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Thursday, May 29, 2014

Research for Hild?

From: Lauren

My friend Genevieve Williams (who is also a writer) saw you speak at SPL* and mentioned Hild, which I had heard about here and there, so I got it (on Kindle, sorry, I don't know if you get as much money from that) and I LOVE IT SO MUCH. I'm only halfway done, but I can't stop thinking about it and recommending it to people. 

I feel like I need to take classes in Middle English (?) as well as Irish and Welsh and whatever else—a feeling I love! I'm a small farmer, too, and you totally nailed the seasonality, the dependency, the interconnectedness of the animals and their byproducts (the sacrifices, the wool, the fat) and the plants and their byproducts (the herbs, the flax) and the humans and the household. Hild after the battle at Lindsey is the perfect antidote to the dudely wars in Banks' books. Her conceptualization of politics as weaving makes me glad. I am basically just constantly rolling around with glee in the feminine, feminist worldview. Nobody's perfect, nobody's a stereotype, everyone is complex and good and bad and wonderful.

I know I'm not a reviewer, but here are my literary comparisons, which you can use in the tally or not:  
  • Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mists of Avalon—thematically, feministically (yes, that's a word now) 
  • GRRM of course, because he WISHES the first book of GoT was like this, but this is so much better
  • Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife—not thematically, but in terms of engrossingness (also a word), loveliness of language, and my evangelism about it to everyone 
Anyway I have no good conclusion because I just want to finish typing so I can go back to reading the book. Um, I'm supposed to ask a question! So ... how long did you research this book? Did you have to study other/old languages? Where did you do your research? 

Thank you so much. I love the book a lot. 
In a way, I've been researching this book all my life. I grew up where Hild grew up, in Elmet which is now in West Yorkshire. So the physical details of Elmet and Deira, that is, the rest of Yorkshire—the change of the air as winters turns to spring, the sound of the trees at different times of year—are part of my understanding of the world. But I'd never been to Hadrian's Wall, or Bamburgh/Bebbanburg, or Yeavering; that's all research.

So much else is research, too. Some of this was systematic and conscious: I'm writing a novel about Hild, I will need to know X and Y and Z. Some of it haphazard and follow-my-nose-is: Oooh, so this is how they made a sword... Both sorts led me in interesting and unexpected directions: Huh, so what data do we have regarding physical remains of domestic animals? Or Which trees/birds/flowers/mammals were common and which rare in which parts of the country in, say, 620 CE?

For at least fifteen years I've been immersed in Britain of the first millennium. (I found so little available on the 7th C that I had to reach further back and then forward and try to fill in the gaps).

Then, too, scholarship is changing all the time. What was known to be known in 1970 is pretty different to what scholars believe to be true today. And, of course, these scholars tend to disagree.

Sometimes I got lost in minutiae. I'd read three different translations of the same poem and find the tone of each so shockingly at odds with the others that eventually I began to teach myself Old English so I could decide for myself. It didn't take me long to realise that this was an idiotic thing to do. To reach the level of expertise I was seeking might take twenty years. I'm a writer, not a Tolkien-level philologist!

It was around this point—2007 or so, I think—that I started pestering people who knew more than I ever would: experts in everything ranging from weaving to weather to warfare. Many, I found, kept blogs. (Some now hang out on Twitter though far fewer than is convenient for me, tuh.) I began reading their blogs. I began commenting on their blogs. It became apparent that I needed a blog of my own. Gemæcca, my research blog, was born. (And, oh, I wish I could go back and change that to Gemæcce! But by the time I saw my mistake, the URL was set. But on the blog I get to think aloud and take the temperature of those more expert than me; see for example this post on York in Hild's time for how this works.)

In my research I use everything: folk tale, music, personal experience, seriously abstruse papers, tattered old textbooks. I get information from friends and colleagues, Interlibrary Loan, books I put on gift wishlists, subscriptions to academic journals. (In my opinion academic publishing is a racket: $185 for a slim hardcover that probably only cost a dollar to produce and for which the author is barely compensated—yes, I've seen a couple of contracts; they are terrible. And just about all the extraneous work usually done by others in the trade press—for example, permissions, indexing, copyediting—is done by the authors and/or editors of the book. The graphic design is often execrable and production values shoddy. There are signs this is changing; as far as I'm concerned that changes can't happen fast enough.)

In terms of note-keeping, well, I'm sadly inefficient. Online tools such as Evernote and Scrivener are great—or would be if all the things I needed were digitised. But they're not. So I have notebooks, and digital files, and maps with pins, and giant charts, and folders of scribbles, and spreadsheets, and printouts, and bookmarks, and boxes of 3x5 cards, and just about everything you can think of. In other words, I'm hopelessly disorganised. But somehow it works. Swapping from one medium or form to another keeps me from settling on a path too soon. My research is like a life: absorbing, frustrating, thrilling, inefficient, varied.

The writing, too, is not straightforward. But I think I'll talk about that another time.

As for sales, I don't get as much money from a Kindle sales as the hardcover—but I get more from an ebook sale than I'll get from the paperback. And sales have gone better than I expected. Trust me, I am not complaining.
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* The Seattle Public Library, the Rem Koolhaas building downtown, where this photo was taken and this podcast taped



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Monday, May 26, 2014

Hild fan art and cat pictures...

You've seen all these before but hey it's a holiday and I'm taking the opportunity to stuff all the pix in one place. Enjoy.

These first two are pictures of Hild by Justine. In the first I imagine Hild's just figuring out this staff thing.

And here she's a bit older, a bit more at home with it. But clearly unhappy about something. Maybe she's just seen what happened to the farming couple to whom she sent that family of bandits.
I suspect there'll be more and I can't wait to see where this goes.

The second two are by Angelique, one drawn not long after a magnificent gift of wine while I was still writing the novel and neither of us knew where the story was heading or how much of Hild's life I would cover. But we did know we're both fans of Asterix the Gaul...

And the second came a little while later when I was working on both Hild and Angelique's amazing article in the Quarterly Review of Biology in which she explains her hypothesis that multiple sclerosis is not a disease of the immune system but a lipid metabolism disorder.
There's another but I still haven't sorted that out. Eh, I'll get to it one day.

Meanwhile here are the cat pictures (and one dog):

Ajax, who utterly dominates David J. Williams, can read upside down

Kevin dreams of being a gesith
Stinkyboy guards Colleen
Petunia will fight you for a book


Fitz (who owns Traci Castleberry) also can read upside down--but prefers library books
Bliss (who supervises Jo Booms) reads to the fish
Hilda (who advises Pastor Pilgrim) communes with an ARC


Talya the Russian Princess (who is served by Anne) has her way with Hild 
Cassie, who owns Brian Zottoli, ponders Hugo nominations

Joy, who owns Jo Booms (at least for now) reads her six-day old son, Wensleydale, to sleep...

I've probably missed a few. Feel free to resend/remind. I'll post updates on the page version of this post.
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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Hild roundup #19

Hild has now been out more than six months. Unless something extraordinary happens, I'll call it a day with the next roundup. I'm massively proud of the novel but 20 posts about its reception is enough, even for me. In fact, I've just listed the latest reviews instead of excerpting them. The first couple are interesting.

All previous roundups are here.

NEWS
  • The Nebula Awards Weekend was wonderful. List of winners--congrats to all--here
  • During the weekend I did three different interviews. I'll post links as and when they go live.
  • Hild is a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
  • The Lambda Literary Awards are in just over a week. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend as I'm teaching here in Seattle. But good luck to all; I wish I could be there.
REVIEWS
MISCELLANEOUS

Some Hild fan art for you, from Justine, who also wrote a review:
And one from Angelique, who drew this a couple of years ago when Hild was still in the rewrite stage. (Yep, we both love Asterix books. There's another in similar style but it doesn't belong to me so might take some time to post.) I love them both; they make me grin really hard. Enjoy.


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Tuesday, May 13, 2014

About the real Hild

In case you missed it, in the back of Hild I wrote a biographical note. It reads, essentially:

Hild was real. She was born fourteen hundred years ago in Anglo-Saxon England. Everything we know about her comes from the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, the foundational text of English history. Of that work, a scant five pages refer to Hild. You can read those, translated by Professor Roy M. Liuzza here (Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 1, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006; hosted with permission of the translator).

The first half of her life can be summed up in one short paragraph. She is born circa 614 CE, after her mother, Breguswith, has a dream about her unborn child being a jewel that brings light to the land. Hild's father, Hereric, of the royal house of Deira, was poisoned while in exile at the court of Ceredig, king of Elmet. Her older sister, Hereswith, marries a nephew of Rædwald, king of East Anglia. Hild, along with many of Edwin's household, is baptised by Paulinus c. 627 in York. She then disappears from the record until 647 when she reappears in East Anglia about to take ship for Gaul to join her sister—at which point she is recruited to the church by bishop Aidan.

We don't know where Hild was born exactly and when her father died—or her mother. We have no idea what she looked like, what she was good at, whether she married or had children. But clearly she was extraordinary. In a time of warlords and kings, when might was right, she begins as the second daughter of a homeless widow, probably without much in the way of material resources and certainly in an illiterate culture, and ends a powerful advisor to statesmen-kings and teacher of five bishops. Today she is revered as St Hilda.

So how did Hild ride this cultural transformation of petty kingdoms into sophisticated and literate proto-states? We don't know. I wrote this book to find out. I learnt what I could of the late sixth and early seventh century: ethnography, archaeology, poetry, numismatics, jewellery, textiles, languages, food production, weapons, and more. And then I recreated that world and its known historical incidents, put Hild inside, and watched, fascinated, as she grew up, influenced and influencing...

The first novel ends at the end of 631 CE (or 632 if you follow Bede, or possibly even 634 according to some annals; I explain the dates here--just go with it), a little beyond the beginning of that Bede-ish caesura. Book II takes place almost wholly within it. Some of the exterior referents of her history are knownwhich king acceded and/or got his head hacked off when; who was bishop where; the name and fate of at least one her sister's children (and countless other relatives)but the story of Hild herself? I'm absolutely, completely making it up.

However, nothing in any of the books I plan to write about Hild contravenes what I know to be known. It could have happened this way.

That's all.

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Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Hild's first religious foundation

For those who like that sort of thing, there's a long post up on my research blog about my thoughts on the site of Hild's first religious foundation.

It's chewy, with Latin and maps.

Enjoy!

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Saturday, May 3, 2014

Friday, 9th May at 7 pm: reading at Elliott Bay Book Company

Join me and a bunch of other Lambda Literary Award finalists at the Elliott Bay Book Company for a reading and celebration on Friday night at 7 pm.

The evening, MC'd by Matthilda Sycamore, will feature ten writers from eight books contending for the prizes (one is an anthology, so the editor and two contributors will be attending):

  • Mattilda B. Sycamore
  • Nicola Griffith
  • Chavisa Woods
  • Evan Peterson
  • Roma Raye
  • Amber Dawn
  • Jason Friedman
  • L.C. Chase
  • Amy Shepherd
  • Ryan Crawford
I will, of course, be reading from Hild.

My hope is that we start on time, move fast (they will be short readings, less than five minutes each), and let the nice bookstore employees have the room in an expeditious manner so they can get home. But I just want to point out that Elliott Bay has a café that sells beer. And if I remember correctly that's open til 10 pm. Could be fun. Just saying.
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Friday, May 2, 2014

Hild's age

From: Kate

I NEVER write author fan mail, but I LOVED LOVED LOVED Hild. I discovered it via my usual Sunday-afternoon listening session of To the Best of Our Knowledge, and alternated between staying up all night reading it and then only reading 3 pages a day because I didn't want it to end. 

This was the best reading experience I've had in a long time -- immensely enriched by also getting to read about your writing process, and read the q/a as you see writing on your book blog. I suppose as a former classics undergrad (I focused on late antiquity), then grad student in economics of religion, current worker bee in the Silicon Valley hive you allude to in the TTBOOK interview, avowed logophile and amateur linguist, and lifelong practicing episcopalian... this was a book made for me. But probably this is a book "made for" anyone interested in just one of those things!

And now, a question: how old is Hild at the end of the book? That's probably a bit random/trivial, but I realized a few times when her age was mentioned that I was off a bit -- probably this was on purpose/i.e. to evoke the reaction "so much has happened to her and she is so young" -- which at times is Hild's own reaction! But by the end  I had really lost track, and it was for me, (and I noticed this comment in a review, as well) a bit distracting/confusing. Not sure why -- maybe I want to know/ground any time of potential happiness Hild might have against what I "know" happens next ie with King Edwin, etc.? Who knows...  Meanwhile if you could let us know how old she is at the end of the book, I'd be much obliged.
At the end of the novel Hild is eighteen. She seems a bit older because I pack a lot in. In fact, it's possible that one of the years is a bit, ah, tardis-like and is bigger on the inside than the outside. This is because of the various histories I've weighed: they use different schema for dates. There's not only disagreement between various annals and Bede, but Bede himself probably started his year in a different month; perhaps he followed the Diocletian calendar, which begins each year on August 20. Bede therefore might have given the date for the end of Hild as 632 but we'd think of it as 631. (This, of course, also applies to what date she was born. Confused? Me too, for a while. Hence the tardis effect.)

For Book II I've reconciled all the dates and made clear decisions: the years are Bede's (as opposed to, say, Annales Cambriae or the Annals of Ulster, etc.) but they begin and end Jan 1 and December 31. This means the novel opens in March 632, just a few months after we last checked in with Hild (even though that might have felt like the end of 632). So now you can look up exactly what lies ahead--at least in kingship terms. Hild herself, of course, was hidden from history at this point. Obviously she was either doing nothing interesting or something/s that Bede disapproved of mightily and so left out of his official holy history.

As for the Silicon Valley corporations I mentioned on To the Best of Our Knowledge, well, I find I'm guilty of musing aloud, something I promise myself I'll never do again--after every single radio interview. I get so caught up in possibilities that I forget to stop and consider whether or not I actually believe in what I'm saying. Do I really believe there are parallels between early feudalism (long after Hild's time) and the operational strategies of big-tech companies? Not entirely. But it's a fun game to play. Hey, I'm a writer; I make stuff up...
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Thursday, May 1, 2014

When It Changed

From: Morgayne

Greetings from the Olympic Peninsula! Just started reading Hild which led me to your blog. I'm a writer who has had a short story published in the local community college anthology and am looking forward to having a novel published.

Hope to be one of the lucky lottery winners for your workshop coming up in June.

I have a couple of questions about your writing process. Do you start with archetypes for your characters? And do you use Joseph Campbell's 12 phases of the Hero's Journey to form your stories?

Have read your previous fiction and am a huge fan. Thank you for being willing to answer my questions.
No and No. I don't use any formulae at all when it comes to writing. No Jung, no Campbell. Just people. And places. And systems.

As you've read my other novels you've probably guessed that I like to know how things work: ecosystems, weather systems, economic systems and so on. That what a world is: a series of interlocking systems. As a writer I build a world (whether here-and-now or elsewhere or elsewhen) then put an interesting person, one with their own needs, into that set of interlocking systems, including other people with their own sets of needs, which promptly sets out to stymie those needs. What happens is the plot. What it means--the consequences for the protagonist--is the story.

I like to begin the story as far along as possible in that moment when the protagonist's life turns from the way it was to how it is now--or, to borrow the title of Joanna Russ's famous novella, to show When It Changed.


The trick, of course, is to know how to bring the reader along on the ride. The 
further the narrative world is from your expected readers' experience, the more time it takes to orient them and get them comfortable. As we're talking about northern Britain in the very early seventh-century, most readers know very little (and even experts find that they disagree with other experts; there's a reason historians used to call that era the Dark Ages).

In other words, it's a lot easier to simply begin with a dramatic moment when talking about (say) nineteenth-century Port Mahon, Minorca, or sixteenth-century Putney, London, than with seventh-century Loides, Elmet.

With Hild I had to not only introduce readers to a time and place they weren't familiar with and a character they'd never heard of but also to the fact that this was A Novel (as opposed to An Adventure or A Romance or even Historical Fiction). It was an interesting challenge. I knew I would lose a lot of readers in the first few pages. Those names! those strange concepts! the destruction of cherished stereotypes! But nothing works for everyone. Every writer has to choose who they're they're willing to lose and who not.

In the end, I made the choice I always do: I wrote the kind of novel I yearn for, one for smart readers who are ready to leap into the void and hope the writer catches them.

The beginning of Hild II is much easier, much less risky than Hild I in the sense that tens of thousands of readers now know Anglisc from British; they have adjusted to the possibility that women can be more than baby machines; they understand that most of what they thought they knew about Early Medieval Britain is probably wrong. But as the book progresses it is much, much more risky.

Ah, but you'll just have to wait and see why.
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