My writing time lately – as I guess I’ve already told you – is devoted to getting my books, previously only available in e-book form, into paperback on Amazon. All my Erling books have been done now, except for two. One is The Baldur Game, the last, still waiting for its cover art. The other is The Year of the Warrior. TYOTW is still published electronically by Baen Books (my toehold on legitimacy). And I’ve also been having the book printed privately (with Baen’s agreement) for hand sale at Viking events and lectures. But I’ve decided it’ll be a better deal – and cheaper – to get it done by Amazon like the others.
No doubt there will be last-minute technical problems explaining the dual publication to the Amazon people. But I’ll cross that cognitive bridge when I get to it.
So here I am, reading the book pretty much for the first time in a quarter of a century.
Am I a great writer? One likes to think so. I like to imagine I’ll be discovered by posterity, even posthumously.
Some parts I like very much. I think that when I’m on my game I’m very good. I think I do a good job at high dramatic scenes – I actually sometimes give myself the shivers, which is a little like tickling yourself.
And sometimes I do dialogue pretty well. When I’m not being preachy – though I’m not as preachy as I feared. Most of the time.
Plotting is my weakness, as far as I can tell. Sometimes I think my plot points are kind of contrived.
And I made one large historical error – I had Erling hold his local Thing at his own farm, which (I’ve learned since) was never done. Things were always held at a distance from the chieftain’s home, to prevent undue influence on his part (which in fact occurs in the scene as I wrote it).
Nothing to be done about that now. Another discussion point for future Walker scholars.
Greetings, fans of the future. I greet you from Eternity.
I offer the two pictures above for your perusal and ponderation.
The top one is one of my favorite personal snaps, which I used as my desktop wallpaper for many years. It’s from my first Norway cruise (2001, I think). As I recall, I took it from the aft deck, on the Aurlandsfjord, at breakfast on my birthday, which is in July.
The second picture is one I generated the other day using my bete noir, Artificial Intelligence. My new laptop includes the Paint app, which has a brand new AI feature. I tried a few experiments with it in odd moments, and one time I asked it to show me a Norwegian fjord.
It gave me three options, of which the one above was one. I thought it looked familiar.
I wonder if the gnomes of the interwebs incorporated my image into their “fjord” database.
Of course, how many possible combinations of mountains and water can there be? My photo pleased me because it was sort of an ideal of a fjord. The resemblance therefore, could easily be coincidental.
[Not only do I hate AI, but I fear it. I cannot bring myself to openly accuse it of plagiarism. What grim vengeance might it take?]
As an aside, I might mention that my attempt to restore curly single quotation marks, in the draft of The Year of the Warrior that I’m preparing for Amazon paperback, was wholly successful. It worked. It worked at once. It worked better than I dared hope.
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.
So what’s going on, you’re no doubt asking. Any progress on The Baldur Game? How’s the translation coming? How do you justify your barren existence?
The Baldur Game is essentially ready for publication. I don’t think I’ll even give it another read-through. A man has to say “enough” at some point.
The hang-up remains the cover. It is being delayed due to circumstances I don’t know, but am confident are good and sufficient. No doubt it’s God’s will that we have a pre-Christmas release. Or a post-Christmas release.
So what am I doing with my famous writing time? I’m preparing my first Amazon paperback edition.
I chose Hailstone Mountain for this experiment. It would be good to do The Year of the Warrior, but there are certain technical problems with that book that I’ll feel more comfortable confronting once I’ve done a simpler book first. A paperback TYOTW does exist; I’m having it printed privately and I lug it around to Viking events and hand-sell it. But I’ll want to get it on Amazon eventually. Sooner rather than later, I hope.
Then there’s West Oversea, the second (or technically third) book in the series. That work has been published both as an e-book and as a paperback by Nordskog Publishing of Ventura, California. But I recently got word that Nordskog is going out of business. The publication rights will revert to me, and I’ve made a deal to buy their entire stock of the paperback. These I plan to hand-sell at Viking events, as I have been doing. But there will need to be an Amazon paperback too – perhaps with a new cover. Can’t get at that until everything’s nailed down with Nordskog.
That leaves Hailstone Mountain. That one belongs to me alone, and has been published for Kindle since 2013. I’m now working the manuscript over to fit Amazon’s requirements, and I’m nearing the end of those revisions. I may manage to make it available on Amazon before the end of the month (barring glitches, which are always possible. Even likely) except…
I’ll be out of town most of next week. Off to Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota, as I have done for so many years. Four days of living like a Viking – except for minor technicalities like modern plumbing, sleeping in a host’s bed, and fast food. Stop in and see me if you’re in the Minot area. It’s convenient to… Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, I guess.
The following weekend I’ll be (God willing) at the Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Which is entirely unreasonable in terms of miles driven for a man of my age, I think, but my book sales were really good last year, and they’ve invited me to be more heavily involved in the program. Which is flattering, because this involves high-level reenactors and genuine scholars.
I won’t get a break the weekend after that, either, as I have a meeting to attend on Saturday in northwestern Minnesota. Which will seem like a short drive after the others. Also, thank goodness, I’ll get to wear modern clothes. (You’d think Viking clothes would be comfortable, but I find they get old pretty fast.)
As for the translation job, I’m feeling good about it. My plan requires me to do 100 pages-plus each month for the next five months. I’m up to about page 85 now, and I’ve still got a few days to fill up my measure for September, even with time off for festivals and frivolity. It’s looking okay.
(Note to potential house robbers – my renter is at home pretty much perpetually now. My place will not be empty, and the booby traps will be set.)
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.
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.
I always post “The Mansions of the Lord” on Memorial Day, because no other song I know expresses it like that one does. It doesn’t work theologically, but even I have to just go with my heart sometimes.
As I wrote in The Year of the Warrior, playing fast and loose with theology in my own right:
“It’s strange to die this way, and me a Christian. If I were heathen yet, I’d know that Odin would welcome me to Valhalla. What welcome has Christ for a warrior, Father?”
I had no quick answer, and Moling must have seen my trouble, because he asked what the boy had said. I told him.
“Tell him I’ve had a dream about Heaven,” said Moling. “The teachers tell us that the Beloved lives outside Time itself. He goes back and forth in it when He wills. And when we go to be with Him, we too will be outside Time.
“It seemed to me in my dream that at the last day the Beloved called together all the great warriors who had been brave and merciful, and who had trusted in His mercy, and He mustered them into a mighty army, and He said to them, ‘Go forth for Me now, My bonny fighters, and range through Time, and wherever there is cruelty and wickedness that makes the weak to suffer, and faithful to doubt My goodness, wherever the children are slain or violated, wherever the women are raped or beaten, wherever the old are threatened and robbed, then take your shining swords and fight that cruelty and wickedness, and protect my poor and weak ones, and do not lay down your weapons or take your rest until all such evil is crushed and defeated, and the right stands victorious in every place and every time. We will not empty Hell even with this, for men love Hell, but I made a sweet song at the beginning, My sons, and though men have sung it foul we will make it sweet again forever.’”
I said these words to Halvard in Norse, and he died smiling.
Big weekend. I saw new (old) things, did my Viking shtick, sold books, and exerted myself more than I’m used to these days. Probably good for me, but it made me thoughtful too.
I’m embarrassed, as a native of southeastern Minnesota, to have had to learn this, but there’s a pretty neat museum in the town of Hastings that I’d never heard of before. It’s called the Little Log House Pioneer Village, and one assumes it started modestly and just grew. It features a large collection of historical buildings, from pioneer cabins to hotels and post offices and gas stations. Some of the stuff goes back only to my childhood, but that’s a long time, after all.
The picture above shows you where we were camped (and by our camp, I mean my tent and awning). Looking up the street you can see just a little of the collection of buildings at the museum. The white building dominating the left-hand side is the town hall from Nininger, Minnesota, a storied place in Minnesota history. It was a utopian community, which Ignatius Donnelly (a radical Republican who eventually become a Populist) promoted as a model community of the future. The crash of 1857 doomed it, leaving Donnelly bankrupt.
Donnelly, a Philadelphia native, was Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota from 1860-1863, and also a congressman and a state representative. He ran for Vice President on the People’s Party ticket in 1900. His greatest fame, though, was as a writer, a forerunner to today’s pseudoscience cranks. This was a man born for the cable channels. His book on Atlantis: The Antidiluvian World is still being reprinted, and continues to be studied by ancient mystery geeks. He also wrote a book about the Great Flood, and championed Francis Bacon as the author of Shakespeare’s plays. In addition, he was a pioneer of Science Fiction, writing a future dystopia novel called Caesar’s Column that was a big success in its time.
The Little Log House Museum hosts an Antique Power Show (steam engines, tractors and classic vehicles) every year. I’m told the place is generally packed for the event. They skipped it last year, of course. And the public seems to still be cautious – our crowds this year were only fair. Still, I sold a moderate quantity of books, and had some pleasant interactions with my species in fairly pleasant weather. It was hot, but I enjoyed fair shade under my awning (better the second day, when we moved my tent onto the east-west tree line). This was not my usual group of Vikings, but a couple of the younger members plus a group of very young new recruits. This made me, perforce, the village elder, and occasional dispenser of dad jokes. I let them have the combat shows all to themselves, but lent some of them arms and armor.
These days I feel my age more every time I do one of these events, but in fact I felt less tired the second day than I expected, and I feel less wiped out today than I also expected. My main concern right now is carrying stuff up and down my basement steps, because there’s no room to store my Viking things on the main floor of my house – and let me tell you, Viking things are heavy (as are books). I need to think about cutting back – not on the events I attend, but on the impedimenta I bring along. I expect I’m going to have to downsize my operation to a plain book table in time.
I was happy, through the good efforts of my printer, Elroy Vesta of EJ Enterprises, Fergus Falls, MN, to have the new paper edition of The Year of the Warrior available to hand sell. I meant to get my picture taken with it in costume this weekend, but it slipped my mind. Here’s a more modest picture.
Oddly enough, I first posted the art above exactly three years ago, on June 18, 2018. It’s the cover for the new paperback edition of The Year of the Warrior. Baen Books still publishes the e-book, but I have their clearance to produce and sell this corporeal version. Various obstacles have arisen since that time to prevent production, but I finally took the bit in my teeth a few weeks back, and arranged with a printer I know to get this thing done.
My plan with this version is to sell it personally, at the Viking events I participate in. If you’re hoping to get it on Amazon, that probably won’t happen, because (I assume) I’d have to ask questions and go through a bunch of red tape to arrange for that. And I’m too old and lazy.
I’m not sure when I’ll actually have them in my possession. The printer sent me the galleys today and told me there’s a problem with the cover. I think I’m going to have to add space at the top and bottom to fill out the cover shape. But I haven’t looked at it yet.
I’m too old and lazy. I’ll get to it over the weekend.
I really like that cover, though. It would have had me wiggling like a fishing worm, back when I was a teenager. Jeremiah Humphries did it, and I think it’s my favorite cover that’s ever been done for one of my books.
Now if I can just find a few more events to flog them at this summer.
As we enjoy the collapse of Western Civilization, there are at least a few consolations to be found in the gradual reduction of lockdown restrictions. In Minnesota, our venerable governor has graciously eliminated occupancy limits in restaurants, and allowed us to go maskless out of doors, as long as we aren’t too friendly about it.
So I went crazy on Saturday and ate at a Chinese buffet for the first time since the Troubles began. Chinese buffets had come to occupy a disproportionate portion of my consciousness, such as it is. Many had already closed even before the pandemic; I feared the lockdown had wiped them out completely. I have an idea the place I went to had been open for a while, actually. But one of my great horrors is having someone tell me, “You’re not allowed in here,” so I waited until I was fairly sure it was OK now. (If you’re in the area and wondering where I went, it was Ocean Buffet in Brooklyn Center. In my experience, the majority of their customers are always Chinese. I tell myself this means something.)
And it was good. Not as good as one imagines after a year of abstinence, but good. I had to wear plastic gloves, provided at the door, at the steaming tables – the cheap kind of gloves made of the same plastic they use for produce bags in the grocery store. Prices have gone up, of course, but that’s a given. I felt a sense of closure. (Or anticlimax. I always get those two confused.)
Reduced restrictions means it looks like there should be some Viking events this summer. I need to take final action on getting my dead tree edition of The Year of the Warrior printed. The printer was going to get back to me, and hasn’t so far. I suppose I’ll have to call him. That book is loooooooong, you know, like something out of 19th Century Russia. It will be expensive to print.
My great fear is that I’ll sink a bunch of my savings into a stock of books, and then the lockdown will return and all my venues will vanish. And I’ll be left with a basement full of stock.
