Welcome back, Potter

I admit I haven't yet read a single book in the series, but this Harry Potter parody video is just too good to resist posting. It will probably only make sense to Americans who've seen the original show.

But for what it's worth, click here and turn your speakers on.

An interview with David Blixt, Part 2

See yesterday's blog entry for Part 1 of the interview, if you haven't read it yet. And apparently, because I said the word "bastard" too much in that post, this blog is now rated R. You've been warned.

You've drawn on many sources: Shakespeare, Dante, early 14th-century Italian history… All these elements seemed to come together very well, but surely there were times (probably many times!) when this information was in conflict. Can you give an example of a time or two when this happened, and how you resolved it in the plot?

Actually, it was all fairly fortuitous. Starting with the initial idea from Shakespeare, I took the historical events and worked the Shakespeare into it. Since Dante was a part of the history, it was a matter of choosing which version of his life’s story best fit my needs.

The hardest part was not mixing Shakespeare with history, but Shakespeare with Shakespeare. There is some overlap, intentional and otherwise, between the Bard’s plays. There are three shows that mention Verona prominently – R&J, Shrew, and Two Gents. Petruchio and Lucentio are mentioned in R&J, giving it a relationship to Shrew. And Mercutio is said to have a brother named Valentine, who is the lead in Two Gents. There’s a servant named Launcelot in both Two Gents and Merchant. Meanwhile, Benedick from Much Ado is said to be from Padua, while the Prince of Aragon is mention in Merchant as well as Much Ado. On top of it all, the Prince in Measure For Measure is an Escalus, making him related to the della Scala clan. So all of these interlocking plays allowed me to toy with the crossover, and that wreaked a little havoc with my history – who was the Prince of Aragon when? What was going on in Vienna? These are problems I look forward to resolving as the series goes on.

On the topic of historical accuracy, here’s a story my wife wants me to tell: a month ago, while finishing the sequel, I was doing research on a family from Ferrara when I discovered a death-date for Cangrande’s eldest sister. It drove me mad, as I had looked for it ages ago and come up blank. It also made me furious because she appears in MV. So I called Keith, my editor at St. Martin’s, and begged him to change the two passages that mention her, wiping her out. To my amazement, he was able to do it. I’m sure there are other mistakes in the book, but that one would have had me tearing out my hair and apologizing to strangers on the street.

I feel like I haven’t answered the question. I'm certain there's a great story about combining Shakespeare and history. But for the life of me, I can't think of it. The resolutions of conflicting storylines aren’t nearly as interesting as they should be, because whenever the solution came along, it did so without much help from me. History was always the answer. Whenever I’m at a loss, I return to the research. The solution to any dilemma always lies in events or facts I haven’t paid enough attention to.

I learned a number of things from the novel, and it refreshed my memory about others, such as Shakespeare, which I hadn't read for years. Also, the expression "giving someone the fig" has found its way into my vocabulary, which, hmm, may not be such a good thing. What are some especially interesting or surprising things you learned while researching?

There were revelations, and like the fig, most of them were small but fun. Take the word Carnival. I studied Latin in high school, but it never occurred to me where that word came from until I was researching Venice, and found out it was the festival that marked the beginning of Lent – Carne Vale, “Meat Farewell.”

Another example – while we were in Verona in 2002, our friend Rita Severi showed my wife and me "death doors." Maybe I had just missed it in other works, but I was not aware that the living and the dead were not allowed to pass through the same doors. So all the houses had these waist-high doorways called death doors. Creepy, but neat. I didn’t have cause to use it in MV, but I plan to make use of it soon.

The research took me all over the place. I learned about horses, pharmacology, falconry, fresco painting, cooking, numerology, and a dozen other subjects. Since I wasn’t raised Catholic, a great deal of practice and belief was new to me. And, of course, I learned a ton about astrology, since the great unifying theme is that Cesco is “star-cross’d.”

One big revelation was Dante. I had never read his Commedia before this, and because it was the Harry Potter of its time, I knew I needed a deep understanding. So I read a couple of different translations and a lot of footnotes (as or more informative than the translation choices). Then Jan and I were able to meet Dante’s descendant, living on the estate Pietro bought in 1353. After an afternoon of discussing his family history, he invited us to a reading in the Piazza della Signoria, with actors doing dramatic interpretations of Dante’s works. I was blown away.

That same week, Jan and I were taken around the city by a woman named Daniella Zumiani, who showed us the Roman ruins beneath the current city. They’re public property, but they’re underneath all the shops and restaurants in the main drag. So she would take us into a shop, brazenly stroll past the proprietors, and lead us to the basement to view the ruins, preserved beneath plexiglass. That was the inspiration for the Roman baths beneath Cangrande’s palace.

As far as the fig goes, there’s a character in the Inferno who gives God the fig. How spitefully, horribly wonderful. I’ve taken it back to Shakespeare, making the fig the insult that starts the opening brawl in R&J. And my world turns full circle…

What scene(s) did you find the most enjoyable or easy to write, and which the most difficult?

The scenes I struggled with most were the scenes I never wrote. I often found myself with an idea for a scene, but resistant to actually writing it out. I’d move on to something else, planning to circle back later. But whenever I did try to return, I decided to make something entirely different happen. If I was bored by what I had in mind, how could my audience not be? Far better to change direction than force a scene I didn’t want to write.

The easiest scenes for me were the ones that were purely dialogue. By the time I was into chapter four or five, the characters were so clear in my head that they practically spoke. All I had to do was transcribe their words. Which made that final scene so surprising, and so enjoyable. It’s all dialogue, and I wrote it in a day, it came out so fast. I never saw it coming.

Historical novels set in 14th-century Italy are few and far between. Do you feel that this was an advantage or a disadvantage in the writing/publication process –or some of each? What finally convinced St. Martin's Press to buy it?

I’m really not sure why it’s an under-mined era. Bernard Cornwell hit it with his Grail Quest series, and everyone loves Edward II, but the rest of the century seems to leave people cold. Is it the plague? Is it that we were forced to read Chaucer in high school? Or is it that the next couple centuries are so rife with potential that we look on the 14th as mere backstory? I don’t have an answer. It’s certainly not a lack of exciting information – look at Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror!

This was actually a help in the writing, because I had very few preconceptions about the era, and could create with impunity. As opposed to another series I have in mind, where I'll be setting foot on some very well-trod boards...

But this lack of interest in the period was definitely a hindrance in selling the book. However, there were so many other obstacles that I don’t know how big a part it played. Time and again, publishers passed on the novel. I was told that historical fiction wasn’t as big a seller as it used to be, something I don’t believe. My first agent kept trying to sell MV as a romance novel, which it isn’t. Shakespeare and Dante were considered too scholarly for mass consumption (mind-boggling, but true). And then there’s the size – not long compared to what I like to read, but longer than most editors want to buy. My favorite rejection was from a large company who said the book was too popular for their high-brow press, but too high-brow for their popular press.

When Michael Denneny became my agent at the beginning of 2004, he sent it around to many people, including his old cohort at St. Martin’s, Keith Kahla. But after reading it, Keith decided to give it a pass.

Then, eighteen months later (!), the two of them were at lunch when Keith said, “Hey, is that Shakespeare novel still available? I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.” Needless to say, it was. By then, I had cut a third of the book, trimming it down to a lean, mean 192,000 words. Keith read the new draft, really liked it, and guided me through the process of getting it sold. All in all, it was twenty-three months from the time he first read it to the actual offer. And it will have been another twenty months from the offer to publication, a time that saw another 28,000 words added and a few significant changes. I doubt I’ll ever have the luxury of that long ramp up again, so I’ve tried to enjoy it.

What can you tell us about the forthcoming second book in the series? How many novels do you have planned in all?

Ah, the sequel. Funny story.

I’ll start with the basics. It picks up eight years after the end of MV, and covering five months in the year 1325. The narrative follows both Pietro and Cesco, with a little Antonia [Pietro's sister] as needed.

Now, the story behind the story. I finished the first draft of the second book – originally entitled IL FALCO (meant to follow IL VELTRO) – over two years ago. But after doing a production of Merchant of Venice, I realized I could do more overlapping with that show. So last fall I went to rewrite it, and I realized I simply had too much story. Details and characters were being denied their full potential. So I cut the book into two parts. Fine. Had a good sucker-punch for the ending of each, I was happy.

Then the contract arrived from St. Martin’s. And there, on the page, in cold black and white, was the devil in the details: they had imposed a word limit. 175,000, no more.

Why? It’s simple. They were having trouble with MV. Advance readers are daunted, a major foreign market doesn’t want to spend the money on translation, and the audio-book folks are balking at the size. So they want the second book to be shorter.

(Let me pause for a moment to express my pleasure that St. Martin’s bought the sequel in the first place. They could have waited until MV was out to see how it did, but they have enough belief in the series – and in me – to commit to the next book. Cheers to you, St. Martin’s Press, and thanks!)

The only trouble was, I was four chapters from finishing the first of the two IL FALCO books, and I was already at 177,000 words.

So I chopped it in half again. IL FALCO is now books two, three, and four.

It meant finding a new ending where one did not exist before, but that was a lot of fun, and a great challenge. And I was able to find some events and develop some characters, as well as include one major historical plot point, that I had been glossing over until now.

As far as how many books, it was originally six. Then nine. Then I did this splitting, which takes us to, what, eleven? But I honestly have no idea. I know the timeframe, I know where Cesco is going and what is going to happen. But how each book breaks down is still an undiscovered country.

What I can say is that certain historical figures are going to crop up, including: Roger Mortimer, Isabella, Edward III, Orhan (son of Osman), Emperor Ludwig IV, Pope John XXII, Petrarch, Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, William of Ockham, and many more.

All this will culminate in the events laid out in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet – though I may be tempted into writing a coda novella. It’s just difficult when most of your leads are dead.

It’s very strange to think about, but I’m writing a series that everyone already knows the end of. So it really is the journey, not the destination, that matters to me. That, and a few surprises waiting along the path.

Thanks for letting me play, and forcing me to think about the forest as well as the trees. Cheers!

And thanks for your willingness to do the interview - it's been very informative, not to mention lots of fun!

To recap: The Master of Verona will be officially released today in hardback from St. Martin’s Press ($27.95, 608pp, 978-0-312-36144-0). Visit http://themasterofverona.typepad.com/ for more information.

An interview with David Blixt, part 1

David Blixt’s first novel, The Master of Verona, begins a generation before Romeo & Juliet, positing a reason for the deadly feud between the Capulets and Montagues. However, it’s much more than just a prequel to Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. It brings together elements from Shakespeare, the life of poet Dante Alighieri, and the political scene in early 14th-century Italy to form a sweeping historical epic replete with adventure, intrigue, betrayal, and star-crossed romance.

Let's look back in time to the year 1314. The scene is set, of course, in Verona. Dante Alaghieri (the spelling is deliberate), the infamous Florentine poet, arrives at the court of his patron, Francesco della Scala, who is widely known as Cangrande: “the Great Hound," or, perhaps, “the Greyhound.” Attempts have been made against the life of an infant nicknamed Cesco who may be Cangrande’s bastard son; rumors fly about the child’s origins, as Cangrande has no heir from his marriage.

Pietro Alaghieri, Dante's 17-year-old son, quickly gets caught up in Verona's longstanding wars with Padua, following Cangrande into battle to defend his interests. He also becomes best friends with Mariotto Montecchi and Antonio Capuletti, two young men of Verona. But when Mari and Antony both fall in love with the same young woman, it rekindles an ancient blood feud between their families.

David Blixt is a Shakespearean actor and director from Chicago currently starring in the title role in the Michigan Shakespeare Festival’s production of Macbeth. His swashbuckling tale is a perfect read for those who love Shakespeare, know Dante, and want to know how their stories might have fit together. But even if you know nothing about either one, The Master of Verona will make you want to find out.

The novel will be officially released tomorrow, July 24th, in hardback from St. Martin’s Press ($27.95, 608pp, 978-0-312-36144-0). Visit http://themasterofverona.typepad.com/ for more information.

In the afterword to Master of Verona, you mention that there isn't much information about the historical Pietro. After you did the research on him, how did you fill in the blanks?

Honestly, Pietro became what the story needed him to be. The first time I sat down to write, I started from Mariotto’s point of view. But that felt like taking sides right from the get-go. I needed a third party to witness the implosion of the Mari-Antony friendship. Dante’s son, who was new to Verona and pretty much a tabula rasa as far as the audience was concerned, seemed a perfect choice. Then, suddenly, he was drawn into a whole new level of intrigue, and we were off to the races.

As far as coloring him in, there are a few clues from his later life that I could draw upon. Pietro goes on to become a judge of sorts, have a large family, and write a commentary on his father’s work. So young Pietro became interested in the law and justice, owned an instinctual liking for children, while at the same time he was grudgingly familiar with poetry.

Like most of the story, Pietro took shape during the writing. Looking back, I can see how interacting with Mari and Antony made him take on the role of a Shakespearean best-friend, the voice of reason, like Horatio and Benvolio. Here, however, that person was front and center – Pietro is the one fighting duels and making hard choices. I didn’t want my lead narrative voice to be a passive watcher.

But, unlike Cangrande, Pietro is not meant to be a lead in a Shakespearean tragedy. If he has any flaw, it’s his need for approval from authority – something he developed living in his father’s shadow. But that flaw is not Tragic, it doesn’t lead to his destruction. Just his disillusionment.

It seems clear that you're an admirer of the historical Cangrande. Why do you say he's one of your heroes? (And, given that you're also an admirer of Dorothy Dunnett… maybe I'm mistaken, but is there a touch of Lymond in Cangrande's character?)

I feel guilty about the historical Cangrande because I haven’t quite done him justice. I don’t admire him the way I do, say, Caesar or Wellington. But I do feel that he’s been given short shrift in the history books – I certainly knew nothing about him before I started researching the history of Verona. His career is astonishing, his exploits as full of daring as any popular hero’s. As a patron of the arts, he really did help start the Renaissance. So, while far from perfect, he was regarded by his contemporaries, friend and foe alike, as the ideal man.

As far as Lymond goes, I was in the midst of Checkmate when I sat down to write, so I absolutely had him in mind. Cangrande is taller, less acerbic, but just as witty and skillful and sly. Then, in a single chapter, he went from Lymond to Graham Mallett. I was as surprised as anyone.

Dunnett is, to me, the pinnacle of the genre. I have never felt an emotional punch the like of hers. The character that will interest Dunnett fans is Cesco. In MV he’s the object of many plots. In the sequel, he’s old enough to be a participant. If anyone ever wondered what Francis Crawford was like as a child, before he was wounded by life, they should pay attention to Cesco. His wounds will be quite different, causing him to grow into a very different man, but the twinkle in the eye is the same.

I normally find battles hard to follow in novels, maybe because character development often takes a distant second place to the action; I have trouble distinguishing between the people involved. However, I never had this problem in Master of Verona. I particularly enjoyed the early scenes where Pietro follows Cangrande into battle against Padua. Given your experience as an actor and director, how do you choreograph action scenes?

Thank you for the compliment. I do have a peculiar advantage here. Having spent the last decade choreographing fights for the stage, my approach to action is very theatrical, almost cinematic. I’m not interested in relating tactics, but in conveying the story of the battle.

There are a lot of bad fights in theatre, and most of the badness can be attributed to one of three things: the actors are bad fighters, the fight is happening faster than the audience can follow, or the choreographer is showing off a bunch of cool moves with no regard to the story. In a book you can easily control the first two. It’s the last one that can kill you.

A good stage fight tells a story. In essence, combat is desire and denial. The desire is to kill, the denial is the need to stay alive. I like to take the weapons away from my actors and have them work it from an emotional perspective. The stabbing becomes reaching, the parry becomes an emotional refusal. So it’s just another relationship, only played out with weapons. Which makes each fight unique, and intensely personal.

The best example of what I’m talking about is, ironically, from Romeo & Juliet. In that show there are two duels back-to-back – Tybalt/Mercutio and Tybalt/Romeo. These are very different fights. The first one is fun, playful, a pair of guys showing off, not actually trying to murder each other. The second is vicious and brutal, with kicks and bites and desperate lunges, surging the action this way and that all over the stage, ending in death.

How do I know this? It’s all in the characters’ motivations in the moment. What do they want? Mercutio wants to humiliate Tybalt. Romeo wants him dead.

That’s what I tried to bring to the battle sequences. While it’s fun mentioning fancy fighting terms and techniques (Roversi! Mollinello! Passado!), they’re only tools to move the story along – and story is all about character.

The Greyhound ("il veltro"), as quoted from Dante's Inferno in the novel's beginning, is enigmatically prophesied to be a mystical savior of Italy. Many characters believe Cangrande to be this person, as do many Dante scholars today. Yet, as the novel reveals early on, "il veltro" has another meaning. How did you discover this interesting fact, and, later, decide to use it in the story?

It was one of the first things that popped up in the research, though not from any book. Back when I started this, in May of 2000, I was living in Ann Arbor. I had a brief Italian history of Verona that I needed translated. Sylvia Giorgini at the University of Michigan was recommended to me, and she took about a week to pull out highlights from the short text. As she handed me her notes, she said, “It’s funny about Il Veltro. They keep saying the Greyhound, but you know that it also means the Bastard, right?”

When the story stopped revolving around the Mari-Antony feud and became about Cesco, this little tidbit was a delightful play on words that I couldn’t resist. Because bastard has just as many meanings as veltro does: 1) born on the wrong side of the sheets; 2) a true hardass or malicious character; 3) a sword that can be used as either a one-handed weapon or two.

As you know, it was actually the original title for the book – in a perfect world, it still would be. But the irony and charm of IL VELTRO doesn’t translate unless you know colloquial Italian, so it was quickly dropped. Sigh.

You talk on your website about Lady Montague's offstage death in Romeo & Juliet, and how that line inspired you to make her the catalyst for the Montague-Capulet feud. I loved the scene from the novel where she's introduced, as a young woman - it's incredibly vivid and dramatic. (I won't quote from it, though, so readers can discover it for themselves!) Given that she's nearly absent in Shakespeare, but looms so large in Master of Verona, was her character a challenge to create?

It was and it wasn’t. She’s actually a character who is a delight to write, and whom I thoroughly despise. Maybe I’m just a guy who's lost too many friends because of girls, but man, she makes me mad. Which is great. It was also surprising, because I had intended her as the ideal woman – another Julia. But instead she became a Guenivere (a comparison that would no doubt delight her).

In terms of her character, it was a fairly simple proposition. She started, as you point out, as a catalyst for the feud, inspired by a single line of text at the end of the play. The only words she utters in Shakespeare’s text – a mere three lines! – are all about Romeo, and how she’s worried about him. And the end of the play tells us she died because Romeo was exiled. That’s all we know.

But she’s Romeo’s mother, and Romeo is a character in love with love. Where did he learn that? Why not from his doting mater. And based on my interpretation of that single line, she breaks her engagement to run off with Mari, her true love. That’s the act of a romantic. So I made her the uber-romantic.

I find it amusing that St. Martin’s promotional tagline for MV is “Romeo & Juliet is the greatest love story ever told – and every story has a beginning!” To me, a great love story is where the lovers live! It’s this idea that love has to be tragic in order to be “great” that horrifies me – and fascinates Gianozza. She buys it, really believes that only untimely death can make a love live on for all eternity. She doesn’t understand that while drama is and must be conflict, love doesn’t have to be. She’s interested in love as drama, and so she will always seek out the conflict.

Watch for Part 2 of the interview with David Blixt tomorrow!

The usual quarterly announcements

The editors' choice reviews from August's HNR are online.

The forthcoming books page has been updated (par moi) with US titles through April '08, and a selection of UK titles through the end of '07.

There aren't any new deals to post because historical fiction hasn't been mentioned much on Publishers Marketplace lately.

I'm presently very itchy and sleep-deprived after a much-needed weeding of the garden last Sunday resulted in a bad case of poison oak. So I expect I'll be posting more later, when I'm more coherent.

Just for the fun of it

I managed to earn this rating because I said the word "dead" twice and "corpse" once, and that was in quoting the Chabon-related pieces last week. I gather dead corpses are not considered appropriate for children.

All the words to catch me on, and they're not even fun words.

Book designs along gender lines

Interior book design is one of those things meant to be unobtrusive - if you notice it, there's something wrong. Yesterday evening I read with curiosity the latest post from Booklist Online's blog, Likely Stories, about the mismatched, over-the-top book design for Andrea Barrett's upcoming historical novel The Air We Breathe, out in October. The post is very funny ("taken together, it’s like trying to read a novel through a doily") and, of course, it compelled me to find the ARC of Barrett's novel I'd grabbed at BEA.

Perhaps what's most interesting that if this post hadn't pointed out the issues with the design, I doubt I'd have noticed anything. To me, The Air We Breathe is designed to look like an authentic 19th-century novel, with chapter numbers superimposed against a woodcut print of a leafy tree, and dropped caps beginning the text of each chapter. I'll admit that the font used for the author's name in the headers on the left-hand pages, with its old-fashioned script flourishes, doesn't go well with the all-cap outline font the title uses on the right. But it wouldn't be so noticeable as to distract me from the text.

On the assumption this difference in opinion was gender-dependent, I asked Mark to take a look at the galley. Apart from commenting on the mismatched fonts on the headers, he didn't notice anything majorly wrong. So I don't know.

Do you like it when interior book designers subtly (or maybe not-so-subtly) try to evoke a past era through their choice of fonts, graphics, etc., or do you find it distracting? Put another way, is this a girly thing? I'm trying to think of other examples where this is done, and failing, but maybe someone else can come up with one.

Evaluation at the halfway point

On January 1st of this year, I posted a small number of reading resolutions. Alas, I haven't been doing very well by them so far. The only one I can truly say I've kept is (5), keeping an ongoing reading list, which you'll find on the sidebar here. I've read an embarrassingly small number of books in 2007, about forty in six months. Don't ask how many I've bought or acquired over the same period. It's probably about ten times that. yikes.

Also, generally, the books I've been asked to read for review have been the ones I've enjoyed most. (See the multiple DNF indications on the sidebar - all non-review books.) There are exceptions, but it makes me wonder if I'm better off having other people dictate what I read.

Things coming up in the immediate future - I'll be posting a two-part interview with David Blixt beginning on Monday, July 23rd, the day before the official release date for The Master of Verona. I'll also be participating in Jane Kirkpatrick's blog tour for A Tendering in the Storm, which will involve a brief interview (based on that novel and its prequel, A Clearing in the Wild, which I just finished). It'll be going online in early August. And sometime in the next two weeks I'll be writing a readalike on W. Michael and Kathleen O'Neal Gear's prehistoric novels for NoveList. This means reading one, preferably two, of their novels to remind myself (as it's been a while) what their style is like. I'll be starting People of the Moon tonight.

I'm currently knee deep in my Historical Mystery chapter, after finishing up with Sagas two weeks ago. Despite the craziness that was June, I'm doing my best to write a chapter every month. This one's a long one, and I started late, so I'm not sure I'll make it. But going through and making notes on the books I want to include are adding an awful lot of historical mysteries to my TBR pile.

On the death of genre fiction

What happens when you write a review of an alternate history novel that not only grants a number of backhanded compliments to the author, but slams genre fiction in its entirety?

`Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' (Ruth Franklin, Slate, May 8 2007)

You leave yourself wide open to a zinging rejoinder from Ursula K. Le Guin:

... 'But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?' ...

Read the whole thing, though; it's worth it. The novel in question is Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Literary snobbery at its most obvious.

Your favorite historical novels 1997-2007

We're looking for input for a feature in the next Historical Novels Review (August - the 10th anniversary issue). We want to know which historical novels from the past 10 years are your favorites.

Email Bethany Latham (blatham@jsu.edu), HNR's managing editor, with the title(s) of your favorite historical novel(s) published between 1997 and 2007. Bethany will be tallying the votes and compiling the list. The only qualification is that the novels should have been published for the first time within the last decade.

Don't be shy - we need more contributions in order to have enough data to run with the feature. And thanks!

Me but not me

I found it amusing but a little strange to discover via the HNS Online Newsletter that there's a new historical novel, Owen Sheers' Resistance, whose protagonist has the same name as me. (Or that I had. Lewis is my maiden name.)

Maybe I should read it to learn what I was doing in Wales back in 1944? At least it got a good review...

Photos from the HNS conference

... are now online at Kodak Gallery. Enjoy the show. (Click on View Slideshow - you don't have to sign in.) I'll be linking these up to the HNS website later tonight.

Photos by Chris Cevasco, Richard Scott, Mark Johnson, Nancy Castaldo, and Val Perry's husband Mike. Captions by me. There are a bunch of people whose names I didn't know, so if you recognize any of them (or if you're one of them), let me know and I'll make the corrections.

Anyone else who took photos and is willing to have them added to the gallery, please get in touch.

The mysterious Lady Kate

While scanning through Waterstone's list of historical novels this morning (with thanks to Kieron for making me look at their site again), I noticed what looks like a new historical novel from Pamela Hill: Lady Kate, from United Writers Publications, a subsidy publisher from Cornwall. I'm wondering if this is the same Pamela Hill who wrote many historicals, mostly for Robert Hale, starting in the 1950s. Her novel Flaming Janet (aka The King's Vixen) about Janet Kennedy, a mistress of Scotland's James IV, is one of my favorites, despite the silly title - which may have been pretty risque back in 1954, who knows. I own nearly everything she wrote.

What intrigues me is that the subject of Lady Kate is very much typical of Hill. Per Amazon UK (Waterstone's doesn't have a description) it's about Lady Katherine Gordon, wife of Perkin Warbeck and several other men besides - I don't know much about her later life. Unfortunately, the Tudor lady on the jacket art appears to be sporting a five o'clock shadow.

Even curiouser, Fantastic Fiction not only has Lady Kate grouped with older Hill novels, but it lists several newer ones too, mostly from United Writers. One is about Shakespeare's supposed journeys in Scotland, which is also in keeping with her usual subjects. I wonder why she's not with Robert Hale any longer, and why I hadn't heard about these additional novels before.

Has anyone else read her? Many of her older novels were published in the USA. And you can read more here (from a previous blog entry) about her novel Countess Isabel.

What my library catalog can do, but Amazon can't

Amazon UK, that is. And neither can Book Depository, Good Book Guide, or Waterstone's online...

Why do they make it impossible to search for books by publication date, or to sort results by "newest first"? I'm writing up my publishing column for August's HNR, the section listing interesting historical novels that will be in stores within the next 3-6 months. Normally I use Amazon UK for this. The advanced search page lets you sort by date, but after you view the first screen's worth of search results, it switches to the usual "sort by bestselling status" arrangement.

This functionality used to be there, but it's not any longer. Other versions of Amazon can do it, though. What I ended up doing to get a list of UK-published historical novels coming out in 2007 is searching Amazon.de for English-language historical fiction, which seems to cover UK as well as US, though it doesn't appear comprehensive.

Maybe only librarians look for this sort of thing, but this annoys me. Grumble.

Reading the Past meets Cute Overload

Aww.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Book discussion will resume tomorrow.

Two historical novels to watch for

You know it's going to be a weird day when you stagger up the steps to the post office, a huge bin of packages in both hands, and the postal clerk greets you by asking if you can tell there's a dead mouse somewhere under the counter. (No, I couldn't.)

Then we traded dead mouse stories. We have three cats and live out in the country, what can I say.

But on to book news. Gillian Bradshaw has a new Roman-era novel, Dark North, out this month. If you haven't heard about it, don't be surprised. Severn House is a hardcover library publisher, so you won't be seeing it in bookstores. I know about it mainly because a Bradshaw fan wrote in via the HNS website. Amazon has it for sale, but the date is wrong - it's June, not September, and if you plan to get a copy, I suggest ordering sooner rather than later. I had to wait six months to get her earlier Alchemy of Fire because it sold out fast, but they did a 2nd printing.

According to the blurb, it's set in Roman Britain circa 208 AD, and deals with an African cavalry scout who gets involved in imperial intrigue after he saves the life of a beautiful attendant to Empress Julia Domna (wife of Septimius Severus, who's on a mission to conquer Scotland). There aren't many novels set around this period of history, I don't believe.

Also, Valerie Anand has a new historical novel forthcoming this November, from Mira. The House of Lanyon, per information I found on a Harlequin blog, is a multigenerational story set in 15th century England. The small print on the cover says "The Exmoor Saga," which makes me think it's first in a series. I never really followed her Elizabethan mystery series (written as Fiona Buckley), but if this is anything like her Bridges Over Time series - one of my favorites - it will be something to look forward to. It's the first novel she's written under her own name in over ten years. This would go on my Christmas list, but I have a feeling I'll be buying it before then. Great cover, too. The UK publication date (also Mira) is April 2008, per an editor there.

My report on Willocks' The Religion, as promised - I'll be doing a full writeup in my next NoveList column (November; August is already turned in), but I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite its having possibly more gory scenes than any other historical novel I've read. Now that says something.

More notes from the conference

I realize you may be tired of hearing about the conference, but there are more links I just have to post, because unlike me, some people in the audience actually took notes and reported back, on their blogs, in great detail.

Suzanne Adair, author of the Revolutionary War mystery Paper Woman and a member of Mary Sharratt's "rewriting the role of women" panel, kept a travel diary of sorts, and if you want to know what C.C. Humphreys, Irene Goodman, our invited editors, and Diana Gabaldon talked about in their sessions, read her blog. The conference-related entries are on June 8 and 9. This is the most comprehensive writeup I've seen so far, given that, of course, it was impossible for any one person to attend everything.

At History Hoydens (a blog I need to add to my sidebar) novelist Amanda Elyot discusses the differences between historical fiction and historical romance, along with reader expectations of each. Excellent genre analysis, although I'm not so sure about the "French" thing. I haven't seen all that many historical romances set in France, yet in historical fiction, I can name quite a few recent and successful novels - those of Susan Carroll, Sandra Gulland, Maggie Anton, Debra Finerman, Susan Vreeland - although (hmm) most of their novels, with perhaps the exception of Anton (about the daughters of the medieval Jewish scholar Rashi, who I don't think many mainstream audiences have heard of, yet) their novels have so-called "marquee names" in them. Such as Catherine de Medici, Josephine Bonaparte ...

Also, imho, if you're writing literary historical fiction, the editorial preferences for historical fiction expressed in this blog entry (and which do exist) are not nearly so firm. I haven't yet started my "literary fiction" chapter, but I know from my own observations that in terms of setting, time period, and fictional vs. historical characters, they're all over the place. (Sorry, I got sidetracked, but my upcoming book will be all about this stuff.) Anyway, both this entry and the lengthy comment trail are well worth reading, along with her earlier summary of Cindy Vallar and James L. Nelson's "Bringing Pirates to Life" session. The same holds true for Elyot's own novel Too Great a Lady about Emma Hamilton, which I reviewed for HNR's May issue.

Last but not least, conference attendee Anne Beggs did a funny writeup of the "Writing Love Scenes: How Much Sex is Too Much" panel (and if you went to the panel because of the catchy title, you can thank me, because I made it up - one of the hidden contributions I made to this conference). Apparently this panel was a big hit, although I missed it because I was at Tamara Mazzei's very informative panel on publishing options.

And here I intended this to be a short post, just a few links here and there, because I have to pack up review books tonight.

The conference committee

There'll be more photos forthcoming on the HNS website later, but here we are - the HNS conference board of directors, hanging out in the Desmond hotel courtyard just before the Friday night banquet. From left to right: Carol Anne Germain (hotel liaison), Claire Morris (publicity coordinator) standing behind Jane Kessler (bookseller liaison), Trudi Jacobson (program chair), me (treasurer), Nancy Castaldo (secretary), Jerry Burke (local coordinator), Val Perry (volunteer coordinator), Alana White (editor/agent liaison). Click on the photo for a larger version. Ann Chamberlin, past chair, was attending her son's graduation and arrived at the conference on Saturday.

My living room, post-conference

I'm back in the land of corn, soybeans, and bugs, and mostly unpacked, although my mind is still back east, in NYC and Albany. The photo above partly explains why. It shows a portion of the books and galleys I found waiting for me when I returned home. Some are ones I shipped from BEA, while others arrived while I was gone. Most will be going out for review for HNR's November issue, though others will wait for February's, if they're 2008 publications. I've got an equal number of books that I picked up for myself, and a similar number for the library, though those are still on shelves in my office.

I dread the trip to the post office, and I don't think I have enough jiffy bags, either.

Because I'm nosy and a fan of Google Alerts, I found these reports of people's HNS conference experiences online today:

• Favorite PASTimes (Cindy Thomson)
• History Buff (Michelle Moran)
• Article from the Albany Times-Union (posting for interest, though the reporter wrote this before the event)
• Compuserve's Books and Writers Community (various attendees)

One member of the latter group posted a copy of the handout from my own presentation (attached to post #8), which I think is pretty cool. However, as a slight correction, none of us are agents - we're all librarians - and we didn't run out of time before the end. But this and the other handouts she posted are decent writeups, and I'm glad to see them, as there were so many sessions I didn't get to see myself.

I guess there are a couple other things I brought back from Albany, namely a sore throat and bad cold. Not sure who to blame for this, though.

BEA/HNS conference trip, day 11

After two years of planning and preparation, it's hard to believe the Albany conference is over. It was a pretty intense three days, and it's hard to describe (and record) everything that happened since Thursday, though I'll try to write up my own experiences, at least briefly.

I didn't get to nearly as many panels and workshops as I'd have liked, as I was too busy getting people settled in / answering questions / whatever, but those that I did get to went very well, at least it seemed to me. My own panel ("the best new historical fiction: what to read and why") was slotted second on Saturday morning, and we nearly filled the room, despite being scheduled opposite Stephanie Cowell/Judith Lindbergh/Lyn Cote (in one room) and Irene Goodman (in the other). Two fellow librarians and I "booktalked" around 35 of our favorite historical novels from the last two years, telling the audience what they were about and why we enjoyed them; a slideshow of book covers accompanied the talk. We went in chronological order by the novels' settings, and finished exactly on time. I even got a few laughs, which was gratifying if occasionally surprising. I have the habit of unintentionally making double entendres, though if people thought I was being funny on purpose, I'll take credit for it.

I didn't make it to Chris Humphreys' panel first thing Saturday morning, or anything scheduled opposite for that matter, though apparently he did such a great job that his novels sold out at the bookseller room right afterward. He also had a huge line at the group book-signing that afternoon. Mary Sharratt's panel on "rewriting the role of women" was also a favorite, with all the panelists sharing their perspectives on writing about historical women, both fictional and real. And lots of people were taking notes during the "publishing continuum" panel run by Tamara Mazzei, Nancy Attwell, and Patricia Wynn during the final timeslot this morning at 10:30.

I didn't attend the "writing love scenes" panel, but I heard much laughter coming through the walls.

Note to self to stop making snarky comments about BEA in LA next year (only in relation to the weather, mind you, as I've never complained about the show itself), as there's a chance I'll end up going after all. It's fairly easy to convince me to go to book events.

Probably the best part of this conference was meeting so many people I've known only over email and/or this blog. Karen Mercury and I hung out at the Saturday evening dinner, I got to meet many authors, HNS members and reviewers for the first time, and I reconnected with other people I haven't seen since Salt Lake City. Since the conference was on the east coast, many HNS members from the UK and Europe made it over; I had some nice conversations with a historical fiction fan from Dublin, and a few others who were based in London. And, hey, I even sold seven books - and got to sign two of them. The Salt Lake City bookseller was convinced they wouldn't sell and only ordered three of them, which sold out immediately. This time, the bookseller (Blackwood and Brouwer out of Kinderhook, NY) ordered ten.

Mark didn't go to the conference per se, although he volunteered to chauffeur some of our guests of honor to/from the train station in Rensselaer. He picked up Irene Goodman on the 4pm train Friday from NYC and promptly got stuck in Albany rush-hour traffic on the way back to the Desmond, but I understand the people in the back seat (other conference goers also en route to the hotel) kept everyone entertained.

Oh, and the food at the Desmond was delicious - no "rubber chicken" or "rolled stuffed hamster" there (that's Mark's phrase to describe typical conference fare, normally chicken cordon bleu or some such). In her keynote, Diana Gabaldon mentioned it was the best food she'd ever had at a conference. I'll be curious to hear what other attendees thought, about this or any other aspect of the conference, pro or con. Any attendees reading this who didn't fill out a feedback form, my address is on the top if you want to mail it back to me, or just email me your thoughts if/when you get around to it. We really do take all comments/suggestions seriously, and we used a number of the ideas on the Salt Lake feedback sheets to plan the program for this one.

I came back from the conference energized, eager to start working again on v.2 of my book, though I'm sorry it'll be another two years until the next conference in North America. We'd do these conferences every year if they weren't so much work, and if we weren't obliged to rotate locales around the continent (which means choosing a new hotel). The good news is, though, that we've had many expressions of interest from people interested in helping with the next event, and after we decompress a little, we'll start evaluating our options. And maybe Mark and I will head to York (England) next April, where I understand the next HNS conference will be.

Conference photos forthcoming, eventually.

We're in Newington, Connecticut tonight and most of tomorrow, heading back to Indy and Charleston tomorrow night.

BEA/HNS conference trip, day 7

I did absolutely nothing useful today, aside from answering about a dozen conference-related emails. Instead, we drove south on Rte. 9 toward the Connecticut shoreline, heading to our favorite used bookstore in the area, the Niantic Book Barn. If you want more info on it, I blogged about this place last December when we were here last.

Even better, this time we took photos. Take a look.