LETTER TO A FRIEND

There have been days when you have woken up and thought: why am I doing this?

Days when you said to yourself: why am I doing this job, when it’s not what I really love?

photo: aowolf from Denver

Times when you have looked at your life and wondered: why am I in this relationship when it’s not what I truly dreamed of?

It’s easy to get buried in the details of life.

We have so many small deadlines to meet that we sometimes forget the Big Deadline; you know – the one we all have but don’t ever talk about.

I sometimes think those little deadlines are there only so we don’t have to think about the Big Deadline.

But it’s there. Waiting for us.

They're not that different from you,
are they? ... Did they wait until it 
was too late to make from their lives 
even one iota of what they were 
capable? Because, you see gentlemen,
these boys are now fertilizing 
daffodils. But if you listen real 
close, you can hear them whisper 
their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. 
Listen, you hear it? ... Carpe, 
carpe diem, seize the day boys, 
make your lives extraordinary! 
- JACK KEATING, DEAD POET'S SOCIETY

I think about this in the quiet moments. In my life, it has provided context.

It’s a frightening thing, to live as if we had only a limited time to live – so most of us live as if we have forever.

But we don’t.

“As you grow older, you’ll find the only things you regret 
are the things you didn’t do.” 
ZACHARY SCOTT

It’s truly exhilarating to see someone follow their heart, take that leap of faith. How many people put their heart on the line for love or risk everything – everything – for a long-held dream?

But when it’s us letting go … it’s terrifying, isn’t it?

Our minds tell us to pull back, urge us to caution.

But as Dicky Fox said in Jerry Maguire: If your heart is empty, then your head really doesn’t matter.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, 
day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.  
~STEPHEN VINCENT BENET

It was pointed out to me recently that my latest novels are all about characters who step outside of everything they know to pursue something – or someone – they love.

They risk everything and don’t look back, no matter what it costs.

I don’t know why I picked up this cause to champion in my novels. When I write I hope of course to keep a reader turning pages; I want to move, to entertain. I certainly don’t think about changing the world.

But … if something I write might inspire someone to follow their heart over their head, I’ll take that.

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - 
real life.  But there was always some obstacle in the way.  
Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, 
time still to be served, a debt to be paid.  Then life would begin.
At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.  
~FR. ALFRED D'SOUZA

It’s why I do what I do. I dream that one day someone will say: I read your book once and it changed everything for me. I believed in what you imagined so clearly it made me decide to live for the passion, and not for the math.

Some days it feels – to quote again from Jerry Maguire – like I am hanging on by a very thin thread.

But like Rod Tidwell said, I dig that about me.

And it’s what I dig about you too.

photo: Matt Yohe

Remembering you are going to die
is the best way I know to avoid the trap 
of thinking you have something to lose. 
You are already naked. 
There is no reason not to follow 
your heart.
STEVE JOBS

WHY A TOMATO IS NOT AN ESSENTIAL PART OF ANY HISTORICAL NOVEL

photograph: Pauk

Looks harmless enough, doesn’t it?

But Solanum lycopersicum could cost you readers.

I got this the other day:

“I started reading Silk Road a couple of days back and was enjoying it very much, just as I had enjoyed one of your other books.

However, when I reached Page 164 I found these words: “…green fields planted with tomatoes and aubergines…” I don’t know about aubergines but I do know, as do most people, [my italics] that tomatoes were not introduced to European cuisine, let alone further east, until the 16th century …

photograph: Ronhjones
“This is a tomato and this is what I think of your book.”

Until I saw these words I had been impressed by the breadth and quality of your research but this is such a basic mistake that I just don’t feel I can read on – it’s not possible to enjoy an historical novel once one realizes that the facts can’t be trusted. I thought I’d point this out so that the mistake can be amended in future printings.”

So there you have it. The case for the prosecution rests.

I have admitted my guilt and have taken to my bare back with chains. I leave on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela within the week.

Unless …

Unless someone, somewhere, you know, needs to take some valium.

For example, I read a disturbing quote on Goodreads recently – (‘Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction’ – if you like HF it’s a fantastic group)  – from an author whose book one of the members was reading.

 “ … he describes a character (a real historical person) travelling somewhere by bus or drinking a cup of tea. He worries that he, as a writer, is being disrespectful by just assuming that the character would have caught the bus and not the train. Or maybe in real life he hated tea and only drank coffee, and because the character is now dead he can’t put the record straight …”

(sigh)

Look, I don’t mind someone taking me to task for my prose, plot structure, characterization, pacing. I pay a lot of attention to these things, to my story-telling ability – because getting this right is my obligation to anyone who buys a book of mine.

photograph: flydime

As Bernard Cornwell said in a recent interview: “If you are wanting to write historical fiction I always say, you are not an historian. If you want to tell the world about the Henrician reformation, then write a history book but if you want an exciting story, then become a storyteller. Telling the story is the key.”

But I’d point out that Cornwell is meticulous in his research as well. As I always try to be. I don’t know how this one got through. I spent a year researching SILK ROAD, paying close attention – among many other subjects – to Tatar politics and dynastic succession after the death of Chinggis Khan, the Nestorian church, shamanism among the nomadic tribes of the steppes, Crusader politics, the topography of Shang-tu, (a city that long ago ceased to exist) … shall I go on? The list is endless. None of it was easy.

And I occasionally make mistakes.

Ken Follett, whose eleven hundred page epic The Pillars of the Earth has rightfully been lauded for its exhaustive historical research also contains … hush my mouth … errors.

photograph: flydime
“Okay Follett, we’re going to teach you not to know all about the history of hops, you bastard.’

For example, the many encounters across social classes depicted in the book are unlikely – as the nobility spoke Norman French and the lower classes didn’t. Sugar – which is mentioned several times – was not available in England then. A priory storeroom contained hops – but hops were not used for food production until centuries later.

(But as far as I can ascertain he was spot on about tomatoes – 1-0 to Ken vs me.)

Do these few errors negate the years of study, the mountains of research, that went into Follett’s astonishing book? According to Ms X – yes. Come on, Kenny baby, get your shirt off, we’ll go and self flagellate together.

What galls me most is that researching SILK ROAD nearly cost me my life.

Seriously.

Reaching the Mogao caves near Dunhuang, for example, meant renting a Chinese four wheel drive and a driver and taking a day’s drive into the mountains north of the Taklimakan in far western China.

Just as we got back to Dunhuang the steering rod broke and the car slewed off the road. Five minutes earlier we were driving along an escarpment; the slewing would not have been into a ditch but off a hair pin bend and down a five hundred metre cliff .

photograph: The Real Bear

Perhaps our fall would have been cushioned by that tomato field I saw at the bottom.

That research trip was some of the most uncomfortable traveling I’ve done in my life. I’ll tell you about it some time; the projectile vomiting, the three puppies and the two men sharing the sleeper bed above mine, all those forty eight hour bus journeys …

I didn’t list that as part of my bibliography or my sources. I love a bit of adventure. But I naively expect the trouble I go to will earn me just a little bit of leeway with vegetables.

Sorry – fruit.

But apparently not. You get one chance and one chance only with Ms X. And when you come to write that historical novel you’d better know your agriculture or you’re – well, history.

photograph: flydime
“I bet they couldn’t do this in the 13th century!!”

I have since asked my publishers to recall all unsold copies so they can be pulped but they seem strangely reluctant. My editor even had the gall to say: ‘Christ it’s only a freaking tomato!’

That’s not the attitude!!

I am now editing my upcoming novel, set in the time of Alexander, and rewriting it in the Thraco-Illyrian dialect spoken in Alexander’s native city of Pella in the fourth century BC.

Okay, no one will be able to read it. But it will be authentic.

And yes, I’ve checked and double checked;  not a single tomato between Macedon and the Jhellum River. The Empire is safe.  

THE FACE THAT SUNK A THOUSAND SHIPS (WELL 3, ANYWAY.)

As any old sea dog will tell you, it’s unlucky to have a woman on board ship.

(Unless the woman is naked, apparently. Sailors make up the best superstitions.)

But in the case of Violet Jessop, you’d have to say the old sea dogs have a point.

Violet started life as a landlubber, her parents were Irish sheep farmers living in Bahia Blanca in Argentine. Violet was a born survivor – three of her nine siblings did not live beyond infancy. She herself developed tuberculosis when she was a child and doctors said she would die.

But she didn’t. As events would later prove, Violet was pretty much unsinkable.

THE SONG OF BERNADETTE

155 years ago a peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous saw an apparition of the Madonna in a cave called the grotte de Massabielle.

Since then the nearby town of Lourdes has grown into a major pilgrimage site for Catholics from all over the world.

A million people flock there every year.

At any one time the transient hotel population exceeds the number of residents by six to one.

Few people were convinced of Bernadette’s visions at the time; not even her own mother.

In fact no one else saw anything and five months later the visitations ended as abruptly as they began.

WHAT PRICE TALENT?

THE SITUATION 

 Washington DC, at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. People rushed past on their way to work. After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule. 

photo: Indiana University

About 4 minutes later: 

The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

At 6 minutes: 

A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again. 

At 10 minutes:

A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent – without exception – forced their children to move on quickly.

At 45 minutes:

He finished playing. He had collected $32.17 contributed by 27 of 1097 travellers. He collected $32.17 contributed by 27 of 1097 travellers. Just seven stopped to listen and only one recognized him.

The violinist was

FROM AUNTY IVY TO KHUBILAI KHAN

My primary school teacher’s name was Mrs Boyne.

She once told my mother at a parent interview: “Your son is a complete dreamer. He’ll never amount to anything in this life.”

I still think that was a pretty harsh judgment on a seven year old. But she was right, of course, I was a dreamer.

It was my greatest asset.

It was about the time I first read Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff. To get my hands on it, I had to endure a slobbery wet kiss from my Aunty Ivy, but I considered it well worth it.

By the end of that first afternoon, I was hooked on classic literature.

NOT TONIGHT, JOSEPHINE

“I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses.”

Napoléon Bonaparte will be remembered as one of history’s greatest generals; yet the one victory that seemed always to elude him was the battle for the affections of his own wife.

She was born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, the daughter of a wealthy Creole sugar baron in Martinique.

But after hurricanes destroyed the family plantation, she was married off to the Vicomte de Beauharnais in Paris in October, 1779, in order to preserve the family fortune.

It was an unhappy marriage, but it produced two children, Eugène and Hortense.

During the Reign of Terror, in 1794, her husband was arrested as an aristocratic ‘suspect’ by the Jacobins; Joséphine herself was imprisoned a month later.

ARE YOU GOING TO FINISH STRONG?

Life isn’t always roses. There have been times for me, as I am sure there have for you, when everything seemed just too hard.

Christliches Medienmagazin pro

I have lost those I did not think I could live without; and there was a time when I was so burdened by a sense of guilt that I could barely function.

There were other moments when I have clung to that one last long shot that would bring about reprieve; then that fell over too.

I have known acute failure.

There have been times I looked in the shaving mirror and muttered: ‘You suck.’

But this is nowhere near as bad as it gets.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE WYRD

You can call me weird. I really don’t mind.

In fact if you said I was in the way of the Wyrd, about two thousand years ago, it would have been a huge compliment.

It would mean I was – the contemporary word is enlightened – one with all things.

(I wish.)

Wyrd is an old English word – and the antecedent of our modern word weird, meaning strange or odd or freaky. These days it is mostly used in a pejorative sense.

Some scholars believe the word was deliberately corrupted by early Christian missionaries to discredit the ‘heathen’ religions of old Europe.

So what does it mean?

A BETTER MAN: THE STORY BEHIND CHICAGO’S AIRPORT

On Wednesday, November 8, 1939, a 46 year old man left his office at Sportsman’s Park in Cicero, and drove away in a black 1939 Lincoln Zephyr coupe.

At the intersection of Ogden and Rockwell, a dark sedan roared up beside him and two men opened fire with shotguns.

He died instantly.

The dead man was