Myth, the Universe, and Everything

For the past two Saturdays, I've had the delight of visiting small history museums in Connecticut. I visited Branford's Harrison House, which is a colonial home and museum, and wrote it up for my column in Branford Patch. The following Saturday, I headed out with my friend TJ to New London's Nathan Hale Schoolhouse, where a young Nathan Hale taught. I will admit that I know more about Nathan Hale since I started reading Lora Innes's The Dreamer than I had prior, in part because she inspired me to grab some revolutionary history off the bookshelves at the library and look him up. The reason we hiked out to New London on Saturday was because Lora was there in person, doing a presentation on her new graphic exhibit featured on the museum's walls. Lora talked about how historical fiction is a gateway into history (clearly, it worked for me).



The Schoolhouse is small -- only two rooms -- but it's recently been restored, so it gives a feel for just how it would have been when Hale was teaching, and discovering his love for teaching. In the (very warm) upstairs room, the previous exhibit about spies during the American Revolution held our attention while we waited for the exhibit opening to begin. Of course, the Culper Ring (one of the most important spy rings of the Revolution) was mentioned, so I texted Arielle Kesweder, who, along with being one of my first-readers, is a in tune with all things geek culture, and asked her in what comic I'd heard of the Culper Ring before. (Answer: Y: The Last Man -- which further proves Lora's point about fiction opening doors to history.) The upstairs also revealed chalk drawings dating back to the Revolutionary period, including this one that is likely of the privateer ship, Nancy.



The presentation began promptly at two with an introduction from state historian Walt Woodward, who celebrated the exhibit team's (Jennifer Eifrig, Stephen Shaw, Rachel Smith, and Lora Innes) approach to introducing Nathan Hale as a human, rather than a hero. A lot of people only bother to remember Hale for his failed spy mission and subsequent execution, but insight into his days in New London show a man who would have been a teacher, a husband, and a father had he lived long enough. Lora was up next, discussing how fandom brings a huge amount of enthusiasm not just for media, but for history. In fact, several other The Dreamer readers were there, including a librarian from just a few towns over (Lora introduced us and gave the two of us a chance to bond as grown up comic readers and history nerds).

I took many photos, but instead of uploading them all here behind a cut, I've put them up over at my facebook page -- they include some nifty images of Lora, the Dreamers, the exhibit team, and New London's very cool historical monuments. I hope you'll check them out, but in the meantime, will leave you with this image:



Happy Fourth of July!

Nope, not a contest from me today (though I should probably do another one soon). This is a contest from Ilona Andrews to promote her new On the Edge, a series starter paranormal romance. Not only is she doing a media blitz contest (linked above), it's a pre-contest to promote the Bitten by Books contest coming up next week. Double the contest, double the fun?

One of the things I found most interesting about Ilona's contest is the top prize: getting to be a beta reader (without the pressure of offering critiques) for six months. The idea of being a beta for a published author is getting to be a more popular idea, I think, and it's a trend that interests me. Brandon Sanderson posts chapter excerpts over at mistborn; Dylan Birtolo does the same at eyezofwolf. Lora Innes just introduced a Fan Flow group for The Dreamer on a subscription basis. I believe that Michele Bardsley gives her "minions" free content as well. The Glamazombies used to get a paragraph a week of spoliery goodness from Mark Henry, which I imagine will start up again in the future.

So, what is going on here? This seems different from the usual technopeasant wretch business. This is *pre* published writing being shared, letting readers in on the whole writing process. Any of you writers out there doing this sort of thing -- how does this impact your writing? Readers who are in on the pre-pub end -- how does this impact your reading? I think this is a trend to watch, and I'm curious who else has noticed it and what they think is happening.

In the meantime, check out Ilona's contest on the 28th at Bitten by Books.

This week, our guest blog is something a little different. Lora Innes is the writer and artist for The Dreamer webcomic, a tale of time travel through dreams, where young Bea finds herself in the middle of the Revolutionary War. Since Lora is working with legendary figures--or, at the least, figures around whom legends have grown--I asked her to explore how she keeps the history and legends separate in her comic. Lora worked as a member of Artifact Group, where she was the only woman in the office. The Dreamer is available at The Dreamer Comic and at Drunk Duck, and will soon be available in print. Thanks to Lora for being a guest of the blog!

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For those of you who don’t know me, I write a webcomic called The Dreamer. It’s a story about an seventeen year old girl named Bea who begins having reoccurring dreams about the Revolutionary War. Every time Bea falls asleep, her dream picks up right where the last one ended, and after awhile she begins to wonder what on earth is going on. The dreams certainly aren’t coming from her interests, as she’s a terrible student who never cared about history until that really hot blond kissed her on page two.

Alana asked me to blog about writing history and mythology and it’s an interesting question. I saw the power of taking modern characters and interjecting them into history in the film Titanic. Most history buffs I know absolutely hate Titanic. Rose acts like a modern woman, empowered by things like the suffrage and civil right’s movements that had yet to take place, but by modernizing the protagonist, a historically illiterate audience is able to connect with the characters in such a way that in the late nineties the Titanic was everywhere: new books and documentaries were released, people suddenly wanted to watch and read A Night to Remember, research teams were sent back to the site, and exhibits toured museums across the U.S. All because America fell in love with Rose as she fell in love with Jack. There might be some revisionist history in that film, but surely the power of bringing history to life for that large of an audience justifies it.

Rather than creating a past character who acts horribly modern, I decided to just take a modern character and interject her in the past. I’m not claiming innovation in this, but the whole “time traveling” element allows readers to enter in the past from their own perspective. So what is foreign to the reader is also foreign to Bea. Which allows me to have some fun as I write:



The tricky part of writing about history is that some of it is laden down with myth. Real, breathing American Heroes are still steeped in mythology. (George Washington and the cherry tree? C’mon!) I have spent countless hours researching these men. It would be easy to write about a mythological George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, or Nathan Hale, but I would just wind up with two dimensional, cliché characters. And though finding information on some of the more obscure American Heroes has been tricky (Thomas Knowlton, Joseph Warren, Hercules Mulligan), these less known stories are like diamonds in the rough--real, genuine parts of America’s story that most of my readers will be exposed to for the first time by... me.

So I carry that weight of responsibility when I write. If people are meeting Nathan Hale for the first time in the pages of The Dreamer, I want him to be as close to the real Nathan Hale as possible. And since he’s one of my main characters, I’ve read more on him than any others of my cast. In his army diary, and letters to his friends and family, I was able to find out seemingly trivial things (like how many times he had his hair dressed while on furlough, which let me know he had a bit of vanity in him) to great heroic things (the men in his company tried to set fire to two of the British Warships in the Hudson, a historical event I take advantage of in Issue #1.)



Because no record of Hale’s last days exist, a lot of mythology surrounds him. I’ve found four radically different versions of his story, all taken from history books! So it’s been a lot of work trying to find actual facts from which to make an educated guess as to what really happened.

It was a great feeling when Thomas Knowlton’s great, great, great... grand niece emailed me to let me know that she loved The Dreamer and that from what she knows about her family’s history, I got him right.



Alas, I can’t stay 100% true to history, as any time you’re writing historical fiction, you cannot deny the “fiction” element. And by injecting two fictitious characters into a historical backdrop (Bea and the handsome blond, Alan) events and people do need to be moved around. Historically, Nathan Hale joined Thomas Knowlton’s Rangers after the Battle of Brooklyn, and left on a secret mission before the Battle of Harlem Heights. If I used this timeline, he’d pop up for an issue or two in the middle of my first story arc. But because I wanted the audience to have a chance to fall in love with him, he’s already a member of the group at our story’s start.

These are changes that must happen in order to tell a compelling story. Historical events separated by days or weeks would make a dreadfully boring read. Something exciting happens and then! ... we sit around and wait for days and weeks. So everything is accelerated and events which seem to span a week, actually spanned a month in history.

The wonderful thing about using history as a starting point is that life really is more interesting than fiction, and time and time again I’ve gotten far more great ideas about my plot and characters from the past than I ever could have from my own imagination. That and historical fiction is, well, infotainment. For a history buff/eternal student like myself getting people excited about history for the first time is half the fun. I don’t think I’ll ever forget finding out that a 19 year old girl was reading a Joseph Warren biography at my recommendation.


Priceless.