Why I don't interview my characters

The scene: a more or less anonymous location somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind. I'm looking more than a little bit frazzled. My interviewee, on the other hand, is quite relaxed. Note to self. Never do one of these when your character is more composed and at-home than you are.

Me: So, what next? (Quickly, before I can get fobbed off - again - with an accurate but totally useless reply) I mean, you've got Constantinople, but there's enemies on either side, and Mehmed is going to be practically frothing at the mouth.

Vlad: (Is that a smile or a smirk? Probably smirk, knowing him.) I certainly hope he is.

Me: So how are you going to stop him coming after you?

Vlad: Killing him first is generally considered good tactics in this situation.(It's definitely a smirk. You haven't seen smirk until it leans against a wall with its arms folded and adds in a kind of pitying, condescending 'don't worry your little head about it' look).

Me: That isn't an answer.

Vlad: (Smiling) You really are taking this far too seriously. You know where I intend to start. You will be informed as the need arises.

Me: (sourly) Gee, thanks. I know how that works. Hours of bloody research or bashing my head against a wall before you tell me what you think I should know.

Vlad: (raised eyebrow - you'd be surprised how cold it can get in here: I'm trying not to shiver, suddenly)

Me: I'm the one writing your books. You want good books, you need to tell me all of it so I don't screw up.

Vlad: (I think my language amuses him) If you would only sit down and write, I would tell you all you needed. You know that.

Me: (speechless)

Vlad: (laughing)

*

The sad thing is, he's right. The sadder thing is, I've got way too much else I'm trying to juggle. For starters, I don't dare try to edit ConVent while I'm dealing with Kaziklu Bey (the sequel to Impaler). The two are so different I really don't need to have the voice of one leaking into the other. Maybe when I'm a better writer. But then, given Sarah's blogging, maybe not. Maybe it's always like this.

On with the motley

In other words, I can't be trusted to remember when it's my week, and my reminder service glitched. So instead of a nice, planned out post, I'm winging it. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

Anyway... Impaler moves closer to the dead tree edition. It should be there Real Soon Now - watch for the deafening squee when this happens. As is, the kindle edition is sitting in the mid-60k range of the Amazon rankings, which for a new author's book with zero promotion is pretty good. I'm pleased.

My con schedule for the rest of the year is set - Discworld Con in July, Capclave in October, and Philcon in November. Details to come as the time gets closer.

Now, did Amanda's challenge scare people away? Really... Let's up the stakes a little. Instead of two free ebooks, the winner can choose one of NRP's dead tree books - Death of a Musketeer, Impaler, Nocturnal Origins, Without a Trace, and The Calvanni. Is that sufficiently awesome to attract new entrants?

Don't make me go into the comments section with a non-entry example. Just don't. It's too scary to contemplate (Remember, I'm the woman responsible for Impaler, ConVent, AND the Knights in Tarnished Armor. This is not someone you want running around uncontrolled).

Impale them All

(God knows his own)

While it's a reasonable bet that Vlad Dracula never actually used that particular phrase, it's a pretty good description of what could be called "pointer" fantasy violence. It's the rather more pointed version of the kick the puppy moment which less skilled writers use to show that the villain must be bad, because see? He kicked that poor, helpless puppy.

And yes, Vlad did impale a lot of people, and more than a few of them were alive when the stake treatment started. He also added a fair few refinements to the basic stake up the khyber routine to make his... ahem... point. (To be fair, it's more than feasible the added extras like rounding the end off and a heavy coating of grease were things he learned in the Ottoman Empire - they were rather enthusiastic proponents of impalement as a way of dealing with problems, themselves.) He also lined the roads with stakes as a way of informing people that they'd better behave themselves - something that seems to have been quite effective.

The thing is, it doesn't matter how much violence there actually is in a book, if it's not properly directed. If you're lopping off heads left, right and center, when you need to raise the stakes (so to speak), you don't actually have many places to go. Gushing arteries and painting the town in someone's blood tend to have that effect.

When I was writing Impaler, I aimed to keep all the on-screen violence (and most of the off-screen, for that matter) tightly focused. If it didn't matter, it didn't rate a mention. I don't think there's a single random act of violence, although there are a number of impalements (kind of hard to avoid them in a book about Vlad), several battles, and assorted instances of torture, bad temper, and - again, somewhat inevitable - impaling and generally despoiling enemy corpses (Yes, the equally inevitable graveyard humor surfaces. It wouldn't be true to the time or the people if it didn't).

How did I keep it from overloading the book and dripping off the pages, you ask (well, actually, no you don't, and yes, I know you're trying to sneak out the back door. Go on then, I'm not stopping you)? I used several techniques - none of them as blatant as the kick the puppy or pet the kitten cues that make me want to smack the author. Hard.

First there was context. You know, Vlad gets pissed, and he directs his - quite filthy - temper at an appropriate target. Appropriate in this case meaning someone he'd have had executed with just cause sooner or later, because even though in that place and time it was normal to beat several kinds of hell out of the servants when you had a hissy-fit, today's readers wouldn't accept it. Or he's got a recalcitrant spy to deal with (trust me, you don't want to know what's going through my mind when I'm writing torture scenes. Let's just say the writer-voodoo is strong in those times. Curiously enough, the target of that particular bit of writer-voodoo is no longer a co-worker). Or it's the middle of a battle and he's fighting as much to stop the other guys killing him as he is for any other reason.

Then there's one of my favorite tools, balancing and offsetting something that would normally be utterly horrific by describing it in a way that's got more dry humor than anything else. If you've ever sat with nurses or cops talking shop, you know the tone. I've naturally got a sarcastic streak wider than I am (which takes quite a bit of effort, what with the beached whale look), so this is a very easy technique for me to use - so easy I need to be careful not to overdo it. In Impaler, that wasn't helped by Vlad's voice being even more strongly sardonic than I am.

Yeah. I finally met someone who could out-snark me, and he's one of my characters. Only a writer.

Anyway, that kind of technique, along with focusing on a specific goal or impact, shifting up Vlad's perspective so he's not always in the middle of the violence (even though he'd much rather be in the thick of it than waiting to find out whether he won or not), and shifting to the next goal instead of the loving writer-closeup of the horror all served to keep the impact of the violence at the level I need it to be - which allowed me to ratchet up the tension a good ways for the climactic sequence.

You'll have to read the book to find out what I did - but I'm pleased with the end result. It still drags me in and doesn't let go until the final sentence. And if I can do that to myself, I have a slight hope of being able to do it to other people.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

As you've probably noticed over the last month and a half, Saturdays have become promotion days for MGC. Sometimes it will be self-promotion. Others will be guest blogs by authors who have new books coming out. Sometimes, we'll even throw in an open floor. Today, I'm going to step in and do a bit of promotion for the MGCers who have titles coming out from Naked Reader Press this month and nexzt.


In a land with a weak king, in a time when murder was often disregarded, four men made sure justice was served.

First up -- and I'm really excited about this -- is Death of a Musketeer by Sarah D'Almeida.

This is the first in the series and it has never before been released in digital format. Now, I see some of you scratching your heads and wondering who this D'Almeida chick is. Well, if you take a look at her Amazon author page, you'll see that she looks pretty familiar. Actually, it's no secret that Sarah D'Almeida is one of several pseudonyms our own Sarah A. Hoyt writes under.



Computer hackers are nothing compared to Legion. Its source is unknown and it continues to baffle programmers and defeat firewalls and antivirus programs. Nothing seems able to stop it. Could Legion possibly be intelligent? Or is it something else, something totally unexpected?

Up next is a wonderful short story written by Dave Freer and Kate Paulk. Legion: The Enemy Within came out earlier this month and, as with all NRP titles, it is DRM-free and available not only at the NRP site but also from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.





A boy's search for the truth sends him on a journey to find his grandfather's downed plane. Suddenly trapped in an alternate South Africa, faced with pirates and worse, he refuses to give up. His quest to clear his grandfather's name turns into a desperate race against time. It's a race he can't afford to lose.

Our next title is Dave Freer's middle school/early YA novella, Without a Trace. It is currently available for early purchase as an uncorrected e-arc (advanced readers copy). The edited version will be available for purchase the second half of March. If you like a rip-roaring adventure, or know someone who does, Without a Trace is for you.

The day she died Mackenzie Santos's life and her perception of the world changed forever. Everyone else thought her return to the living was a miracle. She knew better. How else could she explain away the dreams she knew were symptoms she was losing her mind? And if that weren't enough, she's now in charge of the investigation into the most brutal murder she can remember in her time with the Dallas Police Department.

Nocturnal Origins is by, well, me. Yes, me. The blogger currently hiding under the bed because self-promotion isn't something I'm comfortable with. It will be available from NRP the first half of March.

And don't forget that Kate Paulk's unique take on the Dracula legend, Impaler, comes out in March as well. For more information on Impaler, as well as a snippet or two, check out Kate's website. You can also find more information on Impaler at The Naked Truth and here on MGC. One word of warning, do not expect any sparkling vampires or emo werewolves in this novel. As far as Kate's concerned, the only time vampires should sparkle are when they've stepped into the sunlight and are bursting into flame.

With the exception of Legion: The Enemy Within, each of these titles will also be breaking new ground for NRP. Each of these titles will also be released in print as well as in digital formats.

(Full disclosure here -- for those who don't know, I'm the senior executive editor for Naked Reader Press.)

Heinleining the Just in Time Research

While I was writing Impaler, I did a lot of research (no surprises here - Australian, never been to Europe, only seen snow a few times (courtesy Pennsylvania winters), and I'm writing a book set over six hundred years ago, in Eastern Europe, in winter, involving cultures I had never experienced except through reading books). The funny thing was, most of the research happened rather like modern inventory management - "just in time".

I'd been absorbing general books about the area and the time period for years, but that's not enough for the kind of specifics I was looking for. Things like "Okay, it's mid-winter. Snow - quite a lot of it for the most part - on the ground. Danube River frozen over to the extent that you can march an army across it. How far is that army going to get in a day?" (Not very, especially if they're dealing with unbroken snow). I learned a lot about logistics just dealing with that question.

Then there's the more interesting bits: Vlad is trying to get his army south without Sultan Mehmed II realizing what he's up to - preferably before Mehmed realizes the Wallachian crown has changed hands (again). He needs stealth. Moving several thousand men and horses doesn't correlate terribly well with "stealth" when you're marching them through the countryside - so Vlad comes up with the idea of taking out the enemy garrisons, and sharing the loot with the locals to buy their favor so they don't say anything.

To us, that's not a big issue - but in his time, it was unheard of. Similarly Vlad's decision to buy food rather than loot - despite the high cost (he makes the observation at one point that at this time of year food is worth more than gold) - was a total departure from the norms of the time. Knowing the norms of the time is general research, but the specifics, down to nuts and bolts sometimes, were things that typically I didn't realize I needed until I got to that part of the book.

So, just before the battle for Varna, I spent quite some time trying to find out what Varna's defenses looked like in 1477, as well as the likely impact of the 1444 battle (minimal, since the town itself wasn't directly involved), the architecture of the town, the layout of the governor's palace and where it was in relation to everything else, likely local culture, and so forth. This is not something that is readily available even to the best Google-fu. Google maps helps, interestingly enough. You get a good sense of terrain from that.

Ultimately, I ended up with guesses seeded with the very few pieces of hard data I managed to unearth - things like the old Roman baths still working and converted to Turkish-style, Roman ruins by the palace (which undoubtedly provided their own defensive layer, just by existing), and tried to give the impression of knowing a lot about the place when there was actually buggerall that I could find. Smoke and mirrors, the greatest art of the writer. Mostly I used a blend of known trends in better documented regions as close by as I could get them.

There were quite a few smaller research binges - working out what trees would be growing where, for instance, given that except in the more inaccessible parts of mountain ranges it's pretty unlikely the vegetation now is going to be much like the vegetation then. Phases of the moon in early 1477 was another critical aspect of the story - and that included the extra fun of figuring out whether the lunar calendars I was working from had made the conversion back to the Julian calendar, which was the only one being used in that region at the time (the Gregorian calendar wasn't devised until quite some time later). When various religious festivals occurred, Orthodox and Roman (at that stage, they were in synch - the combination of the Gregorian calendar and a revised method of calculating Easter shifted the Roman religious calendar relative to the Orthodox). I also needed to check and keep track of what, if any, major Jewish and Islamic festivals would be happening, and figure out the local forms of said festivals for the time frame I was working with.

It's much easier if you're writing fantasy - you can just make this stuff up. On the flip side, when you do make it up from the whole cloth, it tends not to be as richly detailed as something that's already got hundreds of years of history behind it. I suspect that's why PTerry uses Earth history and legend and twists it for the Discworld: he gets that richness without having to get all the fiddly little details right.

The big research binge - which took me a few weeks, to get everything I needed and build the right images in my head - was for Constantinople, of course. There, I was reading contemporary accounts of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (eye openers all by themselves), whatever references I could find about repairs and new building in the nearly 25 years since the siege - including tidbits like the northern section of the walls hadn't been rebuilt, but the Golden Gate had been bricked up possibly due to a legend that stated a Christian savior would enter the city in triumph through the Golden Gate (Vlad's entrance isn't exactly "triumphal", but one suspects that little detail won't matter terribly much).

I even found not-quite-period maps, which were close enough to give me an idea of what the city looked like, detailed information about the walls (I was bringing them down, so I needed to know what that was going to take), as well as all the things a pyromaniac could do with a large supply of black powder.

The results of that deserve their own post, about medieval-style battle tactics - which I also learned way too much about. Of course, none of this (I hope) is lectured in the book. Hopefully it's all part of the background, so everything fits without being obtrusive.

Which leads of course to the question: aside from PTerry, who else does a really good job of Heinleining background information like this into their books?

Making the Foreign Familiar

One of the more interesting challenges I faced when I was writing Impaler is something that tends to happen to anyone writing historical fiction - although fantasy and science fiction suffer from it to a lesser extent. Basically, people have a tendency to assume that other times and places, real or imagined, are pretty much like they are now but with different clothes, magic, spaceships, or swords.

Heck, this is something that gets people into trouble now, with cultures as apparently similar as different regions in the USA, the USA and Australia, Canada and the USA, or New Zealand and Australia. It gets worse the more differences there are between where you're writing from (or reading from) and where/when the book is set.

Let's face it, fifteenth century Eastern Europe might as well be a different universe.

I know Sarah rants periodically about authors who'll have a servant buying baby-blue blankies in a medieval marketplace, and I really did not want to be on the receiving end of that rant. And that's really just the start.

Dave and Sarah know this, because I hammered them with all manner of weird questions early on, mostly about "stuff" - 15th century Wallachia wasn't a wealthy principality, and it had armies looting their way through the place on a pretty regular basis, so I needed to have a clear idea what kind of furniture there'd be, what the everyday plates and things would be made of compared to the best quality, what people of different ranks wore (fabrics and colors as well as styles), what would be considered the height of luxury at the time, and what kinds of food would be served at a regular meal compared to a feast. Not to mention what would be a treat for small children, and a whole host of other details.

Google got a heavy workout for a lot of this, and Dave and Sarah fielded more questions than any sane person should (thanks, by the way). There are no "Everyday life in 15th Century Wallachia" books out there, or I'd have bought them.

Mostly what I found were tidbits. Comments by bemused travelers of the period that even though Bucharest was ransacked and burned to the ground every few years the survivors rebuilt in wood (the place was in the middle of a huge forest at the time - wood was presumably the most accessible building material). The main streets 'paved' with wooden slabs where side roads were packed dirt. Somewhere else I found a mention that in winter everyone from the highest rank to the lowest wore sheepskin coats and boots for warmth. Information about what plants were native and what was introduced when. Domesticated animals (mostly sheep and pigs) and wild animals. When forks were introduced.

All the information went into a kind of mental map of what Vlad Dracula's world looked like, even though he's only in it for maybe a third of the book - and spends most of that time planning his southern campaign and carefully manipulating his boyars (the ones I mentioned in my blog spree - was it only 2 weeks ago? - as unscrupulous backstabbers with a well-known propensity for unseating princes and often murdering them as well) so that they're both afraid of finding themselves 'enjoying' the view from a stake and grateful for his generosity.

Then there's the culture. At that time, the culture was predominantly an honor-shame culture where appearances mattered. Vlad couldn't just be a fair, generous ruler - he had to show it as well. That meant calculated gestures of mercy, as well as placing himself at risk by not eliminating those he knows are traitors: instead, Vlad tries to arrange for those men to die in battle, which was considered an honorable death, and meant that he didn't need to make new enemies by executing the dead man's family as well - and gave him a chance of winning the loyalty of the dead man's heirs. Similarly, he had to show courage in battle despite the risk of getting himself killed (This doesn't seem to have been an issue: Vlad is reported to have led charges and taken the most dangerous role in more than a few of the battles he was in).

It was also a very male culture. Women fell mostly into the traditional roles - maiden, mother, whore and crone. In noble culture, women were effectively invisible: while they weren't sequestered the way they were in the Ottoman Empire, they had their part of the palace or manor where they and their servants did what was considered the female work.

To Vlad, the women's lives are an alien world - his last real encounter with female roles was when he left the nursery at the age of five and started training as a warrior and nobleman. Apart from his wife and his young sons' nurse, the women in the palace are irrelevant to him. It certainly never occurs to him to question this segregation - it's simply how things are. His decision to leave young Vlad in the nursery for longer than usual is one of his few unusual 'domestic' choices (He wants to protect his two young sons, and doesn't want to leave his sickly youngest boy with no company).

It's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that women in that time would respond as a modern woman would to that environment when for them it was how things worked. As often as not the wife was independent in her domain, as well as managing the entire estate when her husband was away at war - a situation that was far from rare. Since most noble marriages were arranged and usually political as well, love wasn't common (and it was very common for the husband to keep one or more mistresses - and to some extent it was expected that a virile man would need a mistress or two). Try portraying that sympathetically in today's world!

I hope I got a good balance with the way I portrayed Vlad in Impaler, but I guess March will be when I find out.

The Allure of Evil

(This is the first of a three-part set of posts. Tomorrow part 2 will be posted at The Naked Truth blog, and part 3 will be posted at my site on Saturday. Blame Amanda. She asked me to write about Impaler and why I wrote it, and this is what happened.)

Have you ever desperately wanted to do something you knew was wrong? Have you ever done it, and then thought up all manner of justifications why it wasn't really wrong in the first place? No, don't answer. I'm not who needs to know.

If you answered "no" to either question, you've either successfully convinced yourself, or you've been lying to yourself. Humans are good at that - at both "that"s, really.

Now, one of the things I find terribly unsatisfying about a lot of fantasy and SF is that the evil is so often hollow, unconvincing. You look at it and - if you're me, which fortunately is a rare phenomenon - you wonder why anyone would want it. For instance, in Lord of the Rings, the evil side is uniformly deformed and twisted - there's no reason the average orc would want to stay there, and they can't all be fallen from elf-ness. Admittedly, Tolkien was writing what he thought was mythology, which has a different flow and needs than fiction.

Thing is, coming off 100 years packed solid with examples of populist and/or popular evil - they had to appeal to enough people to get into and consolidate power. After that it wasn't such a big thing - your standard ugly, repulsive evil just doesn't cut it, at least for me.

I'm prepared to admit that I might be a tad on the strange side here (when am I not?), but I've been fascinated by the nature of evil for as long as I can remember, so unconvincing evil irritates me. Evil is attractive: it's supposed to be.

At a more basic level, evil involves letting our least human aspects (i.e., the animal nature) run free. Not being stuck with all those stupid rules and getting a good solid boost over those (insert your epithet of choice here) who make your life miserable... you bet your sweet ass that's attractive. When it's wrapped in a charismatic package, it's very attractive. The idea is to seduce people from what they know is right, after all. And, Rule 34 notwithstanding, orcs and seduction just do not go.

All of this is one heck of an introduction to how I came to write Impaler, and why - trust me, it's relevant. See, my guilty sideline in my reading habits is history. Specifically, the history of such charming topics as torture, of regimes like Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the Mongolian Hordes, and other equally delightful regimes. I joke that I have a hotline to Evil Bastard Central in my head, but whether it's the subconscious processing of my unclean fascination or springs from some other dark corner of my subconscious is something I don't know and prefer not to investigate too closely. I might find the answer...

Enter serendipity, in the form of (I think) a 1980s documentary. At that point, I had what you might call the pop-culture image of Dracula: the pale dude with fangs who wore old-fashioned evening dress and a high-necked cloak. Discovering that there had been real man named Dracula, and that he made even your nastier-than-average vampire look like a wuss, hit me like a hammer on speed.

Naturally I started reading vampire fiction as well as the history of the vampire mythos. Of course, I read Bram Stoker's Dracula. Most of the fiction that mentioned Dracula stuck with the Stoker image, although some (Jeanne Kalogridis (Diaries of the Family Dracul) and Dan Simmons (Children of the Night) come to mind) incorporated the history of Prince Vlad Dracula with the vampire myth. Vlad - of course - was always evil, and usually chewing-the-furniture insane as well.

Eventually I managed to get my claws on the books that are still the gold standard for Vlad: the McNally and Florescu Dracula books (In Search of Dracula, Prince of Many Faces, and assorted others). Fascination turned borderline obsessive: there were (and are) gaping holes in the history, and massive inconsistencies in the narrative. This was a man who was revered by his people (and to some extent still is). How could that reconcile with the standard "perverted mass murderer" narrative?

My first - and thankfully long-buried - attempt to write Vlad's story from his perspective started around then. I wasn't a good enough writer to do it. Besides, I didn't have the resources or the research material I needed. Yes, this was before the Internet.

The situation and idea nagged at me during the following years, generating a crude outline for an alternate history - which is recognizably Impaler, although the resemblance is like an artist's sketch beside the final painting. Over the same time period, my writing kept cycling back to the theme of someone who - for whatever the reason - does evil in the service of good. Not evil rationalized into faux-good, but actually in service to good.

In Impaler, I made the analogy between what a ruler like Vlad has to do, and a gardener pruning diseased branches so the whole plant doesn't die. It's not the only time I explicitly called out that what Vlad is doing is evil by most standard but is in service to a much greater need. Vlad doesn't - usually - excuse his actions on these grounds. He mentally adds them to the long list of sins he'll ultimately be punished for.

This dichotomy between action and goal, between cruelty now to prevent worse later, is a topic I find endlessly fascinating, and I'll be exploring that and the circumstances of Vlad's life - the things that shaped him into the man who dominates Impaler - tomorrow at The Naked Truth.

Update: Post 2: The Kindness of Cruelty is available.

Updated Update: Post 3: The Man Behind the Monster is now posted.

Let's Talk About the Weather

I'm sitting here writing this (Wednesday night) and wondering if my husband will make it home. It's been mixed snow, rain, and every possible combination of the two all day, so the roads are... interesting, and conditions are deteriorating.

Where this gets interesting, and ties into writing, is that a little over five years ago this would have been utterly alien to me. I'd encountered snow maybe twice in my entire life up until then. Now, well... I got home from work this evening, and the first thing I did was get the snow shovel and clear the front path. Now, if you've never shoveled snow before, the stuff is fricking heavy. Shoveling it is hard work, no matter what those damn postcards say. And snow does come in multiple types. There's the soft fine white powdery crap that feels kind of like cold sand, the heavy wet crap which is kind of warmer and tends to happen more when the temperatures are hovering somewhere close to freezing as opposed to below freezing. There's re-snow, which happens on a windy day after heavy snowfalls. Whiteout, where the stuff is coming down so thick and fast you really can't see where the heck you're going. And it's all, every last bloody kind of it, miserable.

It's also unearthly quiet. It's silent coming down unless there's wind, and then what you hear is the wind, not the snow. You hear sleet and rain, but not snow. The wretched stuff also muffles everything else.

As for snow-blindness, well, I knew about that intellectually, but I didn't understand it until the day I saw snow-covered fields glistening silver in bright sunlight.

All of that, including struggling through hip deep snow, is writing experience. Without it, the long march to Constantinople in Impaler wouldn't have been anywhere near as vivid.

One day I'll get to write something that uses some of my tropical weather experiences too, like the warm rain (aka 'liquid sunshine' or 'pineapple juice'), or days where it's gotten so hot that when a storm comes through and the rain starts you get curlicues of mist rising off every surface, or humidity so thick you wiggle your little finger and break out in a sweat. Or the storms sweeping through and people going out into them to get wet and cool down.

In the meantime, of course, the inner writer keeps watching what's going on and taking lots of notes. It's all useful someday.

So what are some of the times where you thought you understood something and then experienced it - and really understood it?

Oh, and a bonus for the Brisbaneites - Before and After pictures of the floods: http://www.abc.net.au/news/infographics/qld-floods/beforeafter.htm

Impaler

This excerpt is the opening scene of Impaler. Final edits haven't been completed, so there will probably be some changes in the published ebook.

Enjoy!

Impaler

Chapter 1

Always before battle begins I am possessed by the need for solitude and prayer. It is a curious thing, for I have never fought as merely another knight. I first ruled men at the age of eighteen, when the old Ottoman Sultan Murad and his son Mehmed still thought I could be a Turk puppet.

Those who slander me say I care nothing for the fate of other men. They forget that those who rule by the Lord's grace are entrusted with the Earthly welfare of their subjects, and to some extent their souls. To take one's subjects into battle, however righteous the cause, ensures that they will sin. The burden of their souls falls upon me, their Prince.

I do not allow others to see my weakness. Few great lords care for the fate of those in their domains. That I of all men should do so would seem the most grotesque of jests. I, whose name echoes through Europe as a byword for atrocity. And yet, I am driven to pray for those whose lives will end on the battlefield this day, men whose only crime is to obey the commands of their lords.

Thus I walked through heavy mists in the Snagov marshes towards a hillock built by the monks to shelter their hermits from winter's worst. Mist beaded on the fine dark red wool of my coat and brushed cold and clammy against my skin. Around me my bodyguards ghosted through the marsh trees, soft-soled boots all but silent in the pre-dawn gray.

Only ten men of the two hundred my cousin Stephen had sent to my aid walked with me. Of all the forces I commanded this day, Stephen's two hundred were the only ones in whose loyalty I placed any trust. There had not been time to build forces of my own as I fought to reclaim my land from the Turk's puppets. My men were hirelings for the most part, bound by no oaths of fealty.

My goal emerged from the chill mist: a glade nestled against an earthen wall overhung with vines. It was a place sought by hermit monks for generations, and an air of peace and contemplation hung about it still.

I nodded to the nearest of my guards, and entered the glade. Another man might not have heard the whispers of movement, the sound of chain mail muffled by layers of quilted cloth. The curse laid upon me by Mehmed had its uses. I knew where my bodyguards positioned themselves, knew that they would give their lives to protect me should the need arise.

I knelt on a bed of fallen leaves, damp cold seeping through my pants to chill my legs. My lips moved without sound as I prayed. I begged mercy for those who would die this day, even those who fought under my traitorous cousin Basarab Laiota's banner. I asked no quarter for myself, nor for victory, for those matters lay in higher hands than mine. And finally, driven by what impetus I do not know, I prayed that if the Lord would not lift the Sultan's curse from me He show me a way to use the curse to further His glory.

How many times I begged that the curse be lifted from my shoulders I could not say. I can only say that this morning, as I prepared to face an army near twice the numbers of my forces, I begged instead that the Lord show me His will.

His answer came mere heartbeats after I stood, when I heard the whicker of a horse and the distinctive sound of metal against leather. My chest tightened and my hands clenched. I swallowed, and forced myself to show no sign of disturbance as I walked the few paces to Stefan, the captain of my guards.

"I heard horses and armor to the north," I murmured.

He nodded, and hastened to another man, who moved away in the mist. I waited, nerves drawn bowstring-tight, while the remainder of my guards joined us. They sensed the tension though they knew not its cause, loosening their swords in their sheaths, faces grim in the ghostly mists.

I drew my own sword, my hand settling comfortably around the worn leather wrappings on the hilt. This weapon had been my father's, a sword of the finest Toledo steel. Like him, I prized it for its strength and wicked sharpness as well as all it represented. How his faithful retainers smuggled it to me when he was murdered, I do not know. I was young then, too young to fully understand for I had never ruled, never known the bitter fruits of betrayal. Now I could only honor them for their courage and loyalty.

The scout returned, moving as quickly as he could without making undue sound. Though he whispered, I heard enough. At least fifty men approached from the north, men in the turbans of Turkish soldiers. It seemed my dear cousin Basarab lacked the courage to meet me on the field of battle and sought instead to murder me by stealth. The horses would be to ensure they could escape before any pursuit could be raised.

The captain swallowed when he turned to face me. "Sire, fifty men from the Turk army, leading horses. We must fight."

I nodded once. I and my ten guards were woefully disadvantaged, the Turks too close for a safe withdrawal. Had my curse-sharpened senses not heard them, they would have held the advantage of surprise as well. "Have your men draw weapons, and conceal themselves as well as they may. In this mist, we will be able to strike the center and send them into confusion."

"Sire... my Lord Prince... We can cover your retreat." The man's face had the calm, empty look of one who knows that death awaits, and has made his peace with his fate.

I smiled. Stephen's men deserved better than I could give them. "If I am not here, they will not allow you to hold them." I saw no reason to add that the rarely-used paths I had traveled to reach this place were unguarded. Better to draw the teeth of the snake here than to hide and allow brave men to die in my stead. "Go." I could hear the enemy more clearly now, whispered curses and the sound of wrapped hooves upon soil and leaves.

My guards melted into the mist, slipping behind tree trunks and bushy shrubs. I joined them without word, fighting the excitement that strove to quicken my breath. Soon enough there would be battle, and bloodshed aplenty to appease the curse. Now I could only wait.

Each breath seemed an eternity, those last few moments before our enemy emerged from the heavy mist stretching out into the everlasting wait. First they loomed as grotesque shadows, blurred darkness, then details began to emerge. Here, the shape of a horse's leg, there the glint of a drawn scimitar. They stayed close, horses and men breathing steam into the air, merging with the swirling shadows.

Their faces were grim, their turbans dark. They wore coats of all shapes and sizes, patched and worn and stained with the blood of former owners, for these were men who rarely saw the bone-aching chill of Wallachian winter. I smelled the oil they used in their hair and beards, the cleaner scent of horse, and shifted a little to ensure that they saw nothing of me as they passed us, alert but unseeing.

No signal was given, for none was needed. The rising tension in the bodies of my men, the quick flicker of their eyes as they checked to see how many had passed us and how many remained, gave the signal to all.

I leaped forward, my sword slicing across a Turk's unarmored chest as screams and shouts of alarm rose around me. Blood sprayed into the air, scarlet against the gray mists. My mouth opened to receive the accursed nectar, the sickly sweet taste sending thrills of anticipation through my body. My first swallow burned through to my stomach, the fire of renewed strength, of the energy that defeated the wasting sickness that would otherwise consume me.

A scimitar's movement caught at the very limit of my eyesight. I reacted without thought, my left hand reaching for the hand that held the weapon even as I kicked my first victim aside, raised my sword to the new threat.

I slashed that one's belly open and wrenched his scimitar from his hand, left him to scream and spill his entrails upon the forest floor. In those few moments, the joy of battle, the knife-edge of knowing that each beat of my heart could be my last, rose to fill me. My sword and stolen scimitar slashed into horses and men as I spun and danced amid the screams of the dying.

None could touch me: the Sultan's curse granted me speed and strength beyond human while the draught of fresh blood coursed through my body. Here, there was blood aplenty to sustain my unnatural prowess and for once, I welcomed it. Surely this was God's answer to my prayer.

If I were to use the curse in His name only, dedicate the victories it won me to His glory, it ceased to be the tool of darkness the Sultan had intended and became instead the scourge of Mohammed's followers. Thus could I expiate my many sins.

I truly know not how long the battle lasted. It can not have been long, for mist still lay heavy about me when my weapons could find no more enemies. I stood, gulping air tainted by the stench of death, and listened. I could hear only my own guards, all ten with the dazed look of men astounded to find themselves still breathing.

Of the enemy, I counted forty and three dead, and seven still living though wounded so severely they would not see the morrow. I stalked to the nearest, rested the point my sword in the hollow of the man's throat.

He took time to recognize my presence, to look up along the length of Toledo steel to my blood-covered face. A moan escaped him, and the words, "Kaziklu Bey."

I smiled. The Impaler Lord. He recognized me: good. "Grant me reason not to impale you alive," I said in Turkish.

His eyes opened very wide, and he grew even paler. His words lacked coherence, and were interspersed with pleas to Al-lah, but they told me enough. This group had been sent to commit murder and return to my beloved cousin Basarab with my corpse -- or failing that, my head. Returning without proof of my death had not been an option.

How fitting that dear Basarab Laiota should choose the coward's path. No doubt he wished to be free of me so he could rest his old bones safely. Perhaps instead of sending his head to the Turks I should send that part of a man they valued most.

My mood must have reflected upon my face, for the Turkish soldier began to beg the mercy I had implicitly promised.

I regarded him with contempt. "May your Al-lah grant you mercy," I said, and drove my sword into his throat. His body spasmed once, then was still. The death reflected nothing upon me, and I felt only weariness. In truth, there was little likelihood that he would have survived to be impaled, but fear of that fate -- and no doubt the reputation I had garnered -- overwhelmed any such consideration in his mind. To Turks, death by impalement was dishonor, and impalement by my hand dishonor and defilement.

For Turks, not only did I grease the stakes, I greased them with pig fat. Few had ever received the relative mercy of the stake piercing their heart: I displayed their proclivities to the world instead. Small wonder they held that death in battle was preferable to capture and impalement.

I cleaned my sword on a fallen man's clothing before sheathing the weapon, and located a relatively unstained turban to unwrap and wipe the worst blood from my face. "Send someone to the camp to have stakes prepared and bring these back." I could feel the grim amusement in my smile, taste it in my voice. "We will have a welcoming gift for the Sultan's tool ere this mist lifts."

#

First Novel Squee

I got the momentous news yesterday - Impaler is scheduled for March this year, and I have a cover.

This makes it all so much more real, seeing the schedule notification on the Naked Reader blog, and of course having Laura Givens cover artwork sitting in my inbox. It's almost like having the physical item (I'm old enough to be a bit of a traditionalist that way, but hey, one day...)

I'd be bouncing with excitement except that when I bounce, too much else bounces along and it doesn't stop when I do. Besides, it's fast approaching this Mad Genius's bedtime. (I'm writing this Wednesday night).

The Road Not Taken

I was informed recently by Those Who Know that alternate history is either "dead" or "rubbish" because there are too many factors in the major events - the prime example being that old standby of Germany winning World War 2.

Now, while I agree that the end-point of a war is something that's far too complex to be treated as a single alternative, I utterly disagree that this condemns all alternate history. Most of history is a kind of juggernaut of inevitable where the pressures of the era would produce if not the same result, then one close enough to make no difference. If Hitler had never been born or had remained a minor artist, someone else would have risen to fill the gap.

There are, however, pinch points where history can, with a bit of a push, head down the other leg of Pratchett's Trousers of Time. This is where alternate history is valid and can produce some very interesting results. Usually the pinch points are individual actions: assassinations successful or failed, edge-of-the-knife decisions, and the like. Sometimes they're circumstances: suppose Catherine of Aragon's sole surviving child had been a boy? English history would have been quite different. Or a more recent example: the Midway sea battle. The weather was appalling, and every account I've read suggests that it was pure good luck that American pilots saw the Japanese aircraft carriers before they'd deployed their planes and soon enough to destroy a hefty chunk of the Japanese naval power of the time. That battle is generally regarded as the turning point of the war in the Pacific - suppose it had ended differently?

Obviously I have a less-than-impartial interest in this, since Naked Reader is publishing my first novel, Impaler - which just happens to be alternate history. The companion novella, Born in Blood, is closer to straight historical novel, and available from Amazon and Smashwords as well as the Naked Reader site.

Both of them deal with one of the relatively few people who formed a historical pinch point: Prince Dracula, aka Vlad the Impaler. To start with, it's rather unusual that someone from a tiny buffer state between two much larger empires should be a central figure in an extraordinarily fraught period of history. Then there's the interesting point that despite Vlad's much-reported faults a change in his favor has the potential to significantly improve the outcomes. Specifically, Vlad recognized that no treaties would stop the Ottoman Empire's expansion - and predicted the fall of Hungary if the Ottomans weren't stopped by the one thing they did recognize: overwhelming force. He was, as it happened, correct.

I describe Impaler with the over-simplified "What if Prince Dracula had won?", when the real event that switched the Trousers of Time around is Vlad surviving the assassination attempt in December, 1476. I'm taking the view that his twelve years as effectively a political prisoner of the Hungarian King served to temper him and he emerged somewhat more in control of what was by all accounts a fearsome temper, as well as realizing that he lacked the resources to completely break the boyar class. That along with the realization that the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II (Mehmed the Conquerer) will not allow him to keep his throne drives the story.

The fun part was in the cascade of events: I dug all over the internet for obscure information about the first few months of 1477 - little things as much as big ones. Where I couldn't find any documents, I chose what seemed to me the most likely possibility given what I could find about what followed. If I get to write sequels, the impact of Vlad's survival will get wider, until ultimately his world and ours are very different indeed.

That's my road not taken. What road would you like to investigate, and why?

Flesh on the Bones

Between Sarah's discussion of empathy, Rowena's talk of bent characters, and Dave's lament on the futility of forcing them to do what you want once they've come to life, I'm left without much choice for my first appearance as a new Mad Genius. The character in question is giving me the smirk that says "Next time trust me. I know better than you."

So without further ado, I shall ramble for a while on the process that finished with Prince Vlad Draculea taking up residence inside my head as a very real person.

For many years before I started writing Impaler, I was fascinated by the historical Prince Draculea (BTW: the spelling is the closest Anglicization of the way he spelled his name. Just another example of character stubborn. He won't let me spell it any other way). What I had was pretty much what any writer has in the early stages of story generation long before there's any conscious move to write the thing: a mix of 'this is a neat idea' and someone who does or did interesting stuff. Add to that the question, "What if he had survived the assassination attempt?" and I had my story.

What I didn't have was my character. Instead, I had a huge problem. How does one depict a man whose name is associated with the most appalling atrocities (and let's face it, they didn't call him 'the Impaler' because he was a nice guy) or the Stoker vampire? He was the central character of the story, but whitewashing his deeds was out of the question. I didn't consciously wonder how I could show him in a more sympathetic light, but the question gnawed at me for about a year between when I first jotted down the rough plot outline and when I started to write. In the meantime, I wrote a completely different novel, ConVent, which is under consideration at Baen.

And I read everything I could lay hands on about Draculea and his times. Translations of period accounts of the Siege of Constantinople (eye-opening, to say the least), reading and re-reading the various Draculea legends, and gradually building from the bare facts and the legends an idea of what kind of man Draculea might actually have been.

Probably the most useful thing I did was wonder, "Why?". Asking myself why Draculea would have acted the way he did helped me to understand the era, as well as the man, and led me to some truly mind-boggling bits of 15th century trivia along the way.

I originally intended to write Impaler as mostly Draculea's point of view, with a few key scenes from other POVs. Instead, somewhere as I reread one of the Florescu and McNally biographies, I got him. Somehow, the constant "well, why would he do that?" had fleshed out the man enough that he was there in my head, dictating the book to me.

From there it was a case of balance: showing Draculea's human side through his narrative without flinching from the worst of his nature. The end result was good enough to make the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award quarter finals, and is currently on an agent's desk in its entirety.

I'll finish with a few paragraphs from the opening so you can judge for yourself how well I fleshed out the man and brought him to life, and whether you can identify with him.

Impaler
Chapter 1

Always before battle begins I am possessed by the need for solitude and prayer. It is a curious thing, for I have never fought as merely another knight. I first ruled men at the tender age of eighteen, when the old Ottoman Sultan Murad and his son Mehmed still thought I could be a Turk puppet.

Those who slander me say I care nothing for the fate of other men. They forget that those who rule by the Lord's grace are entrusted with the Earthly welfare of their subjects, and to some extent their souls. To take one's subjects into battle, however righteous the cause, ensures that they will sin. The burden of their souls falls upon me, their Prince.

I do not allow others to see my weakness. Few great lords care for the fate of those in their domains. That I of all men should do so would seem the most grotesque of jests. I, whose name echoes through Europe as a byword for atrocity. And yet, I am driven to pray for those whose lives will end on the battlefield this day, men whose only crime is to obey the commands of their lords.