I’ve had a few readers tell me they have some trouble following where my protagonist is in any given chapter. It’s a fair critique. One of my goals with this book was to have the narrator visit all four corners of the known world over the course of his life, and that can get confusing in fairly short order. I wouldn’t expect most people to have a firm grasp of South American geography, let alone pre-Columbian geography before the Spanish renamed everything. Here is the map included in my book:

(Click to enlarge.)

But that doesn’t really make it easy to figure out where things really happened, does it? There are half a dozen landmarks, cities, regions, and tribes to use as way points, but I still left it up to the reader to constantly flip back to the map for reference. That must be especially irritating in the e-book version. Accepting this, I started playing around with the map, trying to track down where Haylli went from chapter to chapter. For my own ease I didn’t line things up exactly with the Royal Road network or the available mountain passes –preferring instead to approximate– but even if I had the overlapping journeys would only have muddied the waters. This is what I came up with:

(Click to enlarge.)

That’s kind of a mess, isn’t it? A problem with drawing lines on a map of an empire 3,000 miles long and up to 500 miles wide based on a 70-plus-year narrative is that there’s a lot of repetition. A simple coloured spaghetti chart isn’t much help to the reader interested in matching up the story to the geography. It occurred to me a chapter by chapter breakdown is the only way to really bring clarity to the situation. I did my best to avoid spoilers, but there are some broad plot points that just can’t be avoided. With that said, here’s the prologue and the first two chapters:

(Click to enlarge.)

If this is an approach that will help you enjoy the book, I’m happy to show you the rest. Just click through the jump for the rest of the breakdown.

(Click to enlarge.)

Chapters six and seven have probably the most mileage. A fun fact? The single largest cut I made in editing chopped out several dozen pages of useless plot that incorporated a lot of research about the Collao. If and when I write a prequel, I’ll find a way to use all that library work in a way that matters to the story:

(Click to enlarge.)

A number of people have told me Chapter Nine was their favourite, and while I appreciate that, I also feel like something of a charlatan. Researching the eastern Amazon Rainforest in the 1490s was a tough job, and while I’m pleased with how it came out, I can’t help but admit I roughed out a lot of assumptions and called them good enough in order to set the scene:

(Click to enlarge.)

Chapters ten, eleven, and twelve were probably the firmest rooted in confirmable pre-Spanish history. The reconquest of Quitu is a little fuzzy on this map for the sake of documenting the thoroughness of the campaign, but this is still a fair representation:

(Click to enlarge.)

The War Between the Brothers is a difficult conflict to map geographically. We know the Quitus constantly pushed back the Cuzcos, but where the front was throughout the course of the struggle is almost impossible to pin down. I had the great advantage of having a bureaucrat as a protagonist: I didn’t need him on the front; I just had to say he visited it from time to time. The orange gives a sense of the chaos and retreat, but please don’t hold me to the different points of contact and retreat.

(Click to enlarge.)

Chapters fifteen and sixteen were an easy job for the amateur cartographer: Draw a line from Macchu Picchu to Cuzco and from Cuzco to Caxamalca (Cajamarca) using the closest approximation to the Royal Road network. Here you go:

(Click to enlarge.)

I had fun with this one as well. Where did Rumiñaui and the fictional Haylli hide the treasure held back from Atauhuallpa’s ransom? My pink squiggle to the east of Quitu is my best guess. I also got to take a guess at where Manco Inca set up his rump kingdom capital –Vilcos? Vilcapampa? Somewhere else in Andesuyu? This is what I came up with:

(Click to enlarge.)

And there you have it! For those of you who felt a little lost, I hope this helps.

Cheers!

–Geoff

Happy Holidays Everyone!

My office was closed this week, so to keep myself busy I set myself a goal: I’ve finally figured out how to get my e-published novels available as print-on-demand trade paperbacks. A copy of Inca and Zulu are in the mail to me as we speak. In the next week or so they’ll be available for sale through the various Amazon websites, but in the meantime they’re already available via CreateSpace directly:

Inca by Geoff Micks

Zulu by Geoff Micks

For any authors out there with e-books, I cannot say enough good things about the CreateSpace process. Formatting for print was a little time-consuming, of course, but if you have any kind of a graphic design background it is also relatively simple and totally free! That’s a far cry from the not-so-distant past.

Once upon a time, physical copies of self-published books were only available via vanity press: You bought a few hundred or thousand copies up front from a publisher, and it was up to you to sell them. There was a stigma to vanity presses, and the costs were prohibitive. Today, the stigma has been replaced with a spirit of entrepreneurialism, and making your books available costs nothing at all. When someone orders a book, CreateSpace prints off one copy and mails it to the reader. They deduct their costs from the price, and send me the rest as a royalty payment at regular intervals.

It’s a brave new world, and for the first time in a long time I feel lucky to live in an age where traditional publishing is gun shy of long works of historical fiction from new authors. This is better –so much better! I have total control over my novels in perpetuity, and I have the freedom to write what I like, format it as  I please, and publish on my own timeline. I even have the option of making the book available to bookstores and libraries, although that’s something I want to research further before taking that step.

This has been and will continue to be a journey, but I’m very happy with how far I’ve already come and the road still stretching out before me. I’d like to thank everyone who helped me set this course. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from a man who finds himself grinning ear to ear lately.

Cheers!

It’s been another great year, and I continue to enjoy Twitter –my account is @faceintheblue– beyond my wildest expectations: I’ve live tweeted political debates and playing tourist in foreign cities; I’ve complained about the weather and my distaste for shoe shopping; I’ve championed things I like and rubbished things I don’t; I’ve made new internet friends, and entertained some of the people I know in real life; most of all, I’ve killed time waiting for a bus, and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it.

A few years ago I started a tradition as New Year rolled around. I blogged my favourite 10 tweets of 2010 and my favourite 11 tweets of 2011. Now another year has come and gone, and my foray into micro-blogging continues to distract and amuse me in odd moments that I would otherwise have wasted while waiting for something to happen. As I did last year and the year before, I’ve put together my top twelve tweets of 2012. Here they are!

January 27th

Who decided to give the CP24 traffic cam guy the ability to draw arrows on the feed? “No kidding? The cars go that way? Top-notch analysis!”

February 6th

What happened to you, Monday? You used to be cool. (Don’t ask me to cite examples right now. That’s such a Monday thing to do.)

March 7th

Just watched a baby snatch a set of jingling keys out of her mother’s hand and hurl them the length of a city bus while Mom wailed, “Nyet!”

March 31st

“Sara Three Cats: That’s a great name for a pool shark,” I said to Sara Three Cats as she proceeded to hustle me.

April 18th

Sorry, I never do this, but my April morning is cold: Please send it back to the kitchen, and I’d like to speak to your manager. #Toronto

July 17th

I’m not an incompetent hyperbolic scientist, but I play one on Twitter: If my calculations are correct it’s a billion degrees out today!

July 21st

Random Thought: If plants had ‘the sex talk’ it would literally be about the birds and the bees. Practice safe pollination, saplings…

September 14th

I just saw a squirrel panic at my approach & try to bury a nut into interlocking brick. Conclusion? Winter is coming & squirrels’re idiots.

September 19th

Cooking a premade frozen pizza that promises, “No unpronounceable ingredients!” I am not reassured: I can pronounce lots of awful things…

October 11th

The new guy at work just asked if I stayed late last night. I did. He laughed and said, “Classic Geoff!” Not sure how I feel about that.

November 23rd

Walking through a mall, my buddy mocking all the Black Friday shoppers. Mid-sentence he stops, and now we’re shopping for luggage.

December 1st

I’m sitting next to Typhoid Mary –patient zero of an Irish Wedding that saw dozens fall ill– but she coughs into her elbow, so we’re cool.

- – -

My criteria for the top tweets has evolved this year: They need to be self-contained and stand-alone, flippant, and ideally people enjoyed them on my Facebook newsfeed as well. There were half a dozen more that could have made the cut if only this were 2018. Ah, well. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just mind find you get what you need. I look forward to continuing with it in 2013. All the best to you and yours in the New Year!

Here are the lyrics:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain; heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there, Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air; but his mother only, in her maiden bliss, worshiped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; if I were a Wise Man, I would do my part; yet what I can I give him: give my heart.

- – -

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

My goodness, there is a lot to fuss about.

Just to emphasize my emphasis, I bought the book less than twenty-four hours ago. Fifty pages in I knew whatever else I planned to do with those twenty-four hours was going to have to be put on the back burner. I needed to see this thing through as quickly as possible.

The book was published in 2003 to rave reviews and was made into a movie I’m told I shouldn’t watch in 2009, so I imagine many of you reading this already know what it’s all about. For everyone else, the novel is about a man named Henry DeTamble with a rare genetic disorder that causes him under certain stimuli to become unstuck in time, flashing forwards or more usually backwards through a span of roughly a century to any number of places throughout the United States’ Midwest. He cannot control where or when he appears, naked and disoriented, but the journeys are guided in some way by his subconscious. More often than not he appears in the vicinity of people and places who have great importance in his life: His mother who dies in a car wreck; himself at a younger age; the Art Institute of Chicago, but most often –or at least it features most prominently in the novel– in the meadow behind the house where his future wife lives.

Clare Abshire first meets Henry at six years old, and over the next twelve years their friendship evolves from an almost imaginary friend through to a guardian angel, and then eventually and inevitably into a crush that moves through her teenage lust into something adult and mature. On her eighteenth birthday he tells her they will not see one another again for two years and two months, and the Henry she meets at that point will be the Henry in the here and now –a Henry only eight years older than her who lives in Chicago– and he begs her to have mercy on him. He isn’t the man Clare knows yet, but he will become that person with her help.

Clare does meet the contemporary Henry after beginning university in Chicago, and their life together begins in both an ordinary and extraordinary way. Throughout their lives together it is understood that at any point he might disappear almost without warning, leaving a puddle of clothes behind. Sometimes he’s gone minutes, and sometimes hours, and sometimes days. When he reappears, he often bears the scars of his misadventures. She likens the waiting to women of previous centuries who married men who went to sea and spent long periods waiting and worrying and watching the horizon for a distant sail.

More than that I will not say. Read the book. You will not regret it.

Now I entitled this blog post, “An Essay on Writing by Way of the Time Traveler’s Wife,” and I do want to talk about writing in some depth. Many of you know that I’ve written a couple of novels myself, and when I read a book now, I read it as an author admiring another author’s craft. There is a bit of armchair quarterbacking involved, of course, but there is also a deep appreciation for the process and the art. I once had a trumpet player tell me I couldn’t be a real Beatles fan because I wasn’t a musician. I find that a laughable claim, but I will admit in the same way musicians can enjoy music with a fuller understanding of the mechanics involved, so too do writers appreciate books in a different way than other readers. We ponder motive, pacing, plotting, character arcs, prose, perspective. We wonder why something was done this way and not another. We peer between the lines to look at the author on the other side and ask, ‘What are you really trying to say?’

This is Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel, and she’s been very open and honest about her process. This book revolves around Chicago –her current home– and South Haven, Michigan, her childhood home. Clare is an artist whose principle medium is paper, and Henry works as a librarian specializing in antiquarian collections. Both of these are passions of Niffenegger, who is herself a professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts and a faculty member of the North Shore Art League where she teaches intermediate and advanced printmaking. Clare was raised Catholic, and Henry hovers somewhere between agnosticism and atheism. The two together are how Niffeneggar describes herself.

Going further, in her acknowledgements at the end of the book Niffeneggar thanks a record store and book store owner –both of whom appear briefly in the novel. The Chicago hot spots and neighbourhoods and landmarks come thick and fast, because they are her world as much as Henry’s and Clare’s. She admits she wrote the novel as an extended metaphor for her own failed love affairs. “I had kind of got the idea that there’s not going to be some fabulous perfect soul mate out there for me, so I’ll just make him up.” She has said in an interview. She drew in aspects of her own childhood, her own parents, and then used the idea of time travel as a vehicle to talk about love and loss and faith and perseverance.

It is an achingly beautiful story, well crafted, well told, with room for the reader to find a place in an intimate world between two friends and lovers. There is triumph. There is tragedy. There is conflict, and turmoil, and there is an eventual acceptance of the things that cannot change and will have to be lived around.

I am deeply moved, and I’m also deeply moved to consider my own writing process in contrast to this fine novel.

I have never been interested in writing things from my own life. My geography, my upbringing, my friends and loved ones do not factor into my storytelling except in the most passing of ways. I’m tempted now to trim my sails somewhat and see where that takes me. I have half a dozen projects in the works that I refer to as my third novel. The one I’ve been working on most lately is built around the idea of a man who has a genetic mutation much like Henry, except instead of flashing forward and backward through time my protagonist has the great misfortune to live for thousands upon thousands of years. An embarrassing early draft of the first couple of chapters appear on this blog from my NaNoWriMo 2010 attempt. The short strokes of the story as it is evolving is that this man –who has lived quietly as best he can from the last Ice Age until today– knows he will finally die in a few days time. He has a tape recorder. What would he want to say, now that there is no fear in sharing the truth about who he is and what he’s seen? What is the legacy he would leave for the future to contemplate?

I have the history down, and I see great opportunities to tie in any number of great little stories I know about our shared human experience that I couldn’t write a whole book about but that a chapter would come free and fast. My trouble is that devolves into a mess of short stories, and I’m not a great short story writer. I need an overarching narrative, and I’ve been fumbling that for two years now. I wonder if The Time Traveler’s Wife has shown me how to take a story of people at different points in time interacting meaningfully over an immense span of history. All drama worth a reader’s time is about characters in conflict, but how can I keep that relevant to someone who will outlive everyone he ever knows and loves? I’ve struggled with that question for a long while, and I’m still not quite sure I have the answer.  I’m going to chew on it for a spell longer, but I suspect very strongly Audrey Niffenegger’s work has given me the germ of an idea.

Anyway, I’m excited about it, and this book helped. I wanted to blog about it.

Cheers!

Hello again, everyone,

I’m going to start with an apology: Once upon a time I resolved to write on this blog regularly, making a point to have at least one entry a month, come what may. That was a pretty easy thing to commit to when I had a couple hundred readers a day –many of them personal acquaintances– but my most recent post from three months ago now has had 168,597 readers to date, and I found myself paralyzed by a feeling of inadequacy. I’ve been retweeted and reblogged and followed on Facebook to the point where I know what I write next will be read by a thousand people expecting at least a few minutes of entertainment and possibly something worth thinking upon deeply and making their own. I’ve found myself gun shy: What can I possibly say next to all of those people who are going to read this blog one more time? What would hold your attention and give you value for your visit?

And then I remembered what my friend Matt Cimone has been up to lately.

As a rule, I don’t mention my friends by name on this blog. I do so now after careful deliberation. Let me back up for a moment and give some context to what I hope is going to be a worthwhile read: I have had the great good fortune to know a man for the last twelve years who I believe will one day make a positive mark on the collective human experience. I look forward to the day when I can say with pride I knew him in his youth. After my late grandfather, I strongly suspect Matt Cimone is the finest man I’ve ever known. When I find myself confronted with an ethical or moral dilemma, I ask myself, “What would Matt Cimone do?” I rarely follow that course, but it’s an interesting question to pose for the sake of finding one’s bearings.

I could give any number of examples of why I’m fortunate to know this man, but for the sake of brevity I’ll say he was a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador in his mid-20s; he’s founded his own charitable organization that uses the micro-credit model to empower entrepreneurs in third world countries, and he’s dedicated his life to being the change he wants to see in the world, a humanitarian who speaks openly and often about how we can all contribute in our own small way to a better future.

A year and a half ago, Matt Cimone asked me to go on a road trip with him to see the very last space shuttle launch. With deep reluctance I had to decline: I’d just quit my job, and I had to commit all my efforts to finding my next step. I watched Matt pile into a car with several friends and drive to Florida to join a million spectators as Atlantis hurled itself towards the heavens. In his usual above and beyond approach, he decided to create a short documentary about his experience on a hand-held digital camcorder. But that initial vision has since grown.

“There are a hundred films about the shuttle technology, but we are more interested in the people inspired by human space flight; those like us who always stood in wonder of the night sky.” Matt told me. “It began as a simple video about our trip. I thought we could put it online. Thankfully one of the five who came with us was my friend Paul Muzzin, founder of Riptide Studios. Paul is a filmmaker, and his expertise breathed new life into the film.”

“I’ve known Matt for almost 2 decades and I saw his passion for this trip,” Paul said. “His story is compelling, and I believe will resonate with an audience. While something shot on a handicamDigital SLR and put on YouTube would have still been from the heart, I believe that with some work this documentary could have a place in festivals and theatrical exhibition. I have also been a fan of the space program and always wanted to see a launch myself. In a sense, between directing this film and seeing the shuttle, I was fulfilling two dreams.”

Space exploration has always fascinated Matt, and witnessing the last shuttle launch was a catalyst for him. Human spaceflight brings out the dreams and aspirations of people from every walk of life, and so both he and Paul started interviewing people: Witnesses of the last launch, NASA spokespeople, fans of science fiction –both Matt and Paul are huge Trekkies, and Wil Wheaton even agreed to do an interview—even the astronauts themselves. The duo asked them what they thought, what they dreamed about.

Matt calls the story Chasing Atlantis, and from the humble beginnings of a road trip video of five friends to see the shuttle launch, it is evolving into a professionally shot, edited, and scored feature-length documentary about space exploration, ambition, and the freedom to imagine a future where the best that we hope we can be is given voice.

“Initially I only dared to think we’d make it this far.” Matt said. “When we combined the initial concept with what Paul envisioned we could accomplish with his production company behind us, doors started to open. We asked if we could conduct interviews, and people said yes. Suddenly we were doing something bigger and better. I would have never thought I’d be sitting across from future ISS commander Chris Hadfield or cast members from Star Trek when we first started planning all of this…well…I hoped, but I thought it would be a long shot.”

The common thread through all those interviewed is that the end of the shuttle program is just the turning of a page in the story of human ambition, of human discovery, of human aspiration and that regardless of if your dream is to go to space, or make a film, we all must chase the “Atlantis” in our own lives.

Here’s the current trailer:

After the initial trip of five friends, Matt and Paul have now made several trips to Florida, and they are still planning to film in other locations in the United States and Canada. They continue to gather historical footage and talk to people with insight into a story that will resonate fifty years from now as much as it does today. Dozens of hours of original footage are being boiled down into a feature-length documentary with a professional score, and Matt and Paul find themselves in the awkward position of needing to raise funds to complete a project that has grown beyond a simple tale into a larger story about what people are capable of. If this is something you would like to support, they are now soliciting donations to let them finish their film properly. Until now the film has been a completely an out-of-pocket-funded labour of love.

“I didn’t set out to make a movie, but that’s what we have now. I just want to do it right,” Matt said. “This project has taken more than a year and a half our lives, and both Paul and I have spent more than we care to admit. We’d love to make this film worthy of all the people who have contributed so much of their time and efforts. That’s why we’ve decided to solicit donations through IndieGoGo.”

I’ve never used this blog to ask people for financial support before, and I don’t mean to make a habit of it. This project is worthy of your time and attention. Give it a look and a listen, and if you think this is worth pursuing further, please help Matt do justice to his vision of a documentary about manned space exploration and human potential.

Thank you.

One of my most-visited sites on the web is Reddit.com, and one of my favourite subreddits is HistoricalWhatIf, an online community that debates historical hypotheticals. Earlier today someone asked the question, In a mass knife fight to the death between every American President, who would win and why? Someone beat me to the obvious answer that a final showdown would see Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt doing a dagger-wielding version of a Mexican standoff, so I took it too far and walked through how I thought every president would turn out. An hour later the result greatly exceeded the maximum 10,000 character limit for a post, so I’ve decided to blog about it instead.

To begin, here were the original conditions of the hypothetical, as suggested by the redditor Xineph:

• Every president is in the best physical and mental condition they were ever in throughout the course of their presidency. Fatal maladies have been cured, but any lifelong conditions or chronic illnesses (e.g. FDR’s polio) remain.
• The presidents are fighting in an ovular arena 287 feet long and 180 feet wide (the dimensions of the [1] Roman Colosseum). The floor is concrete. Assume that weather is not a factor.
• Each president has been given one standard-issue [2] Gerber LHR Combat Knife , the knife [3] presented to each graduate of the United States Army Special Forces Qualification Course. Assume the presidents have no training outside any combat experiences they may have had in their own lives.
• There is no penalty for avoiding combat for an extended period of time. Hiding and/or playing dead could be valid strategies, but there can be only one winner. The melee will go on as long as it needs to.
• FDR has been outfitted with a [4] Bound Plus H-Frame Power Wheelchair, and can travel at a maximum speed of around 11.5 MPH. The wheelchair has been customized so that he is holding his knife with his dominant hand. This is to compensate for his almost certain and immediate defeat in the face of an overwhelming disadvantage.
• Each president will be deposited in the arena regardless of their own will to fight, however, personal ethics, leadership ability, tactical expertise etc., should all be taken into account. Alliances are allowed.

With the scenario set, here’s my take on it:

1) George Washington – Commanding presence, strong physique, military training, viewed as a hero by everyone asked to shank him: He makes Top 10 without question. Of the guaranteed top three (I’m going to call them the Holy Trinity for the purposes of this rambling rundown), my money is on Jackson being the one who murders him; he wouldn’t blink, either. They were closer in age, and the hero myth wouldn’t be quite as firmly set. Besides, I’m pretty sure Jackson didn’t blink when he sneezed…

2) John Adams is going out early. Nothing against the man, but portly well-spoken lawyers bring lampoons to a knife fight. It doesn’t end well.

3) Thomas Jefferson. I’d like to say he’d make a good show of it, but he was a bit of dandy… Middle of the pack, but his dying words would be incredibly quotable.

4) James Madison. He’s just too short. I’m sorry: You need reach in a knife fight. The bravado of the philosophy behind Manifest Destiny only gets you so far. He’ll die early, and his small corpse will be one of the least important tripping hazards as the battle wears on.

5) James Monroe. It’s surprisingly difficult to say how he’d do, because he’s just so damned unmemorable. An argument could be made that he’d last a while for the simple reason that his opponents would try to place him. “Who are you again?” That would be distracting.

6) John Quincy Adams. That man had a murderer’s face, a murderer’s eyes, and a murderer’s haircut. Based on these intimidating characteristics alone I’m going to say he makes Top 10. If he teams up with dear old Dad and they watch each other’s back they might even become crowd favourites until the portly lawyer is overcome by a rabid Jackson/Lincoln/Teddy Roosevelt assault.

7) Andrew Jackson –It’s already been said: The man’s nickname was Old Hickory because he walked around town with a bludgeon that to the untrained eye was a walking stick. A man who can beat a would-be assassin within an inch of his life with a cane is going to be a murder machine when provided with an implement designed to end a man’s life. I think of the Top Three he’d be reckless enough to go down first, but he’d also probably have the highest overall kill count.

8) Martin Van Buren. I’m going to put it out there: Jackson and Van Buren may have formed a pact early on (they were as friendly as anyone ever gets with Jackson). Plus, when he shouted obscenities in his native Dutch it might’ve spooked the presidents of the 20th Century whose military service included time fighting ‘ze Germans.’ I’m going to say he makes middle of the pack before Jackson forgets who his friends are and tears into him like a wolverine.

9) William Henry Harrison — The man’s most famous for dying on his 32nd day in office. I know the hypothetical puts him in his prime, but I think the fact that every president after him considers him feeble means he’ll be hunted down and eliminated early.

10) John Tyler – No one liked John Tyler, especially Team Jackson-Van Buren. Not only would he be hunted down, but he would have an unmemorable death unless Van Buren tries to go for style points. Five minutes into the scrap, people would ask each other, “Who was that again? Why is Jackson wearing his scalp as a beret?”

11) James Polk — I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. That man had some grit and gumption and more than his share of character. He said what he meant, and he did what he said. He will not be one of the early deaths, although I think the Top 10 escapes him for a simple lack of ambition. Promising to serve a single term and then following through on that promise? He doesn’t dream big enough to escape the knives of the Holy Trinity.

12) Zachary Taylor: ‘Old Rough and Ready’ had a 40-year military career fighting men armed with hatchets. I like his odds in a knife fight. I really do. Top 10 for sure. Top 5 is not unrealistic. This is a man to watch, folks. If Lincoln and Jackson give him an inch, he’ll bury six inches between their ribs before Roosevelt righteous-indignation’s him to death.

13) Millard Fillmore. Let’s be honest: Weak character, unmemorable fellow, a little stout all his life, boring. No part of this guy suggests he’s going to come out well. Dead early, and only the presidents alive during his lifetime are even going to know whose corpse they keep tripping over.

14) Franklin Pierce. In his prime he was a soldier in a era where bayonets were the main thing that got the job done. He also has a touch of madness in his eye in his official portrait. I’m going to say he makes it to the middle of the fight. Beyond that, I can’t say.

15) James Buchanan. I’m going to put it out there: I think he’d be picked on. I believe at least half of the presidents after his time would want to be the guy to murder Buchanan. Dead early, and his corpse would be stabbed a few times to makes sure, and only Harriet Lane –his niece– is left to mourn him.

16) Abraham Lincoln is one of the Holy Trinity of this rumble. I put him ahead of Jackson and behind Teddy R., but it really would be a sight to see.

17) Andrew Johnson. I’ve got to be honest: This is one of the rare lapses in my understanding of history. Maybe Johnson was a badass, but my suspicion is that despite coming up from nothing he was a lifelong politician who couldn’t make friends. He was the first impeached president. Someone within his generation is going to have a grudge, and I don’t know what mitigating circumstances he has to defend himself. Dead early?

18) Ulysses S. Grant. A career soldier and a mean drunk. Ruthless. Comfortable with blood on his hands. Formidable physically. I think Grant is going to do very well. Top 10 certainly, and maybe he battles with Polk and Taylor for Top 5 outside the Holy Trinity?

19) Rutherford B. Hayes was wounded five times in the Civil War. He was a big guy, and he didn’t lack for courage. That said, he was a bit of a straight shooter and more than a little bit of a straight arrow: Principles can get in the way of winning in a knife fight. Also, that beard is begging someone to take it in their fist and throw him off balance. I see him making the later half of the scrap, but not the Top 10 unless he catches a lucky break.

20) James Garfield. I respect the man, and he served in the Civil War, but I just don’t know enough about his service and physique to make more than an educated guess: He’d hold his own in a fight, but the Holy Trinity would see the end of him at some point.

21) Chester A. Arthur had the build of a brawler, but even in his prime I wonder if his poor health would be a handicap. Dead in the first half, but certainly not among the first dead.

22 & 24) Grover Cleveland paid a man $150 so he didn’t have to fight in the Civil War. Even his biographer said his qualities were typical rather than unusual. I’m going to say among the first 20 dead.

23) Benjamin Harrison. I wonder if he’d try to get to know his grandfather –the marked for death William Henry Harrison– and therefore leave himself vulnerable to a quick shanking. I don’t know enough about him to say otherwise, so I envision a family reunion ending cruelly and bloodily fairly early in the festivities.

25) William McKinley. The man is famous for sitting on his porch and letting the party machine do the heavy lifting. A calm head and broad shoulders might see him through the early fracas, but I think he lacks the fire in the belly required to make his mark. Dead in the first half.

26) Theodore Roosevelt: The man, the legend. A member of the Holy Trinity, and my personal favourite to come out on top. Anyone who gets shot at the start of a long speech and delivers the whole thing anyway –a man who beat asthma by strength of character and who lost vision in one of his eyes while boxing in the White House– has the tenacity to endure more than a few knife wounds if he thinks he’s right and everyone else is wrong. Let’s also not forget how much time this man spent with a skinning knife in his hand: The Smithsonian is a monument to this man’s ability to butcher creatures of all shapes and sizes. He also liked to call his enemies cowards, and the force of his personality could easily unbalance those who would try to argue against his will.

27) William Howard Taft. What did that man look like in his prime? I suspect even at his most physically fit he could go toe to toe with the stereotypical 21st Century Wal-Mart patron. I just don’t think he was ever healthy enough to make a good showing in this arena. Dead early, and his corpse might well be used as a low wall or some sort of artificial hill to lend advantage to his conquerors.

28) Woodrow Wilson. A brilliant mind and a delicate physique. Dead very early. If Teddy Roosevelt in his prime knew that Wilson would be president after him, I suspect Wilson would be a hunted man early in the fight.

29) Warren G. Harding was a lover, not a fighter. Dead in the first half, although I’m not entirely opposed to the idea of his surprising all of us and making it a long way before his inevitable defeat.

30) Calvin Coolidge. He made a name for himself as a man of action during the Boston Police Strike, but I don’t think he’d have the staying power to see through a knife fight. I’m prepared to be wrong, but I just don’t know enough about him to venture an opinion beyond what I’ve already said.

31) Herbert Hoover. I think Truman would help him in the early stages of the fight, but there were enough presidents who grew up during the Great Depression who might like to settle a childhood animosity or two. He wouldn’t be long for this world in a fight with The Greatest Generation.

32) Franklin D. Roosevelt in this scenario has a pretty impressive chair, and that’s going to protect a lot of his vital organs, give him a low center of gravity, and otherwise lend him an advantage not available to other presidents. Plus, one third of the Holy Trinity (Uncle Teddy) isn’t out to murder him and might even back him up. I see Franky D. going far, but at some point Old Hickory or Honest Abe is going to be spooked by the futuristic chair and lash out. That’ll be the end of him.

33) Harry S. Truman would make a good show of things, but he was a little guy. No reach. No intimidation. That said, he keeps calm under pressure and is willing to make hard decisions. I definitely think he’d be a major force early on, perhaps even delivering the coup de grace on those left suffering.

34) Dwight D. Eisenhower has a solid military background, and in his prime he should have been a force to be reckoned with. That said, his penchant for negotiation and seeking consensus is going to infuriate Andrew Jackson. When that mad man comes after Ike without anyone to pull them apart it will be a duel worthy of a 14-part 20-second-in-real-time anime epic.

35) John F. Kennedy. What was his prime? When did he get the bad back and Addison’s Disease? JFK would go down swinging, and he’d leave a beautiful, charismatic corpse. Maybe he makes Top 10, and certainly he makes it through the early melee. Beyond that, I don’t dare speculate.

36) Lyndon B. Johnson was a giant of a man, a Texan, and more than a bit of an asshole. He would be a force to be reckoned with, absolutely. Top 10 possibly, and a staying power throughout the struggle. Beyond that, it’s not up to me.

37) Richard Nixon doesn’t have the physique to go the distance in a battle like this, but I think he had the cunning and the drive to live a lot longer than the majority. I worry that he’d try to take on Kennedy or Johnson early, which might be the end of him. That said, maybe he can convince Jackson to do his dirty work for him?

38) Gerald Ford was another big guy, but I suspect he had too soft a heart for a knife fight. He would defend himself, certainly, but would he hunt down the weak and give them the old cold steel? At some point the hesitation would catch up with him.

39) Jimmy Carter and a knife fight is a comical thought to me. Among the first dead would be my suspicion.

40) Ronald Reagan looks like he would know a thing or two about brawling, and he spent a lot of his prime in either the military or playing a cowboy. I expect he’d go far, but not far enough. Twenty years after the battle people will rewrite the fight to make him a lion among bobcats, but that’s mostly driven by nostalgia.

41) George H. W. Bush gets painted as an intellectual, but he was a war hero and head of the CIA. I’m also confident his son would team up with him from the very beginning. They’d make a formidable team, and I would expect great things from the two of them.

42) Bill Clinton is another big guy, but he’s a lover, not a fighter. He’d give it his very best shot, but I hesitate to say he’d last very long at all.

43) George W. Bush would team up with his father, and the two of them at their prime would be a match for just about anyone outside the Holy Trinity. That said, of the two of them he’ll be the weak link. When he stumbles, his father will overextend himself trying to help. My expectation is they’ll die within moments of each other, but probably surrounded by heaps of their foes.

44) Barack Obama –for all his wonderful qualities– is not a scraper. He’d probably try to negotiate an end to hostilities, and while seeking a middle ground some loon would get the better of him. In an arena full of knife-wielding war veterans, I don’t hold out a lot of hope that he’d make it through the first few minutes.

…And scene!

ADDENDUM: September 6, 2012 — This is already by far my most popular post in the last three years, with 67,996 viewers as of this update. Of course I’m delighted that you’ve all enjoyed it so much, and I apologize to all of you more knowledgeable on the subject matter than I am: I will not make any major edits to the content, but I acknowledge that I failed to sell Lincoln, underestimated Carter’s nerve, oversold Grant and Johnson, and could have spent a lot more than an hour fleshing this out into a detailed orgy of historically accurate violence. Cheers!

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to say we now have a working link. More importantly, my mother has bought the first copy, so I can now tell everyone else about it. Zulu is currently the 218,622nd most popular e-book for sale in the Kindle Store. I’m pleased to see e-publishing is thriving. With your help, I hope to climb at least an order of magnitude in the rankings. I’m sure there will be a number of updates and additional information in the near future –including a Smashwords link for those of you who do not favour Kindle e-readers– but for the time being I’m just going to say this is a proud moment for me. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please tell a friend.

Cheers and happy reading!

Now Available at Amazon.com and CreateSpace!

Addendum: As of September 30th, I’ve decided not to publish on Smashwords, focusing all my efforts on Amazon.com. Cheers!

While I wait for the ISBN number for my next novel, Zulu, I thought I’d add to my ongoing 11-part series on my favourite authors of historical fiction.

#5 – Sharon Kay Penman

I’ve written about Sharon Kay Penman before in one of my earliest blog posts, a lengthy book review that I will not repeat here for the sake of both brevity and originality. That said, I will repeat again what I said back in 2009: She is one of the shining lights of historical fiction today.

The particular era and area she writes about  is on the Middle Ages of Great Britain and France, and her attention to detail in that time period is every bit as impressive as Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. If she says something happened on a Wednesday, she’s looked up the date and adjusted for the Gregorian calendar reforms that dropped ten days out of the year 1582 to make that statement. I’m only exaggerating slightly when I enthuse that when her characters lean against an oak tree, she’s probably seen the stump. She’s less a writer of fiction than a journalist who apologetically plays fast and loose with her quotations because of the understandable difficulty in interviewing people who have been dead for between seven and nine centuries. The history nerd in me gets all warm and fuzzy reading her stories, knowing she will confess her few inventions in a detailed author’s note at the end.

I first came across her work with The Sunne in Splendour, an opus that seeks to undo the damage the victorious Tudor historians heaped upon the legacy of Richard the Third, last of the Plantagenets. Today even those familiar with Richard think of him first and foremost as Shakespeare’s hunch-backed monster wailing about a summer of his discontent, but Penman wanted to tell the other side of the story in a way I hope I’ve managed with Inca and my upcoming book, Zulu.

The Sunne in Splendour was her first novel, but the first 400-page type-written manuscript was lost when her car was stolen. She spent five years practicing tax law in New Jersey, something she called, “A penance” before rewriting her story again from scratch. The resulting 936-page novel was twelve years in the making. The effort involved –the staggering setback to be accepted and overcome– impresses me to no end.

Since her first novel’s publication in 1982 she has written eleven more novels focusing on Wales, Henry II, Richard I, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. If you will indulge me, I’d like to heap even further praise upon this formidable woman for her skill in making these historical figures knowable individuals, shaped by their parents and friends and circumstances into understandable, sympathetic, flawed human beings.

There’s a poem by Catullus, “I hate and I love. How could I do this, perhaps you ask? I do not know, but I feel it happening, and I am tortured.” Penman has the gift for letting you perceive what her characters cannot: The underpinnings of their feelings, laid bare for you to see as plain as day. She has the patience to build up a person from birth to death, careful always to tells us everything we know today about his friends and family in chronological order. Her plot and prose are absolutely character-driven, which is so much harder to do than it sounds.

I cannot say enough about her craft. I met a woman at a bowling alley once, and we spent a happy hour just marveling at how real those long-dead people seemed to us. Start with When Christ and His Angels Slept and see for yourself. Enjoy!

As many of you know, I e-published a work of historical fiction, Inca, last summer on Amazon.com and Smashwords.com. It’s been a wonderful experience so far, and  I’m pleased to announce in the next few days I will be publishing my second novel. I’m just waiting for the ISBN number to come through, and then there will be a short delay while Amazon processes the file. I expect I’ll be blogging quite a bit in the next couple of weeks as everything comes online.

When I was fourteen years old I watched a movie called Zulu starring a young Michael Caine in his first major role. The film is an African Western –if that’s a thing– loosely based on the true story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, a minor siege that saw a hundred and fifty British soldiers defend a mission station against four thousand Zulu warriors for a day and a night. The redcoats won eleven Victoria Crosses for their heroism, but I came away from the experience with a lingering question, “What would make a man get up out of the tall grass and run against a fortress over and over again, armed only with a spear less than four feet long?” The redcoats fought for their lives and only survived thanks to breech-loading rifles and makeshift barricades shoulder-high. What were the Zulu fighting for?

Being a bookish sort, I went to my library in search of answers. Everything I read left me wanting to learn more. The Anglo-Zulu War was not a straight parallel to the Apache or Sioux wars made famous by American westerns: The Zulu were an iron age pastoral society with a strong monarchy, a thriving economy, and a culture that celebrated service to the State. The assault on Rorke’s Drift was fought exclusively by men in their late thirties and early forties who had missed an earlier  battle where their sons and nephews had won a victory that made the Little Big Horn look like a church picnic. The older generation defied the orders of their King and crossed into British territory to attack Rorke’s Drift so as not to go home ashamed at their lack of accomplishment. They threw their lives against the British fortifications because it was better to die than have their children think less of them. The tragedy of that, the stubborn pride involved, humbles me.

The Zulu Kingdom went on to hold off a quarter of the globe for six aching months, and their final defeat saw their whole world collapse into an anarchy of ashes and dust for the hubris of wanting to live free in their own land under their own laws.

Much more so than the Ashante or the Xhosa or the Pashtuns or any other people ground under the Victorian heel in the later half of the 1800s, the Zulu have echoed through history for more than a century for their proud, doomed struggle. It frustrated me as a fan of historical fiction that nothing has ever written from their own perspective: Every story I found was written from the British perspective, and the Zulu were rarely more than a mass of humanity seen over a set of iron gun sights.  They deserve better than that, and I began writing a story at seventeen that I’ve been tinkering with ever since. I hope it does them justice.

Zulu is the story of four young people: Mbeki and Ingonyama, the sons of a blacksmith; the exiled Matabele prince Inyati, and Nandhi, the daughter of a Northern baron. They grow up in a kingdom on the cusp of a golden age. Their lives are far from perfect, but they make friends and enemies at the Royal Court that draw them into the great events of a people with a culture and history as rich and deep as anything medieval Europe can boast of. The abrupt collision of their civilization with an aggressive foreign power armed with the fruits of the Industrial Revolution becomes their highest glory and their deepest tragedy.

If Inca was my attempt to follow in the footsteps of Gary Jennings’ Aztec, Zulu is unabashedly my homage to the early works of Wilbur Smith: There are love triangles, power struggles, boxing matches, elephant hunting, brush fires, and battles. While most of the main characters are fictional, the incredible events they find themselves caught up in really happened.

I’m excited to share that story with you. Best regards and happy reading!

–Geoff Micks

EDIT: As of September 30th, I’ve decided to stop publishing on Smashwords and focus on Amazon.