David Thayer

Max Magee at the Millions brought up the subject of historical fiction in a post last week. Jenny Davidson offered a serious list of books in the comments section. You can access the discussion via Metaxu Cafe or Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading. Historical fiction is a huge area populated by numerous sub-genres that embrace traditional elements of adventure, romance, suspense, mystery and family saga. This does not begin to cover the waterfront; some historicals have teeth, big teeth, as in Count Vlad, dark antagonist of The Historian. Arturo Perez-Reverte has a series set in Spain during the Inquisition. Lewis Purdue has been writing thrillers with historical twists for years; I won’t mention Dan Brown.

I chose first century Rome as the setting for The Year of the Four Emperors. I’d read Tacitus years ago; his Annaleswas written in the last decade of the first century AD. My introduction to Roman history came in Latin class reading Caesar’s Conquests and Cicero. I enjoyed that stuff; other sources include Petronius, a contemporary of Nero and Josephus, author of The Jewish War. My protagonist, Troianus, is a veteran of Judea transferred to Spain in AD 68. He arrives just in time for the civil war between Galba and Nero. His love interest Liviana is a novitiate of Ceres; the religion of Rome included a tradition of female warriors that dates back to their struggles with the Etruscans. Liviana is an expert with a bow and arrow. The book’s climax involves the death of Nero reimagined to include Troianus and Liviana at the fateful moment. The novel covers the months between March and June of  that tumultuous year.

Okay you’re in a bar. It’s a working man’s bar, not a roost for fast trackers. You’ve got your butt on a cracked vinyl stool with a boiler maker in a front of you. The bartender is called Ernie. A ballgame is on but the TV is muted. There would be a haze of smoke but city ordnances forbid smoking. Drinking’s okay though. You get into an argument with a guy named Rafe who has had a few; Rafe’s a big guy and a loud mouth, a troublemaker. He says something like Dennis Lehane sucks; you call Rafe an ignorant lout. Rafe sez you suck you say he sucks Ernie sez knock it off.

Two years pass. Seasons change. If the bar had a calendar, pages would fall off. Ernie has a new haircut, a kind of weird white guy fade that makes his ears blow up like balloons, but he keeps Court TV on mute, otherwise that really loud lady would scare all the drinkers to death. Anyway Rafe ambles over and socks you in the nose and sez Dennis Lehane sucks. Huh? That argument ended in a draw two years ago. I was talking to Bert this morning and he told me we’d heard from an editor on a submission we made two years ago. The guy had some nice things to say about the submission but I’m thinking why did he wait two years. Ernie, explain this to me. Ernie?

Okay you’re in a bar. It’s a working man’s bar, not a roost for fast trackers. You’ve got your butt on a cracked vinyl stool with a boiler maker in a front of you. The bartender is called Ernie. A ballgame is on but the TV is muted. There would be a haze of smoke but city ordnances forbid smoking. Drinking’s okay though. You get into an argument with a guy named Rafe who has had a few; Rafe’s a big guy and a loud mouth, a troublemaker. He says something like Dennis Lehane sucks; you call Rafe an ignorant lout. Rafe sez you suck you say he sucks Earnie sez knock it off.

Two years pass. Seasons change. If the bar had a calendar pages would fall off. Earnie has a new haircut, a kind of weird white guy fade that makes his ears blow up like balloons, but he keeps Court TV on mute otherwise that really loud lady would scare all the drinkers to death. Anyway Rafe ambles over and sucks you in the nose and sez Dennis Lehane sucks. Huh? That argument ended in a draw two years ago. I was talking to Bert this morning and he told me we’d heard from an editor on a submission we made two years ago. The guy had some nice things to say about the submission but I’m thinking why did he wait two years. Earnie, explain this to me. Earnie?

Literary agent Donald Maass ran his breakout novel seminar in San Jose Costa Rica, no San Jose California this weekend. My sister attended, telephoning this reporter before the Saturday night mixer.

San Jose is in the heart of Silicon Valley and I wondered what genre dominated among the attendees. So close to Google HQ in Mountain View, so close to the Roman garrison at Monterey, yet distant from Hollywoodland, what are forty writers in the Valley likely to work on? When I attended Don’s class in Seattle it broke down this way: 21 fantasy, 12 traditional romance, 8 traditional sci-fi, 3 romantic sci-fi, 3 historical fantasy, and one noir thriller.

Terri has written a mystery that centers around a quilt show. She’s a quilter, so that makes sense. Her classmates are probably venture capital specialists or software engineers so I’d speculate the manuscripts breakdown like this: 1 quilter mystery, 4 venture capital thrillers, 11 vc romantic suspense, 7 fantasy Google Rules the World, 9 paranormal venture capital thrillers, 2 books about traffic, and 1 burning Angles, ruddy cheeks adventure about the sacking of York.

Donald Maass is an excellent teacher and the class is worthwhile if you fit one of the following categories: a working novelist, close to publication, or have two or three training novels under your belt. His focus is on writing novels that will perform well in the marketplace; if you’re at the beginner level, try reading The Career Novelist or the Breakout Novel Workbook before investing in the class.

They are greedy, these books that are not books, manuscripts, publishing’s dirty little secret, the incubation of the finished product, the handheld novel bound between two covers because as long as humans have thumbs they might as well use them. Novels in manuscript form are unruly, wilfull, hard to wrangle; individuals who shall remain nameless enjoy making notes on manuscripts, or putting blue ink through harmless paragraphs. Strangled by rubber bands they are sent on long journeys in shoe boxes.

Now we have the e-manuscript. With the press of a button hundreds of pages slip through the ozone. That’s not progress, not really. There are rubber bands lying around with little or nothing to do; they talk among themselves, rejoicing when emails go astray. They know their days are numbered. As for shoe boxes, well, those so inclined can always put their shoes in shoe boxes, although I don’t know why anyone would. Shoes are passive. They just sit and wait.

No more trips to the “lucky” post office, the one where manuscripts are flung into large sacks organized by zip code. Sure the rubber band might break or the buff colored envelope might get scrunched. These are acceptable risks. Sending your novel via email is more fraught with peril, especially when Mrs. Enid Braithewaite of the Outer Hebrides deletes you as spam. Don’t trust this new technology. Enid doesn’t. The American Rubber Band Society doesn’t either.

If you’re a fan of Richard Price you’re probably excited to the see the trailers for Freedomland on the tube. The novel is one of my favorite books even though the narrative has more stops than the number seven train from the Bronx, Price manages to whip the reader through long after the ending was a foregone conclusion. He’s written the screenplay which bodes well for the movie. Or does it?
Two of the more difficult topics a writer can tackle are race and child abuse. Freedomland has elements that make your hair stand on end as Lorenzo Council, a black detective, sets out to locate a missing child, taken by force during a car jacking. Because the action is set in the projects of North Jersey the assumption is the doers are bangers from the hood. The set up becomes a story about the world Lorenzo inhabits, a state within a state, the world of the Armstrong projects, black, violent and dismal.

My reaction to Freedomland was complicated by remembering ads for the old theme park, ads as cheezy and weird in memory as Murray the K claiming to be the Fifth Beatle, as disjointed as an afternoon in the Shea Stadium parking lot with a friend who sold hot dogs. The wind never stops off Jamaica Bay and we dodged flying objects dealing out the franks, which is how I felt reading the book. If that make any sense to you  go to the head of the line.

Amazing blogger tricks: they read, they write, they may be on the same subway car or freeway that you’re on right now. Who are they? Bloggers, my friends. They confound everyone with their ability to assimilate into society at large. “They look like us,” Professor Dagesham Moriarity of Think Tanks Ltd. “Bloggers may one day learn to reproduce.”

Blogger offspring will know how to add links to their sites before they develop other skills such as speech. “They may never speak as their tongues will become vestigial. These future children will never taste a lollipop.” Others are not so sure. “Professor Moriarity is a crackpot,” ventured Stanford Professor Emeritus Evita Dontcryforme. “Although bloggers are wired differently they are not a separate species.”

Tests performed on volunteer subjects revealed that bloggers can succeed at other endeavors although it is not clear how this is accomplished. Professor Moriarity believes that one day in the not very distant future a blogger will go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. “Humans did it in the 1930s and 1940s. Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel may be a rite of passage for all upright creatures.”

In a controlled experiment a blogger and a human were placed next to a water feature in the professor’s back yard. The human slid down the side of the four foot cataract while the blogger dozed. “Curiosity is the key,” Professor Moriarity said. “Large mammals often doze near waterfalls.”

“This is huge for Madison Avenue,” he said. “What if bloggers start buying things?” His work is being funded by private donations; going over Niagara Falls in a barrel violates several city, county, and provincial ordnances. Oliver Castinstone reporting.

Pacing the distance between here and there it soon becomes apparent that the portion of education devoted to measuring such things is wasted on writers. If the beginning is here and the ending is there, we spend our time in the middle, having left the one place in search of the other. The end being nigh might send ordinary people into a tizzy, but we’re not those people, we’re obligated to finish what we start or be forced to wonder if a novel falls in your underwear drawer will anyone ever read it?

In their day the Romans built four million miles of roads with stone markers at each milepost offering passing motorists and barbarian hordes the distance to Rome from wherever they happened to be. Most of the empire’s subjects were okay with this, although the Allemani, a tribe along the Rhine, often lifted the heavy stones out of the ground as a sport; Visigoths left graffiti on the markers. Traffic became a severe problem for Fred and Wilma on Sunday drives; without mile markers they had no idea how far it was to Rome. With ox carts piling up on the Via Appia, and no Imus in the Morning to lead the way, they had to await the arrival of legionary repair teams who would replace the markers along with the local form of government. Sometimes vandals would be caught, and their heads left on the stones as a cautionary tale. Today we have Triple A.

Here at Mile Marker Valentino we salute you. Grab the camera for a quick family portrait before piling the kids back into the cart; a big thanks to those Celt-Iberian warriors who took the photo. Dudes, they all turned out.

Special to the Druidical & Literary, Oliver Castinstone reporting: On a sleepy Saturday the capitol was rocked when news that sixteen year old intern Heather DeMedici had rejected the Pentagon’s fourteen hundred page opus, the Defense Budget. A copy of her rejection letter was leaked by all of the members of the Joint Chiefs. The explosive document, handed to me by special courier, reads as follows: “Dear Chiefs, Thank you for submitting Defense for our consideration. While it had much to recommend it, we feel it was overwritten, florid, fabulistic and far too long. We recommend you seek the services of a reputable literary agent before submitting the work elsewhere. Of course, this is a subjective business. Another editor may feel differently.”

Major General Arnold Spetnatz had this to say: “I resented the tone. We worked hard on this. It kills me that a sixteen year old wields this kind of influence.”

Spokesman Skippy said the president was asleep when the news broke. “Heads will roll,” Skippy said. “This submission…may have been a first draft.” Oliver Castinstone reporting from the branches of an elm tree in Lafayette Park.

Wow. Imagine for a moment that you parked your Volkswagon out on the street and in the middle of the night the fairy godmother sped past sprinkling fairy dust and now your battered Beatle is a Ferrari. You’re behind the wheel of this machine that looks like a million bucks thinking this is great, this is cool, this has dials and blinking things gauges and a leather grip for the tranny chrome glass brushed steel four hundred horses under the hood but the problem is you’re not sure where the ignition switch is oh wait kaboom this is not the putt putt sound no this thing has a throttle all the way to Poughkeepsie and back. This is WordPress 2.0.

Okay that new paragraph command responds like George Patton looking for Rommel and yeah that’s an HTML button on the dashboard and if I press that we’ll all be in hyperspace our noses pressed to the glass. On the right are a whole bunch of Swiss Flags that say things like post slug and Discussion and uh oh more features. Things may weird around here for a while since the earl will have to be crosstrained along with the entire staff. Signal before pulling away from the curb, tap that pedal, avoid the neighbor’s dog…floor it, baby.