In yet another response to my Intercollegiate Review article, Speculative Faith asked me to answer a few questions over at their site. Thanks to those folks.
Category Archives: Blogs, Socials
Interview at Evangelical Outpost
Visitors to the Evangelical Outpost website experienced, today, the horror of being greeted by my face. David Nilsen, who reviewed Troll Valley yesterday, followed up with an interview, which you can read here.
Troll Valley reviewed at Evangelical Outpost
And in all our excitement over Hailstone Mountain, let’s not forget Troll Valley. David Nilsen posted a flattering review today at Evangelical Outpost.
Part of that is due to Walker’s writing ability. He spends a good chunk of the first third of the book describing life and work on a farm in Minnesota, including extended passages just describing food, without ever losing the reader’s interest. Walker also has the fascinating ability to be witty, even humorous, while dealing with the darker aspects of life and the human condition.
Much appreciated.
I did not see that coming
I don’t think it would be right to say that my column on Christian Fantasy for The Intercollegiate Review, posted yesterday, has gone viral. But it seems to be approaching the communicable disease level anyway. Editor Anthony Sacramone tells me it’s rapidly approaching their record for hits. There’ve been several links, including…
Our friend Gene Edward Veith over at Cranach calls it “beyond excellent.”
David Mills at First Things speaks of “good advice” and “interesting insights.”
And, most amazing of all, Jeffrey Overstreet himself devotes quite a long post to it, calling me a “formidable storyteller,” which is kind of like having your singing praised by Placido Domingo. Although he’s visited our blog in the past and responded to some of my comments on his works, I’m surprised that a guy with so much more important things to think about was even aware of my work. He disagrees with my use of the term “Christian fantasy,” a point I appreciate, but I don’t think there’s much to be done about it.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s spread the word. I did not expect a response of this kind. Frankly (as I confessed to Anthony) I was a little embarrassed to submit the thing, because it seemed to me a lot of conventional wisdom that had been dispensed just as well by better writers.
But sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time, like the merchant in Hailstone Mountain who brought a cat to a country full of mice.
This is what you're getting for St. Patrick's Day, and you'll take it and like it!
Under protest, it goes without saying, because I’m afraid of the power of the Irish Lobby, I offer the following clip of the redoubtable Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. It’s a song I’m particularly fond of — the kind that might not impress you on first acquaintance, but sticks in your mind after a couple repeats. I particularly like the line, “Castles are sacked in war, chieftains are scattered far — truth is a fix-ed star….”
Now an Anthony Sacramone update: He sneaked back into his blog last week, tiptoeing with his shoes off, and did a post. Then he did another yesterday. So we’ve got that. He also links to the web page of the Intercollegiate Review, where he’s got a very amusing cover story right now:
Empire builders and revolutionaries, reformers and moral scolds, civil libertarians and uncivil prohibitionists—all believe History is on their side. Beware anyone who imputes to History an inevitable, self-directed, Forward march, as if it were as fixed as a bar code, as predetermined as male-pattern baldness, as sovereign as any voluntaristic deity. Most risible are atheists, old or new, who act as if the expanding energies of a supposedly random and causeless Big Bang could even possess an ultimate purpose….
When I post, people read. For a second or so.
I promised you (subject to editorial approval) an American Spectator Online article by me, on the social and political aspects of the Vikings TV series on the History Channel. Here it is.
Phil and I have both noticed a spike in visits to this blog lately. An examination of our Sitemeter stats shows that every day we get clicks from people searching online for “countries with a cross on the flag,” or words to that effect. This brings them to my post, Flagging Enthusiasm. Those readers generally stay about two seconds before going off to search elsewhere. Apparently there is interest — in widely spread locations around the world — for information on flags with crosses on them. I’m at a loss to explain it. Any ideas?
In further news, my e-book Hailstone Mountain should be coming out very soon now. Just Kindle at first, I’m afraid.
When you reach a fork in the beard, take it.
Today somebody on Facebook referred me to a new blog which will have, I expect, a selective appeal – Sveyn Forkblog. The author, an Englishman named Chris Tuckley, has decided to start a blog to celebrate the millennium of one of England’s most obscure kings – Sveyn (or Svein, or Sven, or Svend – the options are many) Forkbeard, the Viking Dane who conquered England, then promptly died, leaving the whole thing for his son Canute the Great to conquer over again.
This interests me, of course, because it’s in my line and precisely in my period. Svein was an ally of King Olaf Tryggveson of Norway, whom you’ll remember from The Year of the Warrior, but turned against him (actually it was more the other way around; Olaf switched sides on Svein) and led the coalition that defeated and killed Olaf at the Battle of Svold.
If you read West Oversea, you’ll recall how news came of the massacre of the Danes in England by King Aethelred the Unrede. One of the victims was said to be Svein’s own sister, which gave him both a personal reason and a political excuse for returning to England with fire and sword, and subduing the whole place.
He also appears in the classic novel The Long Ships (not the movie), but does not come off very well there.
Should Fiction Authors Be Bloggers?
Joel Friedlander shares some thoughts on the problems and benefits of blogging for fiction authors, particularly unpublished ones.
This should bring in even more hits!
Photo credit: Musicaline
I’ll fess up. I check our blog statistics now and then. Mostly not just to check the total clicks (though visit totals have been gratifying, thank you) but to back-track visitors and find what posts brought in the most Googlers. And this time of year an odd pattern appears. By far the most common search to wash up on these shores involves the words “Christmas crib.” And the searches, oddly, generally come from places in the Middle East. If I’m reading it right (always a questionable thesis), they generally land on this post, which says nothing at all about Christmas cribs, causing me to figure that the draw must actually be the picture of the crèche I used to illustrate it.
The term “Christmas crib” sounds strange to me. It’s not an English idiom, as far as I know. Nobody in these parts talks about Nativity Scenes that way. We call them Nativity Scenes or manger scenes, or if we’re feeling pedantic (and heaven knows I often do) we say “crèche.” But perhaps Christians in the Middle East do call them Christmas cribs. No reason why they shouldn’t. It’s a perfectly good name.
I might note (to continue in my pedantic voice, now that I’ve got it warmed up) that the Norwegian word for “manger” is in fact “krybbe.” There must be a history there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with manger scenes. But I don’t have any facts on that.
From what I’ve read, the traditional inverted A-frame wooden manger we see in Nativity Scenes is nothing at all like anything used in First Century Israel. Many scholars think Christ was born in one of the caves near Bethlehem, where sheep were stabled in those days. The mangers in those structures were made of stone masonry and were built into a corner of the wall. Which is bad for crèches, as it would badly mess up the composition.
However, another theory, which I’ve grown to favor, says that many Jewish houses of that day had an attached all-purpose room, which could be used for livestock when necessary, or could be cleaned out and turned into a guest room when the in-laws showed up. Such a room would have had a built-in manger as well, and that could explain the reference to the baby in the manger in Luke (where the word “stable” does not actually appear).
The problem with this theory is that it renders the traditional mean old innkeeper unnecessary. Which is OK with me, frankly, because he also appears nowhere in the text. And I’ve always identified with him.
Fourth Annual Advent Ghosts Storytelling
Loren Eaton refers to the beautiful aurora in northern-most and southern-most skies, which is one of the cool aspects of the new Angry Birds Seasons update, but I don’t plan to talk about that here. I wanted to announce my participation in Loren’s shared storytelling event, Advent Ghost 2012. We will be posting our 100-word stories on our respective blogs on Saturday, December 22, and Loren will link to all of them on his blog. I’ll be sure to link to this indexing post too. Now, you have something to look forward to. There’s no need to thank me.
You can read past stories for this event and other flash fiction I’ve posted in our Creative Writing category.