Category Archives: Writing

Reviews, Writing

In which I plumb new depths of hypocrisy

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How desperate am I for work, you ask? How low would I stoop for money?

Would I sell a kidney? Flog condo time shares in Florida? Peddle my body on street corners?

Ha! Kids stuff.

I’ve been reduced to watching the History Channel Vikings series.

Yes, in spite of all my railings and denunciations against the thing, I’m watching the first season through now. I think I’ll need to watch more seasons, and I think the most economical way to do that will be to revive the Netflix subscription I dropped. As a business expense, though I don’t think I can deduct it.

Here’s how coming to this pass, uh… came to pass:

I have a friend who works with a web magazine that actually pays non-trivial money. I suggested to him an article I might write for it, one having to do with Vikings.

He countered that he’d like to see my topic related to the Vikings series.

I seem to recall I dickered my fee up a little at that point. Then I agreed to take the thing on. So I now have to watch enough of the series to enable me to speak with some authority.

I mentioned my plight on Facebook. Some friends suggested I might find I enjoy it.

This has not come to pass, so far.

What do I dislike about the Vikings series?

First of all – and I’ve written about this before – they get Norse society completely wrong. The Vikings in this production live in an autocracy, where the chieftain (the “earl”) calls the shots. He claims all the booty from raids. He kills people without consequence.

Sigh. Read Viking Legacy, for pete’s sake. The Norse had a grassroots democracy. Leaders were obligated to submit to election, and could be booted out if they got too big for said boots.

Armor and costumes – perhaps we reenactors overdid it, making “Vikings did not wear horns on their helmets!” our battle cry for so many years. The props people at the studio answered, “Got it! The Vikings didn’t wear any armor at all!” And that idea came to rule all their decisions, stuck fast in their consciousness like an axe in an unhelmeted skull.

There are plenty of fights here, and as far as I can see they’re entirely chaotic. Aside from the lack of armor, neither logistics, troop numbers, nor tactics matter at all. Victory is bestowed by the favor of the scriptwriting gods. Ragnar Lothbrok and his men (by the time of episode six, which is as far as I’ve gotten now) seem to be about to conquer the English kingdom of Northumbria with three ships’ crews).

I could go on and on. I’ll just mention one more thing. Clunkiness.

I’ve often said that one thing I’ve tried to avoid in my novels – and I hope I’ve avoided somewhat it through using Father Ailill as a bridge character – is clunkiness. Old time heroes, clunking around in funny costumes and heavy boots, ranting about honor and the old gods, in awkward sentence constructions. Making little psychological sense to modern readers/viewers.

I have an idea (bear in mind that I’m often mistaken) that Vikings will not age well. It seems clunky to me. When the haircuts stop looking cool, our grandchildren will laugh at it.

But I carry on with my “research.” If I’m going to sell my soul, I mean to give value for money.

Writing

A confusion of options

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A traditional Norwegian chest. Photo: Anne-Lise Reinsfelt, Norsk Folkemuseum. Creative Commons attribution Share-alike 3.0.

I wrote the other night about the glories of the English language, from the perspective of the creative writer. English offers lots of word choice options. Which can be overwhelming. I remember reading somewhere, long ago, about the odd psychological fact that if you’re looking for something to read – in an airport bookshop, for instance – it’s easier to select a book from a single revolving wire rack of paperbacks than from a wide array of shelves-full of books. In the second instance, the very quantity of your options paralyzes. You find something that might be interesting, but you can’t be sure there isn’t something better further along. You dawdle, paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of your options. With the small wire rack, you can quickly grasp the range of your choices, and grab up the best of what might be a mediocre lot.

New speakers of English face a similar problem, I imagine. They often have several choices (counting various word combinations) when looking for what the French call “le mot juste,” the precise, correct word.

In a Norwegian-related Facebook group the other day, a poster from Norway posted a picture of a chest they’d inherited. They described it, in all innocence, as a “coffin.” I don’t think anyone actually made fun of them for the word choice – in Norwegian, the word “kiste” serves for both ordinary storage chests and coffins. I suppose there are conceptual consequences – in Norway you put things away in chests, and you yourself are put away in a chest when you die. There’s a sense that they pack you up and put you in storage, like an artifact.

Not that Norwegian doesn’t have some challenging word options of its own. Long ago, I was corrected about the word for physical exercise. As I recall, I used “eksersis,” a natural guess for an English speaker. But “eksersis” refers to a drill, as in the military. What we call exercise they call “trening,” which is probably, I assume, a borrowing from English, but with the meaning slightly altered for local requirements.

The Norwegian who called a chest a coffin probably translated with artificial intelligence (I imagine). We hates AI around here, we does, for just such reasons. AI, though, is adequate for quick and dirty jobs (sadly, my lamented late side gig translating film scripts qualified as quick and dirty – not that I did it that way. But the quality I was able to offer in my work couldn’t compete, because quick and dirty is also cheap).

Ah well, the world of translation had its chance at my services, and they cast me out. Instead, I will soon release The Baldur Game to inevitable universal acclaim, becoming rich and famous in my declining years.

After which I’ll be packed away in a kiste.

That’s kind of morbid, isn’t it? Sorry. I had to tie the thread up somehow. Tying up plot threads with a death is one of the cheapest go-to tricks in the fiction writer’s bag. Or chest.

Authors, Reading, Writing

Borges on the magic of English

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I need to read some Jorge Luis Borges. Pretty much all I know of him, I like. But I’ve only read one or two of his stories, and those in school. Pure laziness on my part – or a fear of finding myself out of my intellectual depth.

Anyway, this Argentine author has astonishing things to say about the English language in this little clip. He expresses an idea I first encountered years ago in Writer’s Digest magazine. It was in an article also written by a writer who used English as a second language. People learning English often – and very understandably – complain about the size of the vocabulary you need to learn. Which is fair enough. But, this author pointed out, once you’ve mastered it you’ve got an unparalleled instrument in your hands, like a huge organ with a hundred stops. You can get an infinity of subtle effects out of it.

Borges notes here that most every word in English has a light or a dark version, depending on whether you choose the Latin or the Germanic option. He also talks about combinations of verbs and prepositions, which I hadn’t been aware of before.

In my Erling books, I’ve tried to employ Germanic words as much as I could, for two reasons. First, when I was learning to write (I took a sort of correspondence course and studied Writer’s Digest religiously), I was instructed to generally choose the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) word. Anglo-Saxon words, they said, are punchier, stronger. They make your writing more vivid and active.

I took that advice, and still believe in it (though I’m sure there’s an element of cultural bias involved. In the 18th Century, writers aspired to sound Classical, and always opted for the Latin word). But I had a further reason for going Anglo-Saxon. I was writing about Vikings, and I wanted to evoke a northern, Germanic mood. I like to think my diction contributes to a sense of place and time.

How do I master this vast English vocabulary, you ask? Read. Read a lot. Read above your comprehension level (authors like Borges, for instance). If you read on Kindle, they’ve got a neat feature where you can highlight a word right on the page and get a definition as if by sorcery.

Authors, Writing

Death, Tolkien, and sagas

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I’m feeling better today, thanks for asking, so let’s think about death, shall we?

The short Tolkien clip above resonated with me. I forget where I saw it first – probably on Facebook, where I waste too much time.

I’m not sure what I’d have thought about that statement, that great books are all about death, before I started working on The Baldur Game (not to say I’m claiming it’s a great book). If you’ve been following the Erling Saga, you know that this will be the last book in the series. And that can only mean one thing. We’re going to be saying goodbye to at least one important character.

A weird, semi-intentional chronological harmony has followed my Erling books. The first novel, The Year of the Warrior, came out in 2000. That’s precisely 1,000 years after the events described, which culminate in the Battle of Svold, usually dated to the millennium year. That’s what the title means – the Latin numeral for 1,000 is M. And (according to one of my characters) M also stands for Miles, which is Latin for soldier or warrior.

The books have loosely kept pace with the millennial anniversaries since then. If I were following the pattern strictly, I’d have left The Baldur Game’s release to 2030, because it ends in 1030. But the book begins in 1024, and I figure that’s close enough for my purposes. It would be hubristic to assume I’ll still be alive in 2030. I won’t give you my precise age, but I’ll be a little surprised if I live that long. (Though it’s looking more likely as it approaches, which astonishes me.)

And yes, the book is about death. I realized that as I was constructing it. There are recurring images of the sea, of chaos, which in the Old Testament evoked death.

And of course Norse sagas are always about death. There may be numerous other themes – honor, love, freedom, loyalty – but in the end they’re about how the characters faced their deaths.

Like all men, I’ve mostly tried to avoid thinking about my own death – though I’ve made an effort to prepare for it as a Christian. But old age tends to concentrate the mind, as Dr. Johnson said about the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight.

One of the values of literature, I think (and I think Tolkien would agree) is that it prepares us to face the things that must be faced.

Maybe we authors can help ourselves too.

(And before you ask – my health is fine, as far as I know. My chief malady, from my youth, has been melancholy.)

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Writing

Two Hours with Ted Gioia

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Music and culture writer Ted Gioia talked on camera with David Perell of the podcast “How I Write” to talk about his life of reading and writing. I just watched it, and it’s marvelous.

Ted, who has been writing on Substack for three and a half years, shared the interview with a short excerpt about musicians getting inspiration from dreams. In the almost two-hour interview, he discusses becoming a well-read man over many years, reading books for content or style, chasing publishing trends, writing honestly for yourself first and then for readers, and how our worldview as well as social pressure presses us toward select kinds of inspiration.

It’s well worth your time. Many good thoughts were shared. You’ll note some that I didn’t, so feel free to comment on it here.

Writing

Writer’s journal: Character lists and pronunciations

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King Olaf discovers a young man’s “treachery,” a scene I use in The Baldur Game: Illustration for Heimskringla by Christian Krogh.

First of all, I need to correct myself. I’m a little surprised nobody has rebuked me on the point already in comments. No doubt that’s because our readers are highly sensitive and polite people.

In a previous post, I called the list I’m working on right now, for my upcoming novel, The Baldur Game, an index of characters. It’s not an index. It’s just a list. Every index starts as a list, and the process reminded me of indexing. But to be an index, my list would have to specify pages on which the names are found, and doing that would be just making work for myself. Writing a deathless epic is plenty to do already, without such excess exertion.

The really hard part of the character list is the name pronunciations. I discussed that challenge earlier too. How many different ways are there to pronounce Saga Age names? You can use the pronunciations the top scholars use – the ones recreated on the basis of known linguistic laws concerning vowel shifts and the softening of consonants (there’s a name for that, but I can’t recall it. And it hardly seems worth the effort to look it up, even on the internet. Grimm’s Law enters into it, I know – and yes, it’s the same Grimms you’ve heard of, the ones who collected fairy tales). But nobody understands those scholarly pronunciations. I’m inclined to think, in my cattier moments, that the scholars themselves just use them to intimidate us.

Then you can use contemporary Icelandic pronunciation. But I’d have to master Icelandic pronunciation to do that, and it would sound strange to my readers, who are English speakers by and large.

And you can use contemporary Norwegian pronunciation. That’s more or less what I do, as the possessor of a middling facility with Norwegian. But you can only go so far with that too. I can do no more than suggest characteristic Scandinavian diphthongs that don’t exist in English. I fear my attempts won’t entirely please my Norwegian friends and family. My relatives in Rogaland, for instance, pronounce the name Einar something like “AY-nar,” but I make it “EYE-nar,” like Kirk Douglas does in the Vikings movie. Because I don’t want to challenge my American readers’ patience too much. Not when I’m expecting them to plow through my prose too.

The bottom line is that I’m unsatisfied with my pronunciations – and if I changed them I’m pretty sure I’d still be unsatisfied.

It looks like there’ll be a small delay in getting the book finally published. One collaborator, whose contribution can’t be omitted, is being delayed due to multiple obligations.

Still, I have a few things left to do. I need to make some more Photoshop additions to my map – locations mentioned in the book.

I could do another read-through, of course, but my instincts tell me no. I’ll give it one more reading before it’s published, but I think that should be the last step. There comes a point when you’re just rearranging the furniture in a manuscript, changing words and then changing them back. I suspect Frank Herbert was thinking as an author when he inserted an invented quotation in Dune that said (as I recall it): “Arakis teaches the maxim of the knife, cutting off that which is incomplete and saying, ‘Now it is complete because it ends here.’”

Any work of man can be “improved” indefinitely. At some point you’ve just got to let the baby be born already.

Writing

Writer’s journal: Nearing the finish line

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King Olaf gives a sword to Sigvat the Skald. An incident I use in ‘The Baldur Game.’ Illustration for ‘Heimskgringla”: Christian Krogh.

Today was a good writing day. Yesterday was too, come to think of it. I finished up a side job on Monday, which opened up some time to exercise my muse beyond my routine two hours daily. And I was coming to the end of another draft of The Baldur Game.

This was the draft where I incorporated most (not all, but most) of the suggestions I got from my beta readers, one of whom is my co-blogger Phil. (Why are they called beta readers, anyway? Who are the alpha readers? No one ever explained that to me. And here I call myself an author.) I appreciate the comments and tweaks. They unquestionably improved the product and spared me numerous errors.

As one nears the finish line on a project, one often finds extra inner energy for the final sprint, which is what happened now. This is part of the final polish stage, and I feel things coming together. My next step, I think, is to construct my index of characters.

I like indexing. This was a surprise discovery for me. I recall looking at indexes in books I read as a kid, and thinking, “Somebody actually runs through these books and itemizes each item mentioned, and what page it’s found on. What an incredibly tedious task.”

But I took an indexing class in library school, and it turned out to be the most enjoyable class I had there. Indexing, it turned out, is perfect for my minor OCD nature. Approach it systematically, and when you’re finished you’ve got something neat and organized.

Character indexes are easier. I just go through the manuscript, note people’s names the first time they show up, and enter them in an alphabetized list, which is a breeze when you’re word processing. No need for page references. If you miss one the first time it appears, it’ll probably show up again. If not, he’s a pretty minor player, so who cares?

And once that task is done, there’s just the public domain map I plan to insert, to which I need to add some locations with Photoshop.

And then – I hope – one more quick read-through. And then I should be done, with only the cover to approve and the rigamarole of getting it published on Amazon left to do.

I do think this is a good book. In fact, I have an idea it’s a great book – but I also have an idea I’m biased on that score.

Music, Uncategorized, Writing

17 May

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It is my custom, every May 17, to make some kind of mention of Norway’s Constitution Day, celebrated each year on this date. I’ve told the story of the holiday many times – this year I’ll restrict myself to saying that Norway celebrates its Constitution Day as its major national holiday because of a historical anomaly – we had a constitution for almost a century before we got independence. So Constitution Day became the traditional patriotic holiday.

The video above is rather nice – lots of natural beauty, in which Norway is excessively rich. If you’d like a translation of the lyrics, you can find it here.

The Syttende Mai present I received today was a good writing session. I actually gave myself the shivers reading the current draft of The Baldur Game. I suppose that’s insufferable, like comedians who laugh at their own jokes. But writing at my level offers few tangible rewards. And finding the same exhilaration in your own writing that you get from your favorite authors’ is as delicious as it is rare.

To make things even better, I had a thought today – not as common an occurrence as you might imagine. (G. B. Shaw once said that he’d made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a month.) I can’t remember what provoked the thought (perhaps it was the creative thrill I described above, but I’m not sure). But it suddenly appeared, fully formed in my head, and even after several hours I can find no fault with it. It goes like this:

No work of art is ever fully original, nor should it be. Art is a multimedia matrix of interactive themes and influences — all hyperlinked, in a sense. Taken all together, great art participates in an infinitely greater tapestry.

I think I’ll stand by that.

Have a good weekend.

Writing

Author’s journal: Back to revision

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Photo credit: Burst. Unsplash license.

This is the week I turned back to the keyboard. Narration practice is on pause, because my readers’ critiques are in. Most of them relate to typos, but some have to do with plot elements. I’m working now, thanks to a good suggestion, on weaving a small plot thread into one section, which ought to improve… the tone, I guess. It’ll make an underused character stronger, and give them a way to help advance the story. (I can’t afford to pay my characters to just loaf around, chapter after chapter!)

I’m still getting up at 6:30 am to get my writing time in, though my body has instituted base countermeasures. In order to prevent me getting more than six (sometimes four) hours of sleep at night, it’s moved my natural wake-up time back to 5:00 a.m. I suppose I could get up and write then, but I have no doubt my body would then start waking me at 4:00, and it would just be a war of retreat by inches, until I became fully nocturnal.

I saw a clip of Jordan Peterson, who has, I understand, adopted a carnivore diet. He said he’s gotten good results against depression by telling his patients to eat a high-protein breakfast shortly after waking up in the morning. I’ve been putting breakfast off till I got back from the gym (gym comes after writing, that’s the schedule) at about 9:00. So I’ll try Peterson’s way now. This morning I had my breakfast sausage first thing instead of later. We’ll see how that goes.

Otherwise, I have a deadline coming up the first of May for the small magazine I’m editing, and I suspect it’s be a nail-biter getting it all done on time.

Right now, my hopes and dreams are focused on getting into May. I figure things will ease up in May.

Come to think of it, that’s what I said about April.

Writing

‘Writing’ update: Old dog, new tricks

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This happens to be the exact microphone I am using, a Blue Yeti, a gift from a friend. Photo credit Chris Yang, chrisyangchrisfilm. Unsplash license.

Landmark achieved. Another step climbed. Pardon me for talking myself up tonight, but I actually accomplished something that had daunted me, and I need to try to overcome my reflexive tendency to downplay it.

So this is the situation – I have “mastered” the Audacity recording application. Audacity is a free app that’s probably the most common one used by at-home voiceover artists and narrators. I’ve been wrestling with it for some time now. Has it been months? I’d have to look it up, which seems like a lot of trouble.

In any case, you need to understand my history with recording engineering. (I mentioned this the last time I gave you an update.) I went to radio broadcast school and hold a (entirely undeserved, and I null and void now, I think) Radiotelegraph Engineer’s license. But I always struggled with the technical stuff. Working with Audacity, is of course, very different from what I fumbled around with in radio back in the 1980s, but I find it equally challenging. Audacity (not really a complicated app) combines the challenges of radio with the challenges of digital technology. For a child of the analogue age, a “digital immigrant” as they call us, it was less than comfortable.

But – and this is what gives me a small amount of satisfaction – I went to work at it systematically. During my morning writing session each day (except that I skip Sundays) I would set up my recording space (like many home voice artists, I employ my closet) and worked at learning Audacity. I watched a lot of how-to videos on YouTube. I studied the instruction book I bought. And I practiced. Cautiously, and with trepidation.

I decided that, due to the considerable stress unfamiliar technology causes me (I actually woke up from a dream one night, my heart pounding), I needed to take it in small steps. I tackled one challenge at a time, researching and practicing one single operation, one skill, at a time. Once I’d gotten the new thing down, I stopped. The Voices in my Head called me lazy. Said I should do something more now, not waste time. But I had decided that sufficient unto the day was the stress of that one step.

I repeated this program day after day. Some days I got nothing done. I hadn’t yet solved the problem. But I figured I’d accumulated sufficient stress for the present.

And gradually, I figured stuff out. The last step stumped me for a couple days – the operation of cutting and pasting, to make corrections on a track already recorded. My instruction book was unclear, and so were several videos I viewed.

This morning I sat down and just played with the app. Viewed a new video, which helped a little. Finally, I tried something that worked. I had it. I’m not a master of Audacity by any means, but I understand the basic operations, I think, that I need.

Of course, now I’m going to drop it completely for a while. It’s time to get back to The Baldur Game, my work in progress. That’s part of the overall plan.  Now that I’ve heard back from my beta readers, I need to evaluate their suggestions and get the book into final shape.

Then there’ll be the process of publishing the thing through Amazon, another technical challenge I’m uncomfortable with, but I imagine I can figure it out.

And when that’s done, the plan is to start recording The Year of the Warrior.

I do not lack things to occupy me, for the immediate future.

Something else happened today too. I was messing with another piece of new software, a publishing program I have to use for a side gig. And I figured something out on that too.

And I had another (fleeting) moment of satisfaction.

I then had an odd, unusual (for me) thought. I thought, “It’s kind of nice that I’m poor in my old age. If I were rich right now, I’d be vegetating, sitting on a lounge chair somewhere where it’s warm, letting my body run down. I know myself. I never move too far out of my comfort zone unless I’m forced to.”

Instead, in my 70s, I’m learning new stuff, expanding my skills. Keeping young (in a sense), in spite of myself.

God, the Author, seems to be at work plotting again. And plotting, as I’ve often said, means torturing your characters.

So be it.