Pyle of Pirates

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Military History, Research, Writing as Collaborators

Tags

Bunker Hill, Howard Pyle, Illustrating History, Jack Sparrow, Pirates

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In recent posts, we’ve talked about the wonderful Russian fairy/folktale illustrators of the late 19th, early 20th centuries. We thought it might be fun, as we work on the sequel to Across the Doubtful Sea (Empire of the Isles) while editing The Good King’s Daughter for our second series, to continue the conversation by looking at other illustrators, beginning with two Americans, teacher and pupil Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth.

We begin, however, with a familiar contemporary image:

We think it goes without saying who this is, don’t you? He’s a wonderful actor, but, for someone who’s supposed to be dressed as a mid-18th-century sailor, he owes more to Howard Pyle, who, as has been pointed out more than once before, has exerted a strong influence upon Hollywood’s view of such people, than to actual 18th-century sailor’s dress.

Pirates were, in fact, sailors with, shall we say, non-mercantile goals. They were workmen and wore very practical workmen’s clothes, like those in the following 18th-century illustrations.

(This is, in fact, a contemporary illustration of the casting adrift of the notorious Captain Bligh, a British naval officer, although you see him only in his shirtsleeves here, rather than in his blue officer’s coat. His men, however, did not wear uniforms at this period, and, as you can see, would have looked like any other sailor.)

Okay, it might be argued, he’s “Captain” Jack Sparrow–what about officers? Here’s a Hogarth painting of a more-or-less mid-century civilian captain.

As the illustration shows, he simply wears ordinary clothing– no uniform.

Now, here are a few Pyle pictures.

Typical Pyle touches: the bandanas and the huge sashes, not to be seen in period illustrations.

One might argue that Pyle lacked readily-available visual sources: someone in the 1890s certainly didn’t have Google Images. It has been said, that, like Detaille in France, Pyle collected period uniforms, etc., and sometimes dressed up students in them, but, one has only to look at his illustration of Bunker Hill, to make you wonder what he actually collected.

There are numerous errors here, from the cut of the coats, to the lace on the breast, to the packs and that’s only the beginning. The study of the history of uniforms was, of course, only in its infancy in this period and even serious military artists, like H.A. Ogden, could go very wrong.

And yet, there are also Pyle illustrations like these, in which he seems to have gotten things– at least, non-piratical things–right.

In these, you see a depiction of 18th century sailors which looks much more like those in actual period illustrations.

So what was Pyle up to? Let’s look at a much more modern depiction of Bunker Hill, by the American military artist, H. Charles McBarron.

McBarron was a member of the Company of Military Historians and Collectors. He was well-known not only as a skilled artist, but as a thorough researcher, and the owner of an extensive collection of militaria of the past. What you see in this picture (minus the graphic depiction of violence) would have been as accurate a depiction of the event as anyone might imagine.

Suppose, however, you were attempting to picture this event in dramatic terms from the British side. You would want long lines of red-coated, determined men, marching steadily uphill through their own casualties, as in Pyle’s illustration.

Imagine, then, that even if you had much more visual information about pirates than Pyle may have had, but you wanted people to see pirates painted broadly and dramatically, what better than flowing headscarves, and big, blood-red sashes?

And this is why people in the past–and we in the present– love Pyle. Strict accuracy certainly has its place, but we’re perfectly willing to let it walk the plank in favor of romantic strokes and bold depictions.

And, as always, we ask you readers, what do you think?

Next, Pyle’s pupil, N.C. Wyeth.

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

A Forward– at the End

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Writing as Collaborators

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adventure, Book, Collaborating, Fantasy, Fiction, Formatting, History, Hodges, Publishing, Self Publishing, The Waterspout, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

The Kindle version of our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea , has just appeared, and the paper version will be available, we believe, in just a couple of days.

The whole experience, from beginning work in early June to now has been a wonderful one. Neither of us had ever collaborated on such a project before and it was a learning experience every day of our work together. We thought that, in this blog, we would discuss what appear to be the biggest areas of our project: creating together, research, cover design, expenses, making the actual (or virtual) book, and facing the reality that, at least at first, all of this was going to be, in the immortal words of MGM, Ars Gratia Artis. (Cue the lion.)

First, we had to figure out how we were going to write together. There were models, of course—you could think immediately of people from the musical theatre tradition, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Rodgers and Hammerstein, for example. Or, in terms of novels, you might look to older authors from Erckmann-Chatrian to Nordhoff/Hall, or to all of those fantasy/science fiction couplings you can find on the shelves of your local bookstores.

In our case, however, we didn’t model ourselves on anyone. Instead, as the plot progressed, one of us might do more of the actual writing, but every line was, ultimately, the work of both: ideas, editing, changes, inspiration—there was nothing the two of us didn’t do at some time and in some way together.

This changed, however, when it came to the actual self-publishing. One of us, it turns out, has a wonderful (and newly- discovered) talent for the technical side—creating covers, the complex process of formatting the text—and has produced what we feel to be a beautiful and absolutely professional outside for our first book. (Perhaps books can be judged by their covers?) For this later stage of the process, that one of us was completely in charge—and the other looked on, admiringly.

Research was an important element in our work and one of us kept busy figuring out just what we needed to know and acquiring it, from books on naval warfare to work on Inuit and Polynesian languages and cultures. We’ve discussed some of this in earlier blog postings, but there was much more and it created its own puzzle: this was to be a series of fantasy/adventure novels, after all, so how much would we actually depend upon actual history and how much would we create? As well, we wanted to avoid magic per se, which has always struck us as an easy out—and can look very much like an easy out, too! (JRRT was so right to allow Gandalf to show off his real powers so infrequently.)

Once we were into a good working routine, we began to consider what our cover should look like. In our research, we had discovered the work of William Hodges, who was the main artist for Captain Cook’s second expedition (1772-1775). Considering elements in the plot (if you read Across, you’ll know at once what we mean), Hodges’ painting, commonly called “The Waterspout”, but actually entitled “A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits (New Zealand) with Waterspout”, fit perfectly.

A quick internet search showed us that this painting was not in the public domain, but was the property of the National Maritime Museum, in London. This meant that we had to request permission to use it. We e-mailed the NMM, and with the friendly help of the Image Librarian there, Emma Lefley, we obtained permission.

There was a contract, however, and a fee, which we gladly paid, but this brings up another step in the process: expenses. As new to all of this as we were, we hadn’t expected that publishing our first book would be free, but it was another step in our education to watch how the expenses could mount. Our internet research cost us nothing, of course. A certain number of the books—mostly on naval warfare—were already in one of our personal libraries, and we could have gradually acquired more through academic and public libraries, although some of the titles we used would have required ILL searching, but we decided to buy some, as we knew that we would need them for the entire series. (And we like building up our libraries anyhow.) The Hodges’ image was our first big expense, however.

When we began to think about how we might encourage interest in our work, we decided upon a blog and a Facebook page, for starters. The Facebook page was free, but we needed a domain name (that’s “dot.com” )for our blog and there was another expense. (There are lots of other potential expenses with a blog—but we’ll save those for another post.)

Our last big expense came when we had finished the book and we planning its on-line publication. To sell it effectively, it was necessary to have an ISBN—in fact, we needed two: one for the paper book and a second for the Kindle version. An ISBN is not cheap, but two obviously have been double if Bowker (the chief supplier of ISBNs) wasn’t running a deal: buy a ten-pack and the price for the individual ISBN goes down significantly. So we bought the pack—and have used two already.

Then, when we felt that we were ready, we went to Create Space and began the process of turning hundreds of pages of manuscript of what we had decided was the final draft into a self-published book—and in two forms. One of us has already written an informative post on our Facebook page (The Doubtful Sea Series) about the challenges in doing this (a euphemism—but that collaborator was very patient—to say the least!—about the various problems which arose), so, perhaps it’s best just to say here to our readers: be prepared for snags!

And there came at last the moment of truth: how much should we charge for this? And how much would we get in return? (That really was a secondary concern—honest!—but no novelist, at least since Nash turned out The Unfortunate Traveler, has written in the belief that there was no profit motive, at all, no, truly! in the process.) We were torn, of course: a lower price might mean more buyers; a higher price might bring higher profits. Then we hit those buttons at Create Space and received an education in expenses and royalties and realized that we were fortunate to be doing this as an experiment, and not as a new career. This is worth its own post, but, trust us for now when we say that, even if we sell 10,000 copies of Across the Doubtful Sea and even more of its sequels, we will not be banking in the Cayman Islands and thinking about that summer home in New Hampshire. (And now we understand why some of our favorite fantasy/sf novelists are so prolific: volume and more volume is the only way to make enough money to feel that you’re really earning something.)

We said that every moment was a learning experience, however, and, truly, it has been—and every moment has been beyond price. Like people who teach themselves to repair their own cars, we’ve climbed into the engine of writing and publishing a book and have so much more appreciation not only for the creative process and the editing/publishing process, but for all the talent and heart which each of us has shown the other in producing the first in what we hope to be a long line of novels full of fantasy and adventure.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

It’s Out! On Kindle!

09 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Writing as Collaborators

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adventure, Book, Collaborating, Exploration, Fantasy, Fiction, Formatting, French Navy, History, Kindle, Publishing, Research, Royal Navy, Self Publishing, South Pacific, Terra Australis, Writing

Dear Readers,

For us, a very short post. Our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea, has just appeared on Kindle. As of early next week, the book form will be available on Amazon.com. We hope you’ll be interested! As of next week, we’ll have one of our regular essays here, but we just wanted our readers to know that, after all of this time giving you information about the book, the book will actually be available.

Now–on to the second in the series–Empire of the Isles!

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

Sequels and Prequels

05 Monday Jan 2015

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

It’s All About Formatting

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Writing as Collaborators

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adventure, Book, Collaborating, Fiction, Formatting, Publishing, Research, Self Publishing, Writing

Dear Readers,

In our previous posting, we spoke about delaying—but not belaying—publishing our final manuscript of Across the Doubtful Sea. We have certainly put a considerable amount of work into our writing, as it was, in part, a learning experience: what works in a collaboration, the topic of 18^th century south seas exploration, and, for one of us, it was her first novel. As we are nearing the final publication of Across, we’ve reached yet another important step in the process: formatting.

Our project is an entirely self-published book, meaning that we are not only the authors, editors, and publicists, but designers and formatters of our own book, as well. If we had decided to publish our book traditionally, the formatting would have been done for us by a professional working for the publishing company. Of course, we could have paid a professional anyway, as there are several publishing services for authors who’d rather “keep their sanity”—and we’re glad that they’re there—but, in our case, we were up for the challenge, and prefer completing the entire book ourselves.

An advantage of being authors in this decade is the availability of information through the internet—we are already making use of this by publishing online, and reaching you, our readers, and sharing our research and behind-the-scenes work through our blog, Facebook page, and twitter. As this has been a learning experience for us, the first thing we thought to look to for formatting was how-to book formatting guides. CreateSpace.com, the self-publishing site of Amazon that we will be using to publish Across the Doubtful Sea, has an easy to understand formatting guide for those using their site.

This guide has been incredibly helpful in building a structure for our book—in fact, as important as the research, creating the story, and writing the words. Why? The design and formatting of our book are, in a sense, the equivalent of giving a body to a soul. A book such as ours should have a proper format—a proper physical appearance to match what we believe to be a beautiful story. We read a number of articles on book formatting—some seemed to challenge first-time formatters, with titles such as “The Problem with Amateur Book Interiors,” but all gave solid advice as to how to avoid the common less-than-professional look of an independently published book.

As with any exterior, we need to have a cover that will both attract attention and provide a small taste of the book. As often as it is said that a book should not be judged by its cover, a good cover makes all the difference in the book’s appearance. For Across the Doubtful Sea, we’ve chosen a somewhat dramatic painting by William Hodges, A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits New Zealand with Waterspout, 1776, with kind permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. The picturesque aesthetics of the painting already set a tone for what the story itself may look and feel like. In a way, the cover for the book is the face, with readable expressions that interpret what is on the inside.

Before we began, we took a quick look at formatting styles of books in the 18^th century—the time period in which our story takes place—out of curiosity and to see what inspiration could be drawn from there. This also gave us the ability to pay particular attention to how a book is put together, rather than a printed manuscript directly from Microsoft word, as we are used to seeing. There are many styles of formatting, as well—for our book, we chose to include page numbers and the title at the top of each page.

Pagination for our book was when we realized how long our book really was, as a finalized, complete novel. Page numbering was the first real step in giving the manuscript physical form, along with the 52 chapters—we foolishly presumed earlier in the process that we might have stopped at 24, then 48, and then… And, as with any book with several chapters, it involves tedious, yet rewarding, work—we’re quite close to completing the project we began during the summer—but 52 chapters can promise that it won’t be a process to be rushed through. Meticulously following advice from the formatting guide, as well as the aforementioned articles about self-publishing, we placed after each chapter, and each chapter title was placed with the desired font and size. Correct margins also had to be set, keeping in mind that the pages would be bound as a book.

At this stage—even after reading through and editing the entire manuscript—there was a need for a final check on names and their continuity—after all, we invented or adapted languages for this book. Some things, even at this stage, had either been changed, or still needed to be—which is where we learned an important rule for the future—be careful when changing names! Because of words and terms used by the characters in Across, we’ve included a glossary of terms and names at the beginning. We want to take as much care in making sure that our readers understand words in the languages as we did in creating them.

Even now, there is still some work to do—polishing up, working on final font designs, and, then, dear readers, you will have the chance to take a look for yourselves.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Delay (not Belay)

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Research, Writing as Collaborators

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Adventure, Collaborating, Exploration, Fiction, Publishing, Research, Self Publishing, Writing

Dear Readers,

We had hoped to publish Across the Doubtful Sea at the beginning of December. It didn’t happen. Why?

We had the manuscript . Its 52 chapters had been through two complete drafts and many little subdrafts, along the way, by mid-November.

If we had been willing to be part of the older book-writing world, we would now have begun the long and painful process of trying to interest a publisher (through an agent, if we could persuade one to take us on, or not, which was much more likely). Because we decided to publish the book ourselves, however, we entered a new and even more complicated universe, in which we were not only authors, but editors, sub-publishers, and publicists, as well. It has provided a wonderful “behind the scenes” education, but it has taken a good deal more time that we had ever imagined.

We were still in the editing stage when we decided to become publicists. That way, we hoped to begin to build an interested audience some months before the appearance of our first book. “So we need a blog,” we said to each other, “and Facebook. And Twitter. To start.”

WordPress provided the basic blog, for free. (Without sounding like we’re receiving a commission, we can also recommend them enthusiastically: very smart, creative people and very easy to deal with.) The basic blog, however, suggested that, if we were serious, and looked upon our work as part of a greater commercial enterprise (our 19^th-century author ancestors, like Scott and Dickens, would certainly have said that it should be and that, while art for the sake of art was nice, profits were nice, too), we would need a “domain name”. This would then allow us to list ourselves as http://www.Doubtfulsea.com. So we bought—or, rather, rented–one, for a year (renewable).

Then, there was the matter of setting up the blog. Fortunately, one of us has electronic art at her highly-talented fingertips and, after a few tries, produced the beautiful site on which you are currently reading us. (Those tries included picking and replacing an appropriate background image, as well as type face—tricky against the image–and formatting.)

After that, we had to figure just how many posts we could do, balancing them against the rest of our lives. We had read about people who began a blog as a way of talking about a project and eventually found that time for the project was gradually completely consumed by the blog, so we decided that we would do one post per week—but—every week, without fail. So far, we’ve managed to do this from the very beginning: this is post #16 and it will even appear during Christmas week. (Readers who currently struggle to maintain blogs have our permission to roll their eyes and say, “Just wait!” under their breaths, if necessary.)

Then there was Facebook, which came a little later. It was easy to set up, as it was more basic, but it came with the same hunger for posts. The point was exposure, of us and our ideas and thoughts and experiences. This meant, we decided, doing what we were already doing with our blog and so we were committed to two posts per week, one for Doubtfulsea.com and the other for Thedoubtfulseaseries@facebook.com.

So that we didn’t repeat ourselves, we decided that the blog would deal specifically with the Doubtful Sea series (including the other two planned volumes, Empire of the Isles and Beyond the Doubtful Sea) and further books in other series (we already have a complete first draft of one and half of another). We would devote our Facebook page to essays and discussions about reading and writing and creating in general—ours and other authors’.

At the same time, we added Twitter. This was—and is—much trickier. The common wisdom was that you should use it to advertise only 20% of the time and devote the rest to catchy sayings, thoughts, and images from our daily lives. So far, we feel that we haven’t used it enough for anything and, once the book is actually published, we’ve decided to do a lot more research in how to employ it more successfully.

Then we thought the manuscript was ready for the next step.

We are fervent book people, and one of us has even written a scholarly article on a 19^th-century Irish poet publishing his first book (a disaster and most copies were eventually recycled for trunk linings), but we had no idea of what we were getting ourselves into.

As modern people, we began with internet research, of course. We typed in “self-publishing”, and quickly discovered that there were multitudes of people eager to help us out there, some for a price, others for free, others for free, but with sales pitches thrown in. We quickly learned, however, that there was a longer process ahead of us than we had ever thought.

First, after surveying the field of self-publishing services, we decided that we would use Amazon, in part because of its access to Kindle, in part because of its liberal profit-sharing policy. (A hint: if you are following our path, be sure to do a little extra research, when you do your googling to pick a publisher, and type in “reviews of ________________________” to try to provide a more balanced view than the self-publishing service is willing to provide.)

Advice from various sites had convinced us that we needed to have an ISBN. Why we—or anyone—might need it would require a separate post, but, in brief, it forever identifies the book as yours, as well as providing potential sellers with a convenient stock number, among other reasons. Only one is needed per book, but, if, as in our case, we wanted to use e-book form, as well, then we needed two—and, if we wanted it available on other media, like phones, we would need more. The main supplier, Bowker, has a deal for a pack of 10, and we decided to use that.

On the actual formatting of the book, we’ll refer you to the upcoming post on our Facebook page, which talks in some detail about everything from proofreading and correcting to number of words on the page to placement of the text on the page. We will say something about the cover, however.

We were doing research on Pacific exploration when we happened upon the work of William Hodges, who was the main artist on Captain Cook’s second Pacific voyage. We quickly realized that one of Hodges’ paintings, often called “The Waterspout”, was absolutely perfect. We traced it to the National Maritime Museum in London, inquired, and found out how to rent the image (dealing with the very kind and helpful Emma Lefley, who is the Image Librarian—what a wonderful job!). It had to be formatted to become the front and back covers, of course—but see our Facebook page for that.

We said, at the beginning of this post, that we had had a “behind the scenes” education. And that it had taken more time and energy than we had ever imagined. It would be more accurate, in fact, to say that we are continuing to have that education. We had known about the back-and-forth aspect of author and publisher and its complications from the experience not only of 19^th-century authors, but also from the correspondence of Tolkien and Unwin from 1936 on, but there was so much more. A professional publisher would handle renting the cover image, the actual physical creation of the book, and the advertising, all of which is now in our hands. Sometimes, it has seemed like more work than writing that first novel, but it has, on the whole, been a wonderful experience and we’ll be talking more about it in future blogs.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

Research

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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

Beginning(s)

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Writing as Collaborators

≈ 1 Comment

Dear Readers,

We didn’t start out to be co-authors. In fact, we were going to study English and American Poetry and the writing of it. So we sat in Barnes and Noble, surrounded by books and the roar of the coffee machine, and read poems and talked about them. Then, one day, quite early on, D said to C (out of the blue), “I’d like to write a novel about something new, something I don’t know anything about.” Without thinking, C said, “South Seas exploration in the 18th century. Do you know anything about that?”

And that’s the moment we became collaborators.

And that’s the moment when we both realized that neither one of us knew much of anything about south seas exploration in the 18th century. It meant research, and lots of it, not only about the south seas, but about the 18th century maritime world, among other subjects.

We also wanted to write fantasy/adventure/romance: how could we combine our research-to-come with that desire?

And then we discovered Terra Australis.

MTCIDC,

A Bit More

02 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Terra Australis, Writing as Collaborators

≈ Leave a comment

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: Writing as Collaborators

Pyle of Pirates

A Forward– at the End

It’s Out! On Kindle!

Sequels and Prequels

It’s All About Formatting

Delay (not Belay)

Research

Beginning(s)

A Bit More