what would Hild do?

I rarely post stuff like this, but this struck me forcibly as a really, really easy way for people to step up and Do The Right Thing, to be an ally.

The Office of the Governor of California has set up a hotline public opinion vote on the recent state Supreme Court decision regarding same-sex marriage. It's a fully automated system and it's not, repeat not, limited to California residents.

The number works. It's not a scam. I've just called it myself. If ever you've thought, Huh, wish I could do something to help all my queer friends, now is the time.

To vote in support of the California Supreme Court's decision on same-sex marriage, call the Governor's office:

1. call 1-916-445-2841
2. press options 1 (english) 5 (to vote), 1 (LGBT issue), 1 (vote yes)

It's really easy. The first time I called, the line was busy. The second time, the whole process took about ten seconds. Are your queer friends worth ten seconds of your time?

visualising dairy buckets

Over on my Ask Nicola blog I had another question about writing. I answered it at length, but thought those who have been following my Hild-writing process might enjoy a snippet:

Sometimes I can have a good writing day yet not write much. This is happening more than usual at the moment, and it's related to writing historical fiction. Writing mainstream fiction is easy--everyone knows what a bed is like, what people eat and wear, how things work. For the seventh century--unlike, say, Regency England (the rake, the dandy, the ball, dance cards), or WWII (the Blitz, rationing, grey skies filled with barrage balloons, weak tea)--there are no handy plug-ins. I have to invent everything, every single thing, from scratch. If Hild walks into the dairy, what does it look like? (Would there be a dairy? Cows were most likely milked in the field, sheep in a pen.) How do you make cheese when there is no stainless steel? What do you store the milk in with no glass, no refrigeration? (You don't; you turn it into cheese and butter and whey.) How many women/girls does it take to milk how many cows and sheep? What are the buckets made of? (Sycamore, because it doesn't leave a nasty aftertaste in the milk.) And that's just process and artefacts. Social relationships were different, too. I've never written anything full of slavery before, never dealt with a heroic society without literacy. (That changes later, of course.) So a good writing day can be a good inventing/visualising day but a not-many-words-on-the-page day.

The rest can be found here. And now back to reading JLA.

Journal of Late Antiquity

I've just opened today's mail, and found volume 1, number 1 of The Journal of Late Antiquity.

"The Journal of Late Antiquity (JLA) is the first international English-language journal dedicated to the study of Late Antiquity writ large. The journal provides a venue for multi-disciplinary coverage of all the methodological, geographical, and chronological facets of Late Antiquity. All of Late Antiquity will be represented--from the late and post-classical world up to the Carolingian period, and including the late Roman, western European, Byzantine, Sassanid, and Islamic worlds, ca. AD 250-800. JLA is essential, not only as a space for scholarship dealing with practical and theoretical issues, but, in particular, to bridge the gap between literary and material culture scholarship. One of the primary goals of the journal is to highlight the status of Late Antiquity as a discrete historical period in its own right."

I note that the second article is by someone I've actually had dinner with, Edward James. (A first for me. Most medievalists--late antiquarians??--are just photons and electrons floating in the ether. Very kind, helpful, knowledgeable photons, it's true, but not entirely real to me.)

The journal looks wonderful. I can't wait to dig in.

charty process porn

I've been asked twice in the last week (once over at my Ask Nicola blog, once during a discussion with an Oregon book group about my most recent novel, Always) about charts: do I use them? What are they like? Are they on the wall? So I thought I'd talk a little about my process for this novel.

For my (still untitled) Hild novel, I am keeping a close eye on every single one of the sixty-six years Hild lived (614-680, according to Bede). I'm tracking the movements and changing mores of various dynasties (Deiran, Bernician, Kentish, East Anglian, Dalriadan, Pictish, and so on), doing my best to trace shifting alliances and geographies and beliefs--and building techniques and clothes and literacy and language and technology, and so on (and on and on).

I track all this stuff using the web--listservs and online journals and blogs--the library (I don't know how I would have coped without interlibrary loan; I have no academic affiliations whatsoever), bookshops (oh, these books are *expensive*), and occasional personal correspondence. I've been doing this for years, with the most intensive phase being last year.

My notes are extremely disorganised. When I first began, for example, I used yellow legal pads and a fountain pen. I discovered that fountain pen ink will pour right off the page if you knock a cup of tea over everything. I lost a year's worth of careful notes on jewellery and farming technology. I haven't had the heart to redo that work. By the time I came to researching food, I got canny, and used 3x5 index cards that I could, woo hoo, *sort alphabetically*. (Sadly, yes, this really was an exciting discovery for me. I'm a seriously crap researcher, no technique at all: I've never had to learn before this.) So now my food notes are safe: written in ballpoint and in a snap-closing plastic box. Family trees, most of them highly speculative, are all over the place: Wikipedia printouts, photocopies from library books, hasty scribble in the margin of a shopping list, intensively doodles-on curlicued 3x5 cards... I stuff them in folders, then lose the folders, or misfile them, and start another. I have a pile of print-outs on names, including handwritten--again, highly speculative--names of generations on either side of known names

On my wall are two maps: Britain in the Dark Ages, north sheet and south sheet. They're from different editions but I don't mind. It helps me understand the way information would have been gathered piecemeal in the seventh century. The 1964 edition is cleaner and simpler, but the 1934 is prettier, and more effective aid to imagination (though stinky with mildew and someone else's cigarette smoke).

I work from two desks. One in the corner of my office, taken up entirely by electronics--well, there's enough space to balance a notepad, too. (The wall maps are on the right hand corner wall.) The other desk takes the centre of the room. This is where my Big Chart lives. It's divided into 66 boxes, one for each year of Hild's life. This is where What Is Known to Be Known is written: the births, deaths, marriages, accessions, murders, baptisms, wars and so on. As I am about to begin each new section of the book, I study my chart, then write out two or three pages of notes, this time including highly speculative possibilities: after Raedwald's death, Hild travels to Gipswic and encounters her first abacus, or Hild's (fictitious) half-brother gets his first sword (which he will then use in a year or three to defend Edwin during the assassination attempt by Cwichelm's man, Eamer). Then I write the story, trying to pull in environmental detail (when are the lambs sheared? when do the moths fly? where will the moon be? how high the tides?). It's a slow, but joy-filled process.

I want this novel to have a kind of wild magic running through it, the magic of history and nature, of people and their triumphs and failures. I want it to be stately and inevitable. I want it to be exhilarating, heart-pounding, gut-wrenching. No doubt as I proceed I'll to make sacrifices here and there, privileging one state for another, but right now I'm still aiming for the Platonic Ideal of a novel: thrilling, educational, thought-provoking, morally uplifting.

no comparison

Today I got my copy of British Archaeology (May/June 2008) in the mail. On p.30-37 there was a wonderful, detailed article, "The Lost Royal cult of Street House Yorkshire," on the finds at Street House Farm, near Saltburn, North Yorkshire, the 'possible cult centre' graves with the fabulous jewellery. Everything is now beginning to make sense.


However, reading this article hot on the heels of the one in Discovery News makes me even more disgusted with the 'reporting' in the latter. In British Archaeology, Stephen J. Sherlock and Mark Simmons explain carefully the reasoning behind the possible Christian repurposing of the iron age coin (basically, the coin had a sort of cross-like pattern on the reverse, and the piercing of the coin meant that it would hang with that cross properly oriented). They also make clear the timeline of the inhumation: probably while Hild was founding Whitby.

Given that this site is only about ten miles from Whitby, my connect-the-dots fictional engine has been working overtime. I've decided who the powerful, high-status woman in that grave was and why she was there. I know why her jewellery and that of her cohorts is such a mix of Angle and Merovingian and Iron Age. And I'm having a marvellous time inventing it all. I'll do another, longer post on all that another time (when it's all set and sorted and written). For now I'll stick to the reportage aspect of all this: I only got to this thrilling (to me) new fictional place because the journalism in British Archaeology was honest, it made sense, it didn't contradict what is known to be known. Unlike that piece of rubbish in Discovery News. Tuh.

I am appalled

A friend just sent me this link to a Discovery News article on the recent excavation of a royal Anglo-Saxon grave. I'd read about it a few months elsewhere (thanks to links provided by a variety of blogs, for example Carla Naylund Historical Fiction) and this article wouldn't rate a mention but for its truly appalling inaccuracies. It's really, really bad. Either the reporter is misquoting Stephen Sherlock, or Sherlock is ignorant (or letting his publicity-seeking gene warp his judgement), or the editor had a total brain cramp and made stuff up. The article speculates that the 'stridently pagan' grave at the centre of the dig is of a royal woman, probably because of the truly striking jewellery found:



The reporter goes on to say that Sherlock believes the most 'likely suspects' for the identity of this well-provided-for body are 'Ethelburga, the wife of King Edwin,' or 'Eanflaed, the wife of King Oswiu,' or 'Oswiu's daughter, Aelflaed'.

I saw red. For one thing, if Bede is to believed, all three royal women were securely Christian. For another, Æthelburh is assumed to be buried in Kent, and Eanflæd and Ælfflæd at Whitby, where they were co-abbesses. Another leap, involves 'iron age coins':



These are said to be pierced 'to hang as if they were crucifixes' and therefore suggest 'at least one member of the [buried] group was interested in Christianity'. Since when is a piece of coin jewellery anything like a crucifix? This is a very, very sad piece of journalism.

So now I'm wondering, what's the worst bit of medieval sensationalism you have seen?

Most Heinous Use of an Historical Character (So Far...)

Time to confess: I've been taking unconscionable liberties with a well-known historical character.



I took a very brief and most definitely dubious mention of a possible siege of Bebbanburg by Fiachnae mac Báetáin of the Dál nAraidi, turned it into reality (well, fiction). But that's not the worst of it: then I had one of the hostages captured by Edwin turn out to be Fursey, aka Fursa, an Irish prince-monk who later in life spent time in East Anglia doing his best to bring Christianity to the godless heathens. (In my opinion, he didn't do a spectacular job.) Saint Fursey was known as an ascetic, but in my novel, he's a wine-swilling, foul-mouthed, sinfully proud, louche kind of fellow--but extremely well-educated. He spends a few months as Hild's tutor. He is about to travel with her to East Anglia where he'll see opportunities for the future, and then return to Ireland, go through a character volte-face, and return with his brother.

So if I know Fursey's saintly character is utterly unlike the picture I'm painting in my novel, why am I using his name? I'm not sure. For some reason, I feel compelled to. I think it's my Catholic upbringing; I am very (very) suspicious of 'saints'. I've spent too much time with Religious who use their religion as a political tool. In my opinion, those who end up being beatified have worked entirely too hard at becoming well known. Seriously good people tend not to bring their deeds to the public's attention. But, no, that's not the whole story. There's something about both kicking over stones, and about tying things together with familiar names that appeal to me.

Hild herself in my novel will have no unearthly, god-given powers--unless you count preternatural intelligence and a will of adamant. She has an innate sense of fairness but this will, of course, be tempered by her royal heritage: she's been raised to believe some people are more equal than others. But I'm not actively going against anything known to be known about Hild. I can't honestly say the same for Fursey. (At least I'm doing my best to make him likeable, in a bad-tempered kind of way.)

Anyway, I just thought it was time to admit my trespasses.