Posts Tagged ‘ age of sail ’

Archaic Definition of the Week – Tackle and Tail-Block

TACKLE, … a machine formed by the communication of a rope with an assemblage of blocks, and known in mechanics by the name of pulley.

Tackles are used in a ship to raise, remove, or secure weighty bodies; to support the masts; or to extend the sails and rigging.

TAIL-BLOCK, a small single block, having a short piece of rope attached to it, by which it may be fastened to any object at pleasure; either for convenience, or to increase the force applied to the said object, as explained in the first part of the article tackle.

- Wm. Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine (1780).

Unabridged Chick’s Nautical Fiction Reading Challenge

Talk about hitting the right note at the right time!

I have been trying to think of ways to put action to my incessant rants about there being too many aspiring writers and not enough readers.  Then I stumbled on a blog that is awesome and appropriate in so many ways, it felt like a gift from the heavens.

Or, as it turned out, from the seas.

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Story Behind the Story 3 : Setting As Personality

REPOST BY REQUEST

While working out the larger story arc behind the novel I’m pitching, I thought it might be fun to blog a little about writing itself, as I experience it. Sort of telling the story behind telling the story.

I have written a lot of stuff over the years: tons of (mostly bad) poetry, a handful of short stories, and hundreds of thousands of words of non-fiction prose.

But, for this little series on writing I want to focus on The Ligan of the Disomus, and the larger world that is still growing from its seed. It is now a novel, with three sequel novels outlined for the long-term story arc.

When it began, however, it was just a short story assignment in a college writers’ group, an assignment the narrator — a fictional character — ran off with in directions I had not anticipated. But, he was not alone in commandeering what I considered to be “my” story…

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Teaser – The Ligan of the Disomus, The Gap Through Which A Draft Blows

From The Ligan of the Disomus, Chapter 5 – “The Gap Through Which A Draft Blows,” Part V – Chasing Reider. (Following up on the previous teaser.)

CONTEXT: In the port city of Lemaigne, the Observer has just taken testimony from several witnesses that “the two Reiders trashed a bar, putting down thirteen burly dockhands and killing two of them with no weapons more elaborate than a table leg and a salt-shaker” and “instead of looking over the debris of their struggle and basking in the victory, they scrambled frantically out the door and fled in opposite directions.” Confused by their weird behavior, he heads back to his quarters in the night to think about the case.

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Installment – "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die" Part III

Since the latest “short story” in the Observer Tales quickly developed into a novelette, I have decided to publish its four parts in short story-sized installments.

In Part I, our disgruntled narrator — known only by his office, Observer — had only recently been posted to the port of Lemaigne by the Security Corps. Wasting a Sunday morning dockside trying (and failing) to catch some fish, he was sought out by the monk Frer Jacob, who tells him that…

The Sheriff and his men shot a madwoman in the chest last night. She brandished an axe at them, or so they claim. They hit her maybe seven times, point-blank. Then, she just ran off.

The Observer decides that this qualifies as something of interest to the Security Corps, so he heads off to get his pistol, badge, and uniform with the monk still in tow.  In Part II, he interviews three witnesses — a retired Colonel, an old man, and a boy who works as a deck talker — and learns that this crazed woman has been attacking children and tasting their blood.  The girl most likely to be her next victim is Diana Ashcraft, recently acquitted for trafficking in pirated goods.

This leads us to third installment of The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die.

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Installment – "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die" Part II

Since the latest “short story” in the Observer Tales quickly developed into a novelette, I have decided to publish its four parts in short story-sized installments.

In Part I last week, our disgruntled narrator — known only by his office: Observer —  had only recently been posted to the port of Lemaigne by the Security Corps.  I call this the “latest” story because it is the latest to be written, but it is the earliest in chronological order, happening well before the events in The Dun Cat of Mill Bridge, and shows us how The Observer met Diana Ashcraft during his first truly strange case.

Wasting a Sunday morning dockside trying (and failing) to catch some fish, he was sought out by the monk Frer Jacob, who tells him that…

The Sheriff and his men shot a madwoman in the chest last night. She brandished an axe at them, or so they claim. They hit her maybe seven times, point-blank. Then, she just ran off.

The Observer decides that this qualifies as something of interest to the Security Corps, so he heads off to get his pistol, badge, and uniform — with the monk still in tow.  This leads us to second installment of The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die.

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Installment – "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die" Part I

Since the latest “short story” in the prequel Observer Tales quickly developed into a novelette, I have decided to publish its four parts in short story-sized installments.

This back story has been brewing since I worked out the longer story arc for the Observer, and realized the central importance of Diana Ashcraft, her significance in the larger story, the Observer’s relationship with her, and the secret details of her family history.  The Dun Cat of Mill Bridge helped develop the dynamic between their personalities, but left open the circumstance of their first meeting.

And, I wanted to firmly establish the series’ mash-up of detective story and “New World Fantasy” by performing a literary marriage of the Tolkien-inspired deep history of the Observer’s world with a reference to hard-boiled American pulp fiction.  The eponymous Woman Who Wouldn’t Die — a tip of my writerly hat to the classic noir film and the Clayton Rawson novel that inspired it — is a thing from the darkest depths of Antiquity.

This brings us to my third motivation, elements of the larger story that I felt could not be fairly sprung upon the reader in a sequel to The Ligan Of The Disomus, the series’ first true novel.  These hints to the deeper legendarium eventually prove key to the greater conflict that the events and revelations of Ligan kick off; they were ever-present under the surface off the narrative (even in Ligan) but I wanted to offer a clearer set of clues for the careful reader.

These elements include the most ancient of the “bad animals” that so terrify Deputy Tom Sul, the closest thing to vampires in the Observer’s world, and the religious background that explains how the Observer’s commanding officer (in the age of sailing ships) is Commander Lea Thomas rather than Leo.  The “Man” becomes “Woman” in more than just the title.

“I need to get this rambling word-monger back to the task at hand,” the Observer would grunt.  So, with one last minor comment (If you recognize a paraphrase or linguistic play-on-words in this installment, then kudos to yudos! Post it in the comments.) here is the first installment of The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die.

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Archaic Definition of the Week Two'Fer! – Quillon and Quoin

publishingSince I ran out of the popular weekly Amalgam poems last week, I will compensate by offering two Archaic Definitions:

quillon One of the two arms that form a sword’s cross-guard, the device that protects the swordsman’s hand.

quoin A wooden edge with a handle at the thick end used to adjust the elevation of a [ship's] gun.

- A Sea of Words : A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian’s Seafaring Tales (Third Edition) by Dean King with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes.

Maritime Museum of the Atlantic

I just stumbled on this fantastic website for a museum that I really wish was a lot closer than Nova Scotia: The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, just in case you missed the title of this blog entry.

For those often confused by references to sailing vessels in fiction, the site’s tall ships page has a nice guide to sailing rigs that explains the difference between schooners and the five basic types of square-rigged vessels, using silhouettes. 

(Teaser for the uninitiated: despite the term “tall ship,” not all large sailing vessels are technically “ships.”)

Advice From A Dude Who Hasn't Even Been Published – Read Non-Fiction Too

Yeah, I know. Who is this guy to be dishing out writing advice, this self-confessed Dude Who Hasn’t Even Been Published?  And yet, I have already dived into how I completed a novel, not once, but two, three, four times. 

Yes, that novel for which I have yet to find an agent.

Oh, but the hubris goes further!  Since I have no desire to replay the classic observations (of course you can split an infinitive, if you do it well) most of what I want to talk about will be in critique of these standard proverbs of writerly advice.  

This approach may stir trouble, or rub conventional sensibilities the wrong way.  I don’t intend to rile, but certain bits of advice we read — and repeat! repeatedly! — are incomplete, or sometimes miss the point entirely.  Even so, feel free to disagree!  Comments are always welcome.

Today, I want to start by completing the incomplete. Read more »