Robert Treskillard's Blog — Epic tales reaching beyond the wisdom of the ages™

I wanted to point everyone who chances by here to check out the blog and music of someone I consider a friend, Edward Waters:

Rambles Of One Windborne - Bard Of The Grey Wind

He considers himself a Christian Bard, and he just wrote a post about hearing God amidst the din of the world. This can be found here at God Will Seldom Shout.

Edward is a poet, singer-songwriter, essayist, aphorist, and tutor in Biblical studies. His main website can be found at Edward Waters—Bard of the Grey Wind. There you will find his poetry, free downloads of his music, essays, and wisdom.

All highly recommended!

Y Gododdin

Those French Academics! What gall to point out that King Arthur wasn’t English! I can just see the French snearing down at King Arthur from their castle as he clip-clops by with a coconut-shell laden adviser.

You can read the news article here.

At least they didn’t claim he was French. Now that would have been audacious!

So what nationality was King Arthur? This question has been given many answers over the years, with some even thinking far out thoughts that the legend is from the Samartians!

From my own study of the issues, I certainly don’t think he was English in the sense that he was Anglo-Saxon. These were the people he was repelling.

So was he Celtic? My answer is yes.

But from where is the question. As the Celtic peoples were pushed toward the margins of Britain, they were not thought of as “Cornish", “Welsh", or “Scottish” … they were simply different regions of what could be called a pan-Brythonic kingdom, sharing a very similar language, customs, lore, and traditions.

(This Brythonic kingdom also includes what is now Brittany, France. Hum?)

In my series, I start Arthur out in Cornwall, move him to Wales, but he will also fight battles up near Scotland. His fame will spread throughout Britain.

This, in my opinion, is why the very early Northern Brythonic poem Y Gododdin mentions him as the greatest warrior to whom you cannot compare even a man capable of killing 300 in a single battle.

If you want to read a very detailed treatise (not all of which I agree with, but very interesting) on the origins of King Arthur, take a look at The Historicity and Historicisation of Arthur written by Thomas Green, Exeter College, University of Oxford. Here he has a lot to say on the original sources, scholars, etc.

I ran across some free software on the internet that makes “word clouds” out of any writing. By this I mean that it creates a graphic of the most used words and sizes them according to how often they are used.

I pasted in the first third of my book and this is what it produced:

Not only is this fun, but it is useful to find those words that an author uses too much. For instance I use SAID too many times. I learned this from one of my Genesis Contest judges, but if not, this tool would have helped me to catch it.

But there are other words there that surprised me, so this will help my editing process. Even the “small” words are important to look at, as they are among the top 150 words of the document.

Why did I only submit the first third of my novel? Well … because I didn’t trust this website enough to “give” the owner my entire novel. If he wants to try to write my last two-thirds, that’s fine! But I’m not going to submit my entire novel to a stranger, and I suggest you show prudence as well. Doubtful there is little danger here, but why throw caution to the wind?

One Hint About My Book: If anyone reads the “word cloud” above, you might notice the name “Garthwisyk” there. If you are interested in reading about some of the legends behind my series, do an internet search on “Garthwys” and you’ll have some fun reading.

And the very discerning among you might actually catch a tiny coincidental tie in to Stephen Lawhead’s book, Merlin.

The BBC just put up a news item about a King Arthur book, written by Philip Reeve, which won the UK’s oldest book award for his novel “Here Lies Arthur".

He beat six others to win. The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) award is in its 71st year.

According to the article:

The legendary figure of King Arthur is presented in Reeve’s tale as a war-mongering, self-interested “thug".

The book [has] also been described as a political satire and an expose of the ancient art of spin-doctoring.

The author puts it this way:

“It’s a slightly irreverent take which presents Arthur as a not very important minor warlord - or gangster - in about 500AD.”

And this is why I am writing about King Arthur—to provide a counter thrust to the post-modern trend of deflating and destroying everything that holds up an ideal. Of making everything spin and fakery. The post-modern goal is to knock the wind out of belief, faith, hope, and love.

This is a spiritual battle.

Nathan Bransford, literary agent for Curtis Brown, Ltd. blogged yesterday about the book imprint “12″ which only publishes 12 books a year—one per month—and attempts to make each one a bestseller.

As part of this, he points to Moon Rat’s blog, who has some interesting advice for novelists. This advice stems from the fact that most publishers DO NOT follow the “12″ model and instead may attempt to fill a quota, and often give very little editorial support to books prior to them being published. This inattention sometimes means:

• The agent hasn’t read the entire manuscript
• Editors don’t have time to work on your “perfect” manuscript
• The publicist has little time to devote to your book
• Salespeople haven’t read your book before they sell it

What is the advice in light of this situation? (text simplified by me)

=> Read more!

I should have titled that I Might Possibly Be In The Movie “Pendragon—Sword Of His Father”, because I don’t know how the film editing will go. But that title is a bit ponderous, so here we are.

My son and I had the wonderful opportunity of being extra’s during filming last Wednesday night until 4am. It was supposed to end at 1am, but the filming took longer and we got a late start. Regardless, though, it was a fun time, and a privilege to be part of such a worthy endeavor.

=> Read more!

I just finished my first draft of my very first novel: Hammer & Stone, which is part of the Pendragon Spiral.

The total word count equals ~ 152,500, which I intend to chop down as close as I can to 120,000. That goal is steep, though, and I’ll be happy if I can get it close to 130,000. I figure if I can condense away 1/5 of each page, I can do it without cutting any major portions of the plot.

The main thing is that I want to remove as many “bad check-marks” as I can for a first time novelist.

You might ask why I was 4 days late according to my last prediction? The reason is that as I wrote the most exciting chapter in the book, I slowed to a snails pace to make sure I did it right. Once I finished it, however, I sped up again and wrote the last two chapters in just under three days.

How did that “most exciting” chapter turn out? EXCELLENT! I am VERY pleased with it and it is a fitting and incredible end to my first installment of this EPIC TALE!

The interesting thing is that on February 22 my spreadsheet software nailed perfectly my predicted finish. At that time I was only 68% done, but it predicted I would be done today—June 15th.

Will I begin editing right away? No. I intend to let the novel rest while I work on my long-neglected KingArthur.org.uk website.

Just in case someone hasn’t read my post from last year about this new website, here are my plans:

What I would like to do with this website is to make it a “portal” of the top 20 or so other King Arthur sites on the internet. But I don’t want to do this like a search engine OR like an encyclopedia, per se. I want it to not just have links to these pages—I want it to allow you to VIEW these pages inside of a frame.

My goal is to make my environment “around” the viewed site so attractive and useful that you wouldn’t want to do it any other way. I want to organize, map, and link information together in such a way that you can easily jump from one topic to another and compare and contrast what different websites say on the same topic.

Users will have complete freedom to browse using my linking/mapping/tagging system or else by just clicking and browsing within the website they are viewing. Using Javascript I will be able to detect what page they will be looking at and adjust my display accordingly. If I have that page mapped into my system, then my links and titles will automatically refresh and be from the new page’s perspective. If the page they are viewing has not been mapped by my system, then the user can request that it be added.

Along with this, I am planning on a mini GIS system that will allow the users to view locations on a map and go to pages that talk about those locations.

I will be adding my own content with my own point of view. My pages will then be indexed just like all the other pages.

But the key is: All related to King Arthur! All on that one major topic!

My name for this concept: King Arthur’s Excalipedia™ !

Not really related to my book, but I am about to start a new adventure: I am taking up learning the Mandolin. This will allow me to hopefully provide some background music for my kids’ band, Wren Song.

I had a fiasco with the first company I ordered it from, but once I received my refund, I ordered it from another company. It is on the FedEx truck for delivery to my house today, so I’m pretty excited.

What did I order? A new Washburn M1SDL model.

I chose this mandolin because it is in my budget range as well as having the style that the Irish mandolin players prefer: the simpler “A” style body (without the curl on top or points), and also a round hole rather than the violin type “f” holes.

I already play guitar, and even though my playing is fairly limited, I at least know how to move my fingers. With a local teacher—Tom Arri from Tucker Mountain Music who knows Bluegrass, Country, Folk, and Irish playing—I should be well on my way. He’s also giving pointers to my youngest daughter, who is learning fiddle.

I wanted to promote a book that is on my short-list for purchasing: Revision & Self-Editing.

This book is by James Scott Bell, and I have read some of his other excellent books in the Write Great Fiction series. Because of that, and because I will be shortly entering the editing phase of my own novel, I am recommending this book to others.

Also, if you want read a short review of the book, you can do so on Richard Mabry’s Blog.

Donald Maass’ agency site has a link to a great interview with him.

Donald is the author of the incredible book which I highly recommend, Writing The Breakout Novel.

Here is the two-part interview:

• Part 1
• Part 2