I Love a Parade

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Terra Australis

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Agincourt, Bayeux Tapestry, Dol Amroth, Forlong, Great Gate, Harold Godwinson, hauberk, Hirluin the Fair, Howard Pyle, huscarls, Imrahil, Langstrand, Lincoln Cathedral, livery, Lossarnach, Medieval, Minas Tirith, Morthond, N.C. Wyeth, Palermo, parade, Ringlo Vale, Robin Hood, spangenhelm, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tower of Gondor

“I love a parade, the tramping of feet,

I love every beat I hear of a drum.”

–Koehler/Arlen Rhythmania (1931)

Welcome, dear readers, as always. In the past, we’ve spent a posting or two discussing military aspects of The Lord of the Rings, from the look of the Rohirrim to the attack on Minas Tirith. In this posting, we would like to go back one step from that attack to consider what is a rather melancholy moment in the lead up to that assault.

Pippin and his newfound friend, Bergil, have come down to the Great Gate of Minas Tirith.

Here’s the gate from the films.

This immediately reminded us of places like the west door of Lincoln Cathedral.

Or the main door of the cathedral of Palermo.

Because he is now a member of the Guard of the Tower of Gondor, Pippin is allowed to pass through the Gate—and to take Bergil with him out to see and hear the following:

“Beyond the Gate there was a crowd of men along the verge of the road and of the great paved space into which all the ways to Minas Tirith ran. All eyes were turned southwards, and soon a murmur rose: ‘There is dust away there! They are coming!’

Pippin and Bergil edged their way forward to the front of the crowd and waited. Horns sounded at some distance, and the noise of cheering rolled towards them like a gathering wind. There was a loud trumpet-blast, and all about them people were shouting.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

What happens then is a kind of parade.

When we see the defenders of Minas Tirith in the films, they are all uniformly clad.

In our medieval world, this was highly unlikely, the best being that soldiers and servants might wear the colors/crest of the lord they served. This was called “livery”. Uniformity in clothing, weapons, and armor would be some time in the future.

What is coming up the road from the south are reinforcements, marching in a long column of units, and those units differ greatly in look. First are the men of Lossarnach, led by their lord, Forlong:

“Leading the line there came walking a big thick-limbed horse, and on it sat a man of wide shoulders and huge girth, but old and grey-bearded, yet mail-clad and black-helmed and bearing a long heavy spear. Behind him marched proudly a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes; grim-faced they were, and shorter and somewhat swarthier than any men Pippin had yet seen in Gondor.”

To us, those axes make the men of Lossarnach sound like the huscarls, the bodyguard of an Anglo-Saxon king, like Harold Godwinson, whom we see depicted on the “Bayeux Tapestry”.

Their leader, Forlong, might be similar in appearance, wearing a type of helmet called a spangenhelm,

and protected by an early form of mail shirt called a hauberk.

After these, we see more units, but with little description—the men of Ringlo Vale “striding on foot”, so infantry of some sort, five hundred bowmen from Morthond, from the Langstrand, “a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord”. After them, “a few grim hillmen without a captain”, and “fisher-folk of the Ethir”, all of which we imagine in their workaday clothes of hunters and shepherds and farmers and sailors, as depicted in medieval English and French manuscripts.

Next comes a unit which is perhaps wearing livery: “Hirluin the Fair of the Green Hills from Pinnath Gelin with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men.” We aren’t told how they’re armed, but that they may be in livery suggests that they may be better armed than some of the earlier contingents. (In fact, “gallant green-clad men” makes us think of Robin Hood—perhaps more archers?)

And, finally, folk we’ve discussed before:

“And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came.”

“knight in full harness”, as we talked about in an earlier post, probably meant, to JRRT, something from Howard Pyle or NC Wyeth, like this—

As for those “men at arms”, if they appear to be “tall as lords”, we assume that they’re on foot, which puzzles us a bit. “Men at arms” usually means “armored soldiers on horseback” in our world—perhaps with less armor than knights, but still cavalry (unless dismounted, to fight on foot, as the French did at Agincourt in 1415, for example). We see them, then, as looking like those dismounted cavalry, like these—

However they are armed and clothed, however, they are thought to be too few by those watching and, considering what Mordor eventually sends against them, they would not have been enough, if the brave Rohirrim and Aragorn’s reinforcement from the south hadn’t arrived in time. What would have happened if they hadn’t? A subject for very grim fan-fiction!

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Terra (Increasingly) Cognita

30 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, Military History, Narrative Methods, Terra Australis

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Adventure, Book, Exploration, History, Research, Terra Australis, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. Now that Across the Doubtful Sea is out in print on Amazon, we’ve turned our attention towards two projects:

the “prequel”, Empire of the Isles
editing and publishing the complete draft of the first book in a new series, Grey Goose and Gander, which is set in an imaginary medieval Russia. (Yes—it’s a distance from an alternate 18^th-century Pacific, but we love Russian literature, both poetry and novels, and we especially love Russian fairy tales and that outstanding illustrator, Ivan Bilibin.) More on that series in future blogs!

Among the main characters in Empire is Lucien de St. Valerien, the father of Antoine, from our first book and we follow his adventures in two periods: as a senior cadet 30 years or so before Across and then as a captain, 10 years before. The latter will lead right into Across and explain various things only hinted at in that volume in the series.

As his adventures take place in our imaginary Pacific (called “The Calm Sea”) and on our imaginary Terra Australis, we’ve been busy researching and inventing more geography. In doing so, we’re aware that we are violating a dictum which JRRT once set down about creating and mapping:

“If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.”

That we are doing so clearly shows the larky beginnings of this project as well as our desire to allow the Muse to take the story (and the storytellers) where she will.

Although we follow this ideal of inspiration, we would also agree with the Victorian English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who said of inspiration:

“To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting.” (A particularly apropos statement for a man with the goal of writing 10,000 words a day!)

In our case, however, we are using our research as a substitute Muse. And what particularly strikes us at the moment is the interesting clash of world views of early geographers on the subject of Terra Australis.

As we’ve mentioned before, Terra Australis, as a concept, dates back at least to Aristotle in the 4^th century BC and the concept of the need for a balance of continents. If there’s a big one on the north side of the earth (call it Terra Borealis), it would be necessary, for the equilibrium of the earth to have a second one on the south side (Terra Australis).

The next step in the thinking, however, can diverge. There are those who imagined that such a place would resemble the continent on the northern side, having as many peoples and cultures. (This idea appears to be associated with Crates of Mallus, who lived in the 2^nd century BC.) In our imaginary world, this is the standard belief, just as it was in the real pre-Captain Cook 18^th century Europe. (The idea was contested, however, as it is in our books.)

In our research, however, we’ve also happened upon a second view. This was popularized by a 5^th-century AD scholar named Macrobius, who wrote a commentary on the last-century BC Roman author, Cicero’s, “Dream of Scipio”, itself the last part of Cicero’s longer philosophical work, De Re Publica.

Cicero begins with the theory of more than one inhabited continent, but then shifts to describe an earth divided into five climate zones (reading from top to bottom: cold (and so uninhabitable), temperate, torrid (uninhabitable), temperate, and cold once more. This zonal view if followed by Macrobius and a number of the maps which appear in the earliest surviving manuscripts (which date from the period before 1100 AD) shows this very clearly.

What impressed us about this idea was how it mixed what we know to be true in the real world—uninhabitable poles (as some of the maps say, terra nobis incognita frigida—“a frozen land unknown to us”)

with temperate regions. It then added, however, a central belt simply too hot for human existence. (Was this derived from early reports of the Sahara?).

We’re still researching and creating, but our Terra Australis combines the two world views: we have a habitable southern continent, but one which is gradually falling under the control of a god—Atutlaluk—whose power is gradually turning Terra Australis into terra frigida—although it is gradually turning from incognita “unknown” to cognita “known” to us—and will be to you, in our next Across book, Empire of the Isles.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

For a detailed and very interesting article on Macrobius and maps, see Alfred Hiatt, “The Map of Macrobius before 1100” available as a download at http://dx.org/10.1080/03085690701300626.

Sequels and Prequels

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Narrative Methods, Research, Terra Australis, Writing as Collaborators

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Collaborating, Fantasy, Fiction, History, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

As we put the finishing touches on Across the Doubtful Sea (we’ve just realized that we need to have a title on the spine for the print version—oh, and a bar code on the back–yep, the things we never thought about when we were reading someone else’s book), we’ve already begun work on the second in this series, entitled Empire of the Isles.

So, where are we going in this book? Logically, you might say that we should continue in chronological order, begin the second book where the first concluded. After all, at the end of the second book of The Fellowship of the Ring, JRRT didn’t double back into earlier times to the previous defeat of Sauron in which he lost finger and ring and gradually work up to Gollum, to Bilbo, to Frodo . Elements of the past of Middle Earth, of course, appear everywhere in the text, often in geographical features like barrows, the Greenway, and Weathertop, very much the way the past was always present in JRRT’s England in barrows and stone rings and Hadrian’s Wall and castles and the ruins of monasteries. For us, this is one of the book’s great attractions and strengths . The specific past of the ring itself appears in “The Shadow of the Past” (with its resonant title, suggesting not only that the past casts a shadow upon the present, but that, involved in all, is The Shadow—Sauron) and “The Council of Elrond”, chapter 3 of the first book and chapter 2 of the second.

But is that where we want to go?

And, the answer is, no. Instead, we’ve decided to go into the past, but not just in flashbacks or explanations. As we wrote Across, we found it necessary to make reference to earlier events, but this was always done in bits and pieces, where needed for the present narrative. (No spoiler alert here—although this makes an interesting challenge in essay-writing for us: how can we discuss that narrative without too much specificity? How can we inform but tantalize at the same time?) Suppose, however, that we wrote a second book whose plot was based entirely upon events which had happened before Across.

We knew from Across that our main male protagonist, Antoine de St. Valerien, was in the Calm Sea (our Pacific) in part in search of his father, Lucien de St. Valerien, who had disappeared there on an earlier mission. Instead of fragmentary glimpses of his father and his doings, as was the case in Across, why not make the whole next book about him?

As we have written in an earlier posting, a basic premise of our trilogy is that Terra Australis, the southernmost continent which explorers and cartographers and sometimes corporations and governments once believed existed , is, in fact, real. (For those of our readers who would like to know more about this idea, we recommend: William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook, David Fausett, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land, Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570-1750, among many other interesting works.) In our contemporary world, this is Antarctica, of course.

In this alternative world, however, it is not an endless sheet of ice which covers a land mass of rock, but rather the place which those earlier explorers and others believed it to be, a country with a mixed climate, fertile land, and growing seasons. In our imaginary world, however, things are changing, owing to the influence of the people who live at its center, the Atuk, and to their god, Atutlaluk, whose power lies in cold and whose chief followers can mobilize the elements of winter against their enemies. Opposed to the Atuk are the Matan’a’e amavi’o, a Polynesian people who have long inhabited a string of a dozen islands to the north and who have more recently colonized the western fringe of Terra Australis.

Much of this was already in place in Across, but now we could use this second novel to fill in so much more: the history of colonization, the beginnings of the war between the Matan’a’e amavi’o and the Atuk, more about the Atuk, who they are, where they come from, all as a background to the story of Lucien and the part he plays in the greater narrative of the struggle between these peoples.

As we write Empire of the Isles, we’ll do what we’ve done for Across and invite you into the literary equivalent of backstage, in hopes that you’ll enjoy knowing more about where it all comes from and how it all comes about.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Research

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Narrative Methods, Research, Terra Australis, Writing as Collaborators

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Exploration, Fiction, French Navy, History, Napoleonic, Research, Royal Navy, Sea, South Pacific, Terra Australis, Warship, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

In this post, we want to talk a little about research. We’ve already shown you bits and pieces of what the world of Terra Australis and its peoples look like to us—and we hope to you– but we want to add a bit about some of our sources.

As we’ve said in an earlier blog, the idea of setting our Doubtful Sea series mainly in the Calm Sea (Pacific in our world) and on Terra Australis (which only exists as the forbidding Antarctica for us), was just a lark, a spur of the moment thing. We had already known a little about the French admiral and Pacific explorer, de Bougainville. Most of what we knew about him, however, came from his early career as an aide de camp to the Marquis de Montcalm, the commander of French regular troops in New France during the bulk of the French and Indian War (1756-59). (He left behind journals of that time, which have been published in English as Adventure in the Wilderness, translated by Edward P. Hamilton and published by the University of Oklahoma Press.)

And we were aware of Captain Cook, who was also involved in that war and even must have sat across the St. Lawrence River from de Bougainville at the siege of Quebec, in 1759, although neither would have been aware of the other at the time.

So what then? Lots of conversation first, based upon nothing more than our imaginations. Who would our characters be? Where would our characters go? What might happen to them?

As we talked, we began to see that, now that we had a very general idea of the beginnings of a book—and, soon, a series– we needed to know more—lots more. And here was where our plan to base our new, alternative world on the actual later 18^th century of the actual world quite easily supplied a great deal of useful knowledge. We embarked upon a period of research even as we began to write a draft of the first chapters.

Because we knew so little, our questions to ourselves could have seemed as endless as the Pacific to those first explorers, but we quickly found that they could easily be grouped into a small series of main categories:

18^th-century European Pacific exploration
the French and English navies of the time
the history of Polynesian exploration and colonization of the Pacific
Terra Australis/Antarctica
languages/cultures as models for Pacific protagonists/antagonists

And this research quickly proved helpful in two directions. First, it began to answer our questions about the 5 categories. Second, the answers would inspire us, not only to ask further questions, but to further creativity.

It was important, however, to feel a certain wariness about research. One of us, some years ago, began work on a novel, called Swallows Wintering, set during the American Revolution. Chapters were written, and things seemed to be humming along, but then there was a question and everything stopped for more research. And more research. And then everything stopped for good. Insecurity triumphed, perhaps? A lack of conviction disguised as a need for further sources and greater “authenticity”? (And here we might want to consider just how much “authenticity”—maybe “accuracy to the time” would be a better way of saying this—one needs even in an historical novel. You don’t want to have an Elizabethan using safety matches, as we once read in a mystery set in the late 16^th century, but, perhaps it’s possible to suggest a period without being slavish about it? This is, we think, worthy of a long essay on its own!)

With that previous experience in mind, perhaps it was just as well that we decided not to write an actual historical novel, although we can certainly see that there are lots of possibilities there (we might cite our ancestor-collaborators, Nordhoff/Hall, and their series on the Bounty mutiny and its consequences, for an example). By making this an alternative world, we could use whatever we liked from our world, but never feel quite so bound as one might in a work of historical fiction.

We are both very visual people (and, we suspect, so is our audience), so, as we wrote and assembled a little library of what appeared useful books, we really began by spending hours on Google images. We searched for everything from “Antarctica” to “Versailles”, from “catamaran” to “frigate”, from “Cape Horn” to “Captain Cook” and much more besides, gathering several hundred illustrations, a few of which have appeared in our previous blog entries. (And one of which will appear, thanks to the good folk of the National Maritime Museum in London, on the cover of Across the Doubtful Sea in just a week or two.)

As well, we extended our on-line research to include articles on Polynesian and Inuit history and languages and cultures, the religions of the Pacific, the writing system of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), along with material on real Pacific explorers like La Perouse and Wallis, and the bibliographies attached to those pieces gave us more ideas for further research. (We are aware, of course, of the danger of unsubstantiated or even wrong material on the internet, but, because we were—and are—engaged in work s of alternative- world fiction, rather than historical scholarship or even historical fiction, this was not an active concern.)

In our own reading, we very much enjoy learning about earlier authors and how they wrote their books. And so, in these posts, we want to provide you, our readers, with information which, before you read our first book, we hope will entice you to do so and, after you’ve read it, will help you to see something of how we wrote it.

We intend, after Across the Doubtful Sea appears, to include a complete bibliography—including a list of websites and their addresses we found useful or just too interesting not to read (and everyone who surfs the web knows the dangers of this)—in our blog, but, for now, here are a few books we found particularly stimulating/useful. As we said in an earlier post, we experienced some difficulty in our research, owing to the period in which we were working, the 1750s to about 1790. There was plenty of material for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815, but much less easily available for this earlier time. Our advantage in alternative writing, however, stood us in good stead here: we didn’t feel that we had to be accurate down to the last fact, and we could use what we learned from this slightly later time to flesh out what we could discover of the earlier time. So, for example, the Osprey books on Napoleonic naval wars—books like Terry Crowdy’s French Warship Crews 1789-1805, or Gregory Fremont-Barnes’ Nelson’s Officers and Midshipmen and Nelson’s Sailors, or Chris Henry’s Napoleonic Naval Armaments 1792-1815–proved very helpful in getting a general sense of life on board the warships of that world. We would add, from a Time/Life series, Henry Gruppe’s The Frigates, as well as books like Iain Dickie et al., Fighting Techniques of Naval Warfare 1190BC to the Present, Nicholas Blake and Richard Lawrence’s The Illustrated Companion to Nelson’s Navy, and Brian Lavery’s Nelson’s Navy.

As for Pacific exploration, an easy read is Alistair MacLean’s Captain Cook (with Peter Beaglehole’s more scholarly work for those who want to learn more). For two different views of its consequences for the native cultures and peoples , we would recommend Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific 1767-1840 and Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific. For a more general view, we would add the relevant portions of Erik Newby’s The Rand McNally World Atlas of Exploration.

This has been a long entry, and we never intend to overwhelm our readers, so we’ll end here for the present, with promise of more, both on books and on websites, in our next.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Heroes III

24 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, Military History, Terra Australis

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Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In our last, we continued discussion of our heroes. So far, we’ve talked about the French and the English, their look and their ships. Now we want to say something briefly about our heroes—mostly, in fact, heroines—from the Calm Sea (in our world, the Pacific).

As we began to model our villains, as we’ve said, we combined the look of the Inuit with that of Persians and Ottoman Turks. This gave us both a wintery exterior and a lush, brightly-colored interior.

For our Calm Sea heroes, we’ve looked to the Polynesian adventurers who colonized the eastern and southern islands of the Pacific between 800 and 1300AD.

To narrow this a bit, we borrowed linguistically mainly from the Tahitians, but visually from a wide variety of peoples, with perhaps more visuals chosen from the Maori than others. We call our people the Matan’a’e amavi’o, “the people of the goddess Matan’a’e”.

For example, our heroines, Matan’o’ahei, the warrior priestess of the goddess Matan’a’e, and her younger sister, Naru, both wear a distinctive Maori tattoo, or moko, on their lower faces as a mark of their status as belonging to a priestly family.

The warriors of the Matan’a’e amavi’o we imagined as looking like Maori warriors—here doing a traditional war dance, a haka, in this early 19^th-century illustration.

Here’s a selection of Maori weapons—the weapons of the Matan’a’e amavi’o, as well.

For their ships, we have created a sort of Polynesian-based warship, our model being the catamaran.

To give such a ship some teeth, we added this, a small, very basic catapult, of the sort seen in early China.

As for their opponents, whom the Matan’a’e amavi’o call the Atuk amavi’o, “the people of cold”, we will discuss their ships in our next post.

If you have any questions about any of our past posts, or about the civilizations we are developing in our novels, please let us know.

Thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

Terra Australis?

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, Terra Australis

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Dear Readers,

What about Terra Australis?

Why write about a parallel 18th century world instead of the real one?

Certainly, we’re not against doing research in our world to use in that other world we’re creating. In fact, we very much enjoy it. The historical 18th century provides physical structure– real ships, period technology, even period ideas, upon which we can build. Thus, we take real places like England and France, and real political situations, like the struggle between France and England. Then we add something theoretical from the 18th century– Terra Australis, and we make it (selectively) real.

We say selectively real because, on the one hand, we’ve based it on the actual Antarctica, but, on the other, we’ve changed its climate and we’ve populated it. We have made much of it green, and only some parts, ice. By doing this, we have generated a strong plot element: why is this place, Terra Australis, cold in one place and warm in another? Is it possible that someone or something creates that cold? And, if so, are we on our way to mystery and villains?

MTCIDC,

Where Did We Go From There?

09 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, Terra Australis

≈ 2 Comments

Dear Readers,

Terra Australis. Although this looks like it might be Australia, and the name Australia comes from it, in the earlier years of the 18th century, it wasn’t. Instead, it was another continent thought to be in the far south, where our Antarctica is. The idea for such a continent was as old as Aristotle. His idea was that, because there was a northern landmass, there should be an equal one to the south.

In our fictional world, Terra Australis really is a continent in the south. Unlike Antarctica, it is not totally covered in ice and snow– but some areas are. Why this is so forms part of the story of our series of three novels. Here are three images to give you an idea where we started. The first, as you can see, is a very old map, and it imagines Terra Australis the way Aristotle must have.

The second and third are maps of our Antarctica– but imagine it without those huge ice fields, and you can see the rock underneath. Our Terra Australis is founded upon the rock of Antarctica.

MTCIDC!

Thank you for reading,

A Bit More

02 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Terra Australis, Writing as Collaborators

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Dear Readers,

In our first blog posting, we spoke a little about what we’re doing and intending, but now we want to add to that a little more about our first projects. As we said in our first, we are joint-explorers of adventure fiction, writing about exploration in a parallel 18th-century world. To heroes drawn from the French and English navies of the period, we have heroines whom we’ve created from elements of fantasy and South Pacific culture, with our goal the addition of more fierce and able women to the world of fantasy/adventure fiction. The books are in English, of course, but include names based upon Polynesian models for heroines and the world around them, and upon the languages of the far north for their opponents, the strange, silent Atuk and their god, Haleiheia Teiheifata, “he who drinks breath, is twisted in cold” (as their enemies call him).

To create this new parallel, our work combines research into the actual (well, one actual) 18th-century and its ideas about the ocean to the west of South America and about what they believed to be a continent-of-balance far to the south (Antarctica in our world, in fact). We have also had to teach ourselves as much as we needed about the complex world of 18th-century naval technology, as well as about the history of Polynesian culture and colonization of the Pacific. In coming blogs, we’ll discuss that research and provide some bibliography and links for anyone who would like to follow us–and we hope that there will be many.

And, because we enjoy mystery along with collaboration, we have decided to emulate some of our literary ancestors, like the early Brontes and Louisa May Alcott and even Boz, and publish our work under a joint pen name, CD. Perhaps we’ll offer a prize for anyone who can guess why we chose those initials…

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Category Archives: Terra Australis

I Love a Parade

Terra (Increasingly) Cognita

Sequels and Prequels

Research

Heroes III

Terra Australis?

Where Did We Go From There?

A Bit More