Tag Archives: ancient egypt

In The Works – Lord of the Two Lands


This is from a story with the tentative title Lord of the Two Lands.  It takes place two hundred years after Pharaoh’s Son.  I had a strong idea of a character (years ago) and jotted down some things.  I had an idea, suddenly, for a scene, wrote it (or risk forgetting it) and the story has taken off.  Alas, it is on ‘the back burner’ because I must finish Mourningtide, which is going well.  But still…  It’s delightful to know that the springs have not run dry.
This takes place after a battle.  The king has been captured by rebels, who are holding him in a courtyard.  Herihor, who is to all intents and purposes the de facto  ruler of southern Egypt, has just arrived at the end of the fighting.  He has  found Pharaoh where he is being held. 

Herihor stopped and stared. 

A torch lay in a shallow pottery bowl, spilling light across the wall’s carved relief: Pharaoh lunged forward, his fist clenched on his foe’s upraised arm, the swing of his war mace caught at the moment before it descended. Movement – emotion: Pharaoh triumphant. It was magnificent, vibrant, awe-inspiring, from the king’s jutting jaw to the despairing faces of his foes. The dynamic thrust of the leg, driving into the ground, brought his eyes down in a diagonal to a figure at the carving’s feet.
 
 

A man stood half-collapsed against the wall, his shoulder against it, his lowered head turned toward it, catching the lingering warmth of the stone in the fading day. As Herihor watched, the man pushed away, staggering a little, and looked up at the carving.


The thought came unbidden: A flame cast by a shadow.

 

He had made some slight noise. The man glanced over his shoulder and then turned to face him with raised head. His hands and arms were bound behind him, wrist and elbow. They had not been gentle with the ropes. He was pale with exhaustion, blood was caked in his hair and sweat made lighter streaks in his dusty face, but the black eyes that traveled scornfully from Herihor’s feet to his face were as sharp as Herihor remembered. “You, too,” he said.


The contempt in his voice made Herihor wince as he moved forward. “Sire-“


Pharaoh frowned. “Will you spare my troops?” he asked.

 

Herihor stared. Blood was trailing from the side of the man’s mouth and he saw the dark smudge of a bruise at the side of his face.

 

Pharaoh tried to shake the hair from his eyes. “I am defeated: I admit it. How can I not? Do with me as it pleases you. My only request is this: those soldiers that fought for me, those cities and temples that assisted me, did so out of loyalty to their king. I beg you: do not fault them or punish them when you set up your–your dynasty. They will love you and yours all the more for that.”

 

The gallant generosity of that speech made Herihor pause and look down. He drew his dagger after a moment and stepped forward.


Pharaoh watched the knife leave its sheath. He lifted his chin and faced Herihor more fully.

Using Visuals When Writing


One of the things I really need when I’m working on a story is something that I can actually look at, that will give me an idea of how something looks, works, is sized.  Several series of books are chock-full of photos and explanations, and they are invaluable.
The Shire Egyptology series is a good example.  It is published in the UK and each book covers a subject – food and drink, household pets, medicine, textiles, weapons and warfare, Akhenaten’s Egypt…  They are not written by the same person.  The photographs and explanations are especially useful.
Their website is here. 
Ancient Military history is covered by the Men At Arms series published  by Osprey (here is a sample of one of their books on New Kingdom Egyptian military). 
I have similar sources for other books; one series set in 1830’s Paris was helped immensely by a book of old photographs.
 
Time-Life books put out Echoes of Glory in two volumes.  This is one of the most useful books I have ever encountered.  It is separated into sections covering edged weapons, firearms, soldiers’ life, the home front.  Modern photographs of arms and equipment are paired with period depictions.  It has been invaluable to me, being, as I am, rather visually oriented.
In Mourningtide, I write of the effect of the death of a son and brother on his family.  One of the characters is Ramesses, the younger brother of the man who died.   He became the pharaoh Ramesses II, one of the great rulers of his age.  I have seen his statues and photographs of his reliefs, but finding anything that has him pictured as a living person in the flesh is difficult.  Fortunately, I have succeeded.
Here he is, Ramesses himself, as depicted by Yul Brynner in the movie The Ten Commandments.  He is not a prince in this photo – the golden headband with cobra and vulture tends to indicate that he has succeeded his father.  I find it a very enlightening photograph, something that I will have to refer to over and over, I think. 
One more item for my toolbox…

How on Earth Do You Write – Some Observations


Snippets from discussions on process and necessities in writing:
I seldom visualize the beginning of a novel. Usually I have an idea for a happening or series of happenings upon which the novel is based. Writing their progression almost always leads to clarification of their point of origin (as to the story flow..)
cough! cough! Gosh, I’m sorry. That was a horrible bit of talking.
What I mean is that the flow of the story helps to clarify things that have caused its course.

An example: I’m working on a story right now involving the death of a young man and its effect on his family, including a younger brother and his father, who receives the word late. My first image of the story was the young man’s death and his father’s initial reaction. As I filled that in, I was able to picture how the fellow ended up in the position in which he was killed.

Ultimately, I realized that the best way to start the story was to show the father taking leave of his sons, with some instructions to the older one. The older son (who dies) has shown uneasiness with his situation, which ultimately leads to his death. It works, but my first image was of the father’s initial, anguished reaction.

Another story involves a colossal statue crashing down into the middle of a festival throng. The mystery progresses from there. In that case, that scene is chapter 1 – but there is a prologue set several decades before the provides clues to the mystery. 

Must Do’s

From what I’m reading, we all have some sort of ‘routine’, however loose, and some sort of absolutely must do’s, no matter how loose they seem.

It’s delicious when an idea catches hold and the words come flowing out faster than your fingers can move. But why, oh why, does this happen when you’re going hammer and tongs with something that absolutely must be finished within a certain time frame?

You give a shout of joy and then start swearing. Or, I do.

My ‘Absolute Must’ is that I must somehow, in some retrievable way, capture the idea, the snippet of speech, the scene setting, the plot twist. Thinking ‘I’ll remember this, certainly!’ doesn’t work. I speed-jotted a scene that I was delighted with in the manuscript that I am finishing up. Delighted – and I tried to tell a friend just what happened in the scene.  Here’s what I said…

He goes on to patrol the upper path, and she goes with him because she believes he needs the company after the extreme danger and stress of the morning.
He says… Well, he tells her… Um. He apologizes. She says he doesn’t have to. No, wait! I forgot! She insists on going with him because she is a soldier’s widow and knows about how things work.

Gah! I’m telling it wrong.

Anyhow, he tries to apologize and her heart turns over. I think that’s how I phrased it…
What did he apologize for? Why, for being emotional a couple days before. You mean you couldn’t figure that out? What the heck?
Well, anyhow it was a great scene and I captured it before I forgot it. What do you mean I’ve forgotten it? I have it written down! ‘Mind like a sieve???’ Now just a minute! OK, OK, I’ll let you read the scene once I print it.

Sheesh!”

In with the new…


I have at least two projects underway in any given time.  This has several benefits:

  1. It helps to minimize the strange sense of grieving I suffer from when I’ve finished a story and am no longer dealing with a group of characters that I have come to love.  I remember I received this advice years ago from an editor.  “Never have only one work in the pipeline,” she told me.  “It’ll help you cope with finishing a work.”  I learned the hard way that she was right. 

  2. It helps to minimize writer’s block.  I think it’s sometimes the result of working too intensively on a specific project to the exclusion of everything else.  It is an excellent way to burn out.  Switch off to something fresh and you can catch your breath, and regain your stride.

  3. It will give you an excuse not to work on something.  Actually, this isn’t a benefit.


At the moment I’m finishing the first draft of Mourningtide.  I’m also working on Crowfut Gap, a novel set in Civil War Virginia, near the West Virginia border.  There’s another Egyptian story, The Jubilee, which I started a few years back.  It’s moving along slowly as things occur to me and I jot them down.

Lately I have been going back to a period that is slightly after A Killing Among the Dead.  Ranefer is the last of his line, a family decimated by a systemic ailment that has killed them one after another, leaving only him, the third son of a king, the brother of two kings and the uncle of another.  Egypt is crumbling; What is to be done if you are Lord of the Two Lands, and The Two Lands has forgotten that it has a Lord?

It is a bittersweet story (in its current shape) and puts an unusual twist on history as we know it.

The twist came to me as I was driving the three hundred odd miles home from Upstate New York.   I think it may work.  It might help if I stopped blogging and typed it, but I can mull it over a little more…

Only 6,800 words currently, but it should grow nicely – once I really start working on it.

The Hyphen is Mighty Indeed


I just threw out five brand new copies of one of my books that I had ordered for a GoodReads giveaway.   They were free, a  perk for finishing NaNoWriMo.


I  had updated the book’s cover.  When you do that, you have to resubmit the text.  And there was the rub:  there had been a problem with the text: my laptop had been stolen, and with it my final version of that manuscript.  (Yeah, I know.  I’m backing everything up now.)

It’s easy to retrieve the text of a Kindle book, and I retrieved the MS that way, plugged it into the book setup, did a perfunctory final text check – the text had been fine before, and I had simply updated the cover image – and gave the go-ahead.  Then I ordered my five copies for the giveaway.
I’m beta testing a new feature for manuscript editing on CreateSpace.  It’s a good feature, and since I had this book up in the  program, I went through that manuscript.   I sat back and went to one of my favorite scenes, one toward the end where Ramesses the Great, having extricated himself from arrest ordered by his eldest son, arrives at the palace to get some answers, is denied admittance by an over-zealous servant who isn’t aware who’s waiting outside the door, pulls out all the stops and, in the scene, is questioning the servant, a man he’s known for fifteen years.  The scene is related from the servant’s point of view:
“Let me see if I understand you,” Pharaoh said thoughtfully. He raised one long fingered hand and ticked off the points as he spoke. “One  the Crown Prince has gone haring off to parts unknown. Two  you have no idea where Prince Khaemwaset is, but  three  you do know that he tried to drug his brother, and  four  a spy sent the Crown Prince’s ring back to him as a sign of urgent danger to Prince Khaemwaset. Five  the army is in a state of alert, and  six  the city of Memphis is virtually under siege. Am I correct so far?”

It took me a moment to realize what was wrong with the text. Actually, it doesn’t look so bad, even now, but I’d placed hyphens in to highlight the way Ramesses was ticking off the points on his fingers. And the hyphen between ‘long’ and ‘fingered’ described the sort of fingers he had on his hand. Without it, His Majesty had a long hand equipped with fingers.


It should have looked like this:

“Let me see if I understand you,” Pharaoh said thoughtfully. He raised one long-fingered hand and ticked off the points as he spoke. “One-the Crown Prince has gone haring off to parts unknown. Two-you have no idea where Prince Khaemwaset is, but-three-you do know that he tried to drug his brother, and-four-a spy sent the Crown Prince’s ring back to him as a sign of urgent danger to Prince Khaemwaset. Five-the army is in a state of alert, and-six-the city of Memphis is virtually under siege. Am I correct so far?”

In looking things over I discovered, to my dismay, that the file transfer from Kindle to print had stripped every hyphen from the text.  And I hadn’t caught them.
I started looking for them.  I went to another scene where the servant, newly captured after a battle between Egyptians and Hittites (his country), gives everyone a piece of his mind using a coarse expression that draws a parallel between their sexual propensities and Oedipus’.  (I am not going to quote it here; it’s about an eighth of the way through Chapter XIX; the bottom of page 121 if you have a paperback copy of the book.)
In my defense, the text had been perfect when I sent it to Kindle; the manuscript in my (stolen) laptop had been lost, I had retrieved it (I thought…) and simply plugged it in.  But my father always told me never to make assumptions.
Ultimately, I pulled up the adobe document for the manuscript and manually searched it for hyphens.  When I found one, I went to the manuscript and replaced it.  I was able to do global searches for set expressions, but when I relied solely on that method, checking afterward, I kept stumbling across hyphens that needed to be inserted.  (To be honest, I would never have found Mutallish’ epithet directed at Pharaoh if I’d done a global search and replace for commonly used hyphenated words.)
Things were fixed.  Finally.  It was too late to cancel my order of the printed books.  So what to do about them?
Well, they’re defective.  I’ve read enough diatribes on the subject of defective books, whether self-published or not.  These are all, every one of them, being consigned to the trash.  Sigh.
Lesson Learned.

A Gallery of My Kindle Book Covers


Since Kindle covers are hard to see at the best of times, I’m setting up a gallery of mine in the order of their appearance in my story line:
The City of Refuge,  

the second uploaded was, actually the third one I wrote but the first in the cycle, chronologically.  I recently located its very first appearance in my imagination when I was going through some old notebooks.  I had a notation about an idea for a story – and it grew into The City of Refuge.  One of the main heroes, Lord Nebamun, is one of my all-time favorite characters to write about, and I was delighted to be working with him again in Mourningtide, which was published June 1, 2013.
Mourningtide
Pharaoh’s Son

I hung on to Pharaoh’s Son, the third in the cycle (soon to be the fourth, with its ‘prequel’ set to come out in about a year) for a long time.  It is a lively story, the one I enjoyed writing most, and I had wanted to consider what to do with it.  I concluded that Kindle and paperback were best for it, as for my others.  I ran into my first experience of the delicacy required to handle historical fiction involving characters that actually lived.  In the case of Pharaoh’s Son, the names are real, the characters are my own – though I arrived at some insights into the character of Ramesses II during the course of writing about him.  I now have a strong disclaimer at the beginning of my historical novels.

A Killing Among the Dead

Chronologically, this is the last in the Egyptian cycle – and the first one I wrote.  Egypt was rocked by a scandal of tomb-robbing and desecration in the Valley of the Kings.  It happened toward the end of the XXth Dynasty (the last of the Ramesside dynasties) when Egypt was going into eclipse.  The scandal was far-reaching and implicated some of the great mortuary temples along the Nile.  The story came to life for me, and its main character, Wenatef, is the closest I have come to a true tragic hero in the Greek sense.

The Safeguard 

I have another Civil War novel with the tentative title of Crowfut Gap underway.  Another, The Bones, has its roots in the Civil War and involves events set in motion then, but it is set in the present.  The Safeguard features two of my ancestors, who appear as Union foragers…

The Orphan’s Tale

 Set in Paris in the autumn of 1834, The Orphan’s Tale is my newest book. 

‘Autumn is beautiful in 1834 Paris. But to Chief Inspector Paul Malet,   raised in a prison by the greatest master criminal in French history  the season’s splendor is overlaid by a sense of gathering danger: something is afoot.

‘When Malet learns that Victoria, England’s young Heiress Apparent, will be traveling to Paris at Christmas for a state visit, all  becomes clear. Her assassination on French soil would shatter the accord between France and England. And war can be a profitable business for those criminals daring enough to mold events to suit their own purposes.’

 This is a trilogy, with the second book set to be released next year.  While the cover for #2 is problematic (do I use the hero’s portrait – in which case I have to find it or the villain’s?  I don’t like the villain.  Decisions, decisions…)  I do have a projected cover for book #3: