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Author: M Harold Page

Scottish-based swordsman and writer. I teach German Longsword for Edinburgh's Dawn Duellist Society, and currently write historical adventure franchise novels for a living. If you read my writing, you'll spot that Harold Lamb is a big influence. You might also guess that I listen to a lot of Viking Metal, especially Tyr and Turisas.
Dark Lords Through History: Waller Newell’s Tyrants

Dark Lords Through History: Waller Newell’s Tyrants

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Tyrants
Dark Lords Through History (And Why They Did It)

Remember the Sword of Damocles?

Damocles flatters King Dionysus; “Lord! How fortunate and god-favored you are to be so powerful!”

The king — really a tyrant — says, “Sure. Let’s change places for a day.”

So, Damocles has a right old time feasting and carousing, right up until the moment Dionysus points out the sharp sword hung over his head, suspended by just one fraying thread…

Eek!

The take home is, WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO BE A TYRANT, YOU IDIOT? EVERYBODY WILL TRY TO KILL YOU.

And that’s one of the questions that Professor Waller R. Newell sets out to answer in his Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror (the which I talked his publisher into sending me as a nice follow up to Holland’s book on the Caesars.).

By “tyrant”, he means a ruler with personal power unconstrained by law or custom.

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How to Write a Dungeon Crawl (in Actual Fiction and Not a Tabletop Game!)

How to Write a Dungeon Crawl (in Actual Fiction and Not a Tabletop Game!)

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dungeon map 2
Extended dungeon crawls are rare in genre fiction.

It’s still a goto for roleplayers, you see the equivalent in movies, but extended dungeon crawls are rare in genre fiction.

Even when you go back to Dungeon and Dragons‘ literary roots, you don’t really find proper dungeon stories!

Conan generally offers up 1-2 room complexes, e.g. in Robert E. Howard’s classic tale “God in the Bowl.” Tolkien uses mega dungeons, but with narrative summary and — unless they are really just an underground battlefield — only limited denizens. Clark Ashton Smith’s Seven Geases  is close to a dungeon in setting, but in form is a quest story that happens to be underground.

Dungeonland
What makes a dungeon fun to play through doesn’t automatically make it fun to read about.

What makes a dungeon fun to play through — a series of puzzles and tactical or diplomatic challenges — just doesn’t automatically make it fun to read about, or easy to write. And the physical drama that works on screen — Indiana Jones stuff with narrow escapes and trundling rocks — doesn’t generate enough wordcount, and can only be visceral for so long.

Even so, it can be done, and modern writers do it and — of course — I’ve been pulling apart good examples to see how and why they work…

Several modern writers have pulled off extended dungeons crawls or similar. Just to name a few random examples: Paul S Kemp’s exquisite Egil and Nix stories are actually about professional dungeoneers in a Sword and Sorcery world. The climax to  Michael J Sullivan’s wonderful Riyria Chronicles entails an underground adventure.  And Kenneth Oppel’s wonderful Steampunk YA Skybreaker takes us exploring a drifting mega-zeppelin.

Taking them and others together, and without spoilers, here’s what makes a literary dungeon adventure work.

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Jerry Springer through the Time Portal! Tom Holland’s Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

Jerry Springer through the Time Portal! Tom Holland’s Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

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Tom Holland Dynasty
The heir to Harold Lamb?

The wildest period of Roman political history — from the rise of Augustus, through Tiberius, Caligula and C… C… Claudius, to the demise of Nero — is also the hardest to follow.

There are just too many unfamiliar names and too many repeated names — thanks to Roman naming conventions, there are, e.g., more Julias than you can shake a stick at. Worse, people don’t just marry for politics, they divorce for it, and even adopt for it.

Thus you have Emperor Tiberius, son of Emperor Augustus’ second wife Livia by her first husband but adopted by Augustus (originally called Octavian, by the way) adopting his nephew Germanicus who then marries Agrippina (the first: there are two Agrippinas ) daughter of Julia by her first marriage with Marcus Agrippa.  Julia, of course, was the daughter of Augustus by his first wife Scribonia, and not to be confused with Julia’s grandmother, daughter or granddaughter of the same name.

I hope you’re following that?

But really, you’re probably having difficulty hearing me over the sound of a million Ancient Romans chanting, “Jerry! Jerry!”

Because it is like a Jerry Springer show, except with more exiles, more murder, and more death by starvation or ritual suicide.

Despite, or because of this, the period is a favorite fictional setting. Robert Graves’ I, Claudius is the classic, but Simon Scarrow’s excellent Eagle series romps through the military thread. And of course we have the screen adaption Graves’ book plus the more recent BBC Rome.

Personally I have difficulty following even fictionalised renditions of this mayhem! For this reason I was intrigued to get a review copy Tom Holland’s Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar.

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Was Homer a Historian After All? A Look at The Trojan War: A New History

Was Homer a Historian After All? A Look at The Trojan War: A New History

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The Trojan War A New HistoryImagine if the Trojan War happened pretty much as Homer described it? How would modern archaeology, scholarship, and our understanding of war help us understand the events of the Illiad?

Yes, on the face of it, Barry Strauss’s The Trojan War – A New History is an odd book. It’s a bit like John Morriss’s Age of Arthur, which took Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth more or less at their word, much to the derision of other Dark Age historians.

However, this isn’t a Dark Osprey flight of fantasy; Strauss is well aware that he’s doing a “just suppose” kind of history and he does make a good argument as to why we should at least consider Homer as more journalist than fabulist.

For a start, Homer was (probably) based on the coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey was the home to many Greek colonies), and may have had access to local historical sources, including traditions reflecting the Trojan point of view.

The interventions of the gods mirror the rhetoric of numerous Middle Eastern inscriptions in which kings and Pharaohs do mighty deeds while the gods hold their hands in person. The Trojans and their allies also feel authentic to “Asia,” and the rhetoric and political landscape matches what we now know of the milieu.

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Three Ways to Write a Cast of Supporting Characters Without Confusing the Reader

Three Ways to Write a Cast of Supporting Characters Without Confusing the Reader

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vikings
But what were their names?

Remember the 1950s The Vikings? Tony Curtis versus Kirk Douglas. But what were their characters called?

How about Gladiator? Russel Crowe as Maximus. Can you remember the names of the other characters?

Pirates of the Caribbean? Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. I bet you can name the other actors. What about their character names?

The nice thing about movies is that they have actors. Even if we don’t know their names, we do remember and then recognise them. So when Maximus’ right-hand man betrays him, we know who he is even if we can’t recall his name and didn’t realise how significant he was when we first saw him.

It’s harder with prose. Much, much, harder. As soon as you have more than a handful of characters, you’re faced with two problems: seeding and identifying.

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Regency Punk Summer Reading for Adventurous Girls: Penny Blackfeather

Regency Punk Summer Reading for Adventurous Girls: Penny Blackfeather

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Penny Blackfeather
“Brilliant!” (But the cover is less grown up than the content.)
The Girl Reads Blackfeather
“…compares well to the Goth Girl series.”

“This is brilliant...” says “The Girl,” 12, one of my son’s friends.

We’re in the cafe of the kid’s music school and I’ve asked her what she thinks of Penny Blackfeather, a Regency Punk graphic novel that Sloth Comics sent me.

She reads it until we prise it away from her so she can dash off to her recorder lesson.

The next week, we all go for coffee and she dives back in.

She still rates it as brilliant, and thinks it compares well to the Goth Girl series.

“Morgenstern”, my steampunk-loving daughter, 8, is also mesmerised.

She reads it twice and compares it to Adventure Time, her favourite cartoon, and also pronounces it, “Brilliant!”

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Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jantar_Mantar_-_Laghu_samrat_yantra.JPG
…when we sit down to write a book

OK I admit it, I put the Harry Potter reference in the title as link bait. Well almost. Take a look at the word counts for each of the Harry Potter books:

  • The Philosopher’s Stone – 76,944
  • The Chamber of Secrets – 85,141
  • The Prisoner of Azkaban – 107,253
  • The Goblet of Fire – 190,637
  • The Order of the Phoenix – 257,045
  • The Half-Blood Prince – 168,923
  • The Deathly Hallows – 198,227
    (source)

That’s a lot of words, and it illustrates the mountain an author contemplates when we sit down to write a book. Until recently, the length of The Prisoner of Azkaban was pretty much industry standard — 100K words is an economic sweetspot for printing and distribution. Lengths seem to be drifting down of late, because there’s no economy of scale for ebooks.

Who knows? Perhaps we’ll one day return to the sanity of the 35K-word 1970s pulp?

But thirty-five thousand words is still a lot of words!

So it’s natural to look at the project, divide target word count by available days and use that as a measure of progress.

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OMG They Found It! Osprey’s The Catalaunian Fields AD451

OMG They Found It! Osprey’s The Catalaunian Fields AD451

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Osprey Catalaunian FieldsIt’s the one thousand, five hundred and fifty sixth anniversary of the Battle of the  Catalaunian Fields, otherwise known as the Battle of Chalons!

Not heard of it?

AD451. Just as the Roman Empire fades into the Dark Ages. At the Catalaunian Fields near Chalons, a grudging alliance of Romans and Germannic tribes confronts Attila the Hun’s confederation of Huns and yet more Germannic tribes.

Hundreds of thousands of warriors grind through a Ragnarok-grade battle on the scale of Waterloo but fought with cold steel… a battle so murderous that, in the morning, nobody much feels like doing any more fighting.

I’m fascinated by this forgotten battle — I’m even writing a YA Historical series that will put the hero in the midst of the mayhem — so I was overjoyed to receive a review copy of Osprey’s new book, The Catalaunian Fields AD451. Imagine, then, how I felt when, I discovered the chapter called, “The Battlefield Today.”

What? OMG they found it!

The location of this battle has been hotly debated for centuries. Now here’s an Osprey book casually pinpointing the battlefield and using it as the basis for its maps and diagrams!

And it’s convincing.

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Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Via Graphic Novel: Charles Cutting’s Kadath

Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Via Graphic Novel: Charles Cutting’s Kadath

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However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre
However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre
It's like the lovechild of Brighton Pavilion and Portmeirion as raised by Michael Moorcock
It’s like the lovechild of Brighton Pavilion and Portmeirion as raised by Michael Moorcock

HP Lovecraft is a bit like Bill Haley; he arguably created his own genre, but few people now consume his work for simple pleasure.

Just as modern people typically discover Rock and Roll through [your favourite band here], they come to the Cthulhu Mythos through Charles Stross’s Laundry Files(*), through the madness of the Cthulhu Fluxx cardgame, or through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu.

Kids…? Well my daughter (8) has a plush Cthulhu who spends most of his time in the naughty corner for trying to eat the faces of the other toys.

Nobody, typically, just happens to pick up an HP Lovecraft book. If they do, they probably bounce. Let’s just say that speculative fiction has produced better stylists and that “of his time” is proving to be less and less able to explain away his racism.

However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre. He pretty much nailed Cosmic Horror, and though we have chipped off racist carbuncles, all the tropes still bear his mason’s mark.

This means that Lovecraft’s Mythos serves the the same function in the Geek community as the Classical world served amongst educated Victorians. They would remark on somebody being “Hector-like”, we joke that our  pasta bake “turned into a Shoggoth”.

This creates the interesting problem that the our shared subculture leans heavily on a set of texts that are increasingly unreadable for both literary and ethical reasons!

The answer, of course, is to retell the stories in other media, which is where books like Charles Cutting’s graphic novel Kadath come in.

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Using Feedback from Beta Readers and Editors: The Parable of Frankenstein’s Monster

Using Feedback from Beta Readers and Editors: The Parable of Frankenstein’s Monster

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frankenstein
A book, my friends, is like Frankenstein’s monster.

Beta readers — friends who read and comment on your work — and, if you are lucky or flush, professional editors, are great. They tell you things like:

“The characters seemed thin… I just lost interest.”

“The main character was such a #### that I couldn’t read on.”

“Too much technical detail. I got bored.”

“The fight scenes went on too long.”

And they are always right — because reading is a subjective experience — but they are usually wrong, because the issue is usually not the issue.

It’s like Frankenstein’s Monster.

No, really. Let me explain…

In fact, let me tell you a story.

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