Troubadours in Life and Literature: My First Guest Blog Post

Today my very first guest blog went live on Anne E. Johnson’s blog -

 http://anneejohnson.blogspot.com/2014/06/historical-fiction-from-christie-maurer.html  

     Anne is a historical and science fiction writer who majored in Medieval Music and was attracted to my announcement of “The Whitewood Kitarra” on Broad Universe. 

It was fun putting together this post on how troubadour songs inspired my writing. 

     Do stop by if you get a chance, and I hope you enjoy it. 

New Adventure!

I'm deep in the throes of self-publishing The Dark Lady's Stone! I found a free-lance editor to go over my final manuscript for the little things I've undoubtedly missed--grammar, spelling, typos, missing words--and as a bonus she's a poet, who can help with Loriano's troubadour poems. I am also working with a cover artist to come up with a way to depict my story. She and I have spent many hours looking for suitable images on the web. It's a joyful and frustrating process. Standing stones are easy, but I hadn't realized how hard it is to find usable pictures of a guy in his early 20s with shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes who doesn't look too modern or too wimpy. I wish I were a skilled enough artist to paint my own hero.

SF Poetry Contest Result

I just got notice that the poem I entered in the Science Fiction Poetry contest did not make the final cut. I am not at all surprised. If it had--now that would be a surprise!

Entered a poetry contest

I saw a post about the Science Fiction Poetry Association contest on the BroadUniverse listserve  http://www.sfpoetry.com/contests.html For kicks I checked it out and it looked feasible. So, what the heck, I went over "Loriano's" two poems with a fine-toothed delete key and entered the one about Sacerdote Danestor and the Dark Lady Death. I won't hear the results until November, but oooo it's exciting to put something out into the world!

Loriano's troubadour poetry

Everyone insisted I had to include Loriano's poems--and I am no poet. After one poetry class in college I read a few and got bored. What to do? I got a bunch of CD's of troubadour music and listened, probably hundreds of times, following along in the booklet both the Occitan and the English. The originals are in the public domain--the poets have been dead for 900 years--but the translations are not. In studying them I appreciated just how subtle and complex the poems really are. Finally I used metaphors and themes from Bertran de Ventadorn, troubadour to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and put together verses appropriate to Loriano's situation and character. He sometimes excuses their clumsiness by saying he's still working on it. 

I did "receive" a couple of epics. One changed my original 6,000 word short story into a novel. A major turning point in The Dark Lady's Stone comes when the old shaman Edroc recites an epic about the Sea Kings and Lake Illia. To get in the mood I listened to a CD of songs from the Icelandic Edda. The epic started to unfold and I got the basics out over a couple of days. It was much longer than I'd intended and it needed a lot of editing, particularly when I was struggling with the scenes at Lake Illia. A while later I took an on-line course on The Vikings. To my surprise many elements in Edroc's tale were right-on. Of course many others pertained only to my world. 

I read at J.R.R. Tolkien's Sigurd and Gudrun a couple of summers ago. It must've sunk in because Loriano's final epic came to me while I was washing dishes. I was finishing up the last chapter and Count Reynal asked Loriano to tell the court about their long journey. What the heck would he say??? I presumed it would be straight narrative, maybe a few summary sentences. To give myself time to think I got up from my computer to make dinner and discovered all the dishes were dirty. I put my hands in hot, soapy water and Loriano started declaiming in my head. I heard his voice, his tone, his rhythm. I rushed back to my computer and took dictation. When I surfaced and looked it over, I only had to change a few lines. 

To my surprise, folks seem to like it.