Authors

Hans Christian Andersen, in person

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Tomorrow I head south to Story City, Iowa for their annual Scandinavian festival, and on Sunday I’ll be at Danish Day at the Danish American Center in Minneapolis. So I won’t be posting tomorrow. I’m sure Phil will have wonderful things to share, which will ease your keen sense of loss.

Speaking of Denmark, I thought it would be nice to share a few excerpts from J. R. Browne’s report on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen (I spelled it wrong last time), in his book The Land of Thor, which I reviewed yesterday.

Presently I heard a rapid step and the door was thrown open. Before me stood a tall, thin, shambling, raw-boned figure of a man a little beyond the prime of life, but not yet old, with a pair of dancing gray eyes and a hatchet-face, all alive with twists, and wrinkles, and muscles; a long, lean face, upon which stood out prominently a great nose, diverted by a freak of nature a little to one side, and flanked by a tremendous pair of cheek-bones, with great hollows underneath. Innumerable ridges and furrows swept semicircularly downward around the corners of a great mouth—a broad, deep, rugged fissure across the face, that might have been mistaken for the dreadful child-trap of an ogre but for the sunny beams of benevolence that lurked around the lips, and the genial humanity that glimmered from every nook and turn… a long, bony pair of arms, with long hands on them, a long, lank body, with a long black coat on it; a long, loose pair of legs, with long boots on the feet, all in motion at the same time—all shining, and wriggling and working with an indescribable vitality, a voice bubbling up from the vast depths below with cheery, spasmodic, and unintelligible words of welcome—this was the wonderful man that stood before me…. I would have picked him out from among a thousand men at first glance as a candidate for Congress, or the proprietor of a tavern, if I had met him any where in the United States….

“Come in! come in!” he said, in a gush of broken English; “come in and sit down. You are very welcome. Thank you—thank you very much. I am very glad to see you. It is a rare thing to meet a traveler all the way from California—quite a surprise. Sit down! Thank you!” Continue reading Hans Christian Andersen, in person →

Goofing, Writing

Tips from Twitter

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FakeAPStylebook on Twitter hands us words to write by:

  1. Typographers will tell you to eliminate widows and orphans. Typographers are MONSTERS.
  2. “Kill your darlings” refers to editing overwrought copy. Our apologies to the surviving family of Gotham City’s Printon “Scoop” Presser.
  3. To avoid being sued for copyright infringement, alter one letter in each word of quotes from literary works: “Carl mi Ishmail.”
  4. Misplaced modifiers are always in the last place you look.

Priceless and free. This comes from the brilliant minds behind Write More Good.

Fiction

Heroic Sacrifices

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Nameless (Jet Li)



Here’s a meditation on the movie Hero. Jason Morehead loves it, saying the director appears to have developed “a visually ravishing exploration of the sacrifices that people are willing to make for causes larger than themselves, sometimes foolishly, and the human foibles that plague and hinder our attempts at nobility.”

Non-fiction, Reviews

The Land of Thor, by J. R. Browne

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I downloaded John Ross Browne’s book on his travels in Russia and Scandinavia, The Land of Thor, because it was an old account of those regions that I’d never heard of (such accounts can be invaluable for the historical writer), and because I could get it free as a Kindle e-book. Now that I know better, I recommend going to The Guttenberg Project instead, and downloading the illustrated version, as the author’s drawings are half the point.

John Ross Browne was born in Ireland, but raised in the United States. He eventually became a proud—nay, arrogant—citizen of the state of California. He was a frequent contributor of both stories and illustrations to Harper’s Weekly Magazine. For a period of his life around the Civil War he moved to Germany and took the opportunity to travel extensively, sending reports to Harper’s and compiling them into books when he was finished. The Land of Thor is one of those. Continue reading The Land of Thor, by J. R. Browne →

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Summer Crime Fiction

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Mulholland Books has a lot of novel previews and a serial by Ken Bruen and Russell Ackerman which is currently in its 18th part. They have links so we can catch up on the story. Look at other current posts to read the opening chapters of new books from other authors.

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So, You've Been Away A While, Eh?

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Stop what you’re doing, and listen to this report. An American woman has dental surgery done and possibly has a mini-stroke while being sedated. When she wakes up, her speech pattern is so affected she sounds as if she’s from Britain. She has a rare form of brain damage called foreign accent syndrome. You have to hear the radio report. Jane Greenhalgh states:

There have been only about 100 known cases of the syndrome since it was first reported in the 1940s. The most famous case was a Norwegian woman who was hit by shrapnel in World War II; she developed a German accent and was ostracized as a result.

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"I'm an artist! I cannot work under these conditions!"

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The annual Danish Tivoli Fest in Elk Horn, Iowa is history now. I fear it won’t be remembered as one of the best. The combination of a bad economy and rainy weather kept the crowds well down from last year.

As you may guess from this picture (though all the tents aren’t shown), our Viking encampment was also smaller. Which isn’t to say we didn’t have a good time. I’d say we had a very good time. We had a big battle on Saturday, and although I failed to survive any of the skirmishes, I wasn’t physically hurt at all, which is a fairly rare thing. The crowd for the fighting was large under the circumstances, and they were enthusiastic.

I didn’t sell many books.

Still, I consider it a success because I finished getting the footage I wanted for my Epic Book Trailer. Now I’m in the throes of learning film editing on the job. The big challenge will be sound—lots of wind noise in the outdoor shots, which was most of the shots.

I don’t think there’s an audio editor in Windows Live Movie Maker, except for music, though I’ll have to look again.

If I’m distracted for the next few weeks, it’ll be because I’m pondering my challenges as an auteur.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Reviews

My place in The American Culture

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Mike Gray at The American Culture posted pieces about my books not once, but three times, over the Memorial Day weekend.

A review of the Erling books is here.

An interview with me is here.

And a selection of quotations can be found here.

Thanks, Mike. I’m blushing, but not so much that I’d ask you to take them down.

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Underground Jerusalem

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File this under: Super Cool Old Stuff. Old streets, rooms in medieval buildings, and ancient Roman sewers are being opened under Jerusalem for tourist use adding a new sub-level of antiquity to an already ancient city.

South of the Old City, visitors to Jerusalem can enter a tunnel chipped from the bedrock by a Judean king 2,500 years ago and walk through knee-deep water under the Arab neighborhood of Silwan. Beginning this summer, a new passage will be open nearby: a sewer Jewish rebels are thought to have used to flee the Roman legions who destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D.