Clad in Steel and Thunder – final chapter

The last chapter of Clad in Steel and Thunder is the longest and most complicated.
The action moves around a lot, point of view following the survivors from the previous chapters as they take part to the final siege of Bellegarde – my own belated, mecha-oriented version of the battle of Crecy.

Past and present meet on the ramparts of Bellegarde.
This spells the end of the chivalry andallows this world to enter a more modern, hopefully more democratic phase.
Gundam-style, is time to scrap the battle suits and think about reconstruction.

Once the deed is done, the action sort of unwinds.
I do not believe in Star Wars-style throne room scenes and triumphs – after the battle come fatigue, desperation, sense of loss for all those that were lucky or fast enough to survive.
I tried to put some of that in the story, without giving in to angst.

By monday, the story will be done.
I’ll pass therefore to the next in the line – about which, see the next post.

7000 words – Chapter Five

Chapter Four was fast, much faster than anticipated, but it will need revising.
The text is ok, but something came up as I was translating, and I want to follow it up.
I’m working on Brock’s speaking patterns, to make him sound more German, but I don’t want to end up using the usual accent cliches. Something pretty good can be achieved by using slightly longer words than usual, and arranging the words in a slightly unusual, old-fashioned order, so that they still read all right but sound… foreign.

Cheap tricks.

In the meantime, on to chapter five.
Casale Monferrato has just revolted and a band of Flemish mercenaries are trying tomake themselves scarce with a minimum of fuss.
The last pieces of the puzzle fall into place – courtesy of Leonardo da Vinci, who comes center stage but remains incognito.
Leonardo also serves as sort of a clear-headed anchor in this whole story.
Which is pretty needed, considering that the moral compass of the narrative is debatable and the ethics of most of the characters are uncertain.

By the weekend, this story will be translated, and I’ll send it along to the proofreaders.

Chapter Four

Chapter four is more fun that I anticipated – the mock courtly Italian shifts easily into mock-Elizabethan, without the need for weird spellings or stuff.
If there’s one thing I learned, it’s you do not go and try to duplicate accents and regional slurs in writing.
Reading (or trying to read) Dorothy Sayers’ Five Red Herrings, with all that mock-Scottish, was cure enough.

Chapter four is also the one in which Guenda della Crocicchia gets her debut and begins preparations to “do a Joan of Arc”.

Most readers seem to think I based Guenda on Masamune Shirow’s Deunan Knute – and the fact that Masamune Shirow’s work was mentioned as inspiration in the original afterword sort of settled things like that.
In fact it is not so.
Mr Shirow’s work on mechanical armor was certainly an inspiration – you can say my black-powder-and-steam mecha are paleo-Landmates.
But on theother hand, Guenda has little to do with Mr Shirow’s work, being based as she is on my original high-school heartthrob – so sue me.
If possible, I’d say Masamune Shirow copied my memories when he put together Deunan.
It certainly felt that way the first time I laid eyes on Appleseed!!

As a fun note, the place in which the chapter is set, La Crocicchia by Urbino, is the seat of the Science Campus of the University of Urbino – where I spend a few weeks every year teaching environmental statistics.
Wonderful place, great people.
Seemed like a good place for a new richman’s estate…

Clad in Steel and Thunder – Chapter Four

I’m reaching midway point.
Translating the fight/not fight scenes in chapter three taxed my English, forced me to go back to the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and demonstrated the uselessness of on-line dictionaries (most of hich have a capacity of 1600 words).
Chapter three I’ll have to revise, extensively.

Interestingly enough, descriptions become longer (in terms of word-count) as I translate them, dialogues become drastically shorter.
This will be interesting as I come to Chapter four, as this is one of the two dialogue-heavy chapters and relies a lot on polite, archaic Italian structures.
I’ll have to brush up my Shakespeare.

Chapter four shifts the action back to Italy, brings back Alun Brock – now older and wiser – and introduces Guenda della Crocicchia.
About Guenda, I’ll write tomorrow, while polishing her speech patterns.
Alun now is a weird sort, as he’s a survivor not only within the story, but in my writing history, too.
He first appeared in a cycle of three stories I wrote while in University.
They were greeted with irony and distaste from my too-sophisticated colleagues in Turin U., who were particularly leery of my action scenes.
Brock was a good character, and slept for fifteen years at the bottom of a 5.1/4 diskette, only to resurface when I started this story.
His name as a harsh northern sound, and suits the story and the character just fine.

Brock’s old partner in crime – Valerie – was recycled much earlier, becoming the female lead in my stories about the Professional Dreamers, becoming the punkish partner of the chandleresque Dreamer With No Name. One of their stories was published in Italy in Fata Morgana n° 10, the rest was distributed through mailing list.
An adaptation of the Professional Dreamers background for the use of roleplayers was published in the fanzine Whispers in the late ’90s.

Garbed in Steel and Thunder, Chapter 3

Good action chapter.
The story momentarily moves to China (!!) and the Green Count and his men get center stage.
Readers in Turin were particularly pleased, from the feedback I got at readings and social gatherings, finding a descendant of Count Amadeus (whose statue graces the square in front of Turin’s Town Hall) in the pages of my story.

In fact, I’m playing fast and loose with history here.
In this fictional timeline, Amadeus VI never got to create a state of Savoy, and his descendants fight as mercenaries for the French – the head of the family still holding the title of Green Count and displaying a green flag for his units.

I was pretty surprised at the positive reaction of my fellow citizens, ad my Green Count is a scoundrel and a turncoat – good withhis troops but highly pragmatic.
Not really the stuff that heroes are made of.
But there you have it – the guys really liked it, and I get requests for more stories centering on the Green Count and his ironclad Free Company, and their globetrotting campaigns (there’s a hint at a campaign in India, and more).
Who knows, maybe one of these nights…

Garbed in Steel and Thunder

Thunder variations seem to be off-limits…

Rolling Thunder is a 1977 Tommy Lee Jones movie.
Thunder and Lightning is the last Thin Lizzy album.
Riding the Thunder is a romance published by a publisher called Love Spell
Thunder Knight is a character created by Mark. J. Orr

And let’s forget about Riders on the Storm….

And yet – I need a title for a story that has… armors, knights, politics, clockwork contraptions, rabble in arms, steam and black powder, European history remixed…

Garbed in Steel and Thunder

Now this is not half bad, if I say so myself.

Might give it a go, as a working title.

[once again, translating myself I can spare myself a mail about the new proposed title, the wait for the opinions of the author and all the rest... I better not get used to it.]

(title pending) 4/20

I’m well into the second chapter of my story (Henry Tudor gets a fair share of the action), and still thinking about a feasible title.

It is strange looking this way at something I wrote.
I normally pay a lot of attention (too much attention some say) at technique and structure, but now – disassembling and building back the story, so to speak, I’m finding things about my way of writing, that will come handy in future stories.
Like, the fact that I unknowingly stick to two or three word games, tried-and-tested structures that add emphasis to what I write.
Or my choice of verbs and phrase construction.
Weird.

It is also a good opportunity to go back to my sources.
“The Academy of Ares” first of all, the Mathew Rossi article (in his thoroughly enjoyable book Things That Never Were), which started me thinking about this whole cross between Renaissance politics and Japanese-style battle-suits.
My story was designed like a collision between Ludovico Ariosto and Yoshiyuki Tomino.
Brancaleone Da Norcia does Gundam.

Other books that helped.
John Keegan, The Face of the Battle.
James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed.

And a nice picture-book about the small town of Witten, in Germany, that a friend living there sent me as a gift a few years back.
I hope he’ll be happy to know that, thanks to his gift, the town of Witten is laid waste on page two.
I’m only sorry I don’t have such an intimate knowledge of Witten’s geography to be able and specifically blast away and set fire to his very house.

(title pending) 2/20 done

First two pages of my story translated.
No big deal.
It appears obvious that I’ll have to go and refresh my vocabulary where combat maneuvers are concerned, but apart from that, no big deal.

I’ll have to find another title for the story.
Gli Anni del Tuono translates as The Years of Thunder – which sounds like a bad Tom Cruise movie.
Alas, Robert E. Howard already optioned the best thunder variation out there, with his The Sowers of Thunder.
Finding something equally striking is hard going.
I’ll have to find something completely new.

Apart from that, looks like – barring incidents and extra engagements – I’ll be able to do a story in one week/ten days.

I have already secured the services of a few swell friends as proofreaders (hi, kids!), and all in all, the future looks bright.

First Story

I’ll cheat, and start with my own entry for the forthcoming book.
Translating my own stuff should be easier – no doubts about meanings and hidden purposes, wordplays and double-entendres.
No need to mail the author for clarifications.
No stupid comments from the author thinking he knows best.

Translating one’s own stuff is certainly easy.
And I could have made it easier.
Two stories, A Whisp of Smoke, Rising (from the very first Alia anthology) and Electric Shadows (from the second volume) already exist in English.
Both are excellent, solid stories – if I say so myself.
You could label both of them “New Weird” and be pretty close to the mark.
But alas, according to both formal and informal polls among readers, authors and editors, neither is among my best-remembered outings.
Oh, great stuff, they say, but…
But.

So, in the end, I’ll translate Gli Anni del Tuono, an 11.000 words novella which was published in last year’s Alia4, wonderfully illustrated by my friend Dalmazio Frau.
It is a good story, an alternate history yarn.
I got a lot of great feedback on this one, and requests for sequels, or at least for more stories set in the same milieu.
To which I normally reply, We’ll see.

Hell!
It’s long.
It’s full of outlandish words, Latin and technical expression related to Medieval warfare.
It’s got lots of historical references and geographical names.
Translating this one will be hard.

I’ll start with my own entry for the forthcoming book.
If I survive this one, the rest will be mostly downhill.