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Month: February 2021

Review: The Drowning Land, by David M. Donachie

Review: The Drowning Land, by David M. Donachie

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The Drowning Land by David M. Donachie

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

The Drowning Land is a piece of prehistorical fiction, set in northern Europe a little over eight thousand years ago. It’s an adventure story, a romance, and a disaster novel all rolled into one, set in a land that literally sank beneath the sea in the distant past. The result is an interesting and entertaining read.

This review is based on an advance review copy (ARC) shared with me by the author. The final published version may differ slightly from what I’ve read.

Edan is a young member of a Mesolithic tribe, dark-skinned and blue-eyed people, who live in what he thinks of as “the Summer Lands.” Edan’s tribe have lived there from time out of mind, migrating between the coast and the highlands every year in response to the seasons. Their lives are driven by ancient tradition, but they may soon be faced with a crisis that tradition will never help them solve. For the Summer Lands are sinking beneath the waters of the sea, and many are afraid they will soon vanish altogether.

This isn’t a piece of fantasy. The Summer Lands are, in fact, Doggerland – a region that once acted as a land bridge, connecting the British Isles to the continent of Europe. At one time, Doggerland may have been one of the richest countries inhabited by human beings. Yet as the climate shifted following the end of the last Ice Age, Doggerland was eventually submerged beneath the North Sea. Today, its remnants form the “Dogger Bank,” an underwater feature off the eastern shores of Britain.

At the beginning of the story, Edan and his tribe are already struggling to survive. Not only is the once-rich country being slowly poisoned by rising salt water, but other tribes are responding to the crisis by becoming fierce and aggressive. Edan’s people meet one such group, a band of renegades who have taken predatory wolves as their totem, led by a war-chieftain named Phelan. At first, the contact promises to be peaceful, but when Edan rescues a young woman from the other band and accidentally kills one of Phelan’s followers, the consequences are severe.

Edan and the young woman, Tara, are forced to flee together for their lives. Tara, it turns out, is a “troll,” not quite what Edan’s people would recognize as human. In fact, she is from a tribe that has significant Neanderthal ancestry. She is also a visionary, cursed with foreknowledge that the Summer Lands will be drowned within months, on a quest to see if the spirit world can be roused to prevent the disaster.

What follows is a small odyssey, as Edan and Tara travel from one end of the Summer Lands to the other, fleeing from Phelan’s people and the rising seas, visiting other tribes, and seeking a solution to the imminent end of their world. Along the way they both grow and change, and they fall in love. Their fate, and the fate of the entire Summer Lands, is bound up in the rest of the story.

Once I got past the first few chapters of The Drowning Land – which felt a little slow of pace – I found it a compelling story. Edan and Tara are sympathetic characters, and even villains like Phelan have depth to them. As a piece of historical fiction, the story is very thoroughly researched and plausible; Mr. Donachie has certainly done his homework. I was rather reminded of some of Jean Auel’s work.

The story shifts viewpoints with each new chapter, a technique I don’t always appreciate, although Mr. Donachie does take care to label each chapter so that the reader won’t be confused. The prose was also not quite as clean as I usually want to see, with a few typos, and occasional mis-paragraphing during dialogue. None of this rose above the level of a minor distraction, nor did it pull me out of the story.

On the whole, The Drowning Land should work well for anyone who’s interested in historical fantasy, or tales of human survival under punishing circumstances. Recommended.

Status Report (25 February 2021)

Status Report (25 February 2021)

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The last few weeks have been a bit of a ride, so I have a few updates for everyone.

First, for some time now I’ve been dealing with some minor medical issues, and that seems to have come to a head in the month of February. Nothing life-threatening, by any means, but it was kind of hard on my productivity. Chronic headaches, lethargy, inability to focus or keep on task well into each day. I was having a hard time keeping up with work for my day job, much less my creative projects.

It turns out that my treatment regimen for type-2 diabetes has been throwing me for a loop.

Ironically, my lifestyle has been a lot healthier ever since the COVID-19 pandemic crashed down on us. I’m getting more exercise, my diet is much better, I’ve lost a significant amount of weight, and so on. However, until recently I hadn’t adjusted my medication routine to fit, and it’s looking as if my blood sugar was becoming chronically low in the mornings. Again, not low enough to be a serious threat, but more than low enough to account for the difficulties I was having.

The good news is that this is all correctable. Now that I understand the problem, I’m adjusting my treatment regimen, within parameters approved by my physician, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to recover my mornings.

The bad news is that working on this has taken up most of the month of February, with the result that I haven’t hit several of my goals, and probably won’t before the end of the month.

As a result, there will be no charged release or bonus release for my patrons this month. I also don’t think there will be any updates to Architect of Worlds or the Human Destiny draft sourcebook until sometime in March.

That having been said, here’s a summary of the creative projects I have under way at the moment, roughly in order of priority:

  • Book reviews, still at the rate of one or two a month.
  • An update for Architect of Worlds, revising some of the existing material and possibly adding a new section (on the subject of “using real-world astronomical data”).
  • Further progress on The Sunlit Lands, the second book in the Krava’s Legend series.
  • An update for the Human Destiny draft sourcebook, with some new material.
  • Development for a new book-length project, building “A Fire in Winter” out into a novel-length collection of short stories. More about that in an upcoming post.
  • Re-evaluation of The Master’s Oath, with an eye toward giving it an extensive rewrite and preparing it for eventual publication.

I’m also starting to think about how to improve my strategy for publishing and promoting my work. Sales of The Curse of Steel have been kind of disappointing – after an initial surge when the book was published, they’ve faded down to essentially zero since the new year. I’ve tried a few things to promote the book, with very ambiguous results. In the meantime, I’ve gotten hooked into one or two communities of self-published authors, and have been learning a lot about ways to improve presentation and promotion.

Within the next few months, I’m likely to have another book to publish, even if that isn’t The Sunlit Lands. I’m going to take that opportunity to prepare and apply a more aggressive publication strategy. If that works, I may go back and re-launch The Curse of Steel, using some of what I’ve learned. This is a long-term investment, but with luck, it will pay off.

Rehabilitating “The Master’s Oath”

Rehabilitating “The Master’s Oath”

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Thinking about the “new project” I mentioned in my last post, I’ve gone back to re-read the final complete draft of The Master’s Oath.

I usually describe The Master’s Oath as my “first complete, mature, original novel.”

I specify it that way because it wasn’t the first novel I ever wrote; that was a rather juvenile swords-and-sorcery piece that I produced when I was about twelve, and no, that one isn’t remotely salvageable. I also distinguish it from the next five novels I wrote, all of which were fan-fiction and therefore not fully original work. The Master’s Oath was entirely mine, written as an adult with all of my skills fully developed, and it was the first such novel I ever managed to finish.

It’s a novel about a White American man (or at least he thinks he’s American, at the start of the story). He’s a U.S. Army veteran who is recovering from serious wounds, suffered in action in the field. Since leaving the military, he has been living comfortably at home, but his existence has gone hollow: no life-partner, few social contacts, no occupation other than watching his investments tick over, no purpose.

One day, he discovers that he is not American in origin. In fact, he isn’t from our world at all. He comes from an alternate-history Earth, one in which things went differently starting in the twelfth century, and where Hermetic magic rather than technology is the foundation of civilization. He accepts an invitation to travel to this other world, where he is welcomed and elevated to the aristocracy. Naturally, this doesn’t work out well for him, but that’s where the story comes from.

The Master’s Oath is a fairly political novel, probably the most overtly political novel I’ve ever written. It’s about democracy as opposed to aristocracy, justice as opposed to elitism, knowledge that everyone can use as opposed to esoteric occult insight. It’s about a man coming to terms with his own inherited privilege and deciding to do something positive with it.

It is also – and this is where I realized how problematic the current draft of the story is – about race in America.

The alternate-historical kingdom where my protagonist ends up is geographically placed in the southeastern part of North America, and it’s temporally placed in the mid-19th century. It’s culturally French rather than English, but that doesn’t evade the central issue. It has all the same original sins as the real-world United States: imperialism, genocide, chattel slavery, and white supremacism.

As a White American author, I have to be really careful how I approach a story like this one. There’s the technical problem of writing with tropes that will alienate a big chunk of the potential audience if badly handled. There’s also the moral problem that arises from the possibility that I’m exploiting the historical experience of others for my own benefit.

So The Master’s Oath has been sitting in my limbo pile for years, and I’ve often said that it will never be published, that it isn’t actually publishable.

And yet, and yet . . . I poured a lot of myself into that story, a lot of the things I believe and that are important to me, more than most of my other fiction. It’s decently well written, with (in my humble opinion) an interesting protagonist, a neat action-adventure plot, and a ton of world-building detail. Going back and reading it now, I see some things I would rewrite if I wanted to take the time. Would that be enough to mitigate the technical and moral issues with the current draft?

It would be nice to have another full-length novel in my catalog, and this one would take much less work to release than writing a new one from scratch.

It’s a conundrum. I need to wrestle with it some more, and maybe seek out some fresh perspectives.

Notes for a New Project

Notes for a New Project

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Soon after I stopped spending most of my creative effort on work for the tabletop game industry, I started work on what would eventually become my first mature, original, and complete novel. Its title was The Master’s Oath, and it will never be published.

When I finished working for Steve Jackson Games, I still had a lot of that company’s influences in the back of my mind. In particular, a book Ken Hite had written for GURPS in 2001 (GURPS Cabal) made quite an impression on me. It was that book that made me aware of the Western esoteric traditions for the first time: kabbalah, Hermeticism, Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the Tarot, the Golden Dawn, that whole utterly snarled yet gorgeous ball of yarn. I studied esoterica for years afterward, building quite the library of relevant works, all of which are still in my possession.

Mind you, I’m not by any means a believer or a practitioner. The Western occult tradition was a false trail in our intellectual history, not something that has any pragmatic reality. I still find it useful as a source of creative inspiration. To this day, the attentive reader might notice little scraps of it in my fiction – alchemical or Tarot imagery, that kind of thing.

The Master’s Oath was one product of that period of my life. It was an alternate-history novel, a portal fantasy too, with Golden Dawn-style magic built into the plot. I worked on it from about 2008 through 2012, and that was a fierce and terrible struggle. I learned a lot about planning and writing long-form fiction, about world-building in the service of literary work, about a lot of things not to do. I don’t regret that time spent.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, The Master’s Oath is utterly unpublishable, a fact I only realized after I had congratulated myself on finally finishing my first mature original novel. I’m still proud of the research, the world-building, the quality of the prose in it. Unfortunately, it’s also a deeply problematic piece of work . . . not outright racist, as such, but thoroughly insensitive, with tropes built in that an American White male author really needs to be very careful about. Much more careful than I knew how to be at the time. Probably more careful than I have the skill for even today. So I’ve chalked The Master’s Oath up as part of the “million crappy words” that every novelist probably has to write before he can start making real progress.

Still. Nothing a writer ever learns is likely to go to waste forever. I still have all that esoterica lurking in the back of my head, along with everything I’ve learned as a Freemason, and whole reams of early-modern history.

Finally, I think I may have discovered a way to put all of it to use.

Imagine a world that diverges slightly from our own about the time of Elizabeth I, and becomes significantly different sometime in the early eighteenth century. A world where people like John Dee, Michael Maier, Robert Fludd, and Elias Ashmole were really on to something. A world where the Rosicrucian movement wasn’t just a weird historical joke.

A world in which different ideas and different historical currents might give rise to a different kind of modernity. A different kind of United States, in fact. Maybe even a better one.

As always, when I’m tinkering with alternate-historical ideas, my first impulse is to bring a few games to the tabletop out of my extensive library of historical simulations. For example:

Imperial Struggle is one of the most recent purchases in my library, a grand-strategic simulation of the conflict between Britain and France in the long eighteenth century. Its mechanics are deceptively simple, but the resulting gameplay is deep, rich, and nicely balanced – a great tool for developing alternate histories.

Here’s another one, ironically the very first historical simulation game I ever owned:

1776 is a much older game – my copy has been on my shelves for well over forty years now – but it’s a decent simulation of the American theater of a war that was fought across half the world, and ended with the formation of the United States. It’s nicely customizable too, easy to build alternate-historical scenarios for.

I can think of two or three other games I might be able to bring down and use, too. I have more than enough material to start building a timeline and a “bible” for stories set in this putative alternate reality.

As for the stories themselves? Well, “A Fire in Winter” fits nicely into the emerging structure. In fact, thinking about what else I could write to follow that story is probably what got my hindbrain working on this notion. I’m sure that as I start writing down and organizing all of this, more stories will suggest themselves.

None of which means I’m going to be setting aside other projects, to be sure. I still need to keep making progress with Architect of Worlds, the Human Destiny setting, and The Sunlit Lands. Still, I’ve been in a bit of a rut for the last few weeks, and my creative brain seems to work better when I can shift to a new project once in a while. This may be a promising candidate.