A Winner Again

I am somewhat remiss in not posting earlier that I did, in fact, win NaNoWriMo this year. I reached 50,204 words on 29 November. It was nice to not have to worry about writing on the last day of the month. It was happy to take it off. I didn’t set out certain I was going to win this year, but I am glad I did. It’s really a small and insignificant accomplishment; one more draft for a short novel has been put into the world. I don’t have that much pride in the novel even though I think it may be the best of the four I have written so far. It certainly has the most potential to rise to the ranks of decent writing. That feels good too. In any case, another NaNoWriMo is done.

I don’t want to spoil the actual climax of my story, but I am happy with the scene which sets up the murder. Here is the scene with all the characters together right before the murder takes place.

They emerged at last into a room ten cubits square. The light came from two lamps on a bench covered with an assortment of glistening tools and strangely-shaped vessels. Beside this bench were tow seated statues of jackal-headed Anubis. The gold outlines around the narrow jackal eyes stood out against black paint of the god’s head. They seemed to be studying Thutmose as he entered the room. In the middle of the chamber on a thin table or bench a little more than waist high lay a lean dessicated body. Thutmose blinked in the sudden light compared to the darkness of the corridor then stared at the body. After a moment he recognized it. It was his father’s body, looking hardly more dead then the last time he had seen the old man.
Thutmose approached the body reverently. He looked at Jetamesh who was still standing in the doorway of the room and wringing his hands. “Where are the priests to help preform the ceremony?” Jetamesh shook he head and shrugged his shoulders. He seemed barely able to keep himself composed. Something was odd. He walked to Jetamesh and took him by the arm roughly. Thutmose tried to look his friend in the eyes, but Jetamesh refused to look at him.
The sound of a group of people approaching began to echo down the hallway. There was a sinister purpose in the quickness of their steps. Thutmose released Jetamesh. This was a part of the palace Thutmose did not know and he had no idea if the corridor they had come by led somewhere else or if he was trapped in this room. Thutmose looked around the walls of the room and saw no other doors. He took a deep breath and decided to trust in fate. He pictured the calm face of the sphinx he had seen every day for weeks on end. This was the face which had led him on this course. All he could do no was trust in the promise he had received in his dream. Thutmose slowly walked back to the table where Pharaoh’s body lay. He stood beside the head of the corpse and faced whomever was approaching. He assumed an attitude which asserted his right to be here and perform the proper rites upon his father.
In just a few more moments Thutmose saw the thin face and dark robe draped body of his brother Amenmehat, high priest of Amun enter the room. His face pinched in confusion beneath this tall headdress as he saw Thutmose in the room, but he did not break his stride and walked purposefully along the wall of the chamber. Behind him came two of the palace guards. They did not acknowledge Thutmose at all, but took up positions beside the doorway of the room. Next, in clothing as pressed and clean and his own, Amenhotep, Son of Horus, heir apparent of all Kemet. When he saw Thutmose already standing beside their father’s body he stopped short. Thutmose had a glimpse of more palace guards and a priestess behind Amenhotep before his brother commanded all his attention.
“I told you,” the prince pointed at Thutmose savagely with a finger heavy with rings, “never to return to my presence.”
“Nay, brother,” Thutmose shot back, “you said I should not return until the task of uncovering the sphinx was complete. The work is finished.”
Amenhotep was as red as coals. He advanced toward Thutmose, gesturing wildly. “Do not lie to me. That was a fool’s errand.” He smiled savagely, “Fit for a fool like you.”
Thutmose could not remember being openly insulted ever in his life. He flared his nostrils and he felt his body preparing to act. “I have been granted success by my god. Now it is time to take my place as Pharaoh, as Khepri foretold.” He looked his brother in the eye. They were of similar height and seemed evenly matched in that moment.
Amenhotep smiled. “Amenmehat, you have heard the lies and the blasphemy of this traitor.” He continued to fix his glare on Thutmose. “Guards, place this treasonous slave in prison. Pharaoh has spoken!” Thutmose glanced around the room at the four guards. Two were still by the door, but the other two were advancing slowly toward him. He could use some of what he practiced as exercises as fighting methods instead, but he knew he didn’t likely stand a chance again four trained soldiers. He decided he would not resist and again committed himself to let his fate deliver.
The priestess whom he had seen earlier was now inside the room as well. It was hard to be sure since he had only met her once, but he thought she might be the same woman who had attended the opening of the digging at the sphinx. As Thutmose watched the soldiers advance and considered why a priestess of Isis was attending an Anubis ritual, she suddenly shouted. “Strike the bear. The bear must die!”

Right now my word count is 50,204 words.
By now I should have 50,000 words.

The Lion or the Bear?

I don’t have a lot of words right now (since all my words are being used elsewhere). I had a bumper day today and did two days worth of work. I’m pretty happy with this part.

The two adherents left the military training ground behind and passed through a purely industrial quarter. They were surrounded by the smoke from kilns and the noise of draft animals. As they passed a large clay vessel factory and came alongside a open air flax-weaving operation Amenmehat asked, “You saw the beginning of the excavation work at Gizeh. What do you make of my brother Thutmose?”
“His eyes are like the desert lion. I saw one caged when I was a girl,” she added to prove she knew what she was talking about. Then she realized she may have spoken too freely. She made an apologetic noise, “Ahh...”
Amenmehat was simply looking down at the road in front of them as they walked. His expression was grave. Ahtinamun did not know what else to say so she remained silent. Then the priest spoke. “Thank you for speaking the truth about what you have seen.” They were both silent for the length of a few more buildings. Very softly Amenmehat asked, “Did you know Pharaoh has died?” Even though she knew well the theoretical progress of individual Pharaohs through the ages; each new one becoming the living Horus as each former became Osiris in an unending chain, she was still gripped with a sudden fear. No pharaoh? It had never happened in her lifetime and she felt unmoored. As the idea sunk into her mind she recalled there was a definite process.
“How long until my Lord is buried?”
“Two months yet. Then the Son of Horus will rise to be The Living Image of Horus.” He sounded very sad about this prospect.
Ahtinamun realized she was being invited once again to peer behind another veil. “Will the royal family have need of a priestess of Isis?” Even in asking she was other priestesses who outranked her could not be bypasses for this unique opportunity. Amenmehat was looking at her meaningfully. “If not, perhaps I can serve you in some other capacity.”
The priest nodded his acceptance. “Let us speak again of hypotheticals,” he said loudly with a wave of his right hand. “Let us suppose a wild desert lion, like the one you mentioned earlier.” He looked at her and she nodded her understanding. “Now suppose also a bear raised in captivity which had grown to hate the bear-baiters and the bars which were a necessary part of its life.” Ahtinamun was beginning to understand the shape of this argument. “If these two were taken from their cages and left to roam, which would be the more dangerous creature?”
“Are these beasts well-fed or starved?”
Amenmehat suddenly laughed, lifting his head back and expressing his mirth in a short exclamation. The suddenness and force of the priest’s odd laughter caught Ahtinamun by surprise. With a smile he said, “let us say they are fed but neither starved for fattened.”
Ahtinamun knew little enough about animals, especially savage beasts. She had seen a bear as well as a lion. She compared the two. She knew her mentor was not really asking her about animals. She left she had to answer very carefully. “In your example the bear would seem the safer choice, its life of captivity would have made it more docile than a wild bear, certainly.”
“Certainly.”
“However, that familiarity could be a trap. It would be a mistake to treat such a bear as tame. It could strike out when violence was least expected.” The priest nodded. “While the lion could never be mistaken for tame and no one would treat it so. Given a chance the lion would be more likely to return to the desert where it had known true freedom rather than staying in the city at all.”
“I think you are correct in all points.”
Emboldened Ahtinamun pushed forward with another point. “Of course, the question then becomes, that is the purpose of the animal? Is it a guide to be followed? If so, what use is running into the desert for most of us? If this theoretical animal is simply a symbol of power, why tolerate a symbol which returns adoration with contempt?”
“You see the dilemma very clearly, indeed.”
“And it is your place to decided between these beasts?”
Amenmehat was very grave and returned to studying the ground. “It is not my place by right or by obligation. Yet the choice is before me.”
“If we are all part of a cosmic priesthood, who better to make a choice for order than the High Priest of Amun?”
They had reached the plaza where they must part. Her to the sacred precinct and he. No doubt to the palace where the bear rattled its cage even now. “Goodbye for now, Father. I am most grateful to you for these discussions. I feel I am learning much.” Ahtinamun bowed low to the priest.
He returned the bow, but more shallowly, respecting his greater stature. “I am glad you find our time together beneficial.” Without another word the highest ranking priest in the city turned on his heel and crossed the plaza.
Ahtinamun watched him go. His black cloak cut such a grave silhouette against the white stone he was easy to follow until her view was blocked by a public building across the plaza. He was like a shadow, dark as a smear of charred resin, which moved on its own from one forgotten corner of the universe to another. She was very certain what they had been talking about. She would choose the lion. She stood at the edge of plaza for some time watching the mundane business of the city being conducted at its edges. What could she do to help bring about the rise of the lion and the fall of the bear? Perhaps the answer was only known in the lost corners of the universe where shadows roam free.

Right now my word count is 32,027 words.
By now I should have 30,006 words.

A Call for Dialogue

I have worked out how the novel will end. As I’ve written some themes have emerged which I did not except. This was always a novel about political turmoil, but it has certainly been influenced by the political outcomes of this week. Other themes are just part of the normal process of sitting down to craft a story. I did not plan on exactly how Thutmose would relate to his siblings or how Ahtinanum would be brought into the plot to make Thutmose pharaoh. I also did not expect my priestess to be the one who was cynical about religion. Perhaps it is cliché and maybe I am bringing impacted a bit by The Last Days of Pompeii. Whatever the case, I’ve written it so she is now. There’s no time to go backwards in NaNoWriMo.

Eloy, my friend and the head honcho over at Third Eye Games, has taken up the November challenge for the first time this year. He’s writing a screen play. He mentioned the other day that a screen play is so much more about dialogue then other writing. That has been in my mind, and I have noticed I don’t put a lot of dialogue into my NaNoWriMos. I like description of places, actions and feelings but I rarely make my characters interact. I guess that’s a blind spot for me an introvert, or it’s just weakness as writer I need to work on. Anyway, I wrote some dialogue I’m pretty happy with today. Here you go.

Thutmose sat on the low wall of the courtyard where he had just completed his vigorous morning routine. He had run the length of the yard several times, lifted the stones, pushed his body up from the ground by his arms and several other exercises he had learned. He had worked himself until he could not work any more and now he sat on the wall exhausted. He relished this quiet moment. As he sat in the morning sun feeling the sweat on his back dry and skin of his face begin to finally cool he had no thoughts. He had outrun everything. He was not thinking about the clouds he had left behind nor was he thinking about the monumental project which lay before him. He was thinking about nothing for a few silent, quiet moments.

Then the world he could never outrun for long caught up to him and he heard the rustle of fabric and the hiss of a sandal on sand. He did not look up. Let this fragment of the world outside his resting mind speak first. In the darkness behind his closed eyelids Thutmose could not miss the sounds of someone sitting beside him. An older person who eased down onto the wall with a grunt of old age exertion. The one to intrude on his space did not speak. Thutmose could almost feel the shape and face of the person in his mind’s eye, but identity of the figure still escaped him. Still they both waited.

“Thutmose, my son...” It was Shamenkmet. “Tell me what troubles you.”

“Do you not know?” Thutmose’s voice was almost a whisper.

“I know many troubling things,” the wise old man admitted. “You must be the one to speak it.”

“My father...”

“You haven’t seen your father in years. Your relationship never had gave you life. His imminent death does not trouble you now.”

“I do not know if I will be able to uncover the body of the sphinx.”

“Closer. You are worried about your project. Speak the truth of it.”

Thutmose sat up straight and looked into the face of his teacher, healer and guide. The man’s face was serene, as always. His thin lips curved into a subtle smile and his eyes flashed and danced like fish rising to the surface of the pond of his face. His clean-shaven head was covered by a hood made of part of the long wrap of cloth he wore as his only outer garment. He had pulled his feet up under himself. He looked almost like a chunk of rock broken in a odd way and laying at an odd angle such as one could find below cliff faces in the southern desert. Old and darkened by the desert patina in places and bright white along the newly broken edges. Shamenkmet’s fish eyes kept roiling in his patina face and kept begging Thutmose for an answer. He knew he could not keep a secret from this man.

Thutmose leaned closer to this teacher and he felt small and helpless like a child caught filtching honey from the family supply. “I did not speak with honesty upon the matter of Khepri’s statue.”

“You lied?” There was no value judgement in the words. It was simply an observation.

“I lied.”

Shamenkmet nodded with satisfaction. He snaked a thin arm tipped with long fingers out of his wrappings and gripped Thutmose’s bowed head. He pulled the younger man forward forcefully and Thutmose let his head be dragged. Shamenkmet held their foreheads together and looked awkwardly up and forward into Thutmose’s eyes. “Remember, my son, commitment to truth is the highest ideal.” His voice hissed, “The highest!” Thutmose winced and the disgust in his master’s voice. Shamenkmet returned to a whisper. “Maat will weigh your heart someday. Do not weigh it down.” He released the younger man from his grip and caressed the the side of his student’s face as his hand slid away.

Thutmose felt emotion pull at him like carrion birds picked at a corpse. He had been slain with simple words. He pushed the image from his mind. Part of him knew it would not change what his teacher had said but he mumbled, “I acted on an opportunity to serve Khepri.”

“You choose the easy path.”

“I did. How else could I have achieved my commission so quickly?”

“Legacies are not built quickly of inferior products. Do you want to erect a house of dry reeds or a temple of stone?”

Thutmose could not answer. Each of Shamenkmet’s statements came quickly like a series of blows in a melee. He knew where to strike and he delivered crushing damage. Thutmose again saw himself as a corpse being feasted upon by vultures. This time he rested with the image for a moment. His sick father, the false hope he had given him, the chance arrival at the same time as his two brothers. It has seemed like a perfect conjunction of events. If he was Khepri, the light of the morning sun, as he felt and as Amenemhat had said, he should have acted more carefully and more precisely. The dawn came at the perfect time, but its influence was soft and gentle. It was full of promise but not yet full of power. He had done wrong and acted against the request of the god who had spoken to him.

Thutmose looked back into Shamenkmet’s face and he was there, as serene as ever watching his pupil work out the impacts of his actions for himself. Thutmose reached out and said, “Father, please forgive...”

Shamenkmet cut him off with an upraised hand. “Do not ask my forgiveness. You are yet a pupil. You are to err and I am to correct you. You must ask forgiveness of those you have offended. Pharaoh and the god who asked you for protection.”

Thutmose nodded. Then questions came to him. “How do you know I saw a god in a dream? How did you know I lied?”

“I attend upon The Living Image of Horus from time to time. I was there when you spoke with your father and I could read on your face your lie.” Thutmose said nothing, he looked across the court yard. For a moment he did not see the white limestone walls and the palace the and flag stones of the court. He saw again the desert. The desolate landscape. His teacher’s voice reached him through the emptiness like a voice on the wind. “Even if you had not retold the dream yourself, I saw it in your face when you first entered the room. You have seen a god. That vision is part of you now. It has changed you.”

Right now my word count is 19,129 words.
By now I should have 18,337 words.

The Dream

First off:
Remember, remember the fifth of November...

I haven’t done my writing yet for today, but I wanted to put up some of what I wrote yesterday. The writing is going well. I have named my engineer Pentawer and my priestess Ahtinanum. Maybe not great names, and “Ahtinamun” is not attested from Egypt so far as I know, but they are serviceable for a writing blitz. Without more ado, here it is; my version of Thutmose’s dream from the stele. Enjoy.

He made an apology to the elder priest and stepped out of the funerary complex. It was now noon and Ra was at his zenith. He had to get out into the open, away from the incense, but Thutmose wanted a place to sit down and rest. Across from the temple he had left was a huge stone head resting right on the desert sand. The overhang of the chin created a shadowed cleft. It would be the perfect spot to rest and recover himself. He quickly strode across the desert until he was right below the mammoth face. It was crowned with the nemes, the headdress of royalty. It was the face of a pharaoh. The Horus of his day, an Osiris for all time. It was a wide face with full cheeks. So unlike the ruling family of his own day. So unlike his own face. Thutmose touched his cheek impulsively. He knew well that even in the old days temples and statues were erected freely wherever there was available space. This monument might not be directly associated with the funerary temple behind him or the pyramids away on his left. Yet somehow he knew it was. This was the face of the man who had been so important there were still people worshipping his revered memory, if not quite his hallowed name, all these ages hence. Again he felt insignificant in the face of ancient days. He was nothing compared even to the memory of this man. How could he hope to make anything of himself worth remembering?
Thutmose was barely aware his companions had finally missed him and come across the sands to find him. Maatkure touched his arm. “Prince, let us go back to our chariots and return to the river. We can spend the heat of the day in the cool of the date palms.”
Thutmose pulled his arm roughly out of his friend’s grasp. “No, I will rest right here in the shadow of my ancestors.” He walked forward again and came to the edge of the huge head. He stooped below it and walked to the middle of the cleft below the statue. The shade was cool enough and being out of the direct light of Ra was a relief. Thutmose sat and crossed his legs one over the other. His companions joined him shortly. The three talked quietly about their hunting and they resolved between them the trip was over now they were in sight of the river again. They would wait until the heat of the day passed then head back to Men-Nefer. Thutmose’s plan to make they stay in the area of tombs for the night was forgotten as the childish and petty vengeance it was. Their conversation drifted off to nothing. Thutmose felt his eyes drooping. In his sadness he choose not to resist and soon his head fell to his chest and the price, the son of Horus, slept.

He started awake to find darkness had fallen. Shadow covered him but beyond moonlight bathed the desert in shimmering blues beyond the river the black body of Nut was studded with shimmering stars. Feeling he had forgotten something important he looked around for the others. They were gone. He was alone. He did not feel alone. He felt watched. He looked around to search the edge of the shadow again for anything he had not noticed at first but now he saw the shadow had disappeared. He was not sitting on the sand as he had been he was standing looking west into the Land of Death. He tried to remember what he had left behind, he tried to call to whomever had been with him, but his mind felt like a shallow stream and his voice was soundless in the oppressive night.
A wind struck him from the west and the abrasive sand struck him. He lifted his arm to shield his eyes and he felt the old weakness slowing his movements. A thumping filled his years over the roar of the wind. He carefully looked into the west and saw a shape moving against the horizon. It walked on four legs and it’s movements were sleek like a lion. He found he bow suddenly in his hands and he drew back an arrow as the creature in the night moved closer. Each footfall of the beast’s approach was a distant rumble of thunder. He lowered his useless bow as the beast looked higher. Higher than the pyramids he had seen earlier that day. A world-filling power. He stood helpless and mute as it closed the distance from the edge of the night to him in a few simple leaps. As it came closer he could see more than just and outline. Then suddenly, the whole massive creature was revealed to him in the sliver moonlight. He stared up from the massive lion paws to the thick limbs to the human head which rode above the animal body. He mouth gaped. A living sphinx! The largest he could imagine.
The sphinx looked down at him and he felt in looking into him. He felt it read in him every failing, all the weakness, all the resentment, everything. It began to speak and he assumed he would die, blown apart by the force of a god’s whim. Instead the voice was gentle. He heard it as if he were a sleepy child being comforted by a loving father. “Look at me, my beloved son. I am Khepri, Effective for Horus, Disperser of Chaos. I have seen your dreams and read your desires. So I shall make you the king of all the earth. You have a brow fit for the crowns of many kingdoms.” The huge beast knelt and he felt it exhale with pain. Hot breath with the smell of fresh kills passed by him. The beast put it paws before it in the classic guarding pose he had seen repeated hundreds of times before the doors of temples. Leaned forward, looming just above him, the sphinx spoke again, but now its voice was strained. “Look at my face, Thutmose. We have the same face. We share the same heart. You can feel it.” He did. He felt his heart within him straining at his chest. His ka was reaching out to the beast. He felt something was wrong and he wanted to help. They were looking at each other eye to eye. “You are my protector. I need you. The desert has come close upon me and cut off my limbs.” The wind was blowing again. He seemed to be looking down on the sphinx now. It was small and he towered over it’s helpless body. The sand was covering it, burring it as it spoke to him. Gusts blew stinging sand into his own eyes as well. He tried to act, he tried to reach out and comfort the mighty creature but his own body was being buried as well. He could only stare at the sphinx as the sands covered it to its neck. “Come to me, my son,” it begged. “Do what I desire. You are my protector.” Desperation was in its voice and he felt the same desperation as the sand reached his own neck. “Trust. I will lead you.” Then the sphinx was gone, swallowed by the desert and the gusts soon covered him in sand as well.

Right now my word count it 7,104 words.
By now I should have 8,335 words.

NaNoWriMo Begins Again

First, let me announce the manuscript for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest has been completed. We are working to burnish it a bit before we send it on for layout. About 80% of the art has been completed. The comic has been in the bank for a while. Our KickStarter closed one year ago yesterday, so we missed our original target of delivery within one year. That smarts a little, but we rolling forward. I can hardly believe it has been a year already. Writing a whole role playing game from the ground up is hard, let me tell you. Whew! Considering my last major RPG projects all kicked around for multiple years, Wild Skies is proceeding in record time. Always find the latest on our updates page!

What I am really here to talk about is National Novel Writing Month. It’s November and that means it’s time to lay down 50,000 words in 30 days. This is the tenth year I have participated with three victories under my belt. I managed to win last year despite beginning work on Wild Skies and a multi-day trip to see family for Thanksgiving. This year with the editing and layout work to do, I really don’t know if I will have the time for NaNoWriMo. Having said that, one of my victories was achieved in 2013 when there was so much on my plate I needed my novel just to survive. I make no promises. This year I am taking things one day and 1,667 words at a time.

For now, my working title for this year’s novel is The Dream Stele. It is a riff on the actual Dream Stele which sits between the paws of the great sphinx at Giza. The ancient stele tells the story of young Thutmose IV who slept beneath the sphinx on a hunting trip one day. The sphinx was covered in sand. In a dream the sphinx told him he would become pharaoh if he uncovered it. Some version of these events presumably did happen because Thutmose had the story written down on the stele after he did become pharaoh. Assuming the events told on the stele are accurate, I am writing the story of the dream and Thutmose’s subsequent rise to power.

I plan to alternate between three characters. First is young prince Thutmose himself. He’s ambitious and the driver of the events in my story. The scanty scholarship I’ve done on the matter suggests Thutmose may have been epileptic in some form which contributed to his religious convictions. I plan to write him as more manic-depressive. Not in a clinical way, I’ll admit I don’t plan to do much, if any, mental health research. I want to portray him as something of a force of nature. He makes things happen, but no one knows why.

My “real” characters will be the people surrounding Thutmose. Most important will be the engineer tasked with actually moving the sand from around the sphinx. I liked the aquarius hero in Harris’ Pompeii and I have something of a soft spot for Belzoni’s workmanlike engineering so my engineer, as yet unnamed, will likely be a combination of them. I know he wouldn’t think of himself as Sisyphus, but I think he sees himself but in a similar position.

My least realized character so far will be a priestess of Isis. Her story will involve the political and religious side of Thutmose’s rise to power. He wasn’t supposed to be king. Yet he became king. What played out in the halls of power which aided that transition? Whatever story that is will be told from her eyes. I like Jeanne of Arc and I might recast her as my priestess; a character caught up in events “beyond” her because of a clear religious vision. On the other hand, if Thutmose is the religious one and the engineer is the practical one, maybe the priestess plays a role like Valentine Wiggin in Card’s Ender’s Game. She could be the social force which enables what Thutmose is doing to be appreciated. I’ll figure it out as I go along. That’s what writing with abandon is all about.

Right now my word count it 1,721 words.
By now I should have 1,667 words.

A Review: The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard

4/5 stars.
This is the last book in my years-long quest to read ten books about Pompeii in the order they were written. Since The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, from 2008, is the most recent of the books, perhaps it is impossible for it not to be the best. It contains the most up-to-date information about the site and there is no old fashioned wording or style issues which slowed down my reading of some of the other books. It is not just these elements, however, which made this into one of the best in my series. Firstly, there is just more to the book. I learned about specific finds and whole parts of the town no other author had mentioned. The main thing I liked was the approach the author took to the material. She is an archaeologist and she talks about Pompeii and the finds from the city in strongly archaeological terms. I have always had a love of science writing which lays out the evidence in the form; “We know this, because we found this.” Beard brings more of those kind of references per page count into her book than any of the other nine books in my series.

To mention only a couple examples; we know the town was still populated by speakers of (the Italian but not Latin language) Oscan right up to almost the end of the city because there are street signs in Oscan which were painted over only during the post-earthquake renovations of 62 CE. The history of Pompeii as a town of Italians (but not Latins) which was punished for opposition to Rome by being forced to take on a bunch of Roman veterans is revealed right in those painted layers. We know the town was re-entered after the eruption, for hundreds of years, by looters looking for things left behind because coins minted up to 200 years later have been uncovered in the ruins. There are layers upon layers upon layers of history on display in Pompeii when you know what to look for and Beard does a fantastic job of taking the reader through them.

Having read Harris' novel Pompeii not too long ago and enjoying how lively he made the town seem, I was struck by how much more lively Beard made the town seem with her non-fiction. Unlike most of the other non-fiction I have read about Pompeii, Beard does not make the buildings and the objects they hold her focus. She uses the information from the physical remains to illuminate what the people were doing in the spaces they inhabited. Millstones, donkey bones and perfectly preserved loaves of bread are one thing, but Beard paints instead a picture of a middle-class family doing a tidy business in bread and catering. What kind of people were the Romans? Beard answers the question from several angles. She covers business, politics, religion, leisure, death and a few other things. She does this while keeping the people themselves, a good number of whom we know by name, her main focus.

Another element of her approach to the story of Pompeii is an aspect of her training as a scientist. I have read works on the past by journalists and historians who draw from many sources then present the “best fit” of what happened. Beard prefers to speak about ranges of possibility. She pulls from competing historical interpretations, and interjects her own opinions, but leaves things at that. There were over 600 brothels in Pompeii, or only one, depending on how one defines what makes a certain building a brothel. Romans where either deeply pious, with household gods and statues of their divine emperors at major crossroads, or they were merely traditionalists who hated to see the old ways fade away and maintained their shrines long after they had any personal meaning. Sometimes we can't be certain what particular stones, statues, gouges, reconstruction projects or painted slogans mean. By offering the range of possibility then focusing on what can be known for certain within that range, Beard offers the reader both a stunning picture of ancient life as the sort of messy, complicated life we can recognize and proof of the solid results which can be achieved by the exacting science of archaeology.

Simply because of its massive scope, Mommsen's tome on the history of the Roman Republic is still the best book I read is this Pompeii series. However, Beard's Fires is a close second and is certainly the best book specifically about Pompeii I have ever read.

A Review: Pompeii by Robert Harris

3/5 stars I first heard part of this book read on the radio back when The Radio Reader was a thing on NPR. I remembered it being pretty good. There were also literally stacks of copies in the gift shop of the museum where I saw the Pompeii exhibit which got this whole Pompeii reading series started. So, I knew of the book and I knew I had to read it. I got it from the library and blew through it in a weekend. It is not a dense book. I hesitate to call the author a hack, but this is not great literature. It is a very accessible thriller. The story gets a pass from me, though, because of the innovative choices Harris made in his approach to the material. I also enjoyed the explicitly modern volcano science which kicked off each chapter and suffused the climax. Yet, by the end I felt the novel was missing something. Now, like magma squeezing up into a lava tube and inflating the cinder cone, I'll expand these points a measurable amount.

The plot of the book is this: Marcus Attilius Primus is a young aquarius – a hydrological engineer. He has just been assigned to take over management of the aqueduct running along the Bay of Naples after the previous aquarius disappeared. So, the book starts with a mystery. Then the mysteries start to pile up when first the water in Attilius' home base of Cumea turns sulfury and then a report comes in of the failure of the aqueduct altogether. To prove himself in his new role, Attilius rises in the face of these mysteries and sets about the solve them one by one. Like most good mystery stories, all the disparate elements start to come together into one big mystery. Attilius convinces General Pliny, a famous polymath, he can do the job, but in Pompeii he runs afoul of Ampliatus an ex-slave turned real estate mogul. Perhaps inevitably for a thriller, there is also a young woman who turns Attilius' head. Unfortunately, Corelia also happens to be the daughter of Ampliatus. All of the plot lines come to a head, on the day of the famous eruption in 79 CE and the climax plays out during the eruption itself.

I like Attilius as a protagonist. He's young enough to be a bit reckless; but as an engineer, he takes time to think through a problem before acting. Not that I mind a good meaty-fisted protagonist in this kind of story, but I like that Attilius isn't that kind of man of action. I also really enjoy the life Harris breathes into the rhythm of Roman life. The way he discusses how the aqueduct works and the cultural systems in place to access the water give me a picture of the Romans I didn't have before. I don't know personally if they are accurate, but Harris describes the road network and the role of slave labor and the lives of leisure enjoyed by the wealthy in their coastal mansions in terms which seem entirely plausible. While there are good elements in the story, there come along with some bad elements. First, Ampliatus as the villain of the piece had mustache-twisting levels of cliché. He is vain, spoiled, corrupt, merciless, manipulative, all the adjectives really. Secondly, the story is just a little too pat. There's one source of all the problems, the only woman and young hero every meets is the one he falls, every insane and risky thing the hero tries works out because he's the hero and if he died on page 50, there wouldn't be 150 more in the book. I guess it's not really a big complaint. It's a summer vacation or airport-reading style thriller. It isn't supposed to be a challenging read and it sure isn't.

I do want to step back to praising the book for a moment. Each chapter begins with a quote from a modern scholarly work on volcanology specifically talking about what was happening in the earth under the Vesuvius before this eruption. Harris quotes a scholar about how tremors would have preceded the final eruption, then the chapter begins with Romans sweeping up their broken pots. The last third or slightly more of the text takes place during the eruption itself and Harris' descriptions of the stages of the eruption – particularly the pyroclastic flows which buried the city seem quite realistic. Speaking as someone whose volcano knowledge only consists of being old enough to remember the news coverage of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 and reading the volcanology blog Eruptions, I felt like Harris got all that science stuff right and actually offers some science “value added” for the general reader to know what's happening as the setting of the story itself tears itself apart. These modern snippets are, of course, anachronistic for the text, but I think the contrast really helps shed new light on the events for me. When you get scholarly discussion of modification of the environment and CO2 degassing then the first century characters talk about giants shaking the foundations of the earth you realize they had no idea what they were up against. They had no chance against the forces at work below their feet.

That brings me back to the “something” which is missing from this story. When you sit down to read a story set during the final days of Pompeii, you know from the beginning everything is going to be covered in pumice at the end. That is no “spoiler” 1937 years later. Harris has put the material culture of the Romans front and center in the story with his focus for the first part of the book on repairing the aqueduct. The reader knows all the fancy buildings and fish ponds and villas Harris describes, and the aqueduct as well, are all going to be covered in pumice by the end. It tends toward tragedy in the classic sense. Attilius' heroic efforts are for nothing because pumice. Pliny's rescue mission is for nothing because pumice. Ampliatus' schemes are for nothing because pumice. The images of the characters preserved in the ash could have given some kind of bittersweet import to the events. Instead, Harris ends with a more ambiguous fate for the central characters. We are given a little bit of hope, but the idea is so undeveloped as to be almost no hope at all. It's as if Juliet's nurse shouts, “They're not dead yet!” as the curtain falls. It doesn't convert the story into a comedy, it is just confusing. Maybe I am asking too much from a book which is so obviously a light, easy read. I recommend it, and enthusiastically, for it's unusual subject matter, it's breezy pace and for it's vivid portrayal of ancient Roman life.

A Writer Levels Up

Things are moving along nicely with Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. The manuscript is closing in on 200 pages. There are some parts which remain unfinished, but I have been doing some of the fill-in work on the smaller sections. I wrote a “What is role-playing?” bit yesterday for the very few people who would be interesting in an RPG book but who don't know how to play one. After all, new gamers born every day. I also spent some time researching historic prices on gold and silver. In an alternate history setting, we could say the prices are whatever we want, but I wanted to base my made up numbers on something.

I have also been accepted into the Indie Game Developers Network. It's something of a little tiny trade organization for independent game developers. My mug is up on the members page, so I seems like it's for real. I look forward to working with all these fine people to promote the games industry.

A Review: The History of Archaeology by John Romer

3/5 stars.
I grew up with John Romer's history programs back in the days when you could actually learn something on The Learning Channel. This is first book of Romer's I have read. As part of my on-going series, I wanted to see how the (re)discovery of Pompeii fit into his narrative of the development of archaeology as a science. The books is subtitled; “Great Excavations of the World.” I hoped it would be a chronological, example by example look at how archaeological techniques and knowledge were developed. The book is organized more topically and focuses mostly on the Nineteenth Century. It was an enjoyable read, but I don't know that it was all that informative and certainly not a very important work in the field. It felt very much like the companion book to a television show, which of course, it is.

The broad topics Romer covers are: Hey! There's old Stuff in the Ground. Hey! There's treasure in the Ground. Stuff in the Ground Proves the Truth of Literature. Which Culture is Really the Oldest? Stuff in the Ground Proves the Rightness of My Politics. In each of these categories, Romer gives ten to fifteen examples of the development of knowledge or, more commonly, competing interpretations of the same information. This back-and-forth, vignette approach gives an over-all impression of the professionalization of archaeology and the contributions the field has made to human knowledge. This “general impression” result of the book is not exactly a bad thing, but I hoped the text would be more precise. Combined with Romer's very personal writing style, most of the book ends up being an assortment of report about what John Romer thinks about various things, not a coherent, supported presentation of history. For me, that holds the book back.

Many familiar figures are covered; Elgin in Greece, Belzoni in Egypt, Schliemann in Turkey, Petrie in Greece, Evans in Crete and Carter in Egypt. The book also introduced me to others I didn't know; Pitt Rivers (who invented methods of diagramming a site's layers which are still used today), Auguste Mariette (who championed keeping Egypt's history in Egypt), John Stevens and Frederick Catherwood (who followed local guides into the jungle to make the first detailed reports of “lost” Maya cities), and James Breasted who (secured massive corporate sponsorship to conduct extensive surveys of Middle-Eastern sites).

So, what does this book have to say about Pompeii? There are three short sections at the beginning which use Herculaneum and Pompeii as jumping-off points to the themes of the book. In 1980, the docks at Herculaneum where excavated which revealed the actual people who had fled from the volcano is 79 CE. The most striking image being the skeleton of a slave woman clutching the child of her wealthy owners. The interest in the people and the echoes of the society in which they lived was the primary motivation of the excavation. How far from where archaeology started. Back in 1736 when excavations first began in earnest, Herculaneum was just a source of decorations. No one considered what could be learned about Roman life from the remains. Even after Pompeii was uncovered and scholars could see the reality of the world described in the surviving Roman literature they treated Pompeii as more of a blank slate onto which they painted their impressions of the past than as a new source of information. Romer doesn't quite make it explicit, but it seems to me his book is an explanation of how we got from Herculaneum in 1736 to Herculaneum in 1980.

A Review: Pompeii by Roger C. Carrington

4/5 stars.
The next in my continuing series of books about Pompeii is the aptly named Pompeii by Roger Carrington. I got my copy from AbeBooks. The book was published in 1936 which places it squarely between the Nineteenth Century stuff I have read previously and the recent works I have yet to read. Unlike reading a digital copy, it was a constant joy to hold this eighty year old in my hands. The text is full of figures, mostly the plans of houses and temples, and there is a series of photographs at the end as well as a fold-out map of the extent of the excavations as Carrington knew them.

There was much to love in this short book. For the first time (among the books I've read) Carrington gives a full account of the re-discovery of the town. Actually, he starts with the rediscovery of Herculaneum, which was a working-class town around the bay from Pompeii, buried by the same 79 CE eruption. An attempt to sink a well in 1709 turned up sculpture instead. Workmen had tunneled down into the town's theater. For over 100 years, the theater and surrounding buildings were treated like a sculpture mine. I cannot help but think of the Pejite engine mine in Nausicaä. Excavations in Pompeii itself began in 1748, where the layers of ash and lava were thinner, but not until 1860 was systematic archaeological methodology begun.

The emergence of archeology as a science is what most informs Carrington's account. Gell gave a description of the ancient city itself. Bulwer-Lytton used it as a setting for a drama. Carrington takes a ground-up look at the life of the city. He uses facts like which buildings were in use when and how certain items were found stored to tract the changing culture of ancient Campania. Greek, Etruscan, Samnite and Roman influences are all tracked in turn through changing floor plans of country villas and the diverse materials used to build and rebuild city homes. Carrington discusses what can be known about politics in the city from the slogans found painted on Pompeii's walls and what can be known about religion from which temples were most recently renovated. I love archaeological accounts where the author says, “we know that because we found this.” Pompeii is full of that kind of information.

The weakness of Carrington's book is that his account is one largely of institutions. It is an account of merchant guilds, classes of workers, religious cults and political parties. There is little mention of individuals, despite many known names from the city. As I have mentioned before, I have long associated Pompeii with the plaster casts made from the impressions left by those caught up in the disaster. Carrington does mention these plaster casts, but only in passing in the appendix on visiting Pompeii. I suppose this is because the text focuses more on the life of the city than its death. Even so, it seems to me the actual remains of the actual people would be a great way to focus on the fact the city was full of people. Perhaps it was not “proper” in 1936 for a classicist to speak casually about the dead.

I enjoyed reading this book and I learned about the culture of the city. What more could I want?

Wild Skies Character Primer Updated

As I discussed previously, Wild Skies: Europa Tempest has been my major on-going project for almost a year now. Brandon and I are happy to show off some of the progress we have made on the project. The Character Primer 1.2 is now available! The document contains everything needed to create a Wild Skies character; information about the nine attributes, all forty animal types and dozens of animal abilities, twenty career choices, rules for the Moral Compass and ten different party affiliations. This is not the complete game. Histories of various nations, vehicles, equipment, combat mechanics and full skill descriptions are not included. Still, the Primer should provide a taste of the theme and the kind of game we are making. Do have a look if you are at all interested in an alternate history, anthropomorphic, diesel-punk, pulp adventure role-playing game. If you still want to get in on the creation of this game, contact us. Keep watching the horizon, because more is on the way. Thanks.

Crafting Alternate History

Since our Kickstarter for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest was successful back in October last year, Brandon and I have been working on the book. Most of the rules have been at last ironed out (more on that in time) and it is time to turn back to our setting and get it all fleshed out. That is what I have been mainly working on for the last two weeks. It has been great! I love crafting alternate history. From the beginning our jumping-off point was always, “What if the First World War never ended?” With that as the basis it's been my job to turn that core idea into a description of the dozen or so years since the 11 November 1918 date we are familiar with from real history.

We are well aware we are not the first to offer an answer to the question, “What if the First World War never ended?” Harry Turtledove, Michael Moorcock and the makers of Tannhäuser, among many others, have all been over this terrain before. Throughout these last two weeks, I have been thinking a lot about one of my literary heroes; Lawrence Watt-Evans. He once wrote he's never been into writing historical fiction because he's always troubled by the why. Why that particular divergence point in human history? Why that particular version of events from the infinitely many possible versions? My answer can only be; we wanted to create something broadly familiar, but unlike other story worlds we have seen before. We started with a few assumptions about our setting. The first being the on-going war led to revolutions in all the major participants. From there, we assume Bolsheviks would not win the revolution in Russia (at least not outright) and fascists would win a revolution in France. We didn't want Germany to be the Third Reich ten years ahead of time. We did want Britain to lean Orwellian. The United States never entered the Great War.

Excepting those basic assumptions I have been digging through histories of the era and looking at events which followed the Armistice to find little incidents and factoids both to justify and to inform our setting. In our previous projects Brandon and I have both taken echoes of real cultural fragments and recast them in new ways within our fictional settings. Working backward through the list above we take the pro-Wilson 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” and just say he did. Not even the sinking of Lusitania brought American troops to Europe, thus everything which follows is different. We have a lot of ideas for America, but they will not be the focus of Europa Tempest.

The countries of Europe have been our biggest focus. As I said, I'm very happy with the way things have come together. Churchill, famous for his role in WWII, was also in the government during WWI. He fell from power over how the war had been fought. Now take that to the extreme. If the whole government of 1918 is replaced because no one in the country is happy about how the war has turned out you become able to posit the kind of drastic changes Orwell envisioned thirty years early. With Germany we have focused more on a return to pre-war war fever than moving forward to the Nazi bugbear. Kaiser Wilhelm II left at the end of the War. In our setting he has returned to power as an bit of an older and wiser figure. He's not as eager for war in our 1930s setting as he was in 1914. He's the voice of reason now trying to keep in line the newer generation eager for war. It's this reuse in a different form of all the part of history you may have heard of that really gets us excited as creators.

Our inspiration for our other main countries comes less from inversions of specific people and more from ideologies. The basic inspiration for a fascist France comes right out of the Second World War period. I read a few books looking at the tensions within the Third Republic and the origins of the Vichy regime. To make the story very short, the same kind of militant nationalism which became fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany existed in France as well. It is not hard to imagine a cadre of young fascists forming in France during the war and not much harder to imagine an opportunity for them to seize power in the aftermath of the war. Speaking of cadres seizing power, in Russia we have declared the civil war following the October Revolution is still on-going even into the 1930s. Reds and Whites and many other factions are still trying to work out who will win. Our vision of Russia is perhaps the least possible because we haven't pushed anything which helped the Whites or which hurt the Reds. We just want it this way.

I haven't explained much about the setting, I know. This was only supposed to be the briefest mention of some of the bits of the story I've been working on recently. If anything mentioned here does interest you, please have a look at the Kickstarter page. This project is funded and moving along and you can still jump on by contacting us there. Until next time.

A Review: Lovecraft: A Look Behind the “Cthulhu Mythos” by Lin Carter

4/5 stars.
I am by no means a connoisseur of H. P. Lovecraft. I've read maybe a dozen of his stories. I don't particularly care for Lovecraft's ponderous writing style either. There is also the inescapable problem of his xenophobia. All that said, however, there is something interesting and worth reading in Lovecraft's stories. To be overly brief, he posits a universe of immeasurable vastness in both time and space and populates this universe with beings for whom humanity is below notice. The terror in Lovecraft is that humankind is irrelevant. Almost all his characters are assuaging that terror in some way; they embrace madness or deny the truth they have glimpsed or seek relevance by allying with the more powerful beings. These human responses to fear are what make Lovecraft's stories interesting to me because humans still struggle, over 100 years after Lovecraft began writing, to make meaning for themselves in a universe we know to be even larger and even more impersonal than he described.

Lin Carter was a fantasy and science fiction writer who also worked as an editor in those genres. He also wrote three non-fiction studies of fantasy fiction and its origins. This is the second in the series. They aren't exactly scholarly studies, but Carter was clearly very well-read and he knew what he was talking about. He also has the distinction to be among the first to examine the fantasy genre as it was first emerging so his comments form an interesting time capsule of sorts. The first “A Look Behind” book took on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings in 1969 just after the publication of the first paperback edition had made Tolkien a household name. Though I like Lovecraft less than Tolkien this follow-up book by Carter from 1972 was a much better read. Carter knew many of the people involved in the story of Lovecraft's failure to flourish in his own time and in his long, slow rise to posthumous popularity. Carter essentially says because of his professional and personal relationships he was in a unique position to actually take a look behind the origins of the “Cthuhlu Mythos.” Those connections show through in the book. Carter himself met Lord Dunsany, who had been one of Lovecraft's major early influences. He exchanged letters with Lovecraft's ex-wife to get her insight. Carter even had his own Mythos stories published by August Derleth, Lovecraft's main literary successor. These sorts of near-overlaps with Lovecraft give Carter a certainly unique and seemingly well-informed perspective. Carter writes with clarity and authority and the book is very readable.

Carter follows both Lovecraft's biography and his career. I found all of this information interesting because I knew so little of it already. Yet, Lovecraft: A Look Behind this is not really a biography nor is it a deep investigation into the themes of Lovecraft's oeuvre. Carter focuses on the fifteen stories he identifies as connected to each other in the “shared universe” of the Cthuhlu Mythos. He gives dates of composition and tells where and how each story came to be published. Carter sometimes relates anecdotes connected to the tales taken from Lovecraft's enormous correspondence or related directly to Carter by people who knew Lovecraft. This is the main point of the book. It traces how one chance mention on one early story was built upon again and again in later stories to create the cosmos-spanning Mythos. The only real weakness of the book is the tendency of some of these sections to read as simplistic lists following the format: “Then Lovecraft wrote X story, which introduced Y tome of lore and Z elder god.”

In large part the tale of Lovecraft's work is a tale of two publishers. First, the pulp magazine Weird Tales, which seemed to be the first and only magazine Lovecraft considered submitting his work to. A rejection from Weird Tales (often for length or for the simple fact he usually submitted single-spaced, hand-written pages!) usually meant a finished story remains unpublished until after Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft accepted Weird Tales' tiny paychecks and never looked for work elsewhere even as other magazines with wider circulations and better pay rates entered the market. Lovecraft's inability or unwillingness to turn his ideas to profit led to a life of poverty which in turn contributed to his early death from ill health. This also means many of Lovecraft's stories are no longer under copyright because Weird Tales eventually folded and the rights passed to the public domain. After Lovecraft died one of the many literary friends Lovecraft had cultivated from the Weird Tales circle committed to putting Lovecraft's work into hardcover form. This was August Derleth and he launched Arkham House, named for one of Lovecraft's fictional towns. Derleth became a successful publisher as well as an accomplished writer and his goal of collecting all Lovecraft's stories and keeping them all in print was accomplished. Lovecraft's stories have always been both held up as worth reading and easy to access so they continue to be a source of inspiration.

Something I didn't expect is that Lovecraft's large circle of fellow writers considered creating the Mythos as something of a game. The vast number of old books containing forbidden knowledge strains creditably from a certain point of view. How can so many rare and dangerous books be in so many collections without becoming just another part of the standard body of human knowledge? But that logistical complaint comes from the modern era looking back. For the original members of the Lovecraft circle, inventing a new half-mad scholar with yet another collection of arcane formulas referencing some formerly unknown semi-deity was like telling a good joke. They competed with each other, turning each other's names and hometowns into data points in the shadowy background of the shared fictional world they all created. The Mythos was always open-ended. New people were always able to add to it and so many have over the last century. Unfortunately, many people don't seem to have realized the joke part of the whole operation. Robert Bloch told Carter when Lovecraft died he didn't have the heart to tell any more of the jokes because the person they were for wouldn't be able to enjoy them. Somehow it warms my heart to know the man who has become nearly synonymous with dark and horrible and wrote about earth-shaking and mind-shattering beings from the stars was really just having a laugh with his friends.

I did not really learn anything more about the Cthulhu Mythos than I already knew from the dozen or so Lovecraft stories I've read and from what I've picked up via cultural osmosis. However, I did learn quite a bit about Lovecraft and the constellation of writers surrounding him. I've added a bunch of names to my reading list. There's a lot of works about Lovecraft out there these days, but this still serves as a great introduction. I think after Lovecraft: A Look Behind am ready for one of the more substantial Lovecraft biographies out there.

Here is Carter's list of Lovecraft's “Cthulhu Mythos” stories with links to them all on Wikisource. Go read all them yourself, if you haven't already.
1. "The Nameless City" (1938)
2. ”The Hound” (1924)
3. "The Festival" (1925)
4. "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)
5. "The Dunwich Horror" (1929)
6. "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931)
7. The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936)
8. "At the Mountains of Madness" (1936)
9. "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1933)
10. "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937)
11. "The Shadow out of Time" (1936)
12. "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936)
13. History and Chronology of the 'Necronomicon' (1936)
14. Fungi from Yuggoth (1941)
15. “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935) – written with A. Merrit, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long.

A Review: The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

3/5 stars.
I don't remember how I learned Mark Twain covered a visit to Pompeii in this travelogue. I generally enjoy reading old travelogues because they describe a world which doesn't quite exist anymore. To me, it is akin reading about a fantasy world. There is also an historical interest because the author inevitably talks much about his or her own sentiments and ideas. Thus the modern reader learns something not only about the place the writer visited, but also something about where the author is from. All that being said; “Mark Twain goes to Pompeii” seemed like something I should read in my series of books about Pompeii.

First off, there is very little about Pompeii in this book. The book covers a five month cruise all around the Mediterranean, so the buried city only forms part of one chapter (XXXI). About the only thing of note he mentions (revealing something of what was commonly known at the time) is when he thought about visiting a buried city, he imagined it as still buried and exploring it by torchlight after climbing down into the mine-like excavation. He was surprised to see it was all uncovered and open to they sky. I find this odd. Twain makes frequent mention of the guidebooks to European and Near Eastern travel the “Innocents” he traveled with had to hand for their journey. How had he missed the fact the city had been completely uncovered even though he knows of the upright soldier mentioned by Gell? Twain writes:

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves.

Apparently, we still cannot.

Beyond the single chapter for which I read it, the book was just alright. The pleasure cruise Twain went on took place in 1867 and many of the chapters were sent home as newspaper reports. The book is a reworked version of these newspaper pieces together with many illustrations and Twain's fuller reflection upon the events of the trip. There are many incidents which strain credulity, but this is hardly surprising from a man who is remembered as a satirist. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of Venice (XXII), his night time visit to the Acropolis of Athens (XXXII), his luncheon with Tsar Alexander II in Yalta (XXXVII) and I liked the perspective he brought to his horseback ride through Syria and the Holy Land (XLII - LVI). There were also moments, most strikingly in Chapter XVIII, where Twain wonders off into memories of his childhood and youth. I want to know more about the person he describes in those fleeting moments. I have added Twain's autobiography to my reading list.

These enjoyable moments are scattered throughout a large book full of a lot of bad-mouthing of everything. He lampoons his American shipmates and himself, but he gives his worst to just about every else. He goes on about how the Old Masters weren't so great. He points out how nation after nation is run down and reliving old glories. He describes the French and insufferable, the Italians as beggars, the Turks as barely human, the Syrians as dirty and on and on. The American newspaper audience of the late 1860s seems to have had quite the taste for this sort of ruthless dismissal of the Old World, but I do not.

I am at a loss to guess how much of what is in this book is the real Mark Twain and how much was what he felt he needed to say for the papers. (I am aware there is some irony in asking what is real when talking about a man who created a fictional persona for himself.) This book was written early in his career when he showed promise as a writer, but before he became famous. Hints of the biting social criticism he later became known for are evident in this book, but he doesn't yet seem to know how he wants to wield his voice. Again, I want to read more of Twain to see how that development occurred.
In his conclusion, Twain says this:

It would be well if such an excursion could be gotten up every year and the system regularly inaugurated. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

I couldn't agree more.

AMPed Up!

Another project of mine has come to fruition. Third Eye Games has just published United Human Front: Affiliation Guide for AMP Year Two for its AMP: Year One game line. In the game, AMP stands for Accelerated Mutant Potential. When the game first came out I wasn't too interested because I'm not a huge superhero fan. I miss-understood things. AMP is not a superhero game, it's a super-powers game. Maybe it's not that big a difference, but it's an important one. AMP has plenty of “faster than a speeding bullet” without a lot of spandex costumes. When Eloy asked me to write for the game and I actually read the book I liked how dark it was. AMP is full of 1990s-era Marvel-style angst; “they hate us, yet we are dedicated to saving them from themselves.” It's also full of government distrust, secret machinations and downright nastiness which seem to have been pulled from the headlines of recent years. A good setting for a game.

I was asked to write a guidebook for members of the United Human Front. These are the people doing the hating of the AMPs. Explicitly. At first I was not excited. No one wants to be stuck writing about the one-dimensional “bad guys.” Well, I didn't anyway. I took it as a writing challenge, how can I make the anti-mutant faction in a mutation-based super-powers game into something which seems positive? How can I make the UHF a viable option for players picking their character's affiliation? How can I make this faction into something more than a stereotype?

I decided to focus on two things. Conspiracy theories and the kind of anti-government domestic terrorism America saw in the 1990s. McVeigh, Kaczynski, Koresh; they all came from within American culture. That part of the culture hasn't gone away, either. There are even more conspiracies afoot than ever these days. I tried to present the UHF members as thinking people (maybe thinking too much). They have looked at all the evidence and come to their own conclusions. Two members don't have to agree on what AMPs really are, or who created them in the first place to agree they are a potential threat to decent folk everywhere. AMPs are people who can turn into fire or smash rocks with their hands and who are drawn to fight with each other whenever they meet. That's dangerous! The United Human Front is circling the wagons and defending what they know. It's a noble position, in a way. I've also put out the idea not everyone who looks down their nose at an AMP is actually a member of the official UHF organization. This lets GMs use human antagonists claiming UHF affiliation who aren't actually acting by the more careful and deliberate means of the UHF hierarchy. Since the game establishes the UHF was founded by a geneticist, I played up that element too. The UHF top tier people know AMPs are different on a genetic level. It's not technically wrong to say they aren't human. Maybe the man on the street uses it as a cover for racism and fearmongering, but not all members of UHF take the same lessons from the founder's genetic tests.

I've tried to weave the idea of conflicting views of reality into the adventure which forms part of the Affiliation Guide. I have crafted stories as a GM for my weekly game group and I tried to write part of a choose-your-own adventure one time, so I didn't think an RPG adventure would be hard to write. I was wrong. I've not written an RPG adventure for publication before and I found it difficult to present a story where the players were forced to question their own definitions of human and mutant. My first attempt was roughly twice as long as it was supposed to be! I had trouble creating characters players were supposed to care about. I had trouble accounting for everything a group of players might do. I wanted to have multiple paths so different UHF groups with different visions of what it means to be “defenders of humanity” could enjoy the adventure. Ultimately a lot of the branching pathways had to come out to bring the thing down to size. The manuscript I delivered has been polished to a nice gleam by Eloy and the rest of his team. It can only improve when the creators of the game give it a once-over, right? I love seeing ideas I labored on over my keyboard turn into pages with proper layouts and illustrations. Well done, Third Eye Games!

If you want to check it out, the United Human Front Affiliation Guide is available now.
If you want to get started with the AMP game, check out AMP: Year One.
You can also back the Kickstarter for the latest book in the series; AMP: Year Three.

A Review: The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

4/5 stars.
The next in my series of books about Pompeii is my first work of fiction on the subject, and possibly the first ever fictionalized account of Pompeii. The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1835, and coming so close in time to Pompeiana, I expected it to pull liberally from Gell's descriptions. It did. In fact, Gell and the etchings from Pompeiana are explicitly mentioned. Bulwer-Lytton was clearly not bothered by inserting his authorial presence into his narrative nor by breaking into the ancient events with comparisons to the modern day. Asides such as “and you can see this same room when you visit the city today” or “they had a meal much like our own afternoon tea” stand out in sharp contract to the tale Bulwer-Lytton has crafted. He goes so far as to mention he can see the Bay of Naples he is describing from the desk where he writes the book! The mansion on the street of tombs just outside the city, the gladiators, the stalwart soldier whose skeleton was found still erect at his post and numerous other things mentioned by Gell are all folded right into the novel. Instead of being a real distraction from the novel I found I got used to Bulwer-Lytton's style and came to enjoy the specificity of his writing. “You can see the spot I'm describing. You know the type I'm talking about.”

I also enjoyed the actual story of the book. Not so much for the main story, which is what I would call a novel of manors, but for the numerous side stories which are woven together. The main action of the story is a tale of young love between Glaucus, a young Athenian nobleman, and Ione, an Italian-born woman of Greek heritage. Around these two are a constellation of other characters. Ione is the ward of the Egyptian priest Arbaces, who fancies Ione for himself. Ione's brother is Apaecides, who serves Isis with Arbaces but converts to Christianity. The blind slave girl Nydia sells flowers and fancies herself beloved of Glaucus. The rich and spoiled Julia also wants Glaucus for herself. Further from the center of action are the other Christians of the city, the gladiators, Glaucus' vapid friends and a Witch of Vesuvius, living in a cleft on the mountain. I don't generally care for stories where nothing “happens.” There is little which happens in this book. Most of the text is about the way people feel and how the scene looks and the history of Roman culture which explains why people are doing what they are doing. Taken all together, the story becomes more than the sum of its parts. Pompeii, as preserved in ashes in 79 C.E. is a crystallized moment in time and Bulwer-Lytton has taken pains to explore every facet of this chunk of Pompeiian amber from every angle. He has woven his tale into a vivid portrayal of the life of the city itself. I like the approach.

The novel explores many different point of view, but I found two perspectives particularly interesting. The first is the way the Egyptian and Greek characters feel about the Romans. Arbaces the Egyptian is an astrologer and rumored sorcerer. His contempt of everyone around him comes from his feeling of superiority as he views Egypt as the Mother Race and all these Mediterranean usurpers as mere children to do with as he pleases. His hates the Romans and mocks their accomplishments, yet he lives in a Roman city, enjoying the finer things. His views seem to mirror more the ideas of the Nineteenth Century than the facts of the First, but that isn't really a surprise. Through Glaucus, the feelings of the surpassed Greeks are also explored. He is also described as living a life a pleasure, always seeking to forget the fallen cities of Greece. From reading Mommsen, I have a general sense of how the Romans interacted with and treated both the Greeks and Egyptians so I find it fascinating to explore some of how those people may have felt in their day-to-day lives.

The other perspective Bulwer-Lytton explores at length is the nature of early Christianity. Apaecides, who rejects Isis for Jesus, is led in his conversion by Olinthus, who is presented as a passionate preacher and something of a zealot for his young faith. Olinthus is, perhaps too stereotypically, sentenced to face a lion in the arena after he is arrested as an atheist for denying the existence of the Roman pantheon. Other Christians are presented as a bit more calm and contemplative, but all of them conduct themselves with restless energy and powerful certainty. Bulwer-Lytton points out this fresh fire has been somewhat diminished in the present. He doesn't seem to be opposed to Christianity in principle, but he is critical of the methods of the early believers.

As the novel goes along the cast gets more and more intertwined. Their fates all march forward to an ending in ashes. Even if you didn't know about the Vesuvius eruption and the way the city was buried, the title The LAST Days of Pompeii should clue you in something is going to happen. Bulwer-Lytton has done a great job a working in hints of the coming destruction which the reader can hardly fail to miss but which the characters consistently mistake. They laugh off omens or produce talismans against the evil eye as if they can be saved. For instance, early on Arbaces reads in the stars he is in danger from a falling rock and he is indeed smote by a falling statue during a scuffle with Glaucus, but lives. He thinks all danger is past, but from then on I expected him to be killed by a falling chunk of rock from the volcano. It's these little touches which make this book more engaging than its conventional tale of young lovers would otherwise be. The threat of doom looms over the story and as a reader nearly 20 centuries later you know it doesn't end well. Early on, I hoped the book would come to an end before the story was told. I hoped the author would leave his story unfinished to mirror the sudden end to all the stories of the city.

I got fully wrapped up in the story. This was perhaps helped by not actually reading the book, but listening to it through LibraVox. It is nearly seventeen hours long. There is a wide range of volunteers who read the chapters and their diverse pronunciations of the Greek and Latin names can be a little bit distracting, but overall it is nice to lean back and let other people deliver the story to my ears.