How do you like your eggs?

So, it has been some time since my last post, over a month in fact, however it has been an insanely busy one for I took part in this year’s NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated). This is a writing challenge in which you have 30 days to write 50,000 words.

This, as the studious among you will recognise is the same length as five dissertations, all written in a single month! Not even to mention all the research required for a good historical-fiction novel (of which I am quite sure I have done more of, than in either of my dissertations... Vikings > Politics / Management. Who’d have thought?!) Some of this research has really helped the tale to progress, like much of the work I did on the flora and fauna of Newfoundland, including the discovery that flax grows natively there, a particular fibre that one of the crew is very skilled at processing and which becomes vital to their survival.

Other bits of research had less of an impact, for instance I found myself trying to find out whether the Vikings like their eggs fried, scrambled, boiled, poached, etc. I never did find out the answer to that. 

Since NaNoWriMo, I took a couple of days out to recover (25 hour writing stints are NOT good for the health!) but am back now, writing in full swing. My word count has finally topped 80,000 out of my target of 100,000 (though I am sure that will be over run; current expectation on completion is roughly 120,000 now)

I have several projects going on, the book, Pendor and one more which is very much linked to Vinland and I hope that I will be able to reveal more about it in the coming weeks.

The Importance of a Belt Buckle

I write this leading on somewhat from my earlier article “Bringing the Vikings to Life”, as I wish to talk about the experience I have had in injecting detail and description to my writings. Now, firstly my background as a writer is as a game designer, writing either fiction based on a world that I particularly liked or later on writing the script for the adventure itself, either as background lore, quest detail or interactions between the players and the denizens of the land.

Part of this has meant my developing style is very blunt and concise, with a heady amount of action driving the plot forward. Working in such a visual medium as this, it was usually better to leave the optical features to the artists, because as they say, a picture tells a thousand words. Now, that I am writing a book it has come about from frequent critiques that I need to add more detail and atmosphere to the text, as I can no longer rely on the visual feedback from the graphics.

My experiences of this have been widespread, ranging from finding certain aspects really interesting (the weather and environment in particular) and therefore easier to write about. For some reason I find it very easily to properly visualise and then put into words a description of weather and its effects, be it bright sunlight on a mid-summers eve to a blizzard in the middle of winter, however detail of the land is rather more difficult. This is part of the reason for my attempts to get as much visual feedback on the Greenlandic terrain, which led to my discovery of the real Hvalsey in the article mentioned above.

Then there is the part of descriptive text which I find near impossible, and this most likely stems from my own (very) casual attitude to the subject, and that is clothing. I realise that what people wear can be as important to their overall characterisation as their actions, but I find it nearly impossible to connect the two. Does it really matter if Gorran wears a blue tunic or a green one? What about Thorvald’s trousers today? Is it enough that I simply dress up the characters in personality and then let the reader imagine for themselves what exactly it is they wear. I hope so, because this is what I intend to do.

This leads very nicely on to my final point, the nature of novel writing is a very different beast to master compared with script or lore scribbling, and it requires different skills and techniques to pull off; but should I really mould my entire writing style to suit this, or would my book come out as stronger if I write along my strengths rather than weaknesses? Perhaps I should start to concentrate more on Leif’s voyage of discovery and worry less about the shape of Erik’s belt buckles...

The Invasion of Dorset

Well the last two weeks have been packed full of different activities, so much so that I simply have not had a chance to sit down and work on this blog as I should have been. Several things have been going on, both in life, in Vinland and in Pendor, for the interests of not spreading this post too thin, and having it go on for 5,000 words I will limit this one to just the former of the three. I have noted down the events for the others, so expect more posts in the coming weeks which will cover those topics.

Two weekends ago I was travelling through the picturesque villages and towns of Dorset working at better understanding that most Viking of activities, the art of drinking and through that enhancing my appreciation for the fine ales of the region. One of the local breweries had put on a competition which required that you visit 20 of their pubs before the end of September, of course we saw this as more of a challenge which had to be accepted, which dutifully we did. Unfortunately on my first visit to the area we only managed to go to one pub having decided we rather liked it and settled there. After this we were all busy until the weekend before the end of the challenge, so had to do 19 pubs in 2 days. Game on!

Based on my experiences during this I now like to think that the Vikings are simply a misunderstood race, each of their crews simply trying to complete their own pub trails albeit on a far larger scale than I and my friends achieved. It is clear that the Irish, the Franks, the Saxons and all the others simply didn’t realise that those burly guys simply brought their axes along as a dark age bottle opener.  

Bringing the Vikings to life!

Location of "Hvalsey" the capital of Viking Greenland

Ok, maybe not quite to life, but I am writing this literally jumping with excitement at the wonders of technology. Now, my friends are well aware that I have been utilising a little trick to write about the wonders of the land in which my Vikings lived, namely in the section on Norway I used Google Street View to jump on the Norwegian roads and actually wander around what I was trying to talk about, getting some really nice descriptions going about the landscape through which they wandered, and the obstacles they had to face. Had I not been able to do this I would have had to splash out several hundred pounds to travel to Bergen and Trondheim proper in order to get a real feel of the land, the Norwegian landscape being so exotic and different to anything I have myself experienced.

Having found this little treasure trove I began to try the same technique on Greenland, but much to my annoyance the people at Google have not yet mapped out the roads there, and as such there is no Street View; the entire map in fact feels decidedly empty (take a look yourself, Greenland is just a white shape on the map). I then began to look up flights to Greenland, planning to do a little research and was shocked at the price (the cheapest was something like £1300). Despairing I began to search all over the place for pictures of the region and found several good ones, but they tended to focus on one thing in particular (most often being Thjodhilde’s little church) and lacked any real details of what the land looked like, and the impact of the background. Now, a good photographer would never just take a picture of a grassy meadow, or of a rocky beach (unless they happen to live in Brighton, in which case those stone seem to be a focal point!), simply because they are boring. To an author however, who lives on the little detail this was a massive setback, as I simply couldn’t envision the settlement of Hvalsey in my mind.

All this changed with a little more exploration, on a whim I decided to pinpoint the exact location of Hvalsey in Greenland, so that I could at least say the size of the fjord on the slopes of which their settlement was built when I had a major breakthrough. Just because Street View didn’t work, did not mean that Google Earth failed entirely, we still have the satellite images. Now I am not one of those people who perused the service at its inception trying to find conspiracy buildings arranged to look like a swastika, nor did I try to find area 51, in fact the only thing I did look at was the massive bomber graveyard in America just because that sounded so cool. I didn’t realise you could zoom, and it would actually zoom in and give you highly detailed shots, I had been expecting just increasingly pixelated shots in which the sea began to look like the mountains which rose of out it.

Eiriksfjord, on the banks of which Erik built his home.

With some searching I found the Inuit (and as such modern Greenlandic) names of the various settlements, eventually discovering that “Qassiarsuk” was the nearest modern settlement to Hvalsey. A little more searching and I found it on Google maps. Great, I had the basic details of the land now, it was a relatively green patch of the normally icy Greenland, with a massive fjord feeding into it through a series of islands. So far so good, this was pretty much what I had expected.

I zoomed in; is that a path? It was. I went in closer, are those ruins? No, they were just sheep. Disappointing, still this was pretty cool so I followed the road, they tend to go somewhere right?

Then, suddenly like a flash I noticed something I recognised from the photo’s I had found earlier, it was a stone wall with what looked to be a grass roof. Could it possibly be? Perhaps.

Then I saw next to it a smaller structure housed within a small wooden fence. I had found it, there was Brattahlid, the home of Erik the Red staring right up at me from the computer screen. Oh the wonders of modern technology!

The circular structure is the wooden fence, at the centre of which is Thjodhilde's church. Right above that is Brattahlid, home of Erik the Red!

 With many, many thanks to the enterprising people at Google!

Playing chicken, with a horse

So it has been over a week since my last blog post, and I can only apologise for that. I just came back from a holiday in Wales in which we saw many castles, waterways and best of all sampled many different beers. Now, you may be wondering how on each does this relate to the Vikings and how does any of this fit in with Vinland?

The secret to Viking power?

Well, firstly there was life on the water, clearly this wasn’t somewhere in the North-Atlantic during the mid-winter storms but still one had to consider the etiquette on the canals and generally ensure that you do not crash into the banks, or worse another boat... this is harder than it sounds. On the first day we managed to get wedged up with another boat just outside of a bridge, then a couple of hours later nearly crashed into another boat in what became a rather amusing game of chicken, in which one of the chickens was actually a horse.

Eh, what!? I can hear you exclaim, well a boat was coming right at us, and our pilot was adamant that the oncoming vessel was on the wrong side of the canal and that it would move. Unfortunately he did not reckon with the fact that it was being pulled along by a horse on the towpath. It had no motor and was entirely unable to avoid us, and apparently it is too much to ask a horse to get in the water and swim in order to move the boat aside. Finally seeing the problem our helmsman swerved the boat off to the far side of the canal after having scared most of the passengers nearly to death. He did this not once, but twice. On the same day. With the same boat. 

Thus you will see that life in the water-lane is actually quite stressful, I can only imagine how the Vikings felt when they were not only dodging other boats, but pirates, icebergs, seagulls and the dragons at the edge of their maps. 

Now to become a little more serious for a moment, I took a book called “The Hammer and the Cross” by Robert Ferguson with me on the trip. It is at its heart a exploration into the relations between the Christian missionaries and the Norse heathens, and how the Christians tried to convert the Vikings for nearly 200 years with often catastrophic results. Now while this was interesting, it was the little details that he highlighted which were the most interesting to me, including a very in depth rendition of the buildings found in Greenland which was a major revelation to me.

The Vikings basically lived in bunkers, yes, bunkers! Essentially they had massive houses which eventually reached something like 60 rooms. Due to the lack of wood in Greenland, they tended to be built out of stone and turf, and were built a little into the ground in order to conserve heat. There is far more to tell about them as they really are fascinating structures, but to find out, you will just have to read my book!

 

With thanks to : http://planetoddity.com/russian-world-war-2-bunkers/

Tales of a land far, far away.

So this week my writing has taken a rather different turn to the usual, rather than concentrating all of my efforts on Vinland or even direct development on the mod I am working on, Prophesy of Pendor, I have been working on something related, yet very different. We have a large and very active community of fans at the Tale Worlds forums, and one of them asked me if it would be OK to run an RPG based on the lore of Pendor. This was something of a nice endorsement for the team, as I know that James Landes and I (along with a plethora of other writers and contributors) have invested a massive amount of time into producing the backstory for Pendor and fleshing out the world in which hundreds of thousands of characters live in.

One of the hallmark features for Pendor are the “Knighthood Orders” which are essentially organisations inspired by the Knights Templar or Knights Hospitaller. The reason I joined the Pendor Team after the release of Prophesy of Pendor 2 was to flesh these Orders out, and give them a real sense of being and belonging in the world, because before they were simply normal knights pimped out in some rather sweet gear. Part of my work on joining the team included creating a rivalry and conflicts between the various Orders of Pendor, and generally bringing them to life, they now act as non-state military forces, each with their own story, goals, objectives, heroes and of course a political agenda.

The result of this was a nice range of different Orders, each with their own personality and individuality. A few examples follow below;

The Order of Dawn : A fanatical Order dedicated to the ideal of justice and to the mission of destroying the evil cult of Heretics that plagues the realm. Over time their execution of this sacred duty has turned them into zealots and they will punish anyone for even the smallest of crimes or even by the tiniest affiliation to the heretics. This is truly a story of evil encroaching on even the best of intentions.

The Knights of Eventide : As the Order of Dawn becomes increasingly paranoid over the effects of the Heretics, there remained a small faction who believed the way to fight the heresy was to understand them properly. However as part of Dawn’s slide into zealotry, they banned any manuscripts or items considered heretical in order to stave off corruption. A schism occurred and the Order of Eventide was formed by those who sought to use their knowledge of heresy against the perpetrators. The irony now being that the Order of Dawn’s greatest fear seems to be realised as there are rumours that the heretical corruption has spread to the inner circle of Eventide, and threatens to undo all the work they have done to destroy the heretics.

The Order of the Ebony Gauntlet : There is an ancient race of beings that live just outside of human society known as the Noldor, or more colloquially as the elves. The Ebony Gauntlet believe that the Noldor want only the complete destruction of humanity and fight to promote human supremacy in the world, using any tools at their disposal to achieve this goal; xenophobia, racism, genocide. After all, the Noldor are not human, which makes them mere animals that deserve to be trodden under the iron-shod feet of humanity.

Now the players of this RPG have taken on a role from the various Knighthood Order’s that both appeared in Prophesy of Pendor 3, and will be appearing in Prophesy of Pendor 4. The setting is immediately following the events of Prophesy of Pendor 3, where the one hero prophesied has risen to power and united Pendor under one sovereign. Prophesy of Pendor 4 is occurring in another war torn continent which is home to Pendor’s greatest enemy, the Snake Cult.

Not much work had yet been done connecting the events of end of Pendor 3 to those in the beginning of Pendor 4, but now the results of this RPG could well bridge the gap, and better yet it has been done by the community itself so that they have more of an emotional tie to the game; it is even possible that their characters may appear in Pendor 4, who knows?

Oh, yeah and in a little aside, they made me play the King...

The end of the beginning continues!

Welcome back! I know that I meant to publish this next part last week but with one thing or another it kept being delayed, then with the riots being rather distracting over the weekend and into this week it just kept being sidelined. Without further ado, here is the rest of the planning process;

Last week we left off creating the overview of what each character does, and put them in chronological order. This is essentially the very framework of the plot, in a somewhat readable (albeit bare bones) format. You could actually read this tale now, and be able to understand what is happening but it would not be much fun. The next step is to add flesh to these bones, and do the actual writing that turns a plan into a story.

I

·         Bjarni finds America

o   Bring out the superstitious element

o   Make Bjarni appear a coward to his crew

 Becomes;

A raven black as midnight flapped weakly onto the beached ship and hopped on to the mast which was now leaning on the rocky beach. Its strength left it then, and it tottered and fell to the small stones below, wings outspread in a grisly parody of flight.

“Odin has sent us a warning” murmured Snorri softly, eyes not leaving the corpse

“An evil omen! The gods are warning us that this land be cursed!” said Jorvik, his voice high. The superstitious crew all stepped back from the dead bird and then stood regarding it with their mouths agape. 

Bjarni, still in a trance was once again heaving at the ship, trying to push it back to sea. His crew needed no second urging and added their strength to his. Slowly the ship, timbers being eviscerated under the grindstone effect of the shale beneath uttered tortured screams and slid slowly back in to the ocean.

Now we have the manuscript in rough comes the part I am dreading most the editing phase. It is here that I call up all my friends and beg their help as I am well aware that spelling and grammar are not my strongest suits. We then go through the text with a fine toothed comb and make sure the final copy is readable, and that the messages it presents are those I intended. I bring out my notes on the characters and ask my guinea pi... err volunteer editors for their impressions on the cast and see if the two are more or less the same. From there I intend to get some professional editors involved so as to give me a full critique on what is good and what is not. These criticisms will then need to be acted upon and changes made to the script.

Once all of this is done, I should have something that I actually feel comfortable in selling to the general public, and the book is done.

The end of the beginning

“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning” is one of my most cherished Churchill quotes, and rings very true of the status of Vinland at the moment. Following my foray into the countryside of Dorset last week, I have been surprisingly industrious in working on my novel.

As you know, I met with the editor, Leila Dewji some time ago now, and have since then been refining the plot of the story to be rather more dramatic and less epic in scale. This process is thankfully nearly done, and I will soon be returning to what I enjoy the most anyway – actually writing the book!

I am sure you are getting rather curious about how I actually go about writing the book, I have given many hints over the months of my blogging here, but have never actually gone over the process. To start with, I have my notebook (a tool most good writers will have on their person at any one time) which is filled to the brim with ideas, people that i’ve met, strange situations. Anything really that crosses my overactive mind every single day. I then go through this notebook and take out anything which could be suitable to the plot, and note them all down in another, bigger notebook. This I entitle “Stuff to happen”. 

Example;

• Discover America
• Game of Hnetafel
• Warrior arrives
• Sit in hall eating meal ignoring enfolding drama
• Merchant thrown overboard
• Find prince
• Find natives

As you can see this is pretty basic, just an overview of things that could happen. The next step are the characters, and very unlike the plot these are remarkably organic, beyond some general traits and noting down major events I do not plan them overly much. Instead I go through the “stuff to happen” and apply those events to the characters, or if something especially good needs to happen, I create a suitable character for it to happen to.

Example;

• Erik the Red
• Central character. The reason Vinland succeeds
• Thorvald
• The voice of the warrior spirit
• Leif
• The voice of intelligence and reason

See, even the character overviews I have posted on this blog are more in depth than the notes I followed initially. Now we have the rough story and the characters, we need to turn this into a plot. Therefore I cut the events up into “sections” and arrange these sections into a chronological order. This is what we are left with;

I

• Bjarni finds America
• Bring out the superstitious element
• Make Bjarni appear a coward to his crew

II

• Leif loses to Erik at Hnetafel (Viking chess)
• It is a very close match. Mock anger from Erik to display his pride in the skills of his son.

IV

• Kai arrives
• Sits in hall eating meal ignoring enfolding drama

VI

• Edvin, Rorik and Anneliese arrive
• Edvin thrown overboard by Rorik

Addendum

• Find prince
• Dropped, terrible idea and horrifically cliche.
• Find natives
• ?

But how does this contribute to the finished script? Find out on Thursday!