Setting: the Origin of Patterson Mills, New Hampshire

This one's an archival post. It first appeared here in January, 2012. 

It was inspired by a lecture given by historian David Stewart-Smith. While the town in the story is fictional, I tried to make it an accurate example of 18-century New Hampshire towns. Thanks, Walter Chamberlain, for your help with that.

This is rather personal for me, since it's basically a fictionalized version of my own ancestral history.

Those who have read "Pleased to Beat You" may recognize the name of the woman at the end of this piece.

In 1762, Patterson, New Hampshire, consisted of some ten houses clustered around a common pasture. The school hadn’t been built yet, and even the meetinghouse was nothing but a few sketches and a dream. Old Lady Abbot did have a store of sorts: her son made the trip to Boston every month, and she sold the goods from her house. It was one of the nicer houses, with a summer kitchen and a birthing room, and it was in the birthing room that she stored the goods until they were sold, both because it was warm there and some of the goods could be damaged by freezing, and because neither she nor her sons were likely to have a baby anytime soon.

The worst house in Patterson was definitely James Davenport’s, and it was also the oldest. It was a simple affair made of logs, with a thatched roof, no windows and a dirt floor. A stone chimney had been built to replace the original mud one, and now the chimney was the only sound part of the structure.

James’ grandfather had built the house with nothing but his two hands and an axe, in two weeks one fall on a settlement grant. He’d chosen a great spot on the river where boats could land safely, and when the house was finished he’d built a dock there. Nowadays the dock was rebuilt every year by the Abbots, because they needed it for business.

The house wasn’t as cold as one might think in the winters, since James and his wife Sarah had eight surviving children and the cabin was only about ten feet by twelve. But James worried every time the wind blew.

The problem wasn’t that he and his sons couldn’t build a new house. It was that there were houses on every side, and the old house was smack in the middle of its yard. There just wasn’t enough space left on any side to build a decent house--not and have room for a kitchen garden, and Sarah insisted that she couldn’t cook properly without a kitchen garden. They could knock the old one down first, and then start building after they’d cleared it away, but James didn’t like the idea of the little ones being without shelter during the building. This house was going to be a proper one that an Englishman could be proud of, and a house like that took a lot more than two weeks to build.

There were plenty of trees to cut down for lumber. He’d have to take them to the sawmill in Pennacook, of course: you had to have beams and posts and planks and boards for a proper house.

What he needed was a new piece of land. The old house was in a prime location; any of his neighbors would jump at the chance to take it in trade for any nice lot on the edge of the village.

So James Davenport rose early on a June morning in 1762. He dressed in deerskin breeches and moccasins, strapped on his knife, his musket and his powder pouch, grabbed his satchel and filled it with smoked venison, bread, cheese and wild strawberries. Then he kissed Sarah and the babies and went quietly out the door. He always kissed the babies: you never knew how long they’d be with you.

He headed into the forest on the north side of the village, the river to his right. Southward there was no soil for growing things, just gray granite ledge with a little grass and lichen on it. In a few spots there was enough soil for a blueberry bush to take hold, and the berrying was good there. But it was no place for a house. And westward was the bog.

Sarah would have preferred to build a wigwam instead of a house, and he had to admit that a wigwam would have been much more practical - warmer in the winter and less buggy in the summer, and easier to build, with no lumber to mill, no expensive imported hardware to buy. But luckily it was out of the question and he could have his beautiful English house. Then he could show off to Mr. Steade and his rich Boston friends that he, too, had a fine home. Or at least his children could show it off to Mr. Steade’s grandchildren; it might take a while to build.

The reason building a wigwam was completely out of the question, besides the fact that it wouldn’t win him any goodwill from Mr. Steade, was that it was now illegal - not just technically illegal, but very definitely, totally and impossibly illegal. The law had officially been passed some time ago, decreeing that the wigwams in the Colony settlements were to be demolished, and word of it had gotten to Patterson eventually. Of course most of the villagers pretended they hadn’t heard until an official messenger came from the royal Governor’s office, and then nobody could deny knowing anymore. Yet still those who lived in wigwams continued living in wigwams. They had already built their frame houses, as prescribed by a previous law, but that law just said that everybody had to have frame houses; it didn’t say they had to live in them. This time, with this law, the wigwams were banished altogether, and any still in existence were to be destroyed. But there were plenty of people who hadn’t gotten around to destroying then when a band of redcoats came and got rid of the wigwams for them. They threatened to burn the whole village, too, but James and Mrs. Abbot and Parson Merrick managed to calm them down and, by recruiting enough villagers to help pull the wigwams apart, they prevented any torching.

Sarah Davenport was a Pennacook, like James’ mother and most of the rest of the colonists’ wives. The Pennacook were an Abenaki people, and they took their name from the spot, south of Patterson on the Merrimack River, where there were a lumber mill and a village and, more importantly, waterfalls and sand banks.

But James owed a lot to Abijah Steade. The Steades had been, for three generations now, the patrons of Patterson in general, and of the Davenports in particular. They'd provided the capital to start the town and grow it, and bound themselves with the duty to send up “meate and sundrie provisions” if ever a disaster threatened to wipe out the entire village. In turn they received a tribute of furs and maple candy and birch beer, a monopoly on the sale of molasses and rum, and the right to name the Town. Or, more accurately, Abijah Steade’s father Elias had named the Town, and he had named it for his mother, Dorcas Millisante Patterson.

Abijah Steade, like any true gentleman, had time for leisure, and his favorite leisure pursuit was the astounding field of natural philosophy. Once when James had paid a visit to his patron at the grand house in Boston, Mr. Steade had proudly shown him a crude-looking homemade box hiding under a skirted table in a corner of his office. James had reached out immediately to open the box, but as soon as he'd touched it, he had jumped back with a yell. The box had bitten him. Well, not bitten exactly. It was really indescribable, what the box had done, but whatever it was, it was sudden and painful and thrilling and loud. It stopped your lungs from breathing and even your heart from beating, but only for an instant and then it left you alone, euphoric and quivering.

“What is it?” James had asked, when he could find the words to speak again.

“Electricity,” came the answer. “The box is lined with certain metals of high purity, and contains strong vinegar. The result makes a very nice parlor trick, don’t you agree?”

Abijah Steade and the legendary Abenaki Chief Passaconaway may have come from two different worlds, yet both performed wonders that seemed impossible. Some said that Satan’s power was behind these wonders, but James didn’t think so. How could such good things come from evil? Didn’t the Bible say that good fruit could only come from good trees? Mr. Steade was fond of saying that creation held many secrets, and marvelous works could be accomplished by any student determined to learn them. And that made sense. James’ own grandfather and everyone else from his boat would have died of starvation and exposure if the Indians hadn’t shown them the secrets of creation they needed to survive in these parts.

Speaking of surviving, it was a special dispensation of Providence that Patterson wasn’t on the Merrimack, because these days the French had been sweeping down the Champlain Valley and trekking across the territory of the Western Abenaki to raid villages all along the Merrimack and carry away captives to New France. The ransom for just one captive was beyond the means of ordinary people, even if they could have paid in goods. But the French insisted on coin. If the raiders ever did come up the Blackwater, James had firmly decided already, he would give his life in Patterson’s defense. If any of his family were taken, then without the means to get them back, his life would be meaningless anyway.

With an act of will, James turned his attention to happier subjects. He thought of his grandmother and his mother, who had taught him how to hunt, how to catch and preserve fish and how to build a wigwam. (The Davenports themselves didn’t have a wigwam, but they did help their neighbors build them.) They taught him the importance of washing sick people, although his grandfather used to laugh and quote his own grandmother, back in England: “With washing comes the malady. The Lord has ordained a protection about the body, and by washing the protection is removed.”

In the bigger river valleys, where there were ancient flood plains, they grew a lot of corn, and as a child James had gone with his mother to help his cousins plant the corn and to help them harvest it, and so he had learned that, too. Patterson bought a lot of corn from the corn-growing towns, mostly from Pennacook where vast fields of it grew in the flatness of the Merrimack plain, but they didn’t buy it with currency. Currency was a rare thing in the Colonies, and whether it was pounds or galleons or francs didn’t make much difference; it was Crown policy that coinage belonged at home and the Americans should be content with goods. So the people of Patterson set traps, and traded furs for the corn, and the furs doubtless continued down the Merrimack to the sea and ended up warming the soft white necks of fashionable ladies in England.

And of course in the spring everyone went to Sewalls Falls for the fish run, and the fish were so thick in the falls that all you had to do to catch them was to put a bucket in the water and pull it out. Everything teamed with life at the fish runs, with the water so full of fish and the land so full of people. You got to see all your cousins again, you caught up with friends you hadn’t seen since the last run and made new ones, you made business deals and marriage deals. He’d met his own Sarah there.

And then there were the swallows carved in the rocks. Pennacook, which in Abenaki meant Place of Falling Sands, was named for the place where the swallows lived. The sand bank swallows were the symbol of the Pennacook people, the symbol of the renewal of life in the spring, of the annual banishment of the death that came so easily in the leanness of March and April. Because in May, when the moon was right, the fish would run and the yearly famine would be over. And when the fish ran, the swallows were active in the sand banks; the swallows always announced the running of the fish.

James spent a fruitless morning tramping through the woods, looking at the land. He just didn’t like the lay of any of it. Maybe he should have crossed the river and looked to the east. Or maybe he was being too picky. He shrugged and trudged northward.

Finally, he found it. It was the perfect spot, great terrain for a house and barn, a garden and hay fields and pasture land. The view from where the front porch would be was simply gorgeous.

But what was he thinking? He was several miles from the village by now, and besides, the river here was impossible. He would need to bring the lumber up by boat from Pennacook and no boat would stand a chance in this mess of rocks and foam and roaring torrents. Maybe he’d just have to have it delivered at the village dock and drag it up here by oxen.

The good thing about all these stones was that at least he could probably cross the river now. He turned for one last glance at his house site, saying goodbye, then stepped out onto a rock at the edge of the river and took a careful, calculated leap onto its neighbor.

He didn’t leap again immediately. For a long moment he stood staring down at the rushing water, imagining the lumber boat and how it would fare if it happened to be there. No matter that it couldn’t be there, that there was no way to fit such a large object into the narrow chasm he had just crossed. The pure power of the water scared him, fascinated him, held him entranced.

And that’s when he realized. This really was the perfect spot, and the rapids here were part of the perfection. Pennacook and its mill were far away, and Patterson was growing. James and his sons would build a sawmill here.

He smiled and jumped back to shore and walked home. He arranged with the Abbots for some illegal shovels (all-metal ones, not just metal-clad, made by a man named Mr. Ames who dared defy the law that such products were to be made only in England) and diverted some of that rushing water into a mill race. He bought a minimum of lumber from the Pennacook mill just to get started, and milled the rest himself, along with his sons and a hired man, built the house and the barn and finished the mill.

Over time, a village grew up around James Davenport’s mill, and the people called it Patterson Mills. And now, more than two centuries later, Dean Davenport Massilon lived in Patterson Mills with his wife and daughter and three grandsons, in a big white house with five bedrooms and a summer kitchen, next door to the Heikls who lived in the house that went with the sawmill.

In 2005, Fred Strage and his wife bought a piece of property two miles down a dirt road and four miles by road from Patterson Center, and built a rustic house there.

It was a timber frame house, built largely from local materials, including as much as possible the very trees that had been cut down to make room for it. Fred didn’t finalize the design until he’d looked at the trees, and the living room especially was a masterpiece of posts and beams as continuous wholes, trunks and branches left as they’d grown with only the bark removed.

The house was very small, little more than a cabin, with a composting toilet and a high-efficiency wood stove with an afterburner for the smoke and a heat-powered fan to circulate the heat. It was very bright inside, and the electric lights were cleverly placed and well-reflected, and the hot-water supply ran in coils of copper pipe around the stovepipe, all to keep the electric usage to a minimum.

Downstairs were a sitting room and a bathroom, a bedroom and of course the kitchen. Besides the wood stove in the kitchen there was a gas range for summer use, converted for propane, and besides the standard faucets there was a hand pump at the sink. The hand pump drew a lot of comments and even some criticism, but to Fred and his wife it was important. It was one of the things that had really brought them together, in fact: the odd coincidence that they both wanted hand pumps in their kitchens.

Upstairs, under a sloping roof, was a pair of water tanks, one for hot and one for cold, and another hand pump over the cold one in case of power outage, and a loft with four built-in beds with drawers underneath and two little windows, one in each end, in the gables.

The only flaw, perhaps, was in the insulation. Only after the fact did Fred begin to learn about thermal bridging and the possibility, not only theoretical but brought to reality in actual houses, of insulating so well that even in the cold climate of Canada a house can stay warm with nothing but the incidental heat put off by the warmth of bodies and appliance motors. But as it was, the house needed quite a bit of heating, and with only the wood stove that made it hard to go anywhere for very long in the winter.

The house project, overall, was a huge success and Fred went on to design three more, each better at preserving heat than the last. The marriage, though, did not succeed, and in 2010 they were divorced. As usual the wife got the house, but in this case Fred didn’t mind. He was already working on a design for another one, and for this one he wouldn’t have to compromise with anyone.

The wife, of course, was a red-headed freelance translator by the name of Jade Massilon.

Luke Bellmason Interview, Part Two

Here is part two of M Joseph Murphy's interview with author Luke Bellmason:

You did the cover for Canterbury Tales yourself. It’s very impressive, a rarity for authors. Simple and yet instantly recognizable. Is there a difference, for you, between writing and creating visual art?

Thank you for saying so. I am so critical of my own work and it's almost impossible to judge yourself. I think there is link between all of the creative arts. music, painting and writing and it's aesthetics. It's such a difficult concept to grasp because it's entirely subjective. Two people might agree that something looks beautiful but ten others might not. Who is right? I know when I've done something that looks right image wise, but I can't explain how. I just look at it and say to myself "yes, that's right." When someone else agrees that's very pleasing. I only wish it were that easy with writing, I am never quite sure whether that's good or not. There's a lot less certainty.

I think I must have a visual sort of mind, I tend to visualize everything in the story before I ever write it down. The writing part is the last part, like the events have happened and the words are just the 'reporting' of those events. I did a two year course in visual communications about six years ago and, even though I can't draw that well and have never seriously considered working in the industry professionally, I learned how to present things professionally. How to 'sell' yourself and take a professional attitude to manage deadlines and such. It seems like something so simple now, but before going to college I would start projects and never finish them, or never plan them out to how I would complete them. I'm a lot more workman-like about my writing as a result of that and it's certainly come in very handy to know how to do typesetting and produce stuff for print and all that.

The other great thing I learned at college was to be experimental. You have to do something which will stand out. Everyone has access to Photoshop and computer imaging software these days but they are just tools. There's a great temptation to let the computer do all the work but then you'll simply end up with something which looks exactly like everyone else's.

At college, they would encourage us to go out and photograph 'textures' or to collect unusual objects, or do something else totally random. Then we'd have to incorporate these into our work. It made us think differently and come at things from another direction. I have certainly tried to apply this ethos to my writing.

Like the story I'm working on at the moment, which has the plot line of 'discovery'. The main character discovers something which ends up changing his life and leading him in turn to discover something fundamental about himself. I took the word 'discovery' as a theme and 'discovery' wrote the first draft instead of carefully outlining it like I normally would. The result was a different story to the one I would have written if I'd planned it, probably. I don't actually know this for certain of course. I would be inclined to say I learned 'to think outside of the box' if that phrase wasn't so hideously overused.

Describe your writing process? How often do you write and how long per session?

I write do a lot of my writing at work, in the truck or sitting in the driver's waiting room. I can easily clock up three or four hours of sitting-around-time a night. Having said that, I do have an iPad and waste a huge amount of that time on twitter, or watching TV shows and movies.

I recently set up a very convoluted system for making myself write, which involved writing a text adventure game. Check my blog for more details. It's completely crazy, and I know it's crazy, but it seems to be working. It goes back to what I said about being experimental. Nobody in their right mind would waste time creating a text adventure game to help them write a novel, but doing the obvious and the expected is only a sure route to creating something obvious and expected.

The first four tales took over four years to write, but it allowed me to develop a kind of production line system where I start out with a concept, themes and a plot then go on through drafts on to a final version.

Link: Kurt Vonnegut Explains Drama

So to begin with I draw up (with coloured lines and everything) an outline for each main character. If you've seen that video of Kurt Vonnegut explaining Cinderella and other classic tales, you'll get the idea. That outline forms the basis for the first draft, which is a really free-flowing exploration of all the ideas I've had for the story. I don't hold anything back, I just chuck everything in. Usually the story has been gestating for months and rolling around inside my head. I like it best when the first draft spills onto the screen in a couple of weeks.

Sorting out the mess of the first draft is the task of the second draft, which is where I try and figure out where the scenes are, and each scene has to advance the plot. This is vital with a short story where space is at a premium, but it also keeps the story moving along and I like to switch up locations a lot too, have contrasts between scenes so the mood changes and the reader gets a sense of following the character through their journey.

The third draft is where I edit down, make things clearer, try to cut out scenes which aren't necessary or merge scenes. It's great when you can double up things too, like having dialogue which doesn't just explain the plot, but also describes a character and maybe foreshadows or sets something up for later. The third draft really has to get the story ready for publication, with line-editing to cut down the word count as much as possible. Someone once told me to 'imagine the editor is charging you for each word'.

Then there's the final draft, where I do the last bit of proof-reading and checking for overused words, like 'just' or 'decide' or 'wonder', which I seem to use a hell of a lot!

I am the worst procrastinator in the world and will do anything to avoid writing, but with this new system I'm hoping plan out my time much more carefully and get the next volume out in a year.

The ideal amount of time I've found for writing is about 90 minutes. You have to decide to make those 90 minutes sacred, keep away from Twitter and the internet. Even so, for the first half an hour is just messing about, getting the brain warmed up. Then I'll hopefully be in the zone for a good hour, before I stop. I stop at the end of the time, even unless things are going really well, because I'll go off the boil and stop producing anything any good.

One of the things I like to do at the end of a session like this as well is to set up the thing I'm going to be doing in the next session. Write the first few lines of the next scene or a few lines of dialogue. So I'm not coming to the work completely cold next time.

What do you think is your weak point as a writer? Or, to say that another way, describe something about your writing you would like to improve.

I often worry about my characters and whether they're all the same, or whether they're all just versions of me. I enjoy writing dialogue but it's so hard to get into a character if you're not sympathetic with them or if they're supposed to be the 'bad guy'.

My main gripe though is my lack of output, the procrastination that I mentioned. But then again, I would not be too unhappy to have written only one or two good books by the time I leave this rock by one means or another.

I used to read a lot of books on writing and listen to writing podcasts and go to writing workshops, but in the end I think you can overdo it. One tends to end up with analysis paralysis, where you end up doing nothing because you think everything you're writing is bad. There's a sort of bad writing hypochondria where you recognise every example of bad writing and think 'yes, I do that.' You can easily convince yourself you're writing is shockingly bad and that has the effect of stopping you from writing, which is the opposite of what you should do of course, which is write more and more until you get better.

Or, you could do what I do and just have your story told by a narrator and then blame all the bad writing on him.

Lastly, how many volumes are planned for Canterbury Tales? Have you thought about what you’d like to write after the series is finished?

There will be two more volumes of the tales to come, making up the total of twelve tales. Volume 2 should be out next year, with volume 3 following in 2015. Then I'll probably collect the three volumes together into one book, and I'm thinking that maybe I should add some new stuff for that version.

There could be an infinite number of follow ups, but I'm a big fan of ending things before they go stale. Leave your audience wanting more and all that.

The book after was planned so long ago, well before the Canterbury Tales were even conceived. But it's going to be a better book for the fact that I have honed my story-telling skills on this project first. I'm really aware of learning all I can from this project to build up to writing the next one.

It will also be based on video-games and the culture that surrounds them. It'll have two levels going on, a little like the Canterbury Tales has; firstly the group of players in an online game and also the events and characters they play in the game itself. It will also tie in with what I said about online games and the character's stories emerging from the players themselves, rather than having pre-written and scripted things in the game.

I'd love to explore the iteration between the players and their characters in a system which could potentially generate and manage an entire fictional universe drawn from all the world's literature and culture on the internet. A sort of automated AI storytelling machine which injects new stuff into a video game all the time. Such a game would be endlessly playable (not to mention highly addictive.)

Luke Bellmason Interview, Part One

Here's part one of M Joseph Murphy's interview with Luke Bellmason:

I met Luke Bellmason through our mutual friend Jae Blakney. She posted the preface to Canterbury Tales on her blog. I was immediately impressed by the quality of writing. Thankfully, Luke and I have talked several times and he recently agreed to an in-depth interview. Here is Part 1.

  

In your preface you discuss the process of coming up with Canterbury Tales. I think it’s a valuable story for young writers. Did you have someone give you helpful advice when you started writing? If so, who was it and what did they say?

I can't think of any one person who gave me advice when I started writing because I don't think I told anybody I was doing it! I was one of those writers who was scared to show my work to anyone because they might not like it. I am still like that and I imagine it's a natural thing not to want to hear criticism but I didn't even give my work to my friends to read.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to join a writing group and it covered everything you needed to know from fiction, to writing articles, to how newspaper stories are written, to poetry, to romance, to short stories to novels. I can remember reading out a story I'd written for the first time to the group. It was a ghost story about a submarine and it was quite 'atmospheric'. I read it out to the class and it was the very first time anyone had heard my work. A woman at the front of the class said she had been 'transported away' to the place I was describing and she could see the rolling waves, the rain and the dripping walls. I think that was the moment I realised the power that writing could have. Unfortunately, I had neglected to give the story an ending so she said she was dying to know what happened next!

That was the one experience I'd say that made me realise that being an author gave you a tremendous power to create anything you wanted inside people's heads. After that I was hooked, and even though sometimes I feel like life would be a lot easier if I didn't have this little writing demon nagging at me day and night to "sit down and write", I know I'll never be able to give it up.

Once you become a writer, you can never look at the world the same way again. Wherever you go and whatever you do it gives you a purpose; you're an observer, you get to look at things and think about why they are the way they are, what they would be like if they were different.

One if the other major events in my early writing days was finding Douglas Adams. When I first saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on TV, the old 80s series, I realised that I was Ford Prefect. I'd always suspected that I wasn't originally from this planet, so the idea of being a researcher for some intergalactic guide book really appealed to me. That and the fact that Ford (like his creator) managed to be a writer without actually doing that much writing. For Ford (and Douglas) the experiencing of things was far more important than the writing about them bit.

Sorry, I seem to have drifted somewhat from the original question.

No. That’s a perfect answer. In your introduction you mention a video game called Elite. Have you tried replaying it recently?

Yes, I did play a game called 'Oolite' a few years ago, which is a freeware version of Elite for the Mac. It's been updated and expanded quite a bit and has a great modding community, but it has a mode which lets you play it as the original Elite. What you tend to forget is how boring it was! Compared to modern games, there's really very little going on, so much of the game is in your own imagination. That's also the key to good writing I think. The more you cram into someone's head, the less work the reader, or the player, has to do which means they're less engaged.

I often wonder if playing Elite had an influence on my choice of career because I ended up as a truck driver! I even started learning to fly a helicopter about two years ago and there's a lot of that piloting, trucking kind of vibe going on in the my stories. A lot of the stories involve sitting trapped inside a box, and yet being free to roam the galaxy.

Are you aware that Elite has a sequel coming out (Elite: Dangerous). If so, do you plan on playing it?

Yes! In fact I found out about Elite: Dangerous from Twitter and I saw the Kickstarter page the day after it ended. There was an option on there to buy the rights to publish an official Elite book, but I just missed out! So I could have quite easily made 'The Canterbury Tales' into an Elite book, and it would have been nice to have been part of the big launch next year when the game and all the other books come out. The publicity would have been handy too. In another way though I'm glad I missed the deadline because a) I need the money for flying and b) this way I get total creative control.

From what I read the new game is everything we've been waiting for all these years. I played the original Elite sequel, Frontiers, but found it totally unplayable. They had given it realistic physics and made an astronomically accurate galaxy and solar systems, which was incredibly impressive in its own way, but it totally ruined space combat. The speed of everything was all relative to the nearest planet or star and enemy ships would whip past you at thousands of miles per hour, then circle around and whip back again just as fast. You couldn't even hit them!

So I understand that this new Elite has gone in for more of a classic feel, with much more detailed planetary systems, economics and political systems, and everything is supposed to be tied in with one online persistent universe, so when a system decides to build a new station, it will affect the commodity prices for the construction materials in the surrounding systems and so on. Wars can cause humanitarian disasters which will put the food prices up, all kinds of complex interactions will be going on all the time.

What interests me about all of this is the law of 'unintended consequences' and what happens when you let real people loose on an open world. Emergent behaviour is certain to create new and fascinating things in the game which the designers hadn't anticipated. I love all of that. I played EVE Online for a bit and liked how the stories in the game came purely from the player interactions rather than being put there by the designers.

One of the stories I'm working on now for Volume 2, the Miner's Tale, is based on my brief experiences inEVE Online. If Elite: Dangerous can somehow mix the chaos of an online game with the structure of the old Elite, it will be awesome.

If I remember correctly, you’ve never actually read the original Canterbury Tales.  Do you plan on reading it now?

I fear that the original Canterbury Tales is totally impenetrable to anyone who hasn't studied the medieval period and knows how to read “olde English”. Plus the fact it's poetry. I read somewhere that it wasn't just one of the first books published, but one of the first published in English. At the time, books were in German, French or Latin, and the English people spoke was far removed from what we speak now, it really is another language. Remember also that not many people would have been able to read or write when the Canterbury Tales came out.

I suppose in a way, the world of medieval England is as far removed from us now as the world of starships, faster-than-light travel and aliens, so maybe there's a neat sort of parallel.

I did find an updated version of the Canterbury Tales translated into a more readable kind of English, the Percy Mackaye version if anyone wants to find it. I could see myself reading this at some point, though it's still quite hard going. I actually based the language of the 'story-teller' in my book on the kind of language used in this 19th century version.

LINK: Canterbury Tales Kindle Version Translation by Percy Mackaye

The main problem in understanding the book for me would be not knowing much about that time period. The church was a much more powerful force in people's lives and a few of the characters in the original stories are related to religion. In a way, it would be like reading a science-fiction story with all the exposition removed, which might be an interesting exercise.

History fascinates me and I never took much interest in it at school. One of the hardest things about history is forgetting everything that you know and trying to imagine what it was like for people at the time. It's so easy for us to look at major events, like world war two or the sinking of the titanic for example, and look at them with hindsight. People knew and believed different things in the past and that shaped their actions. It's one of the things that annoys me about 'steampunk'. It's lazy history; it doesn't bother to filter out the modern world, it simply assumes everything was the same then as it is now. All steampunk is basically the 'Flintstones' to me.

 Part Two of the Interview Will Be Posted Thursday

For My Review of Canterbury Tales: Click Here

Purchase Canterbury Tales Now on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

 
 

Survival for Fiction Writers

My first experiment in serial blogging is going so well that I've decided to start another series as well. This one will be about unconventional or 'forgotten' ways of living, and I hope it will be helpful for writers of post-apocalyptic, historical or fantasy fiction, or anyone whose characters are in the wilderness or very poor.

Photo: artprintimages.com

Some of the posts will cover very modern topics and probably not be of interest to historical fiction writers. Some will cover very old topics and may be of interest to nobody but historical fiction writers. Most will be somewhere in between.

Even if you don't write, you may enjoy this series because this topic is really about how to live a much more frugal and Earth-friendly lifestyle.

Here are some of the things I hope to talk about:

• How to get along without electricity
• How to cook and bake on a wood stove
• Edible wild herbs
• How to live without money
• Pest control without harmful chemicals
• How to get the most out of your food budget

The Goodwife from Under the Workbench

Here's a short story for all you lovers of fantasy:

“Don’t you know how to take inventory?” Lou was shouting--no, screaming, actually.

“Yes,” Abigail replied after taking a breath. She tried to use the voice her mother always used with Henry, the next-door neighbor with Alzheimer’s disease, when he had his episodes. “Yes, write the description and number, I rememb—“

“Then shut up and start doing it,” Lou bellowed, barging past her out the door and slamming it behind him.

She laughed, from the sudden release of tension, then laughed again when she heard herself laugh. “At least I’m not claustrophobic,” she said to herself.

Photo: Dipity.com

All she’d done was ask Lou if she could enter the data directly into a laptop instead of performing the extra step of using the paper form. She’d anticipated that maybe he’d say no: maybe the program wasn’t licensed for multiple PC’s or maybe he’d be worried that a laptop wasn’t tough enough to carry around to all the supply closets and risk having something fall on it. But she did think he’d be impressed that she’d suggested it. After all, it showed that she was trying to save him money on his labor budget. Wasn’t he always talking about being a team player, thinking proactively, and all of that?

“Oh, well,” she said, talking to herself again, and picked up the clipboard full of blank inventory forms. Three, six, seven, eight, ten…twelve tubs of laundry booster. With any luck she’d at least get an interview out of one of the dozen job applications she’d filled out yesterday.

Speaking of dozen, there were exactly twelve of these supply closets in the small college where she worked. Actually, calling it a college was a bit of a stretch. It was an unaccredited Institute that taught some halfway-decent drafting and geometry courses and let everything else slide. But it took up half a mill building, and had to be cleaned and maintained, and that was why Abigail spent her afternoons here, saving up money to go to a real college.

Right now, she was still a junior in high school, with about four months left in the year. She’d save money by going to a Community College for the first two years, and then, if she had enough money and her grades were good enough, she’d be able to transfer to a really good school. But at the very least, it would definitely be accredited.

She’d probably major in Women’s Studies. Those amazing stories of the Abolitionists and, later, the Suffragettes filled her with a kind of wonder she just couldn’t ignore. After graduation she’d work for the UN, or maybe a private foundation, helping women fight for their rights in countries where females weren’t so lucky as she was.

She finished the shelves by the door and turned the corner, counting items, shifting them around to make sure she didn’t miss anything, filling out the form. This particular set of shelves was built against one of the building’s original red brick walls.

She finished the top shelf of the first section, went on to the next, filled up a sheet of the form-paper and started another. By the time she’d finished the section and gone on to the top of the next one, she’d come to feel something close to affection for the rough, cool bricks. They marked progress: when she got to them she could move on.

But the bricks reminded her of something else, as well. These were old bricks. Their sides were chipped and bumpy, they were darkened by time and many of them were stained. Not that long ago, this whole mill yard - for that matter, the whole city and many more like it in the northeastern United States - had been a crumbling wreck, forgotten by an industry that had long since moved on to other parts of the world. But thanks to a huge effort to revive city economies, the mill buildings had been renovated, converted into offices and meeting-places, restaurants and gyms and apartments.

Like a lot of them in the area, this particular building had been a textile mill, a sweatshop where women and children had worked long hours in hazardous conditions for low wages. Yet in many ways it had been these very factories that had first empowered women. The great movements for abolition and suffrage owed their existence to the mill jobs - the mill jobs and the whaling industry, actually, but the whaling industry was another matter and she didn’t want to think about that.

This building had been a cotton mill, automating the making of cotton fabric, making clothing easier and cheaper to make, and nicer. No more sticking to homespun wool: now ordinary women from the labor-class could wear pretty calico dresses. And stick up their northern noses for managing to be prosperous and enlightened, running a thriving economy without owning slaves. Of course, the mills had bought their cotton from the southern plantations, creating the demand that had kept slavery going.
But behind the bottom shelf of the third section the wall wasn’t made of bricks, it was made of iron. “I think it’s some kind of clean-out door,” Abigail said to herself. “I wonder if the chimney it goes to is still there.” She was fascinated. Inventory forms bored the soul out of her; history thrilled her.

She dragged everything off the shelf onto the raw, gray-brown damaged hardwood floor (three five-gallon pails of floor stripper, four of floor finish and six one-gallon jugs of chlorine bleach) and tried the handle. It was sticky and she had to hit it with the back end of a screwdriver to get it to turn far enough. Then she stuck the screwdriver in the jamb and used her right hand to pry, while she pulled on the handle with her left. The door came open suddenly, with a screech that made her think of a bat.

The space behind the door was no chimney, at least not anymore. She’d figured she’d have to use a flashlight to explore back there, but a soft light shone through from the other side. She reached through and tested the floor with her left hand - cool red bricks, clean and solid - then crawled through. Above her were wooden boards: she seemed to be under a table. In front of her were more bricks, and beyond that, a large wicker basket and the edge of a brown curtain. Looks like an arts-and-crafts room, she thought. For about two seconds, that conclusion struck her as odd: she was pretty sure Alves Institute didn’t have an arts-and-crafts room. Then she decided this room must not belong to the Institute. There were lots of other companies renting office space in the building. She listened for half a minute and didn’t hear any voices. So if this was a classroom, she wasn’t interrupting a lecture. She crawled out from under the table and stood up.

She jumped. Ten feet away, directly in front of her eyes, was another pair of eyes, staring back at hers.

It was the curtain: that brown curtain hadn’t been a curtain at all; it had been a dress - a floor-length, full-skirted, long-sleeved, high-necked dress. Above the dress was a face, maybe in its sixties, framed by wisps of gray hair and practically smothered by a white bonnet. The lady must have been an actress, Abigail figured, and now she was trying on a costume.

“Who art thou?” demanded the face.

“Oh, I’m Abigail. Sorry, I…” Abigail let her words trail off.

“Thou what?”

“I’m sorry if I startled you. I found an old door and I wanted to see where it led to. I can see you’re busy. I’ll let you get back to your...” Her what, Abigail didn’t know. TV show? Play? She shot a quick glance around the room. It was full of things she’d never seen before, things she couldn’t begin to identify and would have had a hard time even describing, but none of them were TV cameras or lights or anything like that. Maybe she was practicing for a play…in costume, for some reason.

“Why didst thou hide under the workbench?” asked the woman.

“Oh, no, I - I wasn’t actually hiding in there,” Abigail explained. “I was in the Engineering Section supply closet taking inventory, and - “

“In-VENT-ory,” the woman interrupted.

“And I found this little door. It looked like an old chimney cleanout door, and I crawled through it, and here I am. Did you ever notice the little door in the wall under your workbench?”

“What wiltow now?”

Abigail had no idea what that meant.

“What wilt thou do, now that thou art here and I have seen thee?” the woman asked.

Photo: h33t.com

“Oh, take inventory, I guess.”

“In-VENT-ory.”

“I beg you pardon?”

“One should not beg for pardon until after one has mended one’s ways,” the woman scolded.

“I just meant, what did you say?”

“I said, in-VENT-ory.”

“What’s that?”

“Speak not in riddles, Goodwife,” the woman admonished.

“You keep on saying in-VENT-ory. What does that mean? What is in-VENT-ory?”

“Even a child knoweth that an inventory is the workshop of an inventor,” the woman replied. “Come, I tire of thy games.”

“So this,” said Abigail, waving both her arms to indicate the room, “is an in-VENT-ory?”

“'Tis plain to see. What wilt thou do now?”

Abigail shrugged. “Well, I have to take inventory.”

“’Tis plain, as well, that thou workest not alone; hast been sent,” said the woman.

“Tell me the name of him who sent thee.”

“Nobody sent me. I just wanted to see where the door went to,” she answered, “I work for the college, Alves Institute. I report to Lou Belden.”

“I know not of what you speak,” the woman replied. “But hear me: if thou wilt confess all, I shall not have thee cast into prison.”

“Into prison!” Abigail gasped.

“Yes, into prison. Now speak.”

“Um,” Abigail stammered, her mouth feeling suddenly dry, “I’ll tell you whatever you want. What do you want to know?”

“Tell me exactly how wastow instructed to perform thy task?”

Abigail wished the woman would talk normally, but she also supposed she herself wasn’t exactly in a position to be making demands. After all, the woman did, technically, have grounds to have her arrested for intrusion, or unauthorized entry, or whatever it was called.

“Well,” she said, “I usually start just to the left of the door, and I see what’s there, and I write it down. Like, you can see here on my paper, to the left of the door were twelve tubs of laundry booster, and beside that, there were two and a half cases of toilet paper, and so forth. So I go all the way around the room that way, writing everything down, and then if there are things in the middle of the room, I write them down, too, starting at one end and going to the other, going in a pattern so I don’t miss anything.”

“Thou writest the contents of the in-VENT-ory, and after, thou takest it?”

“I take what?” Abigail asked, shaking her head in a futile attempt to clear it.

“Art thou confounded,” the woman in the brown dress asked, “or wouldst thou deceive me?”

“Maybe I’m ‘confounded,’” Abigail replied, “because I certainly have no desire to deceive anybody. So this place isn’t part of Alves Institute?”

The woman shook her head. “I know naught of this Institute.”

“Are you guys looking for help?” Abigail asked. “I can type pretty fast, I’m a self-starter, reliable. I know pretty much all the common office software, and I’m a quick study.”

The woman looked sincerely confused, like Abigail had just rattled off a paragraph in a foreign language. But maybe, like her thees and thous, that was just part of the act.

“I’m looking for a job,” Abigail tried again. “Do you need help here?”

“We want no help from thee,” the woman replied disdainfully. “But hark, the inventor cometh.”

The inventor was a short man with yellowy-white hair, a waistcoat and breeches and tights and buckle-shoes, and a kindly smile. “What is thy name?” he asked, peering at Abigail as though she were a koala who’d just appeared in a kitchen sink.

“Abigail, sir,” she answered.

“Oliver,” he replied.

“Hi, Oliver.”

Oliver darted a quick glance at the ceiling before focusing back on Abigail’s face. “Jonathan Oliver at your service,” he said, “and my wife Harriett.”

“Nice to meet both of you,” Abigail replied. “I didn’t mean to interrupt, though. I really should be getting back to work.”

“She hath an odd tongue,” Jonathan observed.

“Yea,” agreed his wife, “and boasteth of grand deeds without ceasing.”

“Me?” asked Abigail, trying to follow the conversation. “I boast of grand deeds?”

Harriett nodded. “Wouldst take this very inventory.”

“Ah,” the inventor replied merrily, “art a knight, then?”

Abigail didn’t answer.

Jonathan’s face grew serious. “Methinks,” he said slowly to his wife, “she hath been taken by a fever, or perhaps by a sadness beyond bearing. She continually spouteth nonsense, and moreover goeth about beyond the walls of her own home clad in naught but undergarments. Let the boy fetch her husband, and perhaps after this, the Doctor.” To Abigail he said, “Who is thine husband, Goodwife?”

“My husband?” Abigail replied, looking at Jonathan the same way he’d been looking at her, like he was the crazy one. “I don’t have a husband. And I don’t have a fever, either, and I’m not crazy.”

“No husband yet?” said Harriett, looking surprised.

Jonathan shook his head. “Art of age to be married. Hast reached, I’ll warrant, fifteen years or perhaps more.”

“I’m seventeen,” said Abigail.

It took a moment for the Olivers to adjust to that news. At first, both of them shifted their weight from foot to foot and fidgeted with their hands, as though they were looking for something to do. Finally, Harriett said in the kindest tone Abigail had heard from her yet, “Fret not. Another life awaits thee than that of marriage and motherhood, in every aspect different, yet wholly as noble.” In spite of her words, though, she still looked embarrassed.

Jonathan said gently, “Art fallen ill. Let us fetch thy mother.”

“Thanks,” Abigail replied, “but I really should just be getting back to work. I feel fine, really, and I think my break must be over by now.”

“As thou wilt,” answered Harriett, “but suffer us to help thee.”

“All I have to do is go back through the little door under the workbench,” said Abigail. “I left it open. On the other side of that wall is the Engineering Section supply closet, and that’s where I need to be.”

Photo: StLouisCNR.com

The Olivers both shook their heads. Even Harriett had lost all her sternness now; she just looked sad, and so did her husband. “Thou’lt find no door in yonder wall,” he said, “whether under the workbench or no.”

Abigail turned around and knelt on the bricks, then crawled back under the workbench, careful not to hit her head. And there, in front of her, was a wall of red bricks, their sides chipped and bumpy, their color a bright, young rusty-orange red, with no stains, no signs of repair, and most importantly, no door or doorway or opening of any kind. She reached forward and put her hand in the middle of the spot where she’d crawled through the wall, half expecting the bricks to disappear and the gray metal shelf unit and pails of floor finish to appear on the other side. But they didn’t. They felt as real to her hand and as they looked to her eyes: cold and rough and solid.

Note: I answered a call from Chainbooks.com to write just the first chapters for several novels, and The Goodwife from Under the Workbench is one of them. If you'd like to contribute a chapter to Goodwife, or check out the other novels-in-progress at Chainbooks, click here.