A Book Develops, Part III

A novel – or its components: character, theme, plot, setting, language – has many sources, many experiences, real and imagined, that work together to create something whose whole is greater than its parts. I am a writer of place, of landscape, and of characters who are shaped by the places they call(ed) home. Many of those places are drawn from my own experiences.

In An Unwise Prince, one of my characters, Cenric, has stuck close to home, a medieval trading centre. Kirt, his partner, has travelled widely, an explorer, a risk taker. Luce has travelled too, but in pursuit of her education in medicine. Then there’s the fourth—young Audun, Cenric’s son, seventeen or eighteen, just finished what might be considered his secondary education, hoping to go home for a while before his next term of study.

I knew Audun was from Torrey, a coastal village (it has a few brief mentions in the Empire series) where his mother runs a workshop making baskets from the reeds and willows of the marshes. I’ve been reading pretty widely on the pre-drainage landscape and ways of life in the fen country of England—not so much for research but because it’s a landscape I love, a love that perhaps has its roots in my genes—or at least in family stories. I’d had a few thoughts about how to use this information to flesh out Audun’s character a little, but they hadn’t coalesced.

Then I started to read Nick Acheson’s The Meaning of Geese, a book about the flocks of geese that return each year to north and west Norfolk to escape the Icelandic and Scandinavian and Russian winters. Acheson—who is a friend of the friend who insisted I needed to read this book—writes in part about his own teenage experiences in the coastal marshes of north Norfolk; about places I know, have walked, can picture in detail. I can hear and feel and smell and see the birds, the wind, the salt in the air, the long views. And suddenly, I had my key to Audun.

The Coal Barn, Thornham Staithe. My photo.

It’s not all there is to Audun, of course, but it lies at the heart of who he is. And gives him a knowledge that may prove useful, later in the story. Or so I think, at this moment in time!

A Book Develops, Part II

Well, I didn’t expect it to be almost three months before I had anything more to say about the next novel! (The first part of this occasional series is here.) January, though, was mostly taken up with finishing other tasks, primarily getting Empire’s Passing ready for release and completing a contracted edit. February took us to Spain, a road trip for birds and Roman ruins and medieval city centres; one of the things I wanted to experience was how remnants of the Roman Empire (or the Eastern Empire, in my fictional world) appeared in a countryside that wasn’t Britain. Something beyond the familiar, to make me see.

Sadly, I don’t have a photo of the image that had the most impact: part of an aqueduct in a random field, and in that field, a man walking his dog. Living with this ancient piece of infrastructure as background to his everyday life. That was the sense I wanted; it will metamorphose, by whatever alchemy happens in a writer’s mind, into what it’s like, 500 years after we last saw my world, to live with the remnants — tangible and intangible –of a past empire.

One of the hardest things I had to find was some scholarly books with a good overview of European history of the later middle ages – roughly 1000 to 1400. Eventually, through discovering the online syllabus to a university course covering that period, and checking its reading list, I ordered two books:

I’ve also signed up for a six-week online course on medieval universities, as the Ti’acha of the first series have developed into something fairly similar (but without the religious context).

I’m still writing exploratory short stories, which can be found, one a month from January onward, on the A Muse Bouche Review. This is a way for me to get to know my characters, and some of the conflicts that the story will be based around.

As my research and character development continues, I’ve realized there are two big challenges ahead of me: which bits of European history to cherry-pick for the books (there’s a LOT going on in Europe and around the Mediterranean in these centuries), and, maybe even harder, to write a novel or novels with at least four POV characters. Two is the most I’ve done before.

But as the book gestates, moving from concept to reality, its lack of a working title was nagging at me. (Titles and book covers make an idea more solid, at least for me.) So here’s a cover mock-up: a place-holder image, and the working titles for both the book and the (presumed) series: All of which may change between now and publication!

‘A wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must endeavour only to avoid hatred.’
The Prince, Chapter XVII
Niccolò Machiavelli

Varril, the elected Princip of Ésparias when the story opens (at this point, at least!) is not a wise prince. Not at all. And on that, it seems, will hang the tale.

(As for the Casillard Confederacy – think of the Hanseatic League, often simply called the Hansard.)

More when there’s more to say!

A Book Develops: Part I

Even before Empire’s Passing, the last book in the Empire’s Legacy series, was partially written, people were asking ‘what’s next?’ To be fair, I had a glimmer of an idea – the same world, about 500 years later, with some aspect of the story derived from the trade alliance of the Hanseatic League.

Passing is done now; I’m just awaiting the paperback proof. It’ll be out in February. I’m in no hurry to write this next book, for many reasons. Key among them is that I know little of 13-14^th C history, so I have a lot of research to do. But books evolve not just from plot but from characters—after all, it is the characters’ responses to the problems and conflicts they are faced with that makes a book interesting. And for me as a writer, characters simply appear, with much of their personalities in place, immutable except through personal growth, their responses to the circumstances of their lives.

Over the next—how long?—year? more?—I plan to record the development of this next book, as much to see if I can elucidate my own process as for anyone else. But you’re welcome to come along on the journey as this yet-without-a-working-title book emerges from research and imagination and craft.

So: where am I now?

Five characters of some importance, so far; one minor ones. Who do we have?

Cenric bé Casille, who describes himself as ‘a man of mature years and a merchant of standing and not insignificant influence’. He’d be about forty.

Kirthan del Candre de Guerdián en Leste, more usually known as Kirthan de Guerdián, another merchant, described by Cenric as ‘made of autumn oak leaves, shades of gold and brown from the short curls of his hair to the tips of his polished boots.’ A few years older than Cenric, known to his intimates as Kirt.

Luce bé Casille, Cenric’s sister. Physician, musician, mid-thirties.

Of some importance is Cenric’s son, Audun, who is about seventeen, and currently attending the equivalent of a cathedral school (equivalent because organized religion continues to play no part in my world) at which his great-uncle (Cenric and Luce’s uncle) teaches. The so far unnamed great-uncle will be an important secondary character, I think.

The first three characters (and the minor one of Cenric’s housekeeper) are introduced in an exploratory short story called The Onion Tart, published this month in A Muse Bouche Review. There will be more of these character-exploring stories: some may become part of the book, some won’t. I don’t think The Onion Tart will, but its description of the meeting of Cenric and Kirt will be background (and canon!).

Meanwhile, while Cenric and Kirt and others tell me little bits about themselves, my first research book is Seb Falks’s The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. Its focus is the 14^th C, but the advantage of writing historically inspired speculative fiction is I can borrow from adjacent centuries, as long (my own rule) I’m not blatantly anachronistic with technology.

More to come, when there’s more to say!

Part II is here.

The Birth of a World

Yesterday, I was tidying shelves in my study. I found a spiral-bound notebook, a multiple-subject one with interior dividers, rather old and battered. For some reason, I leafed through it, checking to see if it was unused, I think.

Most of it was. But in the third section, there were a few pages of notes. The date on the top of the page was December 22, 1997. Twenty-three years ago, plus a few days. The first part of the entry was banal, comments on the weather (cold). But then:

The idea of an alternate world, a separate reality, similar to those of LeGuin in the EarthSea trilogy or Lynn, in the Dancers of Arun trilogy, is appealing. Into this world I could fit not only Lena, but Widowmaker, and, in a different form than first envisaged, even the story of my Norfolk family – all but the murder mystery, which is an entirely different genre.
Sometime over the holiday I hope to sketch the world, clearly Europe but modified – and perhaps do a rough timeline.

I just stared at it for a minute. I was 39 when I wrote those words; I’m 62 now. In that brief paragraph is the genesis of the world and characters that have lived in my mind for over two decades, and an acknowledgment of the two major influences in my world-building, Ursula LaGuin and Elizabeth A. Lynn. I felt like a historian of my own mind.

Several reactions occurred. (One of which was ‘good gods, my handwriting was nearly legible back then’.) Surprise was dominant: surprise that Lena – my MC of the Empire’s Legacy trilogy – had a name, a presence, as early as 1997. There must have been some work done, some notes or early paragraphs, because I’d treated Lena as a title, underlining it as academia taught me to (a habit I’ve never broken.) Another surprise was that my decision to create an alternate world, my analogue post-Roman northern Europe, was a conscious choice: I thought it had just emerged as I’d written.

And then there was the mystery: what was Widowmaker? Again, underlined, so a title. Of what? I had no memory at all of it…but as the afternoon progressed, and I thought about the word’s connotations for me (not the gun, nor the video-game character): a storm and fishing fleets, I remembered. At the time of Kenneth McAlpine, king of the Scots in the mid 9th century, the Picts ‘disappear’ from history. A theory proposed was the loss of most of their men in a ‘widowmaking’ storm while they were out fishing, leaving the women to be subsumed into the Gaelic culture. Clearly, I’d meant to do something with this concept.

Which, I believe, I did, because Empire’s Daughter opens with Lena, in her fishing boat, returning to a village devoid of men. For very different reasons…but was that seed of the idea that grew into my gender-divided world? I can’t know, so many years later. But I suspect so.

Then, of course, I spent some time leafing through other partly-filled notebooks, looking for more entries like this one, but without success. They must have existed, but in one bout of tidying up or another, they’ve been lost. Not that it matters: none would hold the wonder for me this one did, this glimpse into the birth of the alternate reality that I live in for at least part of each and every day.

A Landscape of the Heart: Building the World of my Books.

The English county of Norfolk, as those who have been following my blog for some time know, is my second home. When I will see it again, in the wake of COVID-19, is another question, but it has a firm hold on my heart, my imagination, and a solid place in the construction of my fictional world.

Anyone who knows Norfolk – and my books – may now be asking how? A flat land, for the most part; arable, with little rivers and chalky soils and patches of reedy fen. Not the hilly, sheep-grazed moorland that so much of my world encompasses. No, the influences are more subtle.

Firstly, Norfolk was part of the Danelaw, the part of England under Scandinavian rule. Twenty-nine existing places in Norfolk have ‘thorpe’ as a suffix or prefix, and while this happens to be my last name, its meaning ‘outlying hamlet, small village’ is from the Norse þorp, and from it I take my settlement names in Linrathe and Sorham. In fact, Ingoldstorp, mentioned several times over the series, is the name of the village (Ingoldisthorpe, pronounced Inglesthorpe) just north of the one where I have spent my winters since retirement.

The next village north from that is Snettisham, and I borrowed Snetti’s name, too, for a minor character. There are more examples, but I won’t belabour this point. But in the last paragraph I wrote ‘twenty-nine existing places’. There are also thirty-three ‘lost’ villages in Norfolk with ‘thorpe’ in their names, and it is these missing settlements that also inform my world.

Deserted medieval village is the correct term for these abandoned settlements. In many cases there is nothing but a few lumps and bumps on the ground, and perhaps the ruins of a church. (Or sometimes, a church still in use, but standing in the middle of nowhere, apparently.) The reasons for abandonment are many, including land enclosure and parkland created for manor houses. Others suffered as rivers changed course or land flooded. But in Norfolk, one reason was simply depopulation.

Norfolk is now 40^th of the 48 counties of England in population density, the number of people per unit of land. But in the middle ages, it was the most populous county, and its county town, Norwich, the second city of England. Until the plague: first the Black Death in 1349; then, two centuries later, a third of its population died in the epidemic of 1579, and another third in 1665.

The land Lena inhabits is like this, a depopulated land, villages scattered and distant, too few men to defend the land against threats from two directions. The reasons for the Empire’s depopulation and that of Norfolk are pretty much the same, although the Eastern Fever isn’t the Black Death.

But while Norfolk – and the Empire – are depopulated lands, they both have long histories. If Lena rides east from her coastal village, she will come to the military road, running north and south, wide and paved. If I walk or drive east from my Norfolk village, about, in my mind, the same distance, I come to a Roman road, running north and south. No longer paved; no longer very wide, but a reminder, every time I walk it, of a time there was a Roman fort on the coast, and villas along the ridge overlooking the Wash, and the coins in use bore the likenesses of emperors far away.

Danes and Romans; disease and depopulation; all these are important aspects of my books, influenced – sometimes consciously, sometimes not – by what I know. Not reproduced, but borrowed, moulded and transmuted into a different form, almost recognizable, almost history.

map of Scandinavian place names https://www.mygen.com/users/outlaw/Outlawe_Viking_Origins.htm

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“I’m only a kid.”

“Welcome, Prince,” said Aslan. “Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?”
“I – I don’t think I do, Sir,” said Caspian. “I’m only a kid.”
“Good,” said Aslan. “If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been a proof that you were not.”
~ C. S. Lewis

In my book Empire’s Reckoning, Ruar, the heir to Linrathe, the land north of the Wall, is proclaimed its leader when he is fourteen. While I call what I write ‘historical fiction of another world’, most of it is firmly grounded in actual history. Ruar isn’t automatically the leader (Teannasach) of his country; he’s chosen by a council of nobles, a process based on both the Witan of the Anglo-Saxon kings and the methods of choosing a king in early-medieval Scotland.

While Linrathe is based on Scotland, very few reliable records exist about very early Scottish monarchs. More is known of those who ruled in England. So it is reasonable, historically, that Ruar would have been chosen to lead? He has a couple of things going for him: he’s a son of the traditional ruling house, and, he’s fought in battle, so his nobles respect him. If we look at the kings of England (which wasn’t really all of England, but that’s another story) in the 10^th C, here’s who we have:

Edmund I (ruled 949 – 946) was 17 or 18 when he was crowned, and like Ruar had fought for his country in a very bloody battle two years earlier. He died young, and was succeeded by his older half-brother, who ruled for nine years. But after his death, Edmund’s oldest son, Eadwig, succeeded: he was somewhere between 14 and 16. Three or four years later, his brother Edgar succeeded him, also at about 16. Two even younger monarchs followed: Edward the Martyr, who was about 13 when he was crowned, and Aethelred, who was about 10. They were all related; like Ruar, born into the ruling house. So, based on what we know about early-medieval kingship in Britain, it’s entirely likely Ruar would, indeed, be chosen leader.

How much these young men ruled without regents or a council is a matter of debate, but then, neither does Ruar. Nor is this limited to pre-conquest Britain: Edward III of England was 14 when he was crowned, although his infamous mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer were regents for him until Edward’s successful coup d’etat at 17 – the same year Edward’s first child was born to his slightly younger wife.

Which brings me to another subject – and a thorny one in historical fiction: the ages at which people were considered adult, whether it was for marriage or kingship or the inheritance of land. It’s a subject of discussion among my characters, too, but what happens in my world reflects what happened in Britain and Rome in the equivalent time period.

But, returning to my original subject, young leaders are not restricted to the far-distant past. Alfonso XIII of Spain, who had been king from birth due to his father’s death, took on all the rights and responsibilities of kingship on his 16^th birthday in 1902. So perhaps, in a parallel world 1200 years previously, it’s not that unlikely that 14-year-old Ruar assumes the leadership of his land!

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