I would say in that case sticking with “said” is usually a good idea.

My rule of thumb: if it sounds right, use it.  If “said” doesn’t sound right, but “called” does, use “called”.  But don’t spend your time trying to find some other bizarre word if “said” will do.

Take this exchange from my novella, The Start of the Majestic World:

Maynard and Brett sat outside on the steps that led into the headquarters.  Brett was studying schematics of a sniper rifle on his tablet.  Maynard stared straight ahead, deep in thought.

“I’ve received no communication of any kind from anybody at the Bureau,” muttered Brett. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah, it does;” said Maynard slowly. “This is a Dead Zone.  They are blocking any signal they don’t want getting in.”

Brett nodded.  “And most likely any they don’t want getting out, too.”

“Yes.”

“But D.C. would know it was being blocked.  Any decent Intel machine would—”

“They want it blocked,” she said. “They don’t want to know, and he doesn’t want to tell them.  It’s better for everyone that way.  I’ve seen it a million times—I’ve just never been on the wrong end of plausible deniability before.”

The two agents sat in silence for a minute.

“They have to be listening to us,” said Brett.

“Probably,” said Maynard. “But they don’t give a damn what we say.  They figure there’s nothing we can do.”

The first time Brett speaks, I used “muttered” to indicate he was still looking at the rifle schematic, and not thinking fully about talking.  When Maynard responds, it becomes “said” because now they are just having a conversation.  And I dropped “said” or any variants after that, and left it to the reader to follow.

Leonard had some other interesting rules.  I took particular note of these two:

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

As I wrote recently, I used to believe this too.  Then I wrote a collection of short stories that contained very little description, and my readers complained that there wasn’t enough description.

I thought there must be some other problem.  So I wrote a novella that contained very little description, and my readers complained that there wasn’t enough description.

Was Leonard just wrong? Seems unlikely–he was an award-winning novelist. I am guessing it’s more that once you are a really good writer, it doesn’t take much effort to describe someone or something.  It barely feels like you are doing anything when you know exactly what words to use.  There have been great authors (John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald) who could take things that were not very interesting in themselves, and write gorgeous descriptive passages about them.

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Longtime friend of this blog Maggie Swanson recently published a collection of her blog posts from over the past five years.  It includes many of her poems, opinion posts, fiction and artwork.  Asb8e93-bookcoverimage she has been one of my most loyal readers, I just had to read it.

It is a very enjoyable collection, and as a long time reader of her blog, it was fun to revisit some of the old posts.  I could remember reading many of them when they were originally posted years ago, and it was a pleasure to revisit them. For anyone who hasn’t read them, I recommend getting this book.  Maggie has a talent for poetry, and is extremely inventive in the way she plays with the language.

My only complaint has nothing to do with the book’s content, but rather with its formatting.  I’m not sure how much control she has over this even, but sometimes titles of poems would appear at the bottom of one page, and the entire poem on the next page.  Also, because the book is printed in black and white, much of the originally colorful artwork suffers as a result.  but I imagine it would be extremely expensive to print in color, so this may be unavoidable.

These issues aside, it’s a delightful collection of posts; well worth it for the clever poetry alone. I’ve learned over the past two years just how hard it is to publish a book, so I’m glad she was able to do it. You can get “Whaddya Know!” here.

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I’m not sure how many people will get this, but here goes. So, I was riding the bus the other day, and the fellow who stepped on in front of me was a massive, mustachioed fellow, and I instantly thought “My God, he looks exactly like Ignatius J. Reilly!” He really did–I mean he was dressed better than the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s strange comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, but he had the look and manner to a “T”.

What makes this extra funny is that a bus ride figures prominently in Reilly’s backstory.  So not only did he look like Reilly, he was even in a situation like Reilly himself might be found in.

“A strange coincidence”, you say.  So I thought too.  But in itself, not the sort of thing worth posting about.  Odd, but not really that odd–there are lots of heavy-set, mustachioed guys in the world.

But then, dear readers, we reached the realm of the truly uncanny.

It was about a 20 minute ride, and I was standing directly behind the Reilly doppelganger.  During the 20 minutes, the bus stopped a few times, and two different passengers sat next to him.  He conversed with both of them; though I got the sense he didn’t know either of them.

With the first passenger, he talked about theology.  After that one left, he talked with the next one about geometry.

I swear I am not kidding. For those who haven’t read the book–and make no mistake, you have to read the book to truly understand this–Ignatius J. Reilly is always talking about how modern society needs “theology and geometry”.  It’s like a running joke in the book, mostly because it seems like such an odd combination.  And here was someone actually talking about these things.

I was waiting for the Twilight Zone music to start.  It was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had.

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Historical fiction is a difficult genre.  The writer has to try to balance accurate details of historical events with the need to maintain an interesting and well-paced dramatic story.  While history is full of dramatic incidents, the pace of history is not the pace of interpersonal events, and the great tales of history rarely can be told neatly in the way a purely fictional tale must be.

So, I have to applaud my fellow blogger P.M. Prescott for even attempting such a work with his novel, Optimus: Praetorian Guard.  The novel follows the career of a Roman soldier, Sextus Cassius Optimus, spanning roughly from the reign of Nero to the end of the Flavian Dynasty.

Optimus begins as a rough-and-tumble soldier, who craves women, wine and gambling.  However, when he is assigned to guard Paul the Apostle, he gradually is converted to the new Christian religion through talking with the prisoner, as well as his scribe, Luke.  Thereafter, Optimus changes his ways and begins to atone for many of his past misdeeds.  The second half of the book follows how Optimus and his Christian family and friends are affected by turmoil in the Roman Empire.

The protagonist is well fleshed-out, and his character arc is satisfying.  He goes from being an aggressive, almost sex-crazed man with a hot temper to a more calm, reasonable person after his religious conversion.  I especially liked when, during his turn to Christianity, he likens the spiritual and emotional discipline of the Christians to the military discipline of the Roman legions. It makes the character seem more realistic, as this really is the way a person would come to such a realization.

The biggest flaw in the novel lies, ironically, in what is probably one of Prescott’s greatest strengths: his knowledge of history. P.M. was a history teacher, and his knowledge of his subject absolutely comes through here.  The problem is, unfortunately, that this strength–absolutely indispensable for this type of book–also at times detracts from the flow of the story.  There were a few instances where there was a little too much information on things like Roman military tactics, or background information on Roman politics, that was delivered in a manner that halted the flow of the story.

I don’t envy Prescott’s challenge here–indeed, it’s almost a no-win situation for any author.  Had there been less background information, readers who have little familiarity with ancient Rome might not understand certain plot points. (For example, why one character is unable to leave her abusive husband under Roman law.) But on the other hand, when the background information is put in, it risks boring readers who came for the entertaining story, not the history lessons.

In a few places, Prescott gets around this by having the exposition lines delivered by adults explaining things to children.  This is a good device, since it makes logical sense for children to not understand everyday customs.

My only major criticism of the book would be that it might have been better to trust readers to learn some information for themselves, either from the context or else from their own research.  The occasional lengthy descriptions of Roman customs, though interesting to a historian, kill the dramatic flow.

Despite this issue, however, I very much enjoyed Optimus, and would recommend it to anyone who likes Roman history, or history in general.  My favorite scenes are the conversations Optimus has with Luke and Paul.  Prescott is not afraid to have his protagonist raise some tough theological/philosophical questions, or to have them answered in an appropriately thought-provoking manner. It’s a very interesting and compelling depiction of Christianity in its infancy, and helps give a sense of both how and why what was initially a very small offshoot of Judaism grew to have such influence.

I highly encourage my readers to check it out.  I know first-hand that writing and self-publishing a book is a very difficult undertaking, and it’s always nice to get some support and feedback.  Prescott has been a great help to me, both as a blogger and as an author, and I’d like to see his work get some well-deserved recognition.

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The original cover was more of a placeholder–I’ve now gotten a new cover that I think captures the mood of the book much better.

SotMW
Click to see more information and to buy.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t thank my blogger friends for their help. So thank you, Thingy and P.M. Prescott, for reading and letting me know your thoughts.

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Wow, I thought I was ready for anything out of Go Set a Watchman, but I was not expecting her to start quoting from Gilbert and Sullivan. Longtime readers will know how happy this makes me.

I haven’t read the entire book yet. I just opened it at random when I got my copy. So this is not my real review, but I’m going to follow Thingy’s lead and give my opinion on the whole Atticus Finch issue without having read all of it.

I’ve heard and read a lot of people reading into the “meaning” of Atticus’s change; saying it shows the book is about disillusionment, fallen idols.  Other people are saying it ruins their love for the character in the original book.

Here’s the thing: Watchman is a first draft of Mockingbird.  The fact that the Atticus character changed from the first draft to the finished product doesn’t necessarily have an artistic meaning; it just means Harper Lee wanted to rework the character’s assigned function.

To a reader, characters are people–we react emotionally to them as we would to real people, and judge them as we would real people. To an author, though, a character is also a tool for fulfilling some larger role in the story.  It might be that they are there to convey a theme, or sometimes just to drive the plot. A good writer, like Lee, disguises the fact that these characters are cogs in a machine by making them seem very human and real, but that’s still what they are: platforms for conveying relevant themes/plot points/emotions. And sometimes, when you are editing something, you say: “Hmm, I need to change what characters are assigned what functions–what if I assign function x to character z instead of character y?”

From what I’ve seen, it looks like Lee just changed what the Atticus character’s function was between the first draft and the final version. In modern lingo, the character in Mockingbird is the Atticus Finch “reboot”.  And it’s a mistake to read this as character “development”.  Characters do sometimes change their personalities over the course of a story to suit a narrative or thematic point–in fact, that’s a hallmark of good writing.  But it’s not what we’re talking about here.  This is just a straight-up rewrite from what I can see.

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Over the last year, I feel like I’ve written more books than I’ve read cover to cover.  I’ve been too busy to really sit down and focus on something–I’ve mainly just perused things here and there.  (Though as part of my research for the post on Napoleon, I did read a biography of him by Alan Forrest.) I have recently bought and started reading my fellow blogger P.M. Prescott’s book, Optimus: Praetorian Guard. He was kind enough to read and review my book, so I want to return the favor. I hope to have it finished and a review posted soon.

It also sounds like I am going to have to read this new Harper Lee book, which seems to be stirring up all kinds of controversy, especially regarding what happens to the beloved Atticus Finch character.  (To be honest,  I never thought of Atticus as a Saint like most people do–he seemed like a nice guy, but a bit too idealistic for his own good.  I mean, he never realized just what a threat Bob Ewell posed until it was too late.)

I’m also reading the book The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington.  It’s a bit dated, but still advances some interesting ideas.  Some of his points about the rise of Islam is certainly relevant to what is currently happening in the Middle East.  All things considered, he was closer to the mark than his rival political theorist, Francis Fukuyama. And nothing says “summer beach read” like the downfall of civilization as we know it.

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As promised, my new novella is available now.  Click the image below to get it:

Here’s the description from the Amazon page:

“Agents Maynard and Brett are no strangers to complex mysteries and morally grey assignments. When they are sent in pursuit of a mysterious rabble-rousing radio personality, however, they stumble upon a web of conspiracy and betrayal beyond anything they could have imagined. As events lead them from the brooding hills of Appalachia to the remotest wastes of Siberia to the deserts of the American southwest, they discover unlikely allies and twisted madmen, scientists bent on playing God, and mounting evidence hinting at sinister machinations that threaten the entire nation. With each thrilling episode, the ever-escalating power and scope of the danger they face forces them to call upon all their skills and experience to survive.”