I forgot to show you a picture of the new, fully realized, paperback version of King of Rogaland. So here it is. That’s a pretty good cover, I think.
I also think I told you I’m working on an Amazon edition of The Year of the Warrior in paperback. At the risk of sounding self-satisfied, I’m actually kind of impressed with it. It’s a good story – grabs the reader and keeps the action going. I’m not sure I’ve improved a whole lot as a writer in the 25-plus years since the thing was published.
I was taken aback to discover that the final draft I’m working with – as well as the privately printed version I’ve been handselling for a few years – features “dumb quotes” rather than “smart quotes.” You probably know what that means – smart quotes are the curly ones, curving forward and backward, that you find in printed material, which MS Word usually creates for you automatically. Somehow (I think it must have been during the text’s brief sojourn as a Google Doc) it lost its smarts. And I’m embarrassed to offer the book to the Amazon public in such a state. It would be a blow to my aforementioned self-satisfaction.
So I did a web search and found a method for converting them back. To my astonishment, it worked. Now I’m trying to figure out how to do the one-slash quotation marks and apostrophes.
I’ll probably mess it up. I need to save backup draft.
The hits just keep on coming – as many people must have said in the radio business, but I don’t think I ever did, back when I was in the game.
I am forging my way through my Viking books, and can herewith announce that the paperback version of King of Rogaland is now obtainable from Amazon.com. This completes the whole set (sort of, details below), except for the final book, The Baldur Game, which still awaits its cover art.
And then there are the first two books, which present complications of their own.
West Oversea, Book 3 of the series, is in an odd limbo at this juncture. Nordskog, its publisher, is – sadly – going out of business. They have kindly returned all rights to me, and are selling me their entire stock of paperbacks at a steep discount. That’s about 20 cartons at last count. I’ll have my little house packed with them, I guess, which is (I think) the final stage of deterioration in a self-published author’s life cycle. I’m working now at formatting the book for an Amazon version of my own. I think selling this stock of Nordskog paperbacks through Amazon would create a distribution challenge for which I’m not equipped. So I’ll just create a fresh one, and sell my Nordskog volumes at Viking events. I expect they should last me another 40 years or so.
And then there’s The Year of the Warrior. I’m currently getting the paper version printed by a private printer, but I’m going to try to get that one out through Amazon too. I think it’ll be cheaper, but the juxtaposition of Baen’s electronic version with my paperback will, I have no doubt, raise unanticipated problems.
We suffer for our art in many ways. This is not one of the worst. Yet.
Work continues apace on The Baldur Game. I think I’m nearing the end of my initial drafts. Once I’ve finished this current red-pen revision, I plan to give it one more personal read-through, and then send it to some readers for comments. After that, I expect to do one more revision, and then move into the publication process. So I think that light up ahead may be the end of the tunnel, not just phosphors in my eye.
The tough part about nailing a large construction together is that you find out where you measured wrong. An intriguing little irregularity has appeared. I think I can describe it in vague enough terms not to spoil it for you.
If you read King of Rogaland (and of course you have. You haven’t left a review yet, though, have you? Not that I want to nag…), you may recall the wedding of Ragnhild Erlingsdatter (my hero’s daughter) to Thorberg Arnesson, a son of an important Norwegian family.
Okay, so I set that up. Thorberg will play a major role in The Baldur Game. So far, so good.
But in the saga accounts of the events I’m describing now, there’s another character named Vigleik Arnesson. He doesn’t actually appear on stage in my narrative, but an action he performs has important consequences. And I’ve been trying to figure out who this Vigleik Arnesson was. Snorri Sturlusson never tells us. One would imagine he was a brother to Thorberg, but I’ve seen several lists of those brothers, and Vigleik never appears.
I searched extensively online, not only in English-language but in Norwegian search engines. I found one notation on a Norwegian site that said Vigleik Arnesson was Erling’s nephew. But I couldn’t find out how that connection worked. Who were his parents?
Here’s where my scholarly sins caught up with me. In actual history, I learned at last, two of Erling’s daughters were married to Arnesson brothers – one to Thorberg (as I chronicled), but another to his older brother Arne. Vigleik was this Arne’s son. I had missed the Arne Arnesson connection completely. And the circumstances I set up in King of Rogaland left no room for that marriage. It has to have happened before the Thorberg-Ragnhild wedding, for various reasons, but I made it clear that (in my book) there’d been no previous alliances.
Now if I were Stephen Hunter, this would be no problem. He simply ignores any contradictions that pop up between various volumes of his Earl Swagger series. But I can’t do that. If you find contradictions in my Erling books (no doubt there are some), they’re due to sheer inadvertence. So I have to work this problem out in terms of my fictional world.
I think what I’ll have to do is wrest Vigleik from the bosom of his true family, and give him some other kind of pedigree. Perhaps I’ll marry his mother to some other Arne from some other family. It’s not that uncommon a name. I’m thinking about it.
When a man undertakes to write an epic, he takes on a vainglorious, hubristic task. He will make radical mistakes, demanding radical remedies.
“Dangerosa Jones” at the Regular Rules on Substack has posted a highly flattering review of King of Rogaland:
This combination of history and myth produces a ripping yarn. There is no other way to put it. Father Ailill and Erling are by no means perfect. They are holy warriors only in the most flawed and human of ways — this makes them interesting, multi-dimensional, and armed, a compelling combination. I do not like the popular form taken by current fantasy novels, most of the time, as I find the characters shallow and the conflicts contrived. These books are the exception that proves the rule.
I am delighted to be able to announce that King of Rogaland, the sixth book in the Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, is available for Kindle download as of today. Makes a great Christmas present for Kindle readers.
This will be a scene in the new book, The Baldur Game.
I am excruciatingly aware that I’ve kept my fans waiting far too long for my next book. I just got a reminder on Basefook the other day, showing me a post I’d put up ONE YEAR AGO, saying I’d finished another draft of the new book (to be called King of Rogaland), and hoped I’d have it ready soon.
This is way too slow. I need to purge my life of some lazy writing habits.
In any case, I can now announce that King of Rogaland is finished. Wrapped up. In the can. It’s in the hands of my long-suffering publishing facilitator, who’ll be getting the e-book up on Amazon as soon as he can. However, he’s got stuff on his own plate right now (really important stuff, by the way), so I can’t promise when that will be.
Sorry. It’s coming. I promise.
In better news, King of Rogaland went off Saturday. On Monday I had a… revelation, or something.
I know now how the next book will go. It’s a stylistic departure for me, taking my work up a level (I hope).
The title will be The Baldur Game. It will be big. It will be epic. It will be the climax of the series.
Erling Skjalgsson confronts King Olaf Haraldsson at Avaldsnes. It’s actually this scene I’ve been wrestling with. Illustration by Erik Werenskiold.
So how’s the writing going?, you ask.
King of Rogaland is very nearly done. I’ve been doing the final polish now, taking into consideration comments I got from several first readers who were kind enough to take the time to look it over. I didn’t follow all the criticism, but some of it, I must admit, is spot on.
For instance, a fellow name Phil Wade, whom you might have heard of, pointed out that a particular plot thread had not been satisfactorily tied up. He was correct, blast his eyes. I set out to fix it.
It wasn’t easy.
There are times when you’re writing a book when you need to do something and you’ve got, literally, nothing in your toolbox. Somebody (say, Phil) raises a question and you realize that you haven’t even thought about the matter.
Possibilities suggest themselves. None of them work, because they conflict with stuff you’ve already nailed down. It’s like you’ve got to do laparoscopic surgery on your own body – there’s lots of important stuff in the way of the part you need to get at. (That’s not actually a good metaphor at all. But I like its vigor. What I was really trying to express was that the rest of the plot elements were already in place, and I had to fit this new extension somewhere in among them without bumping into the existing furniture.)
It’s pretty terrifying, really. It’s a question of faith. Yes, you’ve been through this before. You’ve seen ideas appear in the past, after days or weeks or months of brain work. But you don’t know that it will happen this time. This time the well may be dry at last. (Especially if you’re getting old. Lots of writers run out of steam in their old age.)
Mixing metaphors is often a symptom.
But it came to me at last. I think it works.
King of Rogaland is coming. I’ve got to get the cover finalized, and I’ve got to see if my e-book guy is available to help me format the thing and release it to Amazon. So it may take a while.
Still got some reading to do before my next book review. Picked up yet another book about Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral. I don’t know why I keep reading these things. Officially, I’m a Wild Bill Hickok partisan, but there aren’t as many books being written about the Prince of Pistoleers (got to check if there’s anything new out there). But that OK Corral business just keeps fascinating people. The book I’m working on seems promising, in terms of fresh information.
That put me in the mood to watch “Tombstone” again. Like all Earp movies, it falsifies all sorts of stuff, but it works so well as a film – and they did make the effort to make it look authentic. Love those costumes.
And it has some great epic moments. I so love epic moments, where your heart soars a few yards, like Soti in The Year of the Warrior. Made me wish I could write some of my own.
And what do you know? I have some to write! A Work In Progress nearing completion, just needing a few more edits to steer it the tradition of Cecil B. DeMille. Or Sergio Leone. Or whoever directed “Tombstone.” (I forget.)
I finished another draft of King of Rogaland last night. Then this morning as I got up, I thought of a few lines I needed to add, to contribute to the general transcendence of the epic as a whole. Tonight, I start another read-through. I’m close now, I think. This book seems to have more moving, intersecting parts than anything I’ve written before. I think I’ve got most of my ravens in a row now – I’m only aware of one point I’m still not sure about.
Of course, you never know what self-inflicted follies, of my own creation, still lie in wait for me. That’s all part of the (epic) process.
At last I found a lawn guy. I chose the guy who put up a flyer at my church, rather than any of the hard-sell sharks who went all feeding-frenzy on me after I waded into the Home Advisor waters. I may be sorry I made the choice one day, but at the moment I’m pleased with my sales resistance.
No word on the car yet, of course. I have a Viking event this weekend (the link to the Little Log House Antique Power Show is here, if you’re going to be near Hastings, Minnesota), and I’ve been forced to beg a ride from a fellow Viking who can accommodate all my stuff in his vehicle. I’ll owe him a favor now… heaven knows what might be asked of me one day. (I draw the line at felony-level violence.) I hope to have the new paper edition of The Year of the Warrior to sell at this event, and that kind of excites me.
I’m almost surprised to say it, but the new novel, King of Rogaland, is coming together, I think. Now that I’m starting to get the various plot threads tied up properly, I like what I’m seeing. I’ve got ongoing themes happening here; a uniformity of effect (I hope). One oddity of this book (for me) is that it includes more embedded stories than my previous books. By that I mean a character in my story sitting down and telling a story of his own. These interpolated tales, in general (I think), also advance the unified theme. Another oddity is that there are no major battles (hypocritical of me, I suppose, as I’ve criticized Stephen Lawhead for lacking the nerve to write battles). But the final confrontation is – I think – dramatic enough to have a similar artistic effect.
I read a quotation recently that impressed me. I don’t recall the source, or the exact words. But the gist of it was, “The better you get as a writer, the harder writing will be for you, because your critical standards will be raised.” So just go ahead and do it – if you’re having this problem, you’re probably a better writer than you think.
Yesterday and today have been quiet days for me, for reasons I won’t itemize. Suffice it to say I’ve been unwell, in a manner that makes leaving the house inadvisable. I think I’m beginning to recover now. No great distress, just… inconvenience.
And no, there’s no fresh news about my car. They told me the end of the month; kind of pointless to nag them until then. Maybe I’ll just keep the loaner and call it even.
But I’m working on my revisions to King of Rogaland. At this stage I’m working with red pen on a printed manuscript, rather on screen. There are two reasons for this. One is that ink on paper just reads differently for me. That’s an odd thing to say for someone who reads almost exclusively on Kindle. But I don’t feel I can “grasp” my manuscript until I’m literally grasping an inch or so of ream in my hands.
The second, more practical reason is that I often have to page back and forth to see if one passage about a character or subject matches things I’ve written about it elsewhere. Continuity, it’s called. I find that a whole lot easier to do with physical paper. Riffling through dead tree pages is different from scrolling through screen pages, and it feels less daunting.
What I’m doing at this stage is, I’m becoming a student of my own book. I wrote it all, but I wrote it in various moods and states of alertness. There are themes there I need to bring out, and rabbit trails I need eliminate. In a sense the book itself is telling me what it wants to be. I just have to listen to it.
Do I like what I’m reading?
As a matter of fact, I do. I even find it moving in spots.
