That Bastard, Conrad of Montferrat

In my research for TWS Book 2, Hero's Army, I keep coming up against this guy Conrad. The crazy thing is, he's actually dead by the time my protagonist Henry arrives in the Holy Land (or, as the Crusaders call it, l'Outremer - the overseas). But he's a really, really interesting case of tainted history.

See, if you read the old chestnuts of English historical fiction like Walter Scott, Conrad's always the baddie. Conniving, evil, wizened, ugly, sadistic, sexually... ahem... experimental... really, they can't find enough nasty things to say about the guy. But if you actually look at the events of his life, you run into some cognitive dissonance.

First of all, he's a hottie. The Byzantine chronicler Niketas Choniates described him as "of beautiful appearance, comely in life's springtime, exceptional and peerless in manly courage and intelligence, and in the flower of his body's strength." (Heck, I'm a straight male, and even I feel a little tingly.)

A little Clockpunk for your attention

io9.com has this excellent squib about a 16th Cent. knight's prosthetic, spring-driven metal hand. You know I'm going to use it in TWS.

Today's word is STYLITES

Can you say "stylites"?
Or, to be more explicit, saint-on-a-pole.
Very popular in the Byzantine Empire around the EMA (early Middle Ages).
Apparently, Indian fakirs aren't the only holy folk who feel the need to mortify the flesh, but it's an impulse that is utterly alien to me. Why would God desire self-inflicted pain from his creatures? How do you get so deep into your own belief system that this sounds like a good idea?

I don't mean to offend any rockin' stylites out there. I'm just asking.

So- Want a taste of the new book? Sure you do...

It's right here.

Go ahead, CLICK IT!

Where Have I Been?

The Rocket Museum

They Also Do Math

I know, wonder, wonder, wonder. Well, as you may remember, I was spending a bunch of weeks looking at hotels in my fair city and writing them up for NewYork.com. In the process, I relearned about a super cool museum out in Queens, the New York Hall Hall of Science. Not only does the NYHS have gen-yoo-wine, honest-to-goshness ROCKETS (Mercury and Gemini and a chunk of an Apollo) but it also has interactive science exhibits. In fact, they're so cool that one of the earliest, Mathematica, was designed by Charles and Ray Eames, of beautiful chair fame.

And then I was doing some contract work for my alma mater - roar, Lion, roar! - and the day rate was sufficiently high for me to focus on that work to the exclusion of this beloved (but unpaid) blog. But I'm back. And I'm working on Book Two of the Wrong Sword trilogy, Hero's Army.

And I learned enough about Dreamweaver for Windows to know that it is the Devil's work. EVIL!

"It's Easy," I Said...

"...whenever the story starts to drag, just torture your hero."

I was having lunch with a ghostwriter friend of mine, chatting a little about TWS Book 2, Hero's Army. (Which you should totally buy as soon as it's ready. In fact, why wait? Pre-order it now! I promise, in Book Two Henry **SPOILER ALERT**  actually makes it to Constantinople! It just makes things worse, of course.)

Anyway, she asked me how HA was going, and that's when I made my semi-fatuous little genre writer comment.

But as soon as I said it, I knew it wasn't true.

AKA Alhazen

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, ca 965 CE-1040 CE.

One of the great Medieval Islamic scholars, engineers and inventors. By the time The Wrong Sword takes place, he's a hundred years gone, but his work pops up now and again in TWS, Hero's Army, and City of Brass.

In The Wrong Sword, one of the goofier characters makes use of Alhazen's "camera obscura." In case you were wondering, it looks something like this:

Character Interview - Henry the Rat

You want to get to know the protagonist of TWS a little better, don't you? Of course you do! He's so sunny and optimistic!

Q. We're here with Henry the Rat, one of the protagonists of Ted Mendelssohn's The Wrong Sword. So, Henry, why do you think Ted chose you to represent him?

A. Just lazy, I guess. I do the work while he takes the credit. Writers! Oh. You mean, why did he choose me instead of another character?

Q. Um, yes. For instance, why not the Princess Mathilde? We understand she was very eager to do this interview.

A. I’ll bet. She never met an audience she didn’t like.

The Great City

One of the neat things about living where I do is the absolutely insane wealth of antiquities you can find in the museums. If you're dabbling with Byzantium and the Ayyubids - as I am in Hero's Army - you can just walk into the BGAM - Big Giant Art Museum - and boom! There's an exhibit on the Kingdom of the Greeks (that's what the Franks called Byzantium) and the Saracens (the Moslem states, from the Umayyads to the Abbasids.) If you've been researching entirely from books and the Internet, it's an almost physical shock to see actual, tangible objects from that time.

In fact, the more you look, the more you realize that nothing appears exactly as you imagined. Take the coins. You know, intellectually, that gold was even more valuable then than it is today; still, you have this image of pirate-sized gold coins as big as your palm and thick as a slice of cheese. Then you get to the BGAM and actually see Byzantine solidi: Each one is 24-karat gold, able to buy a month's unskilled labor - and no larger or thicker than a thumbnail.

Or the architecture. You hear "Greek" and you instantly imagine white marble, but that's hooey. The reality is that there was lots of painting going on - in eye-watering color schemes. Not to mention silk hangings in twisty patterns of brick red, leaf green, and blue and gold - the disco polyester of the Middle Ages, enough to make the Ayyubids on the other side of the border look positively restrained in their decor. If the black-velvet Elvis painting had existed a thousand years ago, it would have been worth its weight in solidi.


But for some reason, it's the more humble stuff - the carved wood and bone, the potsherds (ostraka) - that really convey just how distant it all is in time. With wood and clay, it's easier to imagine the hands of the men who shaped it.

Book Two on the Front Burner

So while y'all are devouring The Wrong Sword, Book One (Devour it! Devour it, I say!) I'm hard at work on the sequel, Hero's Army. Now, I don't want to give anything away, but I have just one little word for you: Outremer. Look it up.

Satisfaction

Today I just resolved the major plot points of Hero's Army, the sequel to The Excalibur Trick. It's not like I've actually finished the book, but I have put a spine in place; I feel more secure about the direction of the story.

Of course, major changes, additions and subtractions are still possible. Hell, they're likely. But they will be changes to an already existing structure, and plotting is always the hardest for me.

Aahh...first step taken. Only 1,000 more miles to go.

What I'm Doing Now-

-is either smart or stupid, I'm not sure.

I'm working on Hero's Army, the sequel to The Excalibur Trick. Which is smart...because, ya know, you guys deserve to find out what happens next. (Plus it's a cute story - Crusades, Assassins, Richard and Saladin in a total bromance - at least from Richard's POV...so wait for it.)

But I'm also working on a second book, a NON-wainscot contemporary fantasy - or alternate world fantasy, depending on how you look at it - and it's kind of taken up squatter's rights in my temporal lobe, where I keep important stuff like phone numbers and the lyrics to filthy medieval drinking songs.

So I guess I'm going to have to write it all out of biological storage and onto the page.