Category Archives: Writing

Reviews, Writing

‘The Tomorrow War,’ and other struggles

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I watched Amazon Prime’s The Tomorrow War, starring Christ Pratt and Yvonne Strahovski. Everybody’s talking about it, and the praise has been about equal to the derision among my friends on Basefook.

I liked it fine. I’m not in a position to review it properly, because I had it on mainly as background noise while working on the new Erling book. I keep hearing about plot holes, and plot holes are a congenital problem in time travel stories. I have to admit I didn’t catch the holes. The story worked pretty well for me, and there was a satisfying resolution.

My problem with the movie was the same thing that keeps coming up in action movies (and books) everywhere nowadays – the equal participation of women in violence. I confess to my great, patriarchal sin – I hate seeing women slaughtered.

Now logically, in a situation like that in this movie, where the women are going to die horribly anyway if they lose, so they might as well fight, it makes logical sense.

But for me, it’s not entertainment. And I think it’s intended to desensitize us to violence against women, for political purposes.

So that was my problem with the story. Otherwise, I enjoyed it. Even teared up a little (in a manly way) at the end.

J. K. Simmons, as usual, was great.

Meanwhile, I came up with a new scene for the Erling book that pleased me quite a lot, in concept. Based on material in Flatey Book, mostly unknown to Heimskringla readers. Only I couldn’t figure out how to finish the scene, how to bring it home.

This morning, in the process of waking up, the resolution became clear to me.

And it rested on a point of theology I’d been contemplating the other day.

That’s really, tremendously satisfying.

Uncategorized, Writing

Olaf in eclipse

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Painting of the Battle of Stiklestad by Peter Nikolai Arbo

I must be working on the novel, because I’m not progressing very fast in my reading of Caimh McDonnell’s latest book (which is great, by the way; it’s not for lack of interest). In case you’re losing sleep over my car repair problems, I learned today that the ETA for the replacement part is now June 30. This was, as you might expect, no surprise to me at all at this point.

What shall I write about? How about something I learned from John Marsden’s Harald Hardrada book (favorably reviewed a few inches down)?

It has to do with King Olaf Haraldsson, Saint Olaf (or Olav) of Norway. He appeared in my latest book, The Elder King, and also has a major role in the one I’m working on, King of Rogaland.

I do not like this man. He emerges as a recognizable character in the sagas, and although those sagas are generally intended to promote his sainthood, the writers often had the insight to “paint him warts and all.” And this was a guy with a lot of warts.

Marsden’s book includes an interesting discussion of the date of the Battle of Stiklestad, where Olaf was killed. (Incidentally, I recently learned that one of my great-grandfathers was born on the island of Ytterøy, which is located in a fjord and almost in walking distance of the battlefield [once you get out of the water]).

There’s an anomaly in the standard accounts of the battle. The very first skaldic poems celebrating it (written by Sigvat the Skald, who also appears in The Elder King), tell how a solar eclipse occurred in the very midst of the battle. The problem is, the traditional date for the battle is July 29, but the eclipse occurred August 31. I’ve always inclined to the view that people remembered the battle and the eclipse as extraordinary events, and eventually conflated them. But Marsden points out that Sigvat (who wasn’t in the battle; he was on a pilgrimage to Rome at the time) would have been well-informed about the battle at a very early date. Also, the time of day given for the eclipse in the sagas is spot on.

Marsden passes on a possible explanation, suggested by “the editor of a long-respected English translation of Olaf the Saint’s saga.” This theory involves an error in interpreting a theoretical lost document (which I always consider a tenuous stratagem for scholars), but it works out quite neatly. If the original text of this X Document said that the battle occurred “1029 years and two-hundred and nine days since Christ’s birth,” and you reckon hundreds in the customary way, figuring January 1 as the first day of the year, you get July 29.

However – the Vikings counted in what are called “long hundreds.” When they said 100, they actually meant 120. All figures in the sagas need to be adjusted for that.

If you convert “1029 years and two-hundred and nine days” to long hundreds, and start your count at December 25 (a common date for figuring New Year’s Day at the time), you get the precise date of August 31.

That’s pretty neat, it seems to me. My plan, if I live so long, is to write a book about Olaf and Stiklestad a couple books from now, as a sort of sequel to Erling’s Saga. I think I’ll use this date for it, because that eclipse is a really cool bit of atmospheric staging.

Writing

Of convection and creative angst

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Nice day, though the coolness of the earlier week (highs in the 70s) has passed like a memory of youth. It got up to 90 degrees today. This is annoying when I drive my loaner car (a Honda Civic), because the driver’s side window won’t roll down partially – it’s full commitment one way or the other. Like all sane vehicle operators, I like to leave the windows cracked about an inch when I park on a hot day, but with this one I can only do one side. You don’t get the cross-ventilation.

And yes, Miss Ingebretsen, my PT Cruiser, still languishes at the transmission shop. They tell me they think they’ve located the cables we need, and might possibly have them tomorrow.

I’ve heard this song before.

Anyway, the Civic gets me around – and with a little more zip than Miss Ingebretsen, I have to admit. Had to go to the dermatologist for an annual check-up this afternoon; I won’t disgust you with details about that. Nothing serious. My flesh is generally uninteresting (as many women have noted over the years), which is what you’d inspect in a man who gets less Ultraviolet than the average Morlock.

I arrived precisely on time, to be confronted with a sign that said “No Admittance Without a Face Mask.” This shouldn’t have surprised me – they’d made it clear when we scheduled the appointment. They get cancer patients with compromised immunity in there. But I hadn’t thought about it. I keep a stock of masks in Miss Ingebretsen for just such emergencies. But of course they’re baking in the transmission shop lot right now. And it never occurred to me to stash any in the Civic.

So I stood outside the clinic door, and called them on my cell phone. When the woman behind the desk answered, I made eye contact and told her, “I’m standing outside the door talking to you. This is embarrassing, but I haven’t got a face mask…”

She waved me in and handed me one from the cache I expected them to have there. No doubt I’m not the first patient in that situation.

What else to say? I’m revising, revising, revising on King of Rogaland. It’s amazing how lame (yet resonant) my Negative Interior Voice’s arguments are – “This is hopeless. You’ll never finish it.” Despite the fact that the thing is essentially written, and I’m just polishing now. Though it’s true the bumps never seem to run out. I’ve still got a lot of loose plot ends to tie up, and some ends are tied to the wrong other ends, and so need to be untied and re-tied somewhere else. This is far from the longest novel I’ve ever written, but it seems to be the most complex. Lots to keep track of.

I think I may not be smart enough to write this book.

But I plan to finish it anyway. When did I ever claim to be smart?

Religion, Writing

Making new friends through novel writing

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Nicolai Cleve Broch as Saint Olav in the annual Stiklestad Play, near Trondheim. Photo by Leif Arne Holme/NRK, 2004.

Enjoyed a minor writer’s pleasure today, as I worked on the new Erling book.

I went over this one scene I’d added during the last revision. I always feel uncertain about inserted scenes, worrying that the graft might not take (even though most of the time I insert them precisely because I feel something’s missing at that point).

But it did work. Quite well, actually. Not only dramatically, but emotionally. The scene moved me, in fact. Which is always a surprise, like playing a practical joke on yourself.

The scene centered on King Olaf Haraldsson – Saint Olaf. Who is, in the great scheme of the series, the villain. In spite of the fact that he’s the patron saint of my second favorite country, the man was a totalitarian. Also a heretic, in my view, because I consider the use of violence in evangelism heretical. So I approached this project prepared to give him a waxed mustache and a black top hat.

But a funny thing happened as I wrote. I started getting under his skin. The first breakthrough came some years back, when I was talking about Olav’s life with a (longsuffering) friend.

I told him about a story from the Icelandic Flatey Book, not included in Heimskringla (the usual source). Flatey Book explains how Olaf was named after an ancestor, a great king called Olaf Geirstad-Elf, believed to have had supernatural powers. In the old heathen religion, naming a child after a recently dead relation was thought to cause a sort of reincarnation. The new baby was believed to be, in some sense, that ancestor reborn. (Yes, they also believed in Valhalla. And they believed the ancestor slept in his grave mound. Consistency played no part in their theology.) So Olaf was raised believing that he was really a wizard who’d lived before. His foster father Rani even dug into Olaf Geirstad-Elf’s grave mound and removed the ancient family sword, Besing, which was then given to young Olaf.

But Olaf sailed abroad as a Viking, saw a bit of the world, and chose to be baptized a Christian. We’re never told what he thought of his supposed reincarnation, in light of his new faith.

But there’s a story in Flatey Book about how he rode his horse one day past his ancestor’s grave mound. And suddenly a terror came over him. He turned his horse around and galloped off, giving orders that no one should stray near that mound again.

As I told that story to my friend, I suddenly felt I had an insight into Olaf’s psychology. He’d had a traumatic experience there at the grave mound. It instilled in him a terror of the old religion, a fear that he’d be sucked back into the power of a horrific ancestral curse. This helped explain his whole approach to Christianization.

I don’t think I’ll ever be an Olaf booster. His actions are too repellant.

But I think I’m beginning to sympathize with him. A little.

Which leads me to the inevitable thought…

After a thousand years dead, this S.O.B. is charming me! No wonder they made him patron saint!

Uncategorized, Writing

The transmission lockdown, continued

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I’m reading a book right now that I’m enjoying very much. But it’s long. Looooooooong. So the stream of consciousness blogging must continue, regardless of the cost in pain and suffering to our audience.

On the automobile front, my car, Miss Ingebretsen, yet languishes in durance vile, in the transmission shop. I learned today that the transmission itself is all right. It’s the shifter that’s broken. They’re trying to find me a used shifter, and I guess those things must be harder to find than you’d expect. Maybe tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll have to use Door Dash for groceries again.

If you skipped the video above, take a minute to watch it. It’s not much longer than that. It’s the Dragon Harald Fairhair, the big Viking ship I hoped to see in Duluth a few years back, but was disappointed. Seriously, was anything ever more romantic than that graceful ship cutting through a stormy sea? That (or the idea of it, anyway) was what surprised me by joy nearly 60 years ago, making me a lifelong Viking nut, and pointing me to my destiny, as a highly peripheral figure in the world of Norwegian history, literature, and entertainment. And, oh yes, a novelist.

I can report that I’m still working on the new Erling book, King of Rogaland. Its current status hovers in a weird space where the book is essentially written, but far from finished. We speak of “polishing” a manuscript, and that’s what it is. Very like sanding wood. Going over the same surface again and again, smoothing out the rough spots. I’ve got a few passages where I’ve left out place names I still need to select, with a map. And there are joints that aren’t tight. Once this current pass is finished, working onscreen, I think I need to print the next draft out, and labor over it on paper. Some things work better with a red pen and notes and swoopy arrows. Especially when you need to hunt through the pages multiple times.

Also, I’ve never gotten a splinter polishing a manuscript.

Publishing, Writing

Writing pains, prolonged

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Demonstration of Proper Writing Position, from Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms. Wikimedia Commons.

Nearing the end of my formatting/proofreading of The Year of the Warrior text, in hopeful pursuit of a new paperback edition.

I approached this project with some trepidation. I had fond memories of writing the book, and I didn’t want to be disillusioned by the reality. I had an awkward idea that parts of it must be pretty bad, and I didn’t want to stare into that void.

Overall, I’m pleased. Where the book is good, I think it’s pretty good. Sometimes my prose can soar. I make interesting use of poetry, both original poetry and psalms, and I think those passages function a little like a movie score, raising the emotional level of the whole exercise. I am my own John Williams.

But there are flabby spots. I’m way too preachy toward the beginning of Part 2, The Ghost of the God-Tree. I don’t think I’d make that mistake today – I wrote this more than 20 years ago, and I hope I’ve learned a few things about my craft. I think I won’t be entirely ashamed to sell this book. A little ashamed, yes, but also proud, overall.

Today was a beautiful day in Minneapolis, 70 degrees and sunny, as we all watch reports of the Chauvin trial from the corners of our eyes. We hope for the best, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario that isn’t pretty awful. A Chinese restaurant I patronize quite a lot opened for indoor dining again today, and I was there for lunch. It was nice, but I had a sense, as I sat there among a multi-ethnic crowd, that we were all uneasy.

At times like this, one is tempted to ask, “Does novel writing matter?”

And I answer, “Of course it does.”

I have a delusion that somewhere in Heaven, Erling Skjalgsson is pulling for me. And Father Ailill, or someone like him.

Writing

Writing pains

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Writing a book has sometimes been compared to giving birth. I can’t speak to the comparison; it’s for female writers to comment on such matters – not that I generally listen to female writers these days.

But I was in metaphorical labor last night, working on the new Erling book, King of Rogaland. As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve finished the first draft, but that’s very far from finishing the job. I’ve been particularly concerned about the second half, which seemed to cover the plot ground way too fast, and to be insufficiently linked to the first half. So I took one character, whom I’d sent offstage at about the half-way point, and signed him on for another tour of duty. I also decided I needed some more fantasy action. All yesterday, when I wasn’t working on proofreading The Year of the Warrior, I was thinking about a scene to insert.

Thinking is the embarrassing part of writing. It doesn’t look like you’re doing any work. It also doesn’t feel like you’re doing any work. It only amplifies that voice in your head that keeps telling you you’ve lost it… if you ever had it at all.

In the C.S. Lewis story collection, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, there’s a story called “Ten Years After.” It was, I believe, the last attempt Lewis ever made to start a novel (it’s about Helen of Troy). But it’s very short. By the time he wrote it, Lewis was near the end of his life. His health was failing (something glossed over in both filmed versions of “Shadowlands”), and he’d never really gotten over his wife’s death. He just couldn’t find the energy or creativity to write fiction anymore. He decided he was past it.

That was how I was feeling yesterday, when I set about plotting my new scene. I’m several years older than Lewis was when he died, after all – although my health is better, and I’ve insured myself against bereavement by successfully avoiding almost all meaningful relationships. But I was still wondering if I had it in me to write an imaginative scene.

But I came up with something. I think it’s good. It took a lot of thought, and it took time to gel, and it didn’t come together until I’d gone to bed, so I had to turn the lamp on to note it down, but I have a scene. I’ll get on it tonight.

Publishing, Writing

The return of ‘The Year’

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I hope I’m not raising cruel hopes among my millions thousands hundreds dozens (!) of longsuffering fans, but I guess I can tell you I’m in the process of trying to produce a new paper version of The Year Of the Warrior. Ori Pomerantz helped me out in the early stages, and now I’m proofreading a file to submit to a printer. (As you may be aware, Baen Books continues to sell the e-version, but our contract gives me the right to produce a tangible book. I note that the cover above was designed back in 2018, so this has been a long time coming.) It’s always a little awkward, when I’m selling books at Viking events, to tell people that the one Erling book I have for sale in dead tree form is Number Two in a series. TYOTW on paper will mean I’ll have books One and Two both (or One, Two and Three if you count TYOTW as a double. Which it is.). I think that’ll go over well.

Assuming there is a Viking Season this summer. If there isn’t, the money I plan to pay a printer will be sunk costs in my basement for a while.

So I’m re-reading The Year Of the Warrior for the first time in… a decade? Two decades? A long time. What do I think of it?

All in all, I’m pleased. There’s some weak spots, some sentences I’d recast or streamline. And the plotting, especially at the beginning, is occasionally forced. But a lot of the prose reads just fine to me, even moving in spots.

There are errors of fact. Some things I got wrong about Viking life, which have been clarified for me in the many years since. I wish I’d known that Erling’s father, according to a saga I’d never seen when I was writing, was killed in a thrall uprising while he was a boy (I spackled that story over in West Oversea). Other errors I won’t mention, because I’ve already repressed them.

I’m not fixing any errors in this version. “What I have written, I have written,” as a not-so-great Roman said. I think I need to own my mistakes along with my successes. It’s all on the record.

I’d forgotten some details. Erling’s shield shows two eagles (I need to mention that again; it’s thematically important). Father Ailill has a box bed in his house.

Anyway, I haven’t gotten an estimate from the printer yet, but I expect it won’t be cheap, especially with that beautiful cover by Jeremiah Humphries. So that’s where my stimulus money is going. Which is too bad, because I just got brake work done on the car…

Poetry, Writing

Snow and poetry

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Photo credit: Andrew Small @ andsmall. From Unsplash.

Remember that snow I said we’d probably still get, because you can’t get out of March in Minnesota without an encore or two? It came last night. A couple inches, and it’s already starting to melt. I guess some’s coming tomorrow too. But Spring has the big momentum now. Even if the snow keeps coming back, it’ll be in short, vicious snaps, like a rat dying in a trap.

Here’s something I don’t think I’ve written about before here. Poetic prose. I am, as I’ve often said, a poor poet, even when I bother. (I was fairly well on in years before I even started to figure out what poetry is.) But over the years I’ve picked up some ideas about adding poetic touches to my prose. Father Ailill in the Erling books, stage Irishman that he is, is particularly prone to poetic flights, which is one of the things that makes him fun to write. And with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, this might be a good winter’s day to discuss the subject.

A while back I was in a gathering where someone mentioned, cautiously, that they’d been writing poetry, and what did we think of it? And they read some of it. I think that person was hoping I’d say it was great, but I said nothing. Because it wasn’t very good. I wished I had the opportunity to talk to them about it one-on-one, but I didn’t get that.

Here’s what I wanted to say to them:

You think you’re writing poetry here, but what you’re actually doing is just writing prose, the way you’d write prose any time, and then breaking the lines up. Poetry is more than just the way you lay your words out on the page. It’s about using words, and loving words, and manipulating words, marshaling the power of words to say more than bald prose can.

When I think of good poetry, one line comes to mind – my favorite line of poetry in the world. I’m not generally much interested in Dylan Thomas, but his poem, “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” amazes me. Just the first line (which is also the title), actually. I think it’s almost perfect.

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
“Drives my green age…”

Look what Thomas does with that first line.

Eleven syllables. Of those syllables, each is single word, except for the last one.

Such a sequence constructs a picture in the listener’s mind:

Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-double.

Which translates, semi-visually, to:

Stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-FLOWER.

It’s a picture of a flower.

But then the poet takes that picture of a flower and manipulates it. The stem becomes a “fuse.” “Fuse” is obviously a loaded word. Slightly sinister. Suddenly, instead of a mental picture of a flower, the picture is of a fuse burning down toward a dynamite charge. And when the fuse gets to the end, the charge explodes, and that explosion is a flower.

Suddenly we see the flower in a whole new way. It’s not just a pretty (kind of effete) plant sitting in the ground, looking decorative. It’s a little explosion, driven by some kind of a “force.” The rest of the poem expands on that idea of a life force. This is not one of Wordsworth’s daffodils. This is a dangerous flower, a flower from a rough neighborhood.

That’s what poetry is. It exploits the sounds of the words, the rhythm of the words, the associations of the words, and even the way the words look on paper, to turn ideas into little explosions in your head. You think in a new way, and you see in a new way.

It’s like a workout for your brain. And your spirit. It makes the muscles stronger, capable of doing things you never knew they could do.

Uncategorized, Writing

Writing Journal: Rainy day

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Today was a rainy day. Not snowy, rainy. This is not unheard-of in March in Minnesota, but it’s far from the norm. My front yard is entirely free of snow – there’s a little left in back, where the stuff gets piled up at the northeast corner of the house, but even that may be gone now. I haven’t looked out there in a few hours.

The rain has been slow, drippy stuff through most of the day, but I’m hearing thunder now.

A wild surmise begins to burgeon in my heart – we may have seen the last of this winter. The forecast doesn’t show any cold weather or snow for a couple weeks. Of course, we can still get snow even in April, and often do. But the sunshine seems to have gained the upper hand at this point. If we get any more snow, it’s unlikely to establish a beachhead.

Work goes slowly on the new Erling book, but it does go. I’m mostly adding stuff at this point. I’ve got the armature of a book, but it needs fleshing out.

Just wrote a scene (meant to be funny) about haggis, because Macbeth is in the story. This sort of thing is a tad self-indulgent, and if I were a purer artist, I’d probably consider it beneath me. But in my experience, very little is beneath me.