Three Fictional Encounters in Three Factual Events

In my novel Brookhaven, the teenaged Sam McClure has three fateful encounters with John Haygood. The three happen in successive years, and each of the three involve Civil War military operations. 

I was reminded of this when Emerging Civil War posted articles on two of the three operations a week apart this month.

 

The first encounter happens during Grierson’s Raid, an operation ordered by Ulysses S. Grant to distract the Confederates during his siege of Vicksburg in 1863. Some 1,700 Union cavalrymen rode through Mississippi, starting at the Tennessee border and finishing in Union-occupied Louisiana. They tore up railroad track and caused considerable havoc, but more importantly, they kept the Confederates focused away from Grant transferring his army across the river to besiege Vicksburg from the east.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Illustration: Major Benjamin Grierson and his cavalry make a triumphant entry into Union-controlled Baton Rouge at the conclusion of their famous raid through Mississippi in 1863. (Library of Congress)

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Why Governments Cannot Educate – Joseph Woodard at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

How Do You Fix Schools? Teachers Union Says Stop Trump, ICE, and Fascism – Maya Sulkin at The Free Press.

 

C.S. Lewis and Ray Bradbury: Legitimizing Science Fiction – Bradley Birzer,

 

Just War Thery and the American Civil War – Ed Lowe at Emerging Civil War.

 

Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861-1865 by Damian Shiels – review at Civil War Books and Authors.

Finding a Medal in a Small-Town Antique Store

I’m always suspicious of Facebook messages coming from people I don’t know. If it seems that a message might possibly be legitimate, I’ll check the person’s profile page. More often than not, it’s people from Hong Kong or the Philippines or Africa, or people who names and profile photos clearly don’t match. Click delete. 

A few weeks ago, one arrived that raised my suspicions, but the sender seemed legitimate. And he was. He asked me if I was the author of this article at Emerging Civil War: “Research for a Novel Upended a Family Legend.” Yep, that was me.

 

He said he had an interesting story to tell me, and we eventually connected by phone. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Gift of What I’ll Never Write – Scott Hurst at Write to Understand.

 

Afraid to Click “Publish”? – Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

 

Volodya in Paradise: On Vladimir Nabokov – Larry Gaffney ay Church Life Journal.

 

Northanger Abbey and the Critics – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

When Your Characters Take Over the Story

The title for this post is something of a “Well, duh” kind of title. For a story to work well, it’s the characters who have to take over and knock the author from his perch.

 

I’ve been reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough, and he says that he almost called his book Writing Better Character-Driven Fiction, until he realized it was rather redundant. “All good fiction is character-driven,” he writes. He’s not big on outlines, plotting, character sketches, erecting signposts, or anything else that might smack of planning. Instead, he says, “like real life,” he says, “authentic fiction is not planned. Like real life, authentic fiction unfolds naturally.”

 

Stanbrough has an acronym for this – WITD, or “Writing into the Dark.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

American Civil War: prize-winning new book reveals plight of underage soldiers – The National Tribune (Australia). My review of Of Age can be found here.

 

Booknotes: The War That Made America: Essays Inspired by the Scholarship of Gary W. Gallagher – Civil War Books and Authors. 

 

Our Banner in the Sky – Jon Tracey at Emerging Civil War.

 

“Imagine Mountains,” a poem on the 150^th anniversary of Robert Frost’s birth – Carey Jobe at Society of Classical Poets.

 

224 Feet of Fencing – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian. 

Do Your Characters Talk to You?

The news report made quite a splash. Researchers at Durham University in the U.K. teamed up with The Guardiannewspaper and the Edinburgh Book Festival to do a study of authors. And the study reported that two-thirds of authors hear their characters speak while they’re writing. 

My first thought was, this is news?

The study was more of a survey. Some 181 authors who participated in the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2014 and 2018 were asked an array of questions. The biggest surprise, at least to the researchers, was that 63 percent of the authors hear their characters speak, and 61 percent say their characters can act independently. 

I’ve been listening to my characters speak since I’ve been writing. I’ve experienced characters getting a mind of their own and doing both the expected and the unexpected. Other writers I’ve talked with say they’ve experienced the same thing. Of course, characters speak. Of course, authors hear them speak. Of course, characters get themselves totally out of character and screw things up, at least temporarily. This is part of what makes them real to the author and the reader.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog.

The Surprise of "The Scarlet Letter"

It’s been 50 years since I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter in my high school American literature class. What I vaguely remembered was a story about a woman named Hester Prynne in Puritan New England, with a baby born out of wedlock, and the narrowminded colonists who took great pride in displaying their superiority over the sinful, fallen woman. 

As I started reading the book in May, it took me all of the first two chapters to realize that what I remembered, and what had seeped into my head about the book in the past half-century, was superficially right but substantially wrong. It is much more than what I remembered. 

The biggest surprise so far has been the two significant male characters, the Reverend Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale and the man who shows up and calls himself Roger Chillingworth but is actually Hester Prynne’s long-absent husband. (You have to love the names Hawthorne gives his characters, as descriptive as those of Charles Dickens, but then, Hawthorne was writing and publishing about the same time). 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

The Assignment

The archbishop of York had had enough. “What the bishop is trying to say, Michael, is that it’s been decided that you will be assigned to St. Anselm’s Anglican Church in San Francisco.”

Michael sat, outwardly composed but inwardly reeling. San Francisco?

“You can take the time you need to think this over,” the bishop of Norfolk said. “We know this is a surprise and not what you expected. So feel free to consider and pray about this.”

“I accept it, Father Stanton,” Michael said.

   - From Dancing Priest 

Photograph by Ben White via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Reflecting on Writing a Novel

Dancing Priest, my first novel and the first in the Dancing Priest series, is free on Amazon Kindle this week.

It was published seven years ago, and it was almost a decade in the making. From an image inspired by a song, the story spent three years inside my head. In idle moments, or at night after I’d gone to bed, I slowly worked my way through the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes. Over those three years, the story changed, incorporated new ideas and characters, shifted in its narrative arc, and shifted its location from Italy to Scotland. 

When I finally began to transfer the story from head to computer screen, in the early fall of 2005, it came as a torrent. It took about three months, but when I stopped, I had a torrent of 250,000 words, sufficient for three novels. Then began the cutting, splicing, and saving chunks for later. At a writer’s conference or two, I showed excerpts to editors and agents. Editors liked it; agents didn’t. One agent told me that if it didn’t have a vampire or a werewolf, it couldn’t be marketed to publishers (this was at the height of the mania for the Twilight novels). 

Dancing Priest eventually found its way into print. From that first behemoth manuscript in 2005, it was likely rewritten 20 times before it saw the public light of day. Writing is hard work. Editing is hard work. Marketing is hard work. Trying to market one book, write another, and hold down a full-time job is impossible work. 

I’ve reread the book several times, and while there are a few things I’d like to change or edit, I find myself content with it. I’ve always considered it a love story for men, and the reactions of male readers have supported that. While a few (male and female) readers have thought Michael Kent a bit too perfect, male readers have generally seen the character as to what men aspire to. One reader said it should be required reading for teenage boys, because it offered a sense of “the nobility of doing right.” 

The character I still feel the closest to in the story is Sarah Hughes. Her attitude to faith mirrored my own in college, as in, “You’re serious about this stuff?” How she comes to faith is a direct lift from my own experience when I was a senior in college. What happens to her when she begins to talk with the wife of the director of “College Campus Ministry” is an almost verbatim description of what happened to me when I began to talk with the director of Campus Crusade for Christ at my university. 

If there is a single theme in Dancing Priest, it is the same theme that you’ll find in the three novels that have followed it: No matter how dark things look, there is always hope.

This week, you can access the free copy on Amazon Kindle here.

A Street Conversation

“No one’s home,” said an elderly woman standing on the porch next door. “She left early this morning with a suitcase, so she must have been going out of town. Robert and his chum left a little while ago. They should be in school at this time of day.”

Michael said a short prayer of thanks for busybodies. “Did you see which way they went?”

The woman nodded. “To your right, likely for the square at the end of the block. Do I know you? You sound familiar but my eyesight isn’t the best.”

-       From Dancing Prophet  

Photograph by Cristian Newman via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Reality Sinks In

I try to remember when the reality of what had happened to us finally sunk in. I had a glimpse when I saw thousands camped out at the hospital, praying for Mike’s survival. And on the plane to London, I saw the looks of deference as we walked through the cabin to greet passengers. But I knew for sure when we walked into the terminal at Heathrow, with the archbishop and the prime minister waiting for us, almost surrounded by television, flash cameras, and mobiles held high to get a shot of the new royal family.

Us.

- Sarah Kent-Hughes, Dancing King

Photo: British Airways plane at Heathrow Airport.

A meeting at the dorm lobby

As Michael entered the dorm lobby with his bike and backpack, the housemaster stopped him. “Mr. Kent, you’ve got a visitor. She’s been waiting a good two hours.”

It was Sarah Hughes.

She stood, clutching a large artist portfolio. He stood still, gripping the bike, as she walked to him.

“I came to tell you how sorry I am,” she said. “After my outburst yesterday, I felt terrible and tried to apologize, but you were gone. I said terrible things, and there was no excuse. If you can’t forgive me, I understand. I just want to die. I felt so badly I couldn’t sleep last night—” Tears rolled down her cheeks. A few students stopped to watch, and the housemaster was definitely captivated.

“Would you like a coffee?” Michael said.

-  From Dancing Priest 

Photograph by Milan Popovic via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"It's about who you are, who you are as a person"

“Josh,” Zena said, “there’s something in Michael that speaks to you, and I suspect speaks deeply. He thinks the world of you, but it’s about who you are. He’s grateful for what you’ve done and what you can do, but it’s more about you as a person. He likes you, Josh. You’re not used to having someone who simply likes you as a friend.” She paused. “And you may have to ask yourself what your new faith means in the context of government politics.”

     - From Dancing King 

Photograph by Dominik Vanyi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Joining the Family

That evening at dinner, Michael raised the issue. “We have a sixth family, Jason.”

“Yes?” he said, his eyes hopeful but wary.

“Sarah, why don’t you tell him?” Michael said.

“I’ll tell him,” said Jim. “It’s us. We want you to live with use.”

Jason looked at the three of them. “Are you doing this because no one else will?”

“No,” said Michael, “we’re doing this because it took God this long to make us open our eyes and see the obvious. You’re already part of our family. We want you to stay part of our family, if you’re willing to have us.”

     - From A Light Shining 

Photograph by Warren Wong via Unsplash. Used with permission.