So it is said of the past – and most truly said, for it is another country where they do things differently. My esteemed colleague at The Deepening, PDR Lindsay went off on a tear last week, over a badly researched novel of period manners and mystery. The tale in question had been presented as being thoroughly researched, but a close and knowledgeable reading revealed that claim to be embarrassingly far off the mark … and such inaccuracies could have been remedied by research in any number of easily accessed resources. This is not a purely American foible, let me point out – nor is building a whole series of books and a considerable reputation out of writing adventures set in a place one has never visited. The popular German writer Karl May built a fabulously successful career writing best sellers about the American West, although he himself only visited America once, long after his fortune was made, and never went farther west than Buffalo, New York. He did do fairly careful research – aided no doubt that he was writing stories set at least within spitting distance of his own time … but still. May’s books remain terrifically popular in Germany, but any European fan venturing into the very real American west must be in for at least some small disillusion.
The abiding trap for scribblers of historical fiction might be, as PDR pointed out – writing scenes based upon a superficial knowledge of a time and a place that is gleaned from other people’s visualizations of it, especially those on TV or in movies, or even in other novels. This is a trap that lazy writers can fall into, quite easily. A couple of months ago, I reviewed a historical novel about a family of emigrants making their way to California, in the year of the 1849 Gold Rush. It was a serious and literary novel, written by a professor of history and published by a university press – and yet it described a man driving an ox team by sitting in the front of the wagon and using pairs of reins. Mind you, very few living Americans these days have seen someone drive an ox team. Most of us have observed in the flesh or on screen, someone driving teams of horses in the manner described. It seemed the good professor had merely assumed that one way was interchangeable with the other… when a cursory look at contemporary 19th century accounts or artwork should have informed him that ox teams were driven by a person walking next to the lead team, and controlling the animals by voice commands. The past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. I would have thought a professor of history would have known that, but that author victim to the trap of easy visualization.
Nothing quite equals contemporary documentation of what you are writing about – even if allowances are taken for artistic exaggeration. I like to say that I do ‘historical novels set on the American frontier’, because saying that I write Westerns (unless I am talking to a mad fan of Westerns) leads people to assume that I write about the never-never-western-land, that is always vaguely set somewhere in the upper plains, or west of the Mississippi, in the post-Civil War era, in a place where people ride horses or drive buggies, and the women wear very long skirts, and an exchange of gunfire is about to break out any second, the villain wears a black hat, and now and again there is a raid by a bandit gang or Indians, or whoever is the danger of the moment. There are fans who terrifically enjoy this sort of stuff, and people who with malice aforethought write to appeal to them … but I find the real ‘Old West’ to be just terrifically more interesting. Amazingly, nothing can be more dramatic, tragic, engaging, and interesting that what actually happened in various places and at various times.
For me, everything starts with a year and a place. What is the year that the story is set in, and where? That is key; everything else flows naturally from that. Those two elements dictate everything if I am to do a convincing take on my characters’ experience. As well as being a large place, the American frontier changed radically over the course of the 19th century – everything aspect of the story, from what houses would have been built from, to what the local industry would have been, to what sort of comforts and communications there might have drawn from the larger world, what people would have eaten, how they might have dressed, the books they would have read, how their children might have been taught, to what they talked about to each other — even the knick-knacks they might have had on the mantle-piece of their house. Or even if they had a mantel-piece at all, come right down to it.
I very much prefer to do my research in histories and contemporary documents — diaries, letters and accounts, even memoirs written decades after the fact will do in a pinch. Anything to get a sense of what my characters lives would have been like, how they would have felt about the events and people around them. It helps me enormously that I grew up reading books like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House’ series, where I think I first picked up an affinity for the 19th century — and also a joint affection for Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain, both of whom were unequalled as a model for writing 19th century dialogue. As much as one can judge from a century later, the two of them had a quick ear for the vernacular, on the way people really spoke, way back then.
When I am in the research-and-planning phase, though, I most particularly avoid anyone else’s fictional versions of what I plan to write about. A couple of reasons for this, but the most important is… I go by impulse. Something that I read will say to me — ‘this is fantastic, you have to include this!’ I don’t want to unconsciously copy some other writers’ take on a person or event. Should I have something in my writing, similar to something in another book, I would be clear and be assured in my own mind that it came from something that both of us had discovered independently. For visual inspiration, along with actually visiting the place that I am writing about, or depending upon memories of having visited there once, I depend on a number of books that I have, collections of appropriate-era art – things done by people who were there and did illustrations of what they saw. For instance, George Catlin is invaluable for sketches of native Indian peoples, for authentic pictures of mid-19th century personalities, none better than Matthew Brady… and so it goes. One of my reference bibles is an enormous compilation of costumes of various eras – not that I really spend all that much time describing how characters are dressed, but it helps to get a general idea of how my characters might have looked.
Another method of getting in touch with the past – is through local re-enactors and enthusiasts, many of whom are exacting to the point of mania in reconstructing the past. There is no better way of getting an idea of what people really wore, and the tools they worked with than with the guidance of someone who spends a great deal of time there anyway. The actual heft of a heavy six-shooter, the smell of black powder and the complications of harnessing a horse to a wagon… it all helps to make an excursion into the past so much more convincing.
My current project, “The Adelsverein Trilogy” is set in the realm of the classic ‘Western’ – Texas in the mid-19th century, before, during and after the Civil War. There are appearances by Texas Rangers, Indians and horse thieves, lots of cows and all sorts of other elements beloved by readers of the genre. But there are different elements; the pioneering settlers I write about are German immigrants, newly come and all at once, some of them aristocratic, many of them cultured, all of them bound and determined to make the most of themselves in coming to a bountiful new land. Almost at once they open schools, form singing-societies, and build mills and breweries … all in the middle of the howling wilderness. Can you imagine anything more dramatic and original than that?
Ssshhhh! Keep this a secret. I decided to make a couple of Limited Editions of my books that are great for kids.
The Seven Adventures of Cadida: This book for the 6-12 crowd will be coming out soon from Sam’s Dot Publishing. Since I hate waiting (a congenital disorder), I created my own version of this set of seven Aladdinesque tales of a girl and her recalcitrant genie. The SDP version is illustrated and will retail at about $11.00 plus $4.00 S/H. I don’t like that price, so I made my own. Send me an email, and I’ll send you a sample few pages in PDF format. If you’re interested, drop me a line and I’ll send you the book (100 pages) without illos (I don’t have the copyright) for a mere $7.00 plus $3.00 S/H.
The Witches of Galdorheim: This is even more secret and it’s a giveaway book. The 243-page volume contains the first two books in this series about a girl witch who has to find her mojo. She picks up a cute troll along the way. This is a FREE book because I have a royalty-free agreement with the illustrator for the front cover pic. But I’m not made of money, so I’ll take a donation to pay for shipping, handling, and karma. The books cost me about $10 to produce and shipping/handling is about $3.00. What do you say? Want a great kids’ fantasy book? Send me an email and let’s talk.
I should have copies to mail out by December 10th.
[marva's email removed by admin so she doesn't get spammed. We'll provide a contact form here for people who want to contact her.]
Marva Dasef
Texas Boy Publications
Be sure to comment with your Christmas gift books with the info needed for people to buy.
In the annals of the US Army, are recorded many strange and eccentric schemes and scathingly brilliant notions, but none of them quite equals the notion of a Camel Corps for sheer daft logic. It was the sort of idea which a clever “think outside the box” young officer would come up with, contemplating the millions of square miles of desolation occasionally interrupted by lonely outposts of settlements, stage stations and fortified trading posts which the United States had acquired following on the Mexican War in the mid 1840s. The country was dry, harsh, desolate… logically, what better animal to use than one which had already been used for thousands of years in just such conditions elsewhere?
The notion of using camels in the American southwest may have occurred to others, but it was one 2nd Lt. George Crossman who first raised a perfectly serious proposal for their use. One senses initially that the notion had people falling about laughing at the off-beat nuttiness of it all, and then slapping themselves on the forehead with a strange gleam in their eyes and saying, “By George, it’s a crazy idea… but it just might work!”
Crossman and other military men kicked the idea around for a couple of years; it had the backing of a senator from Mississippi, who sat on the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, and was in the position to advocate in favor of an experimental use of camels by the US Army. The senator also thought “outside the box” although it would not be clear for another ten years how far outside the box he would eventually go. But Jefferson Davis was not in a position to make a study of camels, US Army for the use of (experimental) happen until he became Secretary of War in 1852. Within three years, Congress appropriated $30,000 for the purpose, and a designated ship set sail for the Mediterranean, carrying one Major Henry Wayne who had been personally charged by Secretary of War Davis with procuring camels. After a couple of false starts, a selection of 33 likely camels were purchased in Egypt. Wayne had also hired five camel drovers to care for them on the return voyage and to educate the Army personnel on the care and feeding of said camels.
The camels arrived at the port of Indianola on the Texas Gulf Coast with one more than they started with, since one of them was a pregnant female; a rather promising beginning to a project so close to Secretary Davis’ heart. The herd was removed to Camp Verde, sixty miles west of San Antonio by easy stages from Indianola, where they were eventually joined by a second shipment later that year. At a stopover in Victoria, the camels were clipped and a local woman spun yarn from the clippings and knitted a pair of socks for the President of the US out of them. Once at Camp Verde they mostly transported supplies and amused and impressed skeptics by carrying four times what a single mule bear, without visible effort. (But a lot of grumbling.) They were also used for an expedition to the Big Bend. Late in 1857, Edward F. Beale, explorer and adventurer, friend of Kit Carson and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California and Nevada took a contingent of camels on a long scout to explore the southwest along the 35th parallel, all through the vast deserts between New Mexico and California. Beale took twenty-five camels and two of the drovers, who were nicknamed Greek George, and Hi Jolly. The camels performed heroically all the way to California with Beale, and were used for a time to transport supplies from Fort. Tejon.
Alas for the demise of what looked like a brilliant solution; although it might have come to something eventually, but for the Civil War. Just about everyone who was a strong advocate for the use of camels suddenly had much greater problems to worry about than overcoming the resistance of Army muleteers and diverse other potential users. For the camels as draft animals were not readily biddable; they were even less cooperative than mules, which is saying a lot. They spat, nastily and accurately, stank to high heaven, and scared the living daylights out of horses and mules unaccustomed themselves to their presence, and generally did not endear themselves to most of the men who had to work with them. The California herd, those of them which had not been allowed to wander away, was sold mostly to small enterprises and circuses . Those camels, or their descendents who escaped into the desert southwest were spotted for decades afterwards, well into the early 20th century. Beale even took a few of them to his own ranch; a sort of camel refuge as it were. The Texas herd was also sold off or left to wander the range near Camp Verde; although according to this source, one of them found its way into the possession of an Army officer who used it to carry the baggage of his entire company all during the war. The drover, Hi Jolly, eventually took a small herd of camels sold as surplus after the Civil War to the Arizona territory and used them to haul water for a time, before turning them loose. And so passed the end of an experiment, and the last of the US Army Camel Corps.
There is one small footnote to this; the story of the Red Ghost, which terrorized south-eastern Arizona Territory, for about ten years after 1883; a huge reddish camel… with the dead body of a man tied to its’ back. No one ever who he was, or how he came to be secured to the back of a camel, with knots that he could not have tied himself.
The story of the Camel Corps on the Western frontier touches on my “Adelsverein Trilogy” only in an oblique way - in that the camels were landed at Indianola, the short-lived Queen City of the Texas Gulf Coast - and were a frequent sight around Camp Verde. Curiously, one of the camel drovers brought over from the Middle East later settled in Comfort as an all-around-handyman. Comfort is noted for two monuments - that of the free-thinkers… and of a monument to Unionist sympathizers on formerly Confederate soil.
Nancy Fulda proprietress of AnthologyBuilder.com thinks you might be. Executed as a straight forward website on the surface, AnthologyBuilder is in reality, an innovative concept that takes advantage of state of the art of print on demand technology, Web 2.0 user interfaces, and a huge pool of author talent. Seemingly, Nancy has found a way to keep popular reprints available, paper consumption to a minimum and get authors paid for their work.
The Deepening, in conjunction with roving reporter Bosley Gravel, was graciously granted a few minutes of Nancy’s time to get the details of this fascinating project.
BG: What can you tell us about the genesis of AnthologyBuilder and its goals, mission statement?
NF: AnthologyBuilder started as wishful thinking and a whimsical blog post *. I was frustrated because my friends were publishing in so many different magazines that I’d go broke trying to subscribe to them all, and joked that I wanted a build-your-own-anthology web site that let me pick and choose my own stories.
There was an overwhelmingly positive response to that post. Several people even contacted me and proposed business partnerships to get the site up and running. Most of the proposals fell through in the end, but by then I’d fallen in love with the project and decided to make it happen on my own.
The site opened for its first round of beta testing last December and currently hosts 674 stories and 313 cover images. I’m amazed at how supportive the creative community has been of the concept. At this point, we can’t afford to pay our artists and authors the kind of compensation they truly deserve, and yet they’ve chosen to entrust us with these fantastic stories and images anyway. For me, it’s a reaffirmation that we’ve got a truly innovative project here; something people are willing to go out on a limb for because they like the idea of it and believe it will work.
One of the driving concepts behind AnthologyBuilder is the idea of the customer as an editor. In the past, fiction readers have been at the mercy of the market; they could only buy the stories that happened to be in print at the time, and assembling a collection of their favorite stories often required the purchase of over a dozen anthologies and magazines.
I hope that AnthologyBuilder will change all that. As our library grows, I expect AnthologyBuilder to become a place where customers can come to assemble the anthology they’ve always wanted to buy but have never been able to find on the shelves at their local bookstore. A cat-lover could create an anthology of kitty mysteries, for example, and a retired doctor could assemble a collection of futuristic medical thrillers.
BG: Approximately how many hours a day goes into AnthologyBuilder?
NF: Heh. It depends on the day. In the beginning, I spent about three months working on the project full time, and it still sucks entire weeks out of my life on occasion. The rest of the time, I’d say I spend about 2-3 hours per day updating the web site, processing submissions, and doing quality checks on customer orders.
BG: What about staffing?
NF: Mostly, AnthologyBuilder is all me. I’ve got my husband handling negotiations with our printing companies, and I’ll be pulling in some extra editorial help in the not-too-distant future. But for now, the company is far too young to support a full-time staff.
BG: Have any big names (prize winning, etc) contributed to AnthologyBuilder?
NF: The list is actually quite long. We’ve got stories by best-selling author Eric Flint; Campbell Award winner and SFWA Secretary Mary Robinette Kowal; Campbell Award winner Jay Lake; British Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Pushcart award nominee Eugie Foster; and about a dozen winners of the Writers of the Future contest. We also have cover art by Hugo-award-winning artist Frank Wu.
Other names visitors to the site might recognize include Dave Freer, Cat Rambo, Tobias Buckell, Jim C. Hines, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Irene Radford, James Maxey, and Lawrence Schimel.
Oh yes, and our selection of public domain stories includes one written by President Abraham Lincoln.
BG: AnthologyBuilder appears to running custom software. Was it commissioned?
We tried to commission a web developer, but couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the project, so I ended up doing it myself. That was kind of fun, actually. It involved learning PHP, figuring out how to run a web server, interfacing with an online API, and juggling several random tasks that I never would have guessed come hand in hand with running a company.
BG: What is your hosting situation?
NF: We run off of a Linux server and use a fairly standard web hosting package with (theoretically) unlimited bandwidth.
BG: Currently there is no sponsored advertising on the site. Could you tell us a bit about your philosophy on third-party ads?
NF: I make a point of keeping advertising to a minimum on the site. I want visitors to feel comfortable and have fun putting together anthologies. They can’t do that with random advertisements flashing at them from five different directions. When I do run ads on the site, I make sure they’re low-key and relevant to the site’s content.
BG: What sort of things might be in AnthologyBuilder’s future?
NF: The first item of business is to finish the last few bug checks, move out of beta testing, and make our first big marketing push. We’ve been running very low-key so far, making sales primarily by word-of-mouth through the blogosphere, and I’m curious to see what kind of traffic the site might generate once we start actively looking for customers.
After that, the next planned expansion is the introduction of an Open Market where authors can upload their own stories and set their own prices–sort of like the e-Bay of the written word. This would be a secondary site, running separately from the more carefully moderated main site, and would be a bit of an experiment.
BG: Any plans to expand to podcast style stories?
No. Our site is centered around the concept of printed books. Podcasting doesn’t really fit into the scheme.
BG: Will AnthologyBuilder ever offer a paperless version?
NF: I doubt it. For one thing, the contract with our authors clearly specifies reprint rights and limits electronic display to a short preview only. Moving to a paperless version would require getting each author’s approval of the change.
Secondly, I don’t feel it would add much to the site. There are already plenty of places where you can get electronic stories. The whole point of AnthologyBuilder is that you can hold the stories in your hand and stash them on your bookshelf.
BG: Any plans to expand to the world of ‘first rights’?
Only in the sense that authors could choose to put unpublished stories in the Open Market. I’d advise authors against doing that, though. Sell the story somewhere else first. You can always put it on AnthologyBuilder later.
BG: How about on staff copy editors?
NF: Yup. That’s a definite possibility.
BG: Have there been any legal problems?
Well, I have nightmares about all the ways someone could potentially abuse the site, but so far no one has tried.
BG: Tell us about the physical characteristics of the actual book:
NF: The books we print are 6 x 9 inch Trade Paperbacks. That means they’re about the size of a hardcover novel, but with a glossy paper binding. They look about like this, except with a title and cover art of your own choice.
One of the coolest things about AnthologyBuilder, in my opinion, is that you can choose your own cover art for each book, and we’ve got a truly astounding selection. From Carolyn Yoachim’s photographic genius to the fantastical renditions of Dean Spencer and Jonathan Rollins, there’s something here for everyone.
So far, our customers seem very pleased with the books and the quality of the stories. I intend to keep it that way.
BG: What are your favorite anthologies?
NF: Looking over my bookshelf, I’d say three of my favorites are Tales of Knights and Roses, When My Job’s Done, and the Villa Diodati Sampler.
BG: How many books printed this far?
NF: Sorry, that one’s confidential 
Clearly, with dozens of pre-edited anthologies, and hundreds of top notch stories to chose from when you build your own, there is something for everyone at AnthologyBuilder.com. Go build your own personalized anthology today! And don’t forget your gift cards for all your friends and family.
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Nancy Fulda’s fiction has appeared in venues including Jim Baen’s Universe, Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, and Norilana Books’ Warrior, Wisewoman anthology. She is a Phobos Award recipient, a two-time WOTF Finalist, and an assistant editor at Jim Baen’s Universe.
Nancy keeps a blog at http://nancyfulda.livejournal.com. She lives in Germany with her husband, their two children, and no cats.
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Bosley Gravel lives in a constant state of breaking the fourth wall, he is currently working on slipstream detective novella featuring evil incarnate. He writes in various genres and interested in all things fictitious.
Developing a website devoted to reintroducing folks to the joys of reading fiction takes thought. But why do it?
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