Terrierman's Daily Dose: The Gun That Saved Nature

Terrierman's Daily Dose: The Gun That Saved Nature: On this day in 1901 William McKinley died after being shot in the head by an anarchist wielding a .32 Iver Johnson revolver. Teddy Roosevel...

Lion Sheep Wolf Crow

Message to Po Chu-i by W S Merwin

In that tenth winter of your exile
the cold never letting go of you
and your hunger aching inside you
day and night while you heard the voices
out of the starving mouths around you
old ones and infants and animals
those curtains of bones swaying on stilts
and you heard the faint cries of the birds
searching in the frozen mud for something
to swallow and you watched the migrants
trapped in the cold the great geese growing
weaker by the day until their wings
could barely lift them above the ground
so that a gang of boys could catch one
in a net and drag him to market
to be cooked and it was then that you
saw him in his own exile and you
paid for him and kept him until he
could fly again and you let him go
but then where could he go in the world
of your time with its wars everywhere
and the soldiers hungry the fires lit
the knives out twelve hundred years ago

I have been wanting to let you know
the goose is well he is here with me
you would recognize the old migrant
he has been with me for a long time
and is in no hurry to leave here
the wars are bigger now than ever
greed has reached numbers that you would not
believe and I will not tell you what
is done to geese before they kill them
now we are melting the very poles
of the earth but I have never known
where he would go after he leaves me

Makhawis Dreams

Makhawis married the love of her life without ceremony. He was already king of Elis, so she packed her women, her possessions, and the Herakleid Shaman onto boats and then carts and carried them to that place.

When she arrived, she climbed down into his arms and said, “You are my husband.”

He said, “You are my wife.”

She said, “Then I am home,” and that was all there was to it.

Before she came he had already put down the only attempt at insurrection. With his hands still bloody from the slaughter of his challengers, he had called the key survivors together. They came sullenly and warily, expecting punishment. Instead he told them that he didn’t care what they thought of him or what they had done or tried to do against him as recently as this very morning; that was in the past.

These were the absolutes, he said: he would be king; a son of his would follow him. Everything else was open to debate. Every one of them, even the leading plotters against him, would keep his allotments and privileges. He had brought no one to displace them, and didn’t want to disrupt them further anyway. Who would serve as his dimos council, those he would depend on to advise him? After some hesitation, hands began to rise and his people settled into their future.

He was a better king than even she had imagined he could be: patient, prudent, steadfast, fearless, far-sighted, ruthless when he had to be, unstinting in the service of his people, ambitious only for their security. He released them from servitude to commerce that had produced warehouses full of low-quality foodstuffs that were perishable, plagued with vermin, hard to trade for profit in the best of times and completely unmarketable now. Instead he encouraged them to plant and raise the foods and animals that best suited each piece of land. Suddenly it was no longer impossible for a man to feed his family. He made peace with his neighbors while still showing a formidable enough face at his borders that even the most aggressive immigrants passed Elis by.

He encouraged his wife to expand her women’s industry. Eventually this embraced a vast web of wives and slaves who worked in their own homes while still tending their families, yet produced goods of such quality that they were coveted throughout the world even in the edgiest of times, and whose trade the king’s clerks – under his vigilant eye – managed for the benefit of the whole nation. When commerce lines broke, as they often did in those times, Elis still ate, stayed warm, was clothed, defended itself. The trade goods could be held for years, if necessary, until markets turned favorable again.

The people learned to treasure this king. He had come to them already aged, and they did not want to lose him a day earlier than necessary. So while he nurtured them, they nurtured him. they all helped his wife to assure that he ate well, stayed warm, and saw the Shaman with every ailment, however trivial. They did as he asked without arguing, respected the goods he got for them, never abused privileges, solved their own quarrels rather than dragging them before him, gave freely the modest tariffs he asked, let ancient grudges go. They referred to him in three popular figures of speech: “Younger than the king,” meaning extremely old, “As dull as the king,” meaning exceptionally intelligent, and “When the king laughs out loud,” meaning never.
He gave his mind and body unstintingly to Elis; his heart, however, he gave to his wife. He no longer required solitude to renew his spirit. Time alone with her now fed that need.

She slept beside him every night, always stunned with wonder to wake and find him perhaps still sleeping, perhaps awake and silently watching her, perhaps already risen and gone but leaving his scent behind on the rumpled pillows. When he worked late, he would suggest that she sleep with her women; he didn’t want to wake her when he finally came to bed. But she cherished – as he did – those private times together. And she knew something he didn’t know: he would not die on a battlefield, of an accident, of drought, hunger or illness. He would die in his sleep some night, perhaps decades from now, perhaps tomorrow, and she had to be there to mark the moment when he left her.

For the first time in his life, he finally believed that he was both valued and needed. He showed that belief by the simplest and most complex of actions: he retired the gray horse, and traveled instead in an elegant chariot drawn by a pair of tall, gentle mules and handled by a young but very stolid driver. The days of thrilling and perilous riding were over. He had responsibilities.

In the care of all those who loved and needed him, the harsh planes of his face filled and softened. His stiffness eased; his knees and hands limbered again. He became ageless. After a decade, after two, he looked no older to his wife than when she first had seen him. Only his hair and mustache were pure white. She knew that women still watched him, still murmured about him, and she was proud. She knew that men still watched her, and she was proud. She was proud of the children she had given him, one after another as quickly as she could before she left her breeding years behind. He had thanked her solemnly for each of them, and they climbed on him, followed him, fed him grapes and nuts with tiny fingers and slept fearlessly in his arms. His daughters took to their mother’s work early and skillfully. His sons went cheerfully to their fostering and returned as admirable young men.

He never told her that he loved her, only looked at her sometimes with a gravity that made her throat close and her eyes brim. He did not have to speak. She knew herself completely beloved, and knew that she bore herself with such an air that no one who saw her would doubt her value to her husband, and his to her. For all that men and women bragged about sexual conquests, the king’s people respected the two of them all the more for their silent love for each other, and their faithfulness.

They were married many years when he was finally able to acquire a minstrel she had long coveted. He gave the man a warm room, a bed, as much food as he cared to eat. He sent for the minstrel’s people – five gaunt, motherless children – and gave them clothing, places at table, and work to do.

From gratitude the minstrel created a completely new song, not about a known tale, not about deeds, but about love. It spoke with the voice of a man addressing a woman in images of stars seen through dark leaves, fish gliding in water, a jealous moon. In its abstractness, the song nonetheless revealed so exactly the king’s unspoken feelings for his wife that halfway through its first recital the king did that thing his people knew so well. He closed his eye and his face went completely blank. At the moment he did this, knowing he would do it, she took his hand.

Later, when dinner was over and the king was performing his obligatory passage among his guests, she went to him and touched his sleeve. She spoke his name quietly, to draw him even closer. When she felt his breath on her cheek, she murmured, “Keep him anyway.”

He did not answer, but she knew he had heard and would do as she asked. Despite the brief peril of which he might never be aware, the minstrel was safe for life.
And then Makhawis woke.

She finally understood how dreams could make a person so near to mad. It was not monsters, horrors, threats, fear that made dreams unbearable. It was truth.

What, Again?

Maybe Meyers and Briggs were onto something more complicated than I thought.
Just trotted Aias (Ajax) through the test, and am surprised to see that he, like Akhaides, is also an ISTJ.

I think of the two of them as quite different from each other, but maybe that is illusory. I CAN see them working together extremely smoothly, without even bothering to talk about it. Each reading clearly what the other intends, and moving to help, or to take the logical following step without having to ask.

Meyers-Briggs Were (Was?) Onto Something

I often recommend that writers who have trouble building an interesting and complete fictional character trot that person through the Meyers-Briggs personality assessment. I just did that for Peryton's protagonist and this is no surprise: Akhaides is an ISTJ, a Logistician. Perfect!

"When Logisticians say they are going to get something done, they do it, meeting their obligations no matter the personal cost, and they are baffled by people who don’t hold their own word in the same respect." Totally true for him.

Sailing into the Wind

I used to sail a Sunfish around Baltimore harbor and the Chesapeake Bay, but now I'm spending entertaining hours learning about how to sail square-rigged ships, such as were used all over the Mediterranean before the Arabs invented lateens.

It is common belief that a square-rigged ship can only be sailed with the wind. But that's not totally true. While no sailing boat can sail directly into the wind, and lateen sales allow much closer upwind travel, a square-rigged ship CAN move forward into an angled wind - not efficiently and maybe no faster than walking - or swimming - but it can do it. It's tacking, just far more broadly than is necessary in a lateen-rigged boat. The limit appears to be at more than 45 degrees in a boat with a deep enough keel to keep it from sliding too much sideways.

Mycenaean ships had modest keels, but they did use ballast (or else put the heaviest trade goods in the bottom of the boat), and had pointed underwater prows. Like Viking ships, that also used only square sails, they were also lapstraked, yet another feature that would encourage forward motion.

So yes, the Greeks could have sailed to Troy in any season, but the spring winds, blowing from the southwest, would have made it far easier.

The Chickens Have ... Hatched?

All four parts of 'Peryton' - the saga of Bronze Age Greece as it teetered on the edge of collapse - are safely in that massive electron universe we call Amazon. Both paperbacks and ebooks are either available now or will be within 24 hours, and I was able to keep the pricing even, even though the books are of different lengths. Ta da! Now the rain is gone, the sun is shining on Panonas, and I'm going out to breathe some lovely Greek air!

https://www.amazon.com/Kathryn-Berck/e/B076N9XQ5C/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1511940147&sr=8-1

On-The-Ground Research

  
Spent a couple of hours Saturday and all the gorgeous Sunday driving around Lakonia, deciding where and how Paris would have come ashore to perform his fateful wife-napping of Helen, how he would have found her, how long all that would have taken, etc.

And then there are the more important issues that are still rumbling around in my head:

Have already dismissed with the scorn it deserves the idea that they 'fell in love with each other' but the essential "WHY?" still looms large. Did he know about the Tyndareos Oath? If so, what did he mean to start by provoking it? If he didn't know about it, why bother to cross the Aegean and walk for a couple of days to snatch/lure/seduce/whatever a foreign woman who already belonged to somebody else? Why he would have wanted to do that? I've worked through all the complicated reasoning, so today will think about more straightforward reasons - if I can think of any.

And all of this work for a book that's supposed to be about someone else!!

A Role for a Mountain Range?

I am staying in my apartment in Mystras, making casual day trips to visit old friends, new excavations,and generally renewing knowledge of the area's geography and overall feeling for the section of the new book that is told from Helen's point of view. Don't know now how these two disparate sections will fit together, especially since Aias and Helen had nothing to do with each other. beyond him being one of the crowd of suitors for her hand and property years before. But they seem to want to and, as long as we are all still moving toward the same ending (a rule: always write a book's ending first!), I'll let them for now. It might end up being two separate books, although so much has been written about Helen that yet another book about her would have to be extremely different from the general run... This day's travel in the Taygetos gave me some ideas, only half-formed or less for now.

One thing I know for sure: my love for the Taygetos has not diminished. That first sight of them as I drove over the last ridge and there they stood, immovable, implacable as always, asking nothing, offering nothing but simply themselves, was, as always, incredibly moving.

But Why, You Might Ask...

... did the Trojans build their city wall to slant inward?  Any enemy could easily climb it.

But when you stand beside it, you understand. This, like Greece, is a land of earthquakes. A purely vertical wall can easily be shaken askew and broken under the force of those tremors, while a wall that leans against the earth will only settle and become stronger. The outer walls of Mycenae show multiple repairs, while this wall still stands solid.

And besides, you can't easily climb it. not only is it quite steep, but it was topped with a vertical addition several meters tall, at least.

In my book "Warrior" which is currently in process, Ajax encourages the damos - senior village heads - of Salamina to send a force with him to Troy, arguing that the Trojans are so foolish and lazy that they build their walls to lean inward, as if they are already surrendering. So how hard will it be to overrun the place?

Then he sees the wall himself, and understands.

Exhileration

Pulling a trigger, loosing an arrow, flattening a gas pedal --- they are equally scary and exciting. Joining those moments is the mouse click that posts a book for sale on Amazon.

 https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=kathryn+berck

(And no, dear Amazon, the clicker did NOT mean to find Kathryn Back!)

Then there is what follows, which includes postings to reader-specific sites such as Goodreads. And on Goodreads, a sort of lottery: offering five books as prizes in a random drawing that already, only ten hours later, already has fourteen people hoping for a copy of a totally unknown writer's first volume:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/261586-the-hostage

Confusion Wins - For a While

Mine, of course. Encouraged by Eva Pohler, I took the plunge and ended up in shallow water. But it was my own fault, nothing to do with her. Call it over-eagerness, or whatever you like, but it is slowly sorting itself out.

On her excellent advice, I finally pulled the trigger - although didn't hit a perfect home run.

Yeah, I know. But it's finally kinda sorted out.

My Amazon author page is up, the paperback and ebook versions of "The Hostage" - which is part one of the four-part "Peryton" - are up, although I've had to scramble to sort them out. There was even cover trouble, as you might notice if you look at them in the next couple of days. Don't order them until they settle down, but don't forget to order them then.

The paperback should be $11.97 until the release of the ebook in January. Then the paperback will go up to $13.97, while the ebook will be notably less expensive but with an even cooler cover. In any event, it's still a pretty cheap cheap thrill!


https://www.amazon.com/author/kathrynberck

Bad Dogs

Sent Warrior's first hundred-page section - Part One, Salamina - to my esteemed editor just for his overall impression and commentary. Conclusion: he hates the opening: "Way too dark. ... vignette is too horrific and also too revolting to use—ever, probably—regardless of how accurate it is. But it can be toned down, made less graphic, and could then work."

 He hasn't blinked before when characters did their worst: barely turned a hair for the no-blinking-allowed scene of Akhaïdes and Philaios alone. But dogs doing what dogs do made him wince. This process is going to be even more interesting than I thought it might. 

Picture by McKinley Massacre

Joining the Big Leagues

After checking pricing with several developers whose fees were much farther into four figures than I care to travel with my modest needs, I tried my hand at making my own and am pleased by the result.
www.kathrynberck.com

Total cost: domain name $30.34 for two years, site itself $194 per year but can be free if the user doesn't mind ads. It took me about three hours to set it up, learning on the way, then spent the afternoon fiddling with about a hundred thousand tweaks and rechecks. Edits are both unlimited and almost immediate. Very gratifying.

No, you don't need to know WordPress, which some inexplicable people inexplicably love, but to me is as opaque and user-hostile as iTunes. And there are bajillions of all kinds of options to use; you can do pretty much as you please.

A note: I have learned that it's important to know that your page will be useable and intelligible on a handheld device as well as a normal big screen, so whatever process you choose to use, make sure to crosscheck that before pushing the buy-it button. Learned that here: http://www.novelmarketing.com/103/

Chop to Pieces, Rinse, Repeat

As is usual these days, woke very early with "Shit, no!" on my mind. Immediately understood the source of this particular unrest: Telamon's order to Ajax comes way too early. T orders A to do a kind-of-terrible thing, then life goes on as normal for a while? I don't think so. That order must come as part of the avalanche (that word is an exaggeration, but not by much) of thwarts and insults meant to trim A's sails; deflate his confidence and rising power.

Sigh. Okay then. Start coffee, check if the mouse has given up and gone away, then sharpen the hatchet yet again. Take a break to feed horses and check on things outside. Rinse and repeat.

Which is Greek For ....

Two 'characters' - one animate, one perhaps not - have been hanging around bothering me, but I don't know who or what they 'really' are, why they're there at all, and what I'm supposed to do with them.

Hah! Now I know. And one of them explains the other.

Which is Mycenaean Greek for, "It's about fucking damned time, thank you very much!"

Chop, Glue, Repeat

Ajax and I have been stuck for what feels like eons, because of our shared discontent at ordinariness. But now that The Good Kinsman is in my editor's hands and I can't do much until he gets the entire thing back to me, it's time.

Spent many happy hours with the first 100+ pages, cutting and pasting and shifting and 'why?'ing, finally have a rough - don't know what to call it, not an outline, those are all tidy, with numbers and stuff - order in which all those things have to happen - a separate doc that would be totally inexplicable and annoying to anyone else. Kind of like...

...but with a lot more fingerprints, coffee stains, and dog hair. Not to mention a haunted sword (no, please, not the YA way you're thinking of), an unexplained rune painted on his forehead, and a wretched old man he keeps thinking he should remember, but nothing comes. Plus ship borrowing, sword casting, spear training, getting married, bringing the island council to heel, and defying his mother.

That diagram might need a second page taped sloppily at the bottom.

Reviewing

Every time I review the section in which Akhaides seduces Philaios, I find my jaw tightening and then find myself - yet again - saying aloud, "Don't! No you dumbass, don't fall for it! I can't believe you ... Oh, you're gonna be SO sorry!"

I'm never uncritically infatuated by my own work, so I take this as a good sign.
Well, maybe not for Philaios...