Today is a stellar day, a frabjous day – a day I shall much note and long remember.
My endless book translation job is done, done, done. Barring touch-up requests, assuming there are any, it’s over. All but the invoicing. The book was more than 500 pages long, and it wasn’t large print. Footnotes were involved as well.
I once compared translating a book to demolishing a piano, passing each piece through a suspended iron ring, and then reassembling the instrument on the other side. My piano has been reconstituted (Norwegian to English, of course) and I like to think it’s still relatively in tune.
I am limited in what I can tell you about the book (I’ve said this before, but you may have missed it. It’s mathematically possible you might even be interested). It’s a literary biography. I’m doing the work for a scholar in another state. I believe my translation is only for the scholar’s use in a larger project, so I have no expectations of ever seeing it published.
Anyway, it’s done. I am working hard at the moment getting used to the now-alien concept of having free time.
Also, I wanted to mention that I finally (there was a delay) got some copies of the Amazon paperback edition of The Year of the Warrior. This enables me to share the picture above, a family photo of the whole series, except for the baby on the way.
Today the whole world is discussing the fall of Assad in Syria, the arrest of the Brian Thompson killer, and the verdict in the Daniel Penny trial.
It is a busy news day.
Which is rather sad from my point of view, because otherwise I’m confident everybody would be talking about the release, this weekend, of The Year of the Warrior in paperback on Amazon.
You realize what that means, don’t you?
It means that you can now own the whole series of Erling Skjalgsson books, all the same size, lined up on your favorite bookshelf, to the envy and amazement of all your most most sophisticated and insufferable friends.
Just make sure to leave a space for The Baldur Game (coming soon).
I started this business of formatting books for Amazon (if I remember correctly, though I have an idea I may be mistaken on some points) while setting up The Baldur Game. I watched how-to videos on YouTube that took me through the process of making a Microsoft Word document into something you could humbly submit to the gatekeepers of the great publishing leviathan.
I was terrified to do it, frankly. I am an old man, what they call a “digital immigrant,” someone who’ll never be quite at ease with all the ones and zeros. And yet I worked at it to the point where I’m actually relatively at ease uploading books now.
So I figured I might as well go ahead and make all my Erling books manifest. One after the other, I worked my magic, and behold, they did appear, and I held them in my hand, like the treasures of far Cathay.
And I cannot lie – there’s a thrill to holding your book that just doesn’t happen seeing it appear on a Kindle. Like holding your baby rather than looking at his picture. (But with less diaper changing and mineral oil.)
I even think I’ve developed a minor flare for design. I think the paper books I’ve created possess a sort of simple elegance. They look good to me. I am not ashamed of them.
Should I share negative thoughts about my own books on this blog? Is it acceptable to indulge in self-criticism, or should the tone be relentlessly rah-rah and self-promotional?
Oh heck, that ship sailed long ago.
I’m working on formatting The Ghost of the God-Tree, the second part of The Year of the Warrior, for paperback. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s got some strong stuff in it.
But I think it’s among my weakest books. There are lots of things I’d change, if I didn’t feel obligated to keep the editions relatively uniform.
And I’m pretty sure why.
I am very grateful to Baen Books, and to Jim Baen the maverick publisher, who gave me what little legitimacy in the industry I possess.
But Jim had a system. A program for his authors. And into that program I did not fit well.
Jim felt that nothing contributed more to an author’s success than having a bunch of books with his name on them all together on the shelves in the bookstores. This worked for him again and again. He knew his business. In order to achieve that shelf-space goal, he wanted several books from his new authors, quick. That’s why I got a three-book deal.
The problem is, I’m not a fast writer. I’ll admit that some of my languid output is due to laziness and inattention. Fair enough, mea culpa. But regardless of that, it just takes me a while, and many drafts, to produce decent prose. It took me years to produce Erling’s Word, the first part of the book. The Ghost of the God-Tree was written in haste, and suffers from my parental neglect.
On the other hand, judging by history, I’m probably being a little over-critical here.
And there are parts I like. I enjoyed the section where Ailill (Aillil) and Asta go to Thor’s country and meet the god himself. I thought that was kind of fun.
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.
