Audrey Assad performs “The Sands of Time are Sinking”
Today’s hymn is by the Scottish poet Anne Ross Cousin (1824-1906). She wrote it while reflecting on Covenanter Samuel Rutherford’s (1600–1661) notes on Revelation 22. Cousin also composed a poem around the dying words of Scottish Reformer John Knox.
“No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Rev. 22:3-5 ESV).
1 The sands of time are sinking, The dawn of heaven breaks, The summer morn I’ve sighed for, The fair sweet morn awakes; Dark, dark hath been the midnight, But day-spring is at hand, And glory, glory dwelleth In Emmanuel’s land.
2 The King there in his beauty Without a veil is seen; It were a well-spent journey Though sev’n deaths lay between: The Lamb with his fair army Doth on Mount Zion stand, And glory, glory dwelleth In Emmanuel’s land.
3 O Christ, he is the fountain, The deep sweet well of love! The streams on earth I’ve tasted More deep I’ll drink above: There to an ocean fulness His mercy doth expand, And glory, glory dwelleth In Emmanuel’s land.
4 The bride eyes not her garment, But her dear bridegroom’s face; I will not gaze at glory, But on my King of grace; Not at the crown he gifteth, But on his pierced hand: The Lamb is all the glory Of Emmanuel’s land.
I’d like to think this is a significant day in literary history. It’s certainly significant in my literary history. The Baldur Game, the final volume in my Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, has gone live on Amazon today.
It’s only the ebook at this point — the paperback is ready to go, but I hit a small glitch in getting the cover together. I hope that’ll be straightened out very soon.
An era in my life is finished. These are the books I dreamed of writing as a boy. Whatever I accomplish or fail to accomplish in my little life, I’ll be able to say that I fulfilled that dream. I set my books before the world; let it judge them as it will .
This is sort of the kind of weather I was thinking of, but the fields should be brighter. Photo credit: Raychel Sanner. Unsplash license.
There’s a word (probably there are several, but this is the one I’m aware of at the moment) with which I’ve had a lifelong relationship. A dysfunctional relationship. (But pretty much all my relationships are like that.)
The word is “gunmetal.” And to understand what it means to me, I have to take you back (kicking and screaming, probably) to my childhood (which was an extremely tedious one during the periods when it wasn’t extremely horrific).
I spent a lot of time in my head. I was thinking like a writer, I think, even though I wasn’t actually doing much writing. But I was thinking about words, as well as the things that mattered to me.
One thing that happened in my emotional world was that I fell in love with a certain kind of weather. It’s a summer day, and the sun has been shining brightly. And then a storm blows up on the horizon. So there’s bright sunlight where I am, but a dark, dark backdrop of clouds is looming in the distance. And all of nature – the grass, the golden fields, the trees, are shining with the full brightness of summer in contrast to that dark wall of approaching storm. Like an army of dark trolls advancing on a city of treasure.
Such days filled me with longing and aspiration. They were a promise that life could be bigger, richer, more transcendent. Ordinary life might be tedious and gray and repetitious, but beauty did exist. There it was, right before my eyes, no charge for admission. Even I could dream of higher things.
And when I thought about how I’d write a description of such a day, I hit on the word “Gunmetal.”
Yeah, that was it! Gray like a gun barrel, in contrast to the gold and green of the earth.
Then I looked up the word in a dictionary.
“Gunmetal” does not mean steel gray.
Gunmetal is a type of bronze – an alloy of copper, tin and zinc. It’s gold in color. Sometimes it’s also called “red brass.” They call it gunmetal because naval cannons used to be made of it.
Nothing gray about it at all, except, I suppose, for the smoke.
Well, that made me feel ignorant.
But imagine my amusement when, more than once over my years of reading, I’ve come across a page where some novelist describes a sky as “gunmetal gray.”
So I suppose I could get away with it too, if I wanted to.
But by now it’s kind of a cliché.
If you’re gonna have a cliché, it seems to me it ought to be accurate, at least.
Sarah A. Hoyt, who blogs at According to Hoyt and who frequents the juggernaut that is Instapundit, was kind enough to include my novel The Year of the Warrior in her final post in her Liberty Book Promo, promoting authors who support freedom. Here’s the link. There are other books there that might interest you too.
Author Jeffrey K. Schmoll is a recent acquaintance of mine on X, and I bought his book out of curiosity. The Treasure of Tundavala Gap is not exactly in my usual line, being a story about twenty-somethings and adventure in Africa. Nevertheless, I was increasingly drawn in as I read.
Mateus de Silva is a brilliant physics student working on his doctorate in Texas. He is also the orphaned son of a Cuban exile, and grandson of a well-known Cuban general who was lost fighting in Angola. He has a cocaine habit as well, one which he tells himself he has under control. He also suffers from crippling shyness. His two best friends are his gaming buddies, wealthy Tay and female computer whiz Munie.
When Mateus gets a call to go to Cuba, he’s reluctant to go. He’s informed that his great-grandmother is dying, and she wishes to speak to him. But why should he go? She considers him a bastard and has rebuffed all his previous attempts to make contact.
But she is his only family, so he makes the trip. The woman is fading fast, but makes sure a certain cigar box is placed in his hands. Examining it at home, he is intrigued by a poem included among his grandfather’s letters from Angola to his grandmother. He and his friends put their heads (and computers) together to analyze it, finally realizing it’s a clue to the location of a great treasure.
Soon Mateus and Tay are off to Africa, where they will face crime and corruption, betrayal, romance, and sacrifice. Mateus will discover qualities in himself he never guessed at – and he’ll need them.
The Treasure of Tundavala Gap wasn’t a flawless novel. The author’s prose is adequate – quite good compared to a lot of stuff I’ve read recently – but not memorable. Occasionally he misplaces modifiers, but not too often.
The action is sometimes improbable, but that’s a commonplace in contemporary thrillers. Film tropes show up – the classic bullet wound in the shoulder that’s not all that incapacitating, and when the treasure is found, they feel compelled to examine it by pouring it all out in a visually compelling way rather than just dipping into the sack. But those are small things.
The story was exciting, and filled with twists and turns. The villains were particularly well-done, three-dimensional, and that’s a hard trick for a writer. I was worried for a while that the Cuban Communists looked too romantic, but the author fixed that. I was troubled by the hero’s use of cocaine, even if it diminished as he grew in character. But sequels are promised; perhaps that’s a victory reserved for a future story.
All in all, I recommend The Treasure of Tundavala Gap. A very impressive and exciting first novel.
I don’t generally read space opera, but I picked up this book on a whim, out of Sarah Hoyt’s regular book plugs. The Hero at the End of His Rope is actually a novella. Author Jason P. Hunt wrote it, he explains in his Introduction, according to a plan to make each chapter precisely 800 words long.
Richard Thorpe is our hero, a sort of a Han Solo character. As the story opens, we learn that he’s wanted by the authorities. Apparently he has blown up a planet. The reasons for this extreme action are revealed gradually as the story goes on, as are his motives for wanting revenge against a powerful space gangster, his former employer.
As he flees in his spacecraft, he is assisted by an alien friend and his redheaded girlfriend, who proves to have a secret of her own. One feels the influences of Star Wars and Star Trek in the faster-than-light speed chases and the banter among the characters here.
The Hero at the End of His Rope is light entertainment, and succeeds at that purpose. I personally was not happy with the format – each chapter precisely the same length. Such strictures prevent an author making the best use of his words – I have often quoted Lincoln, who said that a man’s legs should be long enough to reach the ground. Likewise, a chapter ought to be precisely long enough to do its narrative job, no more nor less.
But overall my response is favorable. Worth the price.
I like to think I keep relatively up to date on Viking studies, both for my writing and for my second life as a Viking reenactor. But as Dunning and Kruger have taught us, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know – and I think I’ve learned to settle for being better informed than most people, to keep up with the state of the art as stuff gets published for popular consumption.
So I bought Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough, which was recommended to me by a couple friends. And I have to say it’s an impressive book within the limits of its intended purpose.
Embers of the Hands pairs well with Kat Jarman’s River Kings, which I reviewed a while back. Like that book, it considers the Viking world through examination and analysis of archaeological artifacts. But Jarman’s book centered on one artifact (a bead), while Barraclough uses a number of artifacts to elucidate various aspects of the Viking world.
The emphasis here is on ordinary life – the way the people who weren’t famous lived. The clues given us by the things they used and left behind , that enable us – to some extent – to look at their world through their eyes. Author Barraclough possesses a happy gift for description and empathetic thought.
And that gift is needed, because I feel I must admit that I found the book rather dull in stretches. Most of us were lured into Viking studies by way of romantic dreams, of adventure and heroism. Embers of the Hands is pretty relentlessly unromantic. This approach is an excellent corrective for people like me – writers and reenactors. I think it will have more trouble holding the casual reader, who may be looking for bigger and more colorful stories.
Still, it’s a well-researched and well-written book, and ought to be read and pondered by its intended audience.
I might mention that the author seems not much interested in the contentious issue of shield maidens, and I was very grateful to her for that.
Today’s hymn is one I think I’ve sung my whole life, but I can’t remember the last time I sang it. Perhaps that’s because it so common to me I don’t note when we sing it, but it may be that it has that tent revival quality to it that places it lower on the list of hymns my church tends to choose.
New Yorker Fanny Crosby (1820-1915) wrote “Praise Him! Praise Him!” in 1869. The tune by Chester G. Allen (1838-1878) of Cleveland, Ohio, is primarily associated with her text.
“Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King.” (Ps. 48: 1-2 ESV)
1 Praise him! praise him! Jesus, our blessed Redeemer! Sing, O earth, his wonderful love proclaim! Hail him! hail him! highest archangels in glory; Strength and honor give to his holy Name! Like a shepherd, Jesus will guard his children, In his arms he carries them all day long:
Refrain: Praise him! praise him! tell of his excellent greatness, Praise him! praise him! ever in joyful song!
2 Praise him! praise him! Jesus, our blessed Redeemer! For our sins he suffered, and bled, and died; He our Rock, our hope of eternal salvation, Hail him! hail him! Jesus the Crucified. Sound his praises! Jesus who bore our sorrows, Love unbounded, wonderful, deep and strong: [Refrain]
3 Praise him! praise him! Jesus, our blessed Redeemer! Heav’nly portals loud with hosannas ring! Jesus, Saviour, reigneth for ever and ever; Crown him! crown him! Prophet, and Priest, and King! Christ is coming! Over the world victorious, Pow’r and glory unto the Lord belong: [Refrain]
A story is told of Wild Bill Hickok in his later, declining years. Wild Bill had given up on law enforcement after accidentally killing a friend while stopping a riot (it’s believed his eyesight was failing). He’d tried stage acting with Buffalo Bill Cody, but couldn’t bear it. He was subsisting as a professional gambler, spending his days in saloons and (occasionally) his nights in jail for vagrancy.
Admirers surrounded him in the saloons, and he’d regale them with stories. Tall tales about his days as an Indian scout. He’d describe a situation where he was alone on a hill, wounded, his horse dead, nearly out of ammunition, surrounded by thousands of Indians charging on horseback.
“What did you do, Wild Bill?” a wide-eyed audience member would ask.
“I got killed,” he would answer. And everyone would laugh and somebody would buy him a drink.
This illustrates Problem Number Two in story plotting, in my personal sequence.
I think it was last week that I wrote here about plotting problems. I referred to a difficulty I’ve mentioned often – that of the author’s (and by the author’s I mean mainly my) difficulty in testing our characters to the extremes. This is Problem Number One.
Since then, Plotting Problem Number Two has occurred to me. It’s the problem Wild Bill solved with his joke:
You have succeeded in inventing a horrible problem for your hero to solve.
Now, how do you resolve it?
Let me make a revelation – writers are not necessarily more resourceful in real life than the average member of the population. Indeed, I’m not sure most of us are in the upper percentile. If I wanted a non-literary problem solved in real life, I think an author would be one of my last choices for a resource person. I suspect a successful businessman might be optimal.
In general, however, as storytellers, what we do is cheat.
Fortunately, we have the advantage of being in control of time, in our small created worlds.
“I could get my hero out of this corner if he had a Swiss Army Knife,” I decide after pondering the problem for a while.
As the almighty author of the story, I can then go back a few pages and insert a scene to provide him with that Swiss Army Knife. I might show him putting on his coat and feeling its weight in his pocket. Perhaps he thinks then that he never uses the thing and it’s wearing on the fabric. He ponders unburdening himself of it, but he’s in a hurry.
Voila! He now has the knife when he needs it.
(The brilliant William Goldman has a laugh at such a situation in the clip from “The Princess Bride” above.)
But my Swiss Army Knife is a very simple example. Not very creative.
The sneakier you can be, the better.
Suppose he doesn’t need a pocket knife. Suppose he finds out he’s been poisoned. He tries to induce vomiting with a finger down his throat, but he can’t make it work.
Ah, but you, the sneaky author, can go back and add a scene in the first part of the story where the hero’s landlady forces a Tupperware bowl of her onion soup on him. He throws it into the back seat of his car, meaning to discard it. Because she always does this, and he hates onion soup.
But now he crawls to his car, finds the container of soup, and slurps it down. And it tastes so disgusting to him that he’s enabled to empty his stomach, thus saving his life.
I remember a story I read years ago. I think it was one of Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective stories. A couple characters in this particular story comment about how badly the detective hero dresses – they particularly criticize the cheap polyester ties he wears.
Later in the story, the detective discovers his girlfriend, who struggles with depression, has hanged herself with one of his ties.
The author inserts a break in the story at this point, to let us despair along with his character.
Then we have a scene (spoiler alert) where he’s talking to the doctor who treated the woman. The doctor says what saved her life was the cheap polyester tie, which stretched so much that it slowed her asphyxiation.
It’s nice to run into a professional writer these days, one who knows how to lay out a sentence and to spell, and who has a feel for settings and character. All that describes Rhys Dylan’s work in The Engine House, first installment in a series featuring retired Detective Inspector Evan Warlow of Pembrokeshire in Wales.
The story opens with a landslide that uncovers a hidden cave near a cliffside path. Revealed now are the bodies of a pair of hikers who disappeared more than seven years ago. And this was no death by misadventure – the couple had been beaten to death and stuffed into the hole.
Which leads to a call to Evan Warlow, retired chief inspector. He was a successful detective before his early retirement, and he worked on the missing persons’ case. He is reluctant to get involved – for reasons not revealed in this book to his colleagues or to the reader – but at last his great curiosity and the passion he’d invested in the mystery lure him back onto the job. On a temporary basis.
He’s set to work with Inspector Jess Allanby, a highly regarded woman detective. They form a task force to re-open the old files in light of the new discoveries. And the things they discover – and have a hard time discovering – are troubling.
Meanwhile, a young couple has moved into the old house where the deceased couple had lived. They’re creative and eager, though the young woman is disturbed by a sense of being watched, from somewhere on the other side of the ravine, near where the old, derelict Engine House stands in ruin. (The story flirts with the paranormal here, but doesn’t go too far in that direction.)
I have only praise for the writing and storytelling here. Rhys Dylan knows what he’s doing as a novelist.
My own personal reservations rise from a hint – and it’s really only a hint – of conventional stereotyping in the story. The author doesn’t go as far as to suggest – as so many modern novels seem to – that the police force is actually “gender-balanced,” but the team we follow is half male and half female. And it annoyed me when Jess (Inspector Allanby) reprimands Evan for trying to shield her with his body when they’re threatened with a firearm. Blast it, protecting women is what we men do. There’s not much excuse for our existence otherwise.
Also, the scenes set in the present are written in the present tense, something I object to on stubborn principle.
So I probably won’t read on in the series, but that shouldn’t stop you. The Engine House is really a very good police procedural, in a picturesque and exciting setting. I do recommend it.
