From the top down:

The Greatest Knight: The Unsung Story of the Queen’s Champion by Elizabeth Chadwick.
A historical novel about William Marshal, one of the most important knights in history, whose life was interwoven into that of Henry II and Richard the Lionhearted. I heard of this book in a review of a novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine, in which Elizabeth Chadwick was recommended as being very accurate in her novels. I’m looking forward to it, as the Platagenets are so often sensationalized, and believe me, it is not necessary; they were quite interesting enough on their own. They don’t have to be the Tudors.

William Marshal by Georges Duby.
A biography of the above, for the historical perspective. I usually find Duby’s writing dry but accurate, even if I sometimes don’t care for his over-emphasis on certain things.

The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara A. Hanawalt.
The title says it all. I’m interested to read this one, since it’s tough to find out about medieval peasant life, much less anything good or even balanced about medieval peasant life. (It’s harder still to learn anything about servant life, but that’s another matter.)

Spinning in the Old Way by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts.
A book about how to make yarn using high-whorl spindles (as opposed to other types of spindle). Most books try to cover a wide variety of spindle types, so I was happy to find this book that focuses exclusively on the high-whorl type, which is what I’m learning on.

A Small Sound of the Trumpet by Margaret Wade Labarge.
A book on women in medieval times that was recommended in a review. I’m hoping it’ll give a well-reasoned analysis without too much of the “medieval men were pigs” kind of slant that a lot of these books are prone to.

A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1297-1344 by Judith Bennett.
I picked this one up on a whim. It’s a slim volume documenting the life of a female peasant in the 14th century.

The Machiavellian Enterprise by Leo Paul S. De Alvarez.
A commentary on Machiavelli’s The Prince that appears to offer an unusual take on the text. I added it to my reading list based on a somewhat peculiar review on the Amazon page. I’ve already got Alvarez’s own translation of The Prince to go along with it, and I’m planning to read The Education of Christian Prince by Erasmus as a counterpoint.

Medieval Women by Eileen Power.
This is a Folio Society edition, in a red slipcase. So even if I can’t afford to join the Folio Society right now, I can sometimes buy the books.

Richard the Lionheart by John Gillingham.
This is a book I’ve needed for a very long time, for a novel project I’ve had in the works for years. John Gillingham is well-respected biographer of Richard I, and I loved his other volume, Richard I in the Yale Monarchs Series. I think this is one of the first books I put on my Amazon wishlist, and it’s nice to finally take it off.

Richard & John: Kings at War by Frank McLynn.
This one sounds entertaining as well as informative, and compares Richard and John to each other, as well as to their popular images. I don’t know about you, but I always liked the image of “Prince John, the Phoney King of England”, sucking his thumb and crying for his mommy. ;)

Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook by Debbie Stoller.
Oh, how I resisted this book. I get that “Stitch ‘N Bitch” isn’t really referring to the ladies themselves, but I hate it when women call themselves bitches, and I hate over-the-top snark. So maybe you can see why I was a bit turned off by this? But it’s recommended by a lot of people, and really, when it comes down to it, it’s a pretty good introduction to knitting.

Firethorn by Sarah Micklem.
Another one picked up on a whim. The hardback I got has a doozy of a cover. The paperback cover is different, but very pretty too. From the description on the back, sounds like it’s a good book for character study.

The Knitter’s Book of Wool by Clara Parkes.
A book about my favorite fiber! What more could I ask? Part craft book, part sheep breed book, this beautiful volume has lots of nice pictures of sheep and their wool, with lots of lovely, classic patterns too.

Perrault’s Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault.
Probably my favorite find this trip (thanks for spotting it, Danielle!) Charles Perrault is to French fairy tales what the Grimm Brothers are to German. This volume is covered in lovely gold-leafed, block-printed wine-colored buckram, and features the illustrations of Edmond Dulac, famous French fairy tale illustrator (and my favorite).

In all, this was a great trip! I offloaded a bunch of old books, got some new (to me) books, and was able to remove a few things from my wishlist that had been on there a very, very long while.

Not to mention, the hotel we stayed at had TV Japan, which is NHK’s channel for improving American and Canadian relations with Japan. The hotel was clean and comfortable, so I was surprised to find myself actually wanting to hang out there and watch the mesmerizing PBS-style Japanese programming. There was also a kaiten-zushi restaurant, Marine Polis, just across a parking lot. For a few Japanophiles from the sticks, who are lucky to find Japanese anything anywhere, it felt like the heavens were smiling upon us.

Image courtesy santarosa on Flickr.

How can it be that last night I was ready to give up on Foxglove, and now, after just an hour of mental meandering while trying in vain to sleep in, new ideas have me plotting, planning and getting ready to pull out the notecards and finally finish the outline?

The Muse is fickle. I’ve taken Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways course, and I’ve learned to manage my Muse to a certain degree, to trick it into giving up the goods, but there are still times when it’s elusive. I think a lot of that comes down to how distracted I am by other things, or how sick I am of dealing with the piece. Sometimes it’s because I’m in one of those moods where I never want to be a writer at all. I used to get ideas while dozing—that was my best creative time—but I find that more often than not nowadays, my mind starts circling and gets stuck in gear, and the only thing that can break me out of it is putting pen to paper and focusing.

Anyway, yes. I have a new direction to take the story in, a couple of ideas that alighted upon my imagination during those early-morning moments of half-sleep, and I think now I can finish the outline and write the rest of my 100,000 (or so) words.

Writing has slowed down a bit since I’m at the stage where I have to write a real outline or it’s going to be a mess. I keep combing through what I’ve already got, looking for an exciting direction for the rest of the story. I think I know what I’m doing, but it’s mentally tiring work.

Not much else to say right now, so here are some pictures from the buffalo BBQ I went to this weekend at Full Circle Bison Ranch:

When I decided to branch out into reading other members of the Inklings (the casual literary circle comprised of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others), Dorothy L. Sayers was the obvious first choice as the only female of the group. I started out reading Mind of the Maker, Sayers’ book on the creative process; it’s still sitting next to my bed, and I turn to it when I want to give my grey matter a workout. C.S. Lewis wasn’t kidding when he famously said he liked “the extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation—as I like a high wind.” Her writing in Mind of the Maker is brisk, brilliant, and forces you to engage intensely with the text as she carries you from point to point with razor-sharp acuity.

That acuity is the bedrock of Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, in spite of Lord Peter’s languid speech and flippant manner; with shades of The Scarlet Pimpernel, he seems an unlikely detective at first, speaking in an aristocratic drawl, carefully selecting the appropriate dress in which to view a body discovered in a bathtub, and employing his valet as an assistant in surveying crime scenes. He’s the epitome of the younger son of the British aristocracy, but as the story goes on you see that this is, if not exactly a front, not the full depth of Wimsey’s character.

Wimsey is all enthusiasm when he receives a call from his mother who knows some gossip she thinks might interest him: a body has been discovered in the bathtub of an unsuspecting church architect, Mr. Thipps, wearing only a golden pince-nez. Wimsey calls on his friend, Detective Parker, who’d thought at first that the corpse might be that of a missing person he’s searching for, Sir Reuben Levy, a successful Jewish businessman who apparently disappeared from his house stark naked. It turns out not to be Levy, but still Wimsey and Parker can’t shake the suspicion that the two cases are somehow connected.

This is not tough reading like Mind of the Maker, but it’s no potboiler either. The story keeps you guessing, and even though my suspicions about the identity of the murderer were confirmed, I couldn’t have dreamed up the way in which it was done, and that’s really the focus of the whole story: how do the two crimes connect, and how was it accomplished? And why? Meantime, the character of Lord Peter is compelling as you watch his complexities emerge from behind that easy-going façade—ever so subtly—bit by bit; archetypally English, no fuss is made about his past, and ultimately, little is revealed, but you just know there is more to Wimsey than the bored aristocrat looking for his fun solving crimes and collecting antique folios.

The other characters are equally interesting, and what seem to be caricatures turn out to be something more. Wimsey’s over-talkative mother is actually sharp as a tack, and by her prattling she uncovers important details and imparts them to Wimsey in the guise of gossip. It’s no accident, either—Lord Peter’s carefully cultivated appearance of superficiality would seem to be inherited.

Detective Parker plays Watson to Wimsey’s Holmes, and there appears to be a true, if reserved, comradeship between them. In fact, Sayers isn’t afraid to mention Sherlock Holmes a number of times during the story; she makes it clear that Wimsey was personally influenced by reading the stories, and so she carries the real world (Doyle’s influence on her work) into the world of the story (the influence of the Holmes stories on Lord Peter). This and other literary references (for instance, to Dante, whom Sayers translated) give the sense that these characters live in the same world we do (albeit in the 1920s), and as in Sherlock Holmes, we come into the characters’ lives in media res; though this is the first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, this is not his first investigation, nor his first crime solved.

There’s no point denying the influence of Sherlock Holmes since Sayers doesn’t bother. Wimsey never pretends to have Holmes’s genius, but along with the fact that he too plays a musical instrument (in Wimsey’s case, the piano) there is something about his manner, his intuition, the way he puts two-and-two together in a sudden, inspired way, that gives a feeling of similarity between the two. Perhaps there’s also a similarity in the emotional walls they both put up to hide their weaknesses and sensitivities, Holmes’s wall of cold, unfeeling intellect, and Wimsey’s barrier of devil-may-care flippancy.

Whose Body? is a short, fun and very smart novel, in which Dorothy Sayers has crafted a detective compelling enough that she returned to him in 13 novels and a number of short story collections. Lord Peter Wimsey may be inspired by Sherlock Holmes, but he has a style that is all his own.

This review is part of The Golden Age of Detective Fiction at the Classics Circuit.

Before I left, something happened (a relationship thing) that left me devastated . . . yet somehow rekindled the creative fire at the same time. It’s as if letting go of this situation cleared away the distractions and sharpened my vision. The decision to stop pining for him and create solely because I need to, instead of in preparation for a future too far away to see, gave me a sense of purpose I didn’t have before. I still have the Dream, it’s just put away for now. I imagine I’ll take it out from time to time, when it helps more than it hurts.

I picked up Foxglove again before I left, and made some breakthroughs that I think will really open the story up and take it into unexpected avenues. The process I’m experimenting with is working beautifully so far; I printed out what I had of the manuscript (about 100 pages), sat down with it and cut up everything into scenes, did notecards for each, and took notes on where the story was pointing, and where I wanted it to go. I’ve got some subplots in development, and my Sentence finally seemed to come together in a way that it hadn’t before. So it’s going extremely well. I can’t wait to get back to work on it!

Right now I’m reading Whose Body by Dorothy L. Sayers for The Classics Circuit: The Golden Age of Detective Fiction on Tour, and still working at The Iliad. There’s something pleasant about reading it, even if it’s not exactly a book I’d choose to snuggle up with.

Anyway, I’m trying to get back to it. I’ve been thinking about how I spend my time and what I want to spend it on. Creatively, I’m a writer, will always be a writer, but when I spend too much time on writing-related etcetera, my whole creative life suffers. I need time to work with my hands, to work with tangible things instead of just ideas, and I need time to just think. I feel like the content of this blog is focused on such a narrow part of my life, and full of too many lengthy book reviews; I never meant for this blog to become a book review blog, but at the same time, I do want it to be about books and writing.

I dunno. Sometimes I think about posting about everything I’m doing, making it more personal. I know that I don’t want Badgerish.Net to be a “writing tips” blog, for a few reasons. One, I have pitifully few finished manuscripts, so I don’t feel confident giving writing advice; two, I have this funny idea that it’s counter-intuitive for a writer of fiction to build an audience of other writers looking for writing help. I want to get to know other readers, because that’s who I’m interested in, honestly.

Which leads me to wonder, what do readers like to read on an author blog? For myself, I know I don’t like to read negative, angry political talk or diatribes. What I do like to read is harder to say, because the truth is, I rarely see authors writing about anything other than writing on their blogs. This is helpful to me as a writer, but I wonder how well they’re serving the readers of their fiction. On my current favorite blog, The World According to Maggie, Maggie Stiefvater talks not only about her books, but posts playlists she listened to while writing, pictures of herself with her bagpipes, photos from her travels, and what’s generally going on in her life. She doesn’t post much “writing advice” only of interest to other writers; she writes about things that her readers want to know.

Enough rambling. I’m back now, and trying to catch up on stuff. I’ve been working on Story A Day May, and even though I haven’t written a short story every single day (not by a long shot), I’ve written a few, which is a few more than I’ve written in the past three or so years. Maybe longer. I still don’t love writing short stories, but I think the element of instant gratification is good for the soul.

I’m normally not a short story writer. In fact, I don’t even like reading them much, unless they’re by an author I love. Even then it’s sort of tough. Basically, by the time I warm up to the characters the story has ended. (I think this may have something to do with relationship styles; I can’t get close to characters immediately anymore than people. Anyhow . . . ) I do think short stories are an important part of a writer’s repertoire, however. So in the interest of developing my technique, I’m going to write a story a day for the entire month of May (“Stop this rhyming now, I mean it!”)

To participate, you don’t have to write every single day—but you need to have some kind of schedule. For instance, I don’t write on Sundays, and I’ll stick to that schedule through the month. The stories can be any length, but need to have a beginning, middle and end. So flash fiction and the like is okay.

I’m brainstorming story ideas today, and I’ll try to work out fully-developed idea sentences for each, but no more. I do better if I have some sort of plan.

Anyway, I’ll be changing the layout live, over time, so it may look weird for awhile. But it’ll get there, and it’ll be just the way I want it. I hope.

Also, I’ve switched from full feeds to partial feeds and back again. I’m debating it. It should stay full feeds for awhile, and honestly, that’s my preference. There are some drawbacks to either choice.

Portrait of Napoleon by Antoine-Jean Gros.

In The Companions of Jehu, even though Alexandre Dumas implies the fate of some of the characters from the beginning, throughout the book I couldn’t help wishing—no, believing— that it could turn out differently.

I have to admit, The Companions of Jehu, got off to a very, very slow start. I’m pretty sure I’ve never read a book that was so slow to begin. There was an introduction, in which Dumas shares at length, in narrative form, how he developed the idea for the novel and how he conducted his research. It was kind of funny and not boring, but there was more. Before the actual story starts, which begins in 1799, there is a ten or so page prologue tracing the history-in-brief of the city of Avignon, from the late 12th century. (I’m not kidding.) While a lot of it was pretty interesting, I understood more deeply than ever why writers are cautioned against prologues, and against beginning the story too early.

On the other hand, this history adds depth to a tale that might have seemed isolated and superficial without it. It puts the story into context. Also, it seems from the text that one of Dumas’s primary goals in the writing of his novels was to educate the French public about their history. (He must have had a more patient public than most readers today.) I know he educated me; I couldn’t help but return to Wikipedia and the dictionary again and again to learn about personages throughout the history of France and political terms of the day. Even though it was difficult to get through that initial chunk of background, I’m glad I read it. There were more history lessons sprinkled liberally throughout the text, which I found illuminating (if sometimes a pesky interruption). I’m pretty sure this is not the best way to include exposition, and it’s definitely not how it’s done now, but it did the job. Dumas’s somewhat peculiar self-aware style of narration made it easier to swallow.

Once the history was covered, it was easy to get into the story itself. Dumas has a way with dialogue and fast-paced action, which I guess maybe goes without saying. Two mysterious strangers appear at a wayside inn, and sit down at a table d’hote (basically family-style dining with other guests) and overhear the tale of some highwaymen who, in Robin Hood-like fashion, rob from the government and give to the cause of the exiled King Louis XVIII. The two strangers are surprised and appalled when one of the masked brigands enters the dining room, returns some personal funds—accidentally mixed in with stolen government money—to their owner, and leaves with no one challenging him. One of the strangers, Roland, a fiery young soldier with a death-wish, who also happens to be aide-de-camp to Napoleon Bonaparte, makes it his mission to track down these Companions of Jehu and put an end to their treason.

Dumas is sympathetic towards and critical of both the Republican and Royalist camps. He seems most sympathetic to Napoleon’s cause, but in spite of that, I felt more sympathy for the Royalists; I especially loved the rugged Chouans of Brittany and their leader, Georges Cadoudal. I also found myself more on the side of the character of Morgan, the most important “Companion of Jehu” in the story, than that of Roland, even though I liked both characters; maybe I’m just a sucker for a lost cause, but I found the royalist ideals more heartfelt than Roland’s almost unthinking devotion to his friend, Napoleon. Roland’s chivalry eventually won me over, though.

This action-packed political adventure has a bit of darkness to it, since the events take place just after the Terror. Reading this story, set in context by Dumas, it’s easy to see why people were drawn to a figure like Napoleon, and why the people of France longed for the order and stability he must have represented after the upheaval of revolution.

(Oh, and I found a new kind of dandy to love.)

This review is part of Paris in the Spring: Alexander Dumas on Tour at the Classics Circuit.

There’s no particular point at which I know if something will “work” or “not work”; it’s just a general feeling I get as I spend time on the project. There’s no question of throwing the piece out or stopping completely on it; I have a tool I use to figure out what isn’t working, and to fix it so it works again. I use brainstorming to track what fuels my passions, and I also track what I dislike or what bores me. The mind-maps I make are independent from any given work-in-progress (If you’re familiar with Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways ecourse, I basically use the “Sweet Spot Map”.) This way, when I’ve been working on something for a little while—or better yet, when I’m first planning my idea—I can see quickly why my interest is fizzling out.

It works like this: Is my Major League Baseball pitcher hero making me yawn? Maybe that’s because “sports” is on my Boring List. So I turn him into something I know I’m excited about. A 17th century poet is better. Yes, everything will have to change around him (unless I want to write a time-travel story, which I don’t.) I can adjust my idea to fit. The point is, rather than having to start over from scratch with a new idea, I’ve tweaked my idea so that it’s the right idea for me. It may not be anything like the original story, but the point is that I still have an idea.

This is useful at any stage of the process, and sometimes it’s possible to tweak things just enough that I don’t have to start over from scratch. The only time this method gives me trouble is when I’m writing about a topic that I like to read but don’t necessarily enjoy writing about. Those can be harder to peg.