This book, compiled in 1939 when there were still plenty of people to be found in New England who’d lived through the 1800s, is a great resource. As you’d expect, many ballads are included, ranging from the comic to the tragic to the comically tragic. Some of the ‘standard’ folk songs, like ‘The Elfin Knight’ and ‘Frog Would A-Wooing Go’, appear in this collection with different verses I’ve never seen anywhere else.

But there’s a lot more to this compendium. Sea chanteys (with notes on which chantey went along with which specific shipboard task), ‘kissing games’, and even fiddle tunes and dances. I didn’t know the difference between a ‘line’ or ‘contra’ dance and a quadrille (square dance) before reading this book, but now I do! And I didn’t realize that lumberjacks had their own tale-telling and musical tradition–although, if you think about it, how could they not?

There’s a section with short biographies of the singers and callers, and notes about their family history, that is well worth reading as well.

In short, this book is a cultural treasure, a snapshot of a time when old traditions, though waning, still survived in an unbroken line–as opposed to being revived, as they are today (or so I hope).

Well, obviously I didn’t do enough research before I wrote Robin Hood: Wolf’s Head. In the story, I have King Edward making a royal visit to Nottingham Castle, annoying the Sheriff no end. Now I find, through an article in Archaeology Today, that Edward probably would have hung at The King’s Houses instead. This was a royal complex at the edge of Sherwood Forest that was something like a cross between a country club and a convention center. It featured (of course) a large hunting park, as well as a private pond stocked with fish for those inconvenient fast days. A great place if you were an aristocrat, but as far as Robin, or any of the local villagers were concerned, it would have been a case of “there goes the neighborhood.”

Today nothing remains but a few tottering, ruined walls. I can’t find anything on the Archaeology Today site about this, but you can read all about it  here. Note that this brochure calls the site “King John’s Palace”, but the text shows that it was very much in use during the period I’ve placed my Robin Hood story, the early to mid 1300s.

If you follow the link above, you may even find out what a “caracute” was.

Moving over to Nottingham, I found an amazing 2013 Gizmodo article from a link at Archaeology Today. It turns out that Nottingham sits over a network of sandstone caves, many or most of them artificial. They range from beer cellars used by local pubs to one nasty oubliette where, legend has it, Robin himself was once imprisoned. Sometimes the caves are connected by tunnels or labyrinths. It occurs to me that they might have offered a handy way to get in and out of Nottingham unseen…which may be how Robin wound up making his escape!

The article about Nottingham’s underground world can be found here.

This year, I have my books listed in N.N. Light’s Holiday Gift Guide. Looks like a lot of other great titles are available too:

This is the work of two talented sisters from the Netherlands. An improvement on my own unaided efforts, to put it mildly. The new cover will be available on Amazon within the next week or two!

I’m offering both my books for free from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday.

Robin Hood: Wolf’s Head

The Road to Hel

You can’t afford not to get one!

I’m participating in The Virtual Book Fair! The event is live November 12-21. For more information, check out the event on Facebook here.

I’m Eric Tanafon. Thanks for visiting! I’m an eccentric, reclusive author with a large family, living in genteel poverty in New England.

Robin Hood: Wolf’s Head reveals, for the first time, the true nature of Robin’s band of merry….men?

Be warned, for Here There Be…

Creatures of darkness, not all alike. Kings without crowns, knights who left their shining armor behind. Witches, hermits, berserkers, and other honest outlaws. Ballads sung to the lute and spells spoken by moonlight.

Stories within stories, a Thousand and One Sherwoodian Nights.

And in the end…redemption.

***************************************************

Right now, you can get a copy for only 1.99. Why not preview it first?

Scavenger Hunt Number: 10

Find more booths to visit here!

I and my family observe a special holiday each fall: Wood Stacking Day. I admit it’s a bit eccentric, but this is New England, so we’re allowed.

We celebrate it by spending pretty much all day lugging logs from our driveway to stack on the porch, or down cellar once the porch is full. Like most celebrations, this tends to cause a hangover. In this case it’s sore muscles, rather than an aching head.

Hauling logs from one place to another gives me a lot of time to think. Naturally, it occurred to me that this activity amounts to a metaphor for writing.

You start with a disorganized pile of logs. These represent all your story ideas. At first the task seems overwhelming, but you select some logs, a few at a time, the ones that seem like they’ll fit together. Gradually a structure begins to reveal itself–first an outline, then, if you’re lucky, an actual plot emerges.

You build up the layers of wood higher and higher, complication on complication. At last you place the last few logs and you’re done. The resolution has been reached and now you’ll begin to go through the stack, building fires to keep yourself warm on the cold nights that are coming. Since the wood burns faster than it grows, I’m going to say this is analogous to reading the finished story–years of work consumed in a few days or weeks.

What’s left? A smaller pile of chips too small for kindling, loose pieces of bark, and dirt. We use this as mulch for our hedge. I guess it would correspond to unused ideas, or bits of them, things that didn’t quite work out. So you recycle them, returning them to your subconscious to help nurture your stories yet unborn.

Happy Wood Stacking Day, all!

A guest post I did on MighyThorJRS blog–thanks, James!

Bridge of Birds is a triumph, a huge, picaresque magical journey through a China that ‘never was’, but in some ways, will always be. I found this book initially because I had read Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung books, and wished there were more of them. Bridge of Birds is not much like Kai Lung, really, other than the Chinese fantasy setting–the characters don’t speak formally, which is where much of the humor in Kai Lung comes in, and the story-within-a-story structure is absent–but the story is vastly enjoyable in its own right.

One of Hugharts’s triumphs is, paradoxically enough, making his characters universal: his magical China contains vulgar peasants, beautiful maidens, supernaturally gifted con men, matriarchs both good and evil, gods and goddesses who interfere in the mortal realm, misers with hearts of gold, and tyrants with no hearts at all. In other words, it’s like the fantastic world of any traditional culture from Europe to Japan. Also, this book has some of the most affecting and simply human passages I have ever read–for example, Miser Shen’s lament for his daughter.

Even given the large cast of characters, Li Kao and his protege, Number Ten Ox, carry the story as easily as Ox carries the old sage on his shoulders. They are wonderful characters and fully deserve the ultimate fate that the author had planned for them: to be accepted into the heavenly realm to live forever as minor deities.

For me, the other two books in this series, though still enjoyable, are a bit of a letdown. (spoiler alert) For one thing, they use the same basic plot outline as Bridge of Birds, though with varied characters and a different Chinese ritual as background. Also, the occasional bawdiness of the first book spins out of control, for my taste, particularly in The Story of the Stone.

But Bridge of Birds is a masterpiece–among the best modern fantasy books I’ve ever read and re-read.

It’s been a year and change since I started my self-publishing career. In the course of getting my two books (so far–another is planned for November) into print, I’ve learned a few things. Strangely enough, they all have something to do with giving.

You must give in order to receive.
Reviews, that is. Trying to get book bloggers to review your work feels uncomfortably like sending query after fruitless query to literary agents. No small part of my motivation in self-publishing was to see such things only in the rear view mirror (like Lubbock, Texas) and thus find happiness. But it’s true that otherwise, nobody gives you a review unless you invest some time and write one first.

Well, not completely true–I have gotten exactly one unsolicited review between my two books. It was only 3 stars, but hey–that means there is at least one casual reader out there who thinks my work is not completely worthless, and what’s more, is willing to say so.

Also, on the plus side, reviewing has introduced me to some great authors whose works I intend to keep following.

Sometimes you can give it away, but should you?
I’m seriously considering not doing any more Goodreads giveaways–the one I did this year attracted quite a few entries, but garnered zero reviews and even zero ratings from the readers who wound up with copies. It did result in a couple of copies showing up for sale used, which makes me feel like I’ve arrived, in a sense. But the real payoff is that, without a giveaway, I don’t even need to put the time into preparing a print edition. 95% of my sales have been e-books, anyway.

Don’t give up.
In accordance with the soon-to-be-infamous Rule #4 in my upcoming book, Father Winter, there are no guarantees. So, chances are that fame and fortune will take their own sweet time to materialize. After all, they have eternity. And there will inevitably be a lot more of those times when discouragement sets in, and I feel like taking my marbles and going home.

Unfortunately for me, I’ve already lost all my marbles. And this is home.