The book is officially published tomorrow – 30 mins time, May 20.
Thanks to all who have helped with its publication and to everyone who has blogged it or reviewed it so far!
The advantage of writing historical fantasy is, of course, that you don’t have to make any of the details of your world up. It’s all there for you in history.
The problem is that history is slippery, amorphous and sometimes unrecorded. The dark ages (sound of historians screaming as I use that name, sorry, early medieval period) where I’m setting the first three books of my Wolfsangel series, are a case in point.
There can be a great deal of dispute about what a particular historical figure said or did and the details of day to day life can be very hard to come by. You can’t extrapolate back from the high medieval period because the difference in world view and even technology between the 8th century and the 13th is immense.
OK, with effort you can find those things but it’s the little details that kill you. I’m currently having a bash at discovering what the walls of Paris would have looked like in the 9th century. My guess is that they’d be the old Roman ones – perhaps with a bit of patching here and there.
However, it’s equally likely that they could have been a wooden pallisade or a rampart.
Then there’s clothing, attitudes, geography. If you’re making up your own world you just say ‘I know, let’s have some deep ravines along this river to the sea.’ Historical fantasy writers, however, are left with trying to find out exactly how, say, the Somme looked in the early medieval period. Fens, apparently. Well, I’ve never been in a proper fen so now I have to find out about them.
And this is the dark ages. There are relatively few things to get right – horses, houses, dress, customs but it’s not such a complex time as, say, the Victorian period. Also, luckily, sources are few. Why luckily? Well it means you can take educated guesses at things that you don’t know without getting a call from Eric Pode of Croydon saying ‘do you know your description of the mechanism of a gentleman’s fob watch in 1876 is anachronistic. The mechanism you’re talking about didn’t exist until 1877 at the earliest’.
Still, I do like to get things right because the richer you make the reality the more convincing will be your world. Exactly what was the disposition of houses outside the walls of Paris? Was the river faster or slower flowing back then? How did the armies that invaded the Frankish realm – Vikings, Saracens, Frisian and others camp – under tents? Probably but I can’t find any definite evidence that says they did..
All of this is fine and, actually, quite fun. Does it matter if I get the length of a Frankish cloak wrong (half length, known as a Saie, I think) or the language of ancient Paris? Not terribly materially to the story – I’ve got werewolves and sorcerers in it after all. It would matter to me, though.
The reason is that the past is a very strange place. One of the reasons people come to fantasy is to get a sense of wonder. To me – and I’m really not knocking imaginary world fantasy at all because I love that stuff – there’s as much wonder in a recreation of the world view of a 9th century prince, monk or peasant as there is in hearing of the invented moon-worshipping customs of the Ngler of Nglee.
In fact, I think it’s easier to create wonder using real history than it is fantasy. We’ve come a long way since Tolkien and there have been many, many books with invented worlds – some brilliant, some not quite so.
It’s actually quite hard to do something new in fantasy world building. Yes, you can have original ideas but the bar is set very high before you get the ‘wow!’ factor, for the simple reason that there have been so many ‘wows’ before. I have to confess I find it quite hard to get excited about a new race of creatures, a new floating forest (random example, if someone has a floating forest, I’m not talking about that book!), a new magic item.
Of course, all those things can be exciting if done well. It’s just that it’s getting harder and harder to do them well, or at least originally.
I was going to continue this blog entry for a while yet but, since I’ve been composing it since before Christmas, I’ll stick it out now or it will never get done!
Wolfsangel still attracting good reviews and early indications are that bloggers really like it too, which is gratifying. There’s always a nervousness that a good reception by critics won’t be matched by the reception by fans. It can work the other way around, of course. Something that gets a critical mauling – Da Vinci Code, for instance, is loved by millions around the world. Hopefully a novel can score with both sets of readers. My fingers, toes and other extremity is crossed.
Just had another good review for Wolfsangel, this time from Stephen Deas – author of The Adamantine Palace.
Stephen is a braver man than me because, while werewolves have been fairly well covered in literature – he successfully took on the myth of the Dragon – a much more difficult beast to bring originality to, owing to their complete centrality to fantasy lit.
Stephen says Wolfsangel. ‘Sent chills down my spine. Dark, bloody and dangerous, you can almost smell the sweat and iron coming off the pages. There are a lot of werewolves coming our way this year, but Wolfsangel could well be the standard by which they will be judged for some years to come’‘
Hoorah!
First responses coming in on proofs of Wolfsangel and they are so far very good.
This is gratifying as there are several sections I considered a bit risky to put in – not in a BS Johnson ‘nuttier than thou’ way but just passages of a slightly different tone to the main one of the book. There is also a fair bit of use of flashback, which is not always easy to pull off.
Pleased to say people have spontaneously said how much they like these.
It’s a tribute to the fantasy community (is there such a thing?) that people read new authors’ books so quickly and are willing to be so generous about them.
Hoping that the authors who are reading the proofs are going to enjoy them all the way to the end. That way I may garner a few cover quotes. I hope the people in question will allow me to report their responses. This isn’t a foregone conclusion, even if someone likes a book. Some authors are wary of having their name on the front of too many books and some only give quotes to stuff they absolutely adore – ie one every ten years.
Good to see my wolf on the proof cover has got a bit of claret on his lips now. Any self respecting werewolf needs a little slaughter-dew on the chops to set of his look.
Have done something, through circumstance more than anything, that I’ve never done before – paused while writing a novel. That is, I finished the first 50,000 words about 8 weeks ago but – after going down a couple of blind alleys – I haven’t really done much since. I have, again unusually, been trying to write a synopsis though.
This has put me in the unusual position of thinking about a book, something I normally take to be a bad thing.
That is, I prefer to do a book in a rush of writing and then edit afterwards.
However, I have mulled, read other books and generally ground the old cogs over this one.
The result, surprisingly, is that I think I’ve come up with something really good. When I say good, what I mean is ‘character consistent’. If a character is being pursued and you want him to end up in a certain location, it’s very tempting to make him end up there by chance. He has to run in some direction, why not the one you want him to?
The answer, of course, is that it’s vaguely unsatisfying for him to do that, too easy.
What I’ve found is that, if you really let your characters sink in to your mind, the clues to their behaviour are right there. You’ve written them.
Plot, I find, either writes itself – as it did with Wolfsangel, or, frankly, is a nightmare – at least for me. I do an amount of words and then have one or two moments that take me ages to work out.
This has shown me that, if I start the book in good time, that need not be a problem. I just spend 8 weeks going ‘hmmm, ah, hmmmm….’
Good lesson not to panic in future, just relax and wait for midnight inspiration.
Trust your werewolf to find his way!
This is the first post on my new blog!
Thanks to the redoutable Neil C Ford for setting this up for me, I really do appreciate it.
Wolfsangel’s launch is 6 months away now but 6 months is a short time in publishing. I’m hoping to get the message out about this ‘different sort of werewolf’ – based more on Norse myth than the Hollywood conventions of changing at the full moon and getting shot with silver bullets. Nothing wrong with the Hollywood/Twilight version, of course, but I wanted something that had a bit more strangeness about it.
I’m doing Dragonmeet this weekend, so do come up and say ‘hello’ there.
And check out the extract here. Inevitably, with something taken from half way through the book then it lacks a bit of context but I hope it gives a glimpse of the flavour of the book.
I was going to stick the opening chapter in but it’s 5000 words long and a bit breathless – I couldn’t see where to stop it and I didn’t want to post half the book up.
Anyway, do drop me a line with any suggestions or ideas. And if you’re a Norse myth nut and would like to chat about all things Edda then this is your place.
There’s another extract from the book here
http://www.werewolfpage.com/wolfsangel.htm
And, should you wish to pre-order.