In the mythical country of Borschland, newspapers carry a word puzzle that is as popular as a crossword puzzle in the United States. Try your hand at it!
Unscramble the sentence to make a grammatically correct Latin sentence. Translate the sentence accurately. The sentence may refer to an ancient story. If so, use your knowledge of the story to guide you to the correct translation.
Latin I: semper sub cum navem flumen terram navigabis trans spiritis
Latin II: Apollonis rapuerat bovibus rex nuntio de quae dixit deorum
Latin III and above: Gallis Romam arcis dicunt anseres collem servavisse ascendentibus poetae
Give your answer to one or more of the Jumbles in the comments. If you're the first one correct, you get a ticket in the upcoming Borschland National Sweepstakes with the chance to win a fortune in Borschic schillings (BS), redeemable as soon as your plane hits the ground in fabled Borschland.
BTW... If you don't know any Latin, putting the scrambled words in Google Translate might give you a fighting chance to figure it out, especially if you know a little mythology or history. But the scrambled nature of the puzzle means Google will be a bit misled.
Even better-- find someone online who knows Latin and ask him or her.
May the odds be ever with you, or, as we say in Borschland, Te Lot Zijn Soort!
When people find out that I am a Latin teacher as well as an
author, they usually react in one of two ways:
a) "You mean they still teach Latin? Amazing!"
b) "My Latin teacher gave it to me in the neck."
Fortunately, my own Latin teacher never gave it to me in the
neck, which is why I stuck with it, and why I try in the
classroom to make Latin as fun as a dead language can be.
And it is also why Latin has now officially leaked into my
fiction.
My new short story, "The Sweepstakes Winner," probably contains
more Latin than 99.9 percent of all short stories ever published.
But it is an integral part of the story, about a young man
equally intent on winning the lottery as he is on marrying a
woman "above his station."
Gerd Trubelz wants to become rich, and his best chance, he feels,
is by playing the Borschland National Sweepstakes (BONAS for
short). That game is a conventional numbers-picking lottery, with
one twist: if you can solve a Latin translation puzzle correctly,
you can pick a bonus number.
Why Latin? Well, why not?
Actually, Latin is required of all Borschic schoolchildren, and
the Latin puzzle has become a way of getting a bit of fun out of
their studies. It sure beats corporal punishment. The puzzle has
in fact become about as popular as crossword puzzles here in the
US.
The puzzle is a jumble: a Latin sentence that must be
un-scrambled and translated correctly. For all you Latin geeks
out there, I include an easy one below:
terram sub trans semper navigabis flumen navem
The sentences of the Borschland jumble often refer to Borschic
wisdom and/or the lives of Borschic saints. The sentence in
"Sweepstakes Winner" is no exception. The sentence I give above
refers to a character in Greek mythology.
if you like such things, I will be posting a Latin Jumble
regularly on Twitter on my writing and publishing co-op's page
(@truenorthwrite).
If you know the answer to this one, feel free to comment.
Unscramble the sentence and name the character in Greek mythology
to which the sentence refers.
And if you do happen to purchase the story, let me know how you
liked it. It is on Smashwords to start, elsewhere as I have the
time and inclination.
Good luck with the Jumble, and remember the Latin motto of my
writers and publishers co-op: scribere quam scribere
videri: to write instead of just seeming to write.
I got my first library card in the third grade, at the desk of a gorgeous old pile of bricks on the corner of Hopkins Street and The Alameda in Berkeley, California. It was an ivy-twined Spanish Revival building that looked like the setting for a novel about kids who get lost in a library that's bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.
I got the card in 1970 and it said it would expire in 1972. Wow, my third-grade brain said. That seems like such a long way off.
I began to read what that library and my school library had to offer, and I will never forget the day I discovered baseball novels for kids.
Baseball has always been my favorite sport. Every game tells a story: who won, and how. And every baseball season tells a story. And every individual baseball player has a story.
Even just one at-bat tells a story.
And it turns out that in the 50's and 60's there was a minor industry of baseball novels for kids. I read as many as I could get my hands on. One of them, "The 1.000 Kid," told a story about a high-school ballplayer who had to make the choice between signing a contract to play minor league baseball or going to college. He manages to get a big-league team to give him a taste of the majors before he makes that decision. After a lot of adventure, he decides on college!
That was a twist ending for this aspiring major leaguer.
Duane Decker was my favorite author, and my favorite book was called "Rebel in Right Field." In this one, a talented young outfielder injures himself by running into the outfield wall trying to make a catch. As he recovers, he finds himself unable to play his normal game because of his fear of re-injuring himself at the wall. I was riveted by the hero's inner struggle to overcome his fear and become the player his talent promised he could be.
Reading for me led to writing, including baseball novels of my own, none of which I finished. "Skater in a Strange Land," which is about ice hockey, is the first sports-oriented novel I've ever completed.
Readers have been impressed with the realism or believability of the hockey in "Skater." "Where did you learn to describe hockey so well? Did you play?" And the answer is no, I never played ice hockey-- though I did play street hockey as a teenager.
I like to think that reading so many baseball novels as a kid trained me, along with all the other writerly skills I picked up along the way, to find the essence of the action in hockey and translate it into the written word.
I still want to write baseball novels, and maybe you'll see one come out one of these years. For now, the Borschland Hockey League is where it's at for me.
But thanks, Duane Decker, wherever you are. And thank you, public libraries everywhere.
"It's steampunk." "No, it isn't." "It's pretty steampunk." "No, it's not." "You have to admit, it has steampunk elements." "Well, it's not steampunk."
A discussion about my novel, Skater in a Strange Land, which can be categorized as "steampunk lite"?
No, an exchange with me and stepson, who is apparently a big genre purist, concerning the movie "Oz the Great and Powerful."
We hadn't seen the movie yet, but from the trailer it was clear that the time period (late nineteenth or early twentieth century) and period technology the movie did qualify as steampunk-y if nothing else.
But once I saw it, genre considerations took second place. Was it a good story?
I don't think so, and technology, I think, doesn't help.
"Oz the Great and Powerful" has a prominent 3D element. I am not a big fan of 3D. I saw "Up" in 3D, and it made my head hurt and added exactly nothing to the story. I would argue, in fact, that 3D takes away from the story by distracting you from the progress of the action.
Storytelling is about action, not effect.
Now I saw "Oz" in 2D by preference, so that I could concentrate on the story. It was still a spectacular feat of technology, but it felt like a feast that wasn't warranted, like having Easter dinner on Maundy Thursday.
Again, did the appearance of the movie contribute to the storytelling?
Not so much.
"Oz the Great and Powerful" concerns the "man behind the curtain" from the 1939 classic movie, "The Wizard of Oz." It asks the question, how did the wizard get to be who he was?
The movie starts with a black-and-white sequence in Kansas, like in "The Wizard of Oz." It also has a tornado that whisks you away to the fantasy world. And, as in the other movie, the whole screen is filled with brilliant color and effects after the fantasy world is entered.
What is that made this cinematic strategy so fun and story-appropriate in the original? Dorothy, the girl from Kansas, knows nothing but a very bland, boring, and yet menacing world. When she enters Oz, we feel her awe. She has truly come somewhere else and other.
James Franco, who plays the main character, Oscar Diggs ("Oz"), is a womanizing con man and sleight-of-hand magician. He himself is master of many special effects in the grayish Kansas he inhabits. When he enters the kingdom of Oz, his reaction is bemusement, but not wonder. He is too cynical to be amazed by the new world. And he cynically manipulates the first person he meets in Oz, the naive witch Theodora (Mila Kunis), who resembles very much the naive woman he manipulates while in Kansas.
3D does not help this type of story. You don't believe the world because the main character doesn't believe the world. One strike against.
As the story progresses, the audience is asked to believe that Oz, this charlatan, is going somehow to save the world that coincidentally has the same name as he. In fact, we are asked to believe that three powerful and intelligent witches (Kunis ends up being quite formidable) somehow need this man to unite the kingdom. The more power they show (and the more the technology shows them using it), the less we believe that Oz is the man for the job of CEO.
Talk about a glass ceiling.
One part of the movie does ring true for me. When Oz and his sidekick, talking monkey Finley (Zach Braff), enter "China Town," a village made up of porcelain houses and porcelain people, he uses common glue to heal the broken legs of the best character in the movie, the China Girl (Joey King). Her reaction of wonder to technology we take for granted is magical. And the special effect of her walking after being healed is affecting. That was worthy of an ooh and an ahh.
L. Frank Baum wrote a whole slew of beloved Oz books, with a bunch of strange technology (including visions of robots, television, and laptop computers), and in a world full of wonder.
This movie really made me want to go back and read those books, and use my imagination to create the special effects.
If you are a member of goodreads.com and interested in a chance at a free (personally inscribed) copy of Skater in a Strange Land, get on over to the Giveaways page and search. The Giveaway ends on March 11, and there are two books available, so you double your chances.
In other news:
The sequel to Skater in a Strange Land is titled "The Skater and the Saint"; I'm going to be doing the main drafting and revising over the summer, but I am pleased to announce the book is about a third there, almost 24,000 words.
Coming soon: in Borschland there is something called the Borschland National Sweepstakes, or BONAS, which is keyed to a daily puzzle in Latin that you need to solve. I'll be starting that on this blog with fabulous (or sorta fabulous) prizes available.
One of the things I would love everyone to have is a map of Borschland and the Continent on which it lies. I'm working on that and will be making it available soon.
As always, if you have any questions about Borschland, the Borschland Hockey Chronicles, or for me as an author, don't hesitate to contact me at teenage underscore heroes at sign yahoo dot com.
On NPR this morning, much speculation about the subject of the letter that the "Woman in Blue" is reading in Vermeer's famous painting.
The beloved, who is a painter herself, harumphed and said, "I'm sure Vermeer was concerned more with the color of the dress than with the subject of the letter. It was probably his wife reading a receipt."
I went to the NPR site to have a look, and they have a lovely, large .jpg of it that you can click twice and make bigger.
What caught my eye was not the woman so much as the background-- a mysterious map painted on the wall.
I am big on maps and created Borschland first as a place and without any of the people in mind. The ice hockey and the Dutch culture came after.
You can read about the origin of my love of maps here. But what was this particular map depicting? It's blue and beige and from a distance hard to tell.
I went to the handy-dandy Internet and found out the map was of the Netherlands, which makes sense since Vermeer was Dutch. But I still couldn't place the picture as the Netherlands. It didn't look like the maps of the Netherlands I know, even framed off and magnified, as it is here:
(With humble thanks to the English students at the Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Spain, who write an impeccable report in impeccable English)
So off it was to another of the 21st century's best tools, a picture manipulation program. I blew up the photo of the map and saw the words NOVA ET ACCURATA HOLLANDIAE ET VESTPHALIAE TOPOGRAPHIA, which is Latin for "a new and accurate map of the Netherlands and Westphalia."
I also saw the words MARE GERMANICUM in part of the beige section of the map, and what looked like a bunch of ships. Then I realized, like a person who looks at a Rorschach test a second time, that the beige was water, and the blue was land. MARE GERMANICUM means "German Sea" and is an old name for the North Sea.
I rotated the picture with the manipulator program, and hey presto! the Netherlands was staring out at me.
Compare this with a contemporary map of the Netherlands:
What does this have to do with Skater in a Strange Land? Not much, at first, but follow me into the wilds of my imagination if you dare.
Vermeer painted in the 17th century, which is also the century when Borschland was discovered. It was an age of great exploration, and the Dutch were some of the most adventurous sailors out there, including a guy named Abel Tasman, who discovered the Australian island of Tasmania.
I imagined Tasman also discovered the mystery continent where Borschland is located while on his way to Australia, since the Continent is fairly close to Australia. In fact, I wrote a short story about Tasman and the two captains, Willem van Noos and Henrick Lojren van Borsch, whom he left behind to map the Continent. You can read the opening of that story here and buy the whole thing if you wish. If you've read this far, you can even ask for it from me for a gift. First three askers who comment (and send their email address to teenage underscore heroes atsign yahoo dot com) get it.
That short story will be helpful background reading for my next novel, The Skater and the Saint, which hopefully will be published around Thanksgiving of this year (2013).
I love that Vermeer included a map of the Netherlands in his painting, with all the tiny ships on it that indicate the Dutch commitment to expanding their horizons. Borschic folks have a little bit of that adventurous spirit still, which makes for a fun place in which to set adventurous stories.
So I have a few start-of-the-year suggestions for indie publishers:
1... Stop thinking of this as a gold rush. We are now in the new normal.
Image: Jack London, chronicler of the gold rush and successful writer
For writers and publishers like Smith, this line of reasoning rings true. He is a publishing veteran with dozens of novels under his belt. His publishing company, WMG Publishing, has equipment, employees, and tons of momentum.
But to continue with the gold rush metaphor for just a bit longer: Smith is no longer a solitary panner working a claim. He is an established mining concern with a big heap of placer behind his sluice box.
In that respect, for him to call indie publishing the new normal is the result of looking in the mirror. For him, the gold rush is over. Now he is simply running a business.
For the individual writer, however, indie publishing still resembles a gold rush. More and more writers are staking their claims in the literary fields, digging for a finite number of readers. Even to get to the fields to prospect, you need to have done a lot of work, and to have spent some money. Like a forty-niner who had to travel to California or a sourdough to the Klondike, the writer has to have a commitment, an investment, and infrastructure. You start off with a rapidly-dwindling stake that you're hoping to win back someday.
Also, as with the real gold rush, those who offer the services to writers-- instruction and coaching, editing, cover and interior art, publicists and promotion-- these are the folk, like the grocers and outfitters of long ago, who make the reliable money. The writers mostly make nothing.
(Smith, by the way, offers seminars on self-publishing and sells books on the subject. So he's not only a miner, he's also a dealer, vertically integrating his business. Smart man.)
Gold rush or not, the individual writer looking to succeed in publishing still needs to figure out what to do. Smith offers methods, and tons of useful information on his blog. But he focuses on the individual.
Here's something in which I'm currently investing: a writer's co-op.
A writer's co-op is more than one individual trying to struggle on his own, and less than a traditional publishing company that takes most of an author's rights and royalties. In the co-op, members buy in with an investment to a joint name, website, and mission. They
provide mutual support to each other as they write
offer to read and edit each other's stuff
promote the heck out of each author's published work
and whatever else they all agree to do. Based on their mission, they can keep individual proceeds, websites, and even publishing companies separate, or go all in together. They also can decide whether or not to add members or take on the bigger job of publishing from submissions. It's not a publisher-- it's a publishing co-op.
I do not know of any successful writer's co-ops yet, and I suspect the idea is still a new one for 95% of writers. But the idea makes sense to me, and I'm going with it.
I am the type of writer who works best when I know someone's already out there waiting for me to push that content out. And I don't yet have a bunch of readers waiting for the sequel to Skater in a Strange Land. So working with colleagues makes sense for me.
And it makes the endeavor a lot less like a gold rush, and more like a civilized endeavor. Something we should all hope for, even if you don't read this hair-raising Wikipedia article about the negative effects of the California gold rush. (Seems to me we're overdue for a high quality TV series with a more realistic view of this incredible time in history.)
One more thing from Smith that helps to drain the gold rush metaphor of its relevance: he claims that, unlike gold, readers are in huge, huge supply, especially internationally:
Exclusive, no matter in what form or for what reason, is your enemy in this new world and this new year. The world has become a place to sell in hundreds of different markets and forms. Distributors (both paper and electronic) will try to rope you into exclusive agreements. Don’t go for any of them. And don’t let a traditional publisher rope you into a contract that will force you to write only what they want when they want it. The phrase for 2013 should be “Spread Out.”
In other words, our claim is not a 6x6 square next to the Feather River up in the Sierra Nevada. It's the entire blessed world.
So take heart, you literary forty-niners. That mansion in San Francisco isn't as out of reach as it seems. You just have to work your tail(ings) off.
Big thanks to the Haddixes and Streetlight Graphics for doing the work on Skater's cover. I asked for a cover that had some Steampunk elements but would go light on corsets, blimps, and gears. The metal frame around the blue background really did the trick.
Then the classic buildings with snow in front gave a feel of Borschland in winter. The color palette of blue, white, and grey felt very right for this winter's tale. In fact, I was inspired by one of the covers of Mark Helprin's 1983 novel, Winter's Tale.
That novel, a fantasy about New York City at the turn of the 20th century, feels similar to Skater; so does John Crawley's Little Big. But both of these are more ambitious and classically literary. I am impatient both as an author and as a reader. I like my stories less sprawling.
Phil also asked what authors influence me today, and I regret not remembering to say Jack London. I'll have a post on that soon.
It was a great pleasure to talk to Phil and discuss the book with someone who liked it, and I got some substantial insight from him as a reader to an author.
Besides being an avid reader with a writer's podcast, Phil hosts a sports show and is a sports guy. He has a popular Internet radio talk show where his substantial sports knowledge is on display. Phil is also the owner of and resident professional at an American Tennis Academy in Corfu, Greece.
So it probably shouldn't have come as a surprise to me that Phil's favorite part of Skater was the characterization of Skater's hero, Sherm Reinhardt, and the description of the Borschland Hockey League games in which Sherm plays:
Skater in a Strange Land, apart from the talking bears, foxes, phase shifts and the like could actually be written about any average athlete with dreams of playing in the big time... Sherm leaving home to travel to Borschland in order to further his career is a journey many of us have taken and I felt a certain kinship with him... Frauenfelder was spot on with the vernacular of a pro hockey player and his description of the hockey games in Borschland made me feel like I was actually watching the game in real life.
Nevertheless, I was surprised, and I think I was surprised because all of the readers of the book to this point have focused on other things besides the hockey and the sports angle. My writing colleague Bob Mustin, for example, wrote in his review of Skater that "I think of hockey like I think of pro wrestling." In other words, not too highly.
I've had fantasy readers enjoy the book, and romance fans have something to cheer about as well. But Phil was the first reader who comes from a sports perspective.
So, I am reminded again that every reader comes to a story uniquely. And that good literature works as a mirror, helping readers to see themselves in another person's story. I hope that Skater is good enough that every reader will come away from the book with a sense that it spoke to them personally. Beyond that, like Sherm Reinhardt, I'm just happy to be in the game.
On NPR this morning, commentator Frank Deford laments that the entertainment industry is giving us only "sex, Justin Bieber and boxing" while ignoring an important part of our sports culture: hockey.
Deford laments: "But most important, right now, I wish the entertainment moguls would do a play or a film for the poor hockey fans who don't have an NHL season because the owners have locked out the players...I feel very sorry for ice hockey fans..."
Here's your story, Frank: Skater in a Strange Land. It's about ice hockey, talking bears, steampunk, romance. And there is a bit of fighting in it. Because that's part of hockey. But there isn't any boxing.
The Borschland Hockey Chronicles tells the story of a lost continent, an ice-hockey mad nation, Upright Bears, a young poetess, and the goal-scoring American who encounters all of them and changes himself and Borschland forever.
