Frances Hunter
blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth
Latest Book News!
To the Ends of the Earth
now available
everywhere
Patronize these fine bookstores if you are in the area:
Austin, TX - BookPeople
Billings, MT - Borders Books and Music
Washburn, ND - Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center (Fort Mandan)
Nebraska City, NE - Missouri River Basin Lewis & Clark Interpretive
Center
To the Ends of the Earth has won the coveted Violet Crown Award, sponsored by the Writers' League of Texas. This is a very competitive contest and we are absolutely thrilled to be the winners! We had a swell time at the awards ceremony at the Texas Book Festival.
Our book is now available in e-book format for Kindle and Mobipocket.
A reader's guide for book club discussion is now available.
The outline for the new novel has been completed! Yippee! Now, as William Clark would say, "a fine morning we commenced wrighting &c."
A book signing is coming up in April! Stay tuned for details.
Current State of Mind
Tired, and tired of being tired.
We had a pleasant and reasonably relaxing weekend, and managed to get
a few things done, too. Taxes and leaf-raking: the perennial themes
of spring in Texas.
Watched two movies. "Ratatouille" is a delightful animated
romp about a rat who dreams of being a chef. While not emotionally gripping,
it's a fun movie. The animated rats are surprising realistic, so avoid
if you're scared of rats!
"Into the Wild," based on the great book by Jon Krakauer,
is the haunting story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who rejected
his family and all obligations to seek a higher truth in the wilderness,
only to perish in Alaska. The movie is definitely overlong, but worth
seeing as a tale of how an obsession with "truth" led a young
man to great adventures, and how his unwillingness to compromise ultimately
resulted in his own ruin.
- Reading:
The Tears of Autumn - Blood and Thunder
Music:
Tony Bennett
Celtic Legacy-
Movies:
Into the Wild
Ratatouille
7 Up/7 Up Plus Seven
The Towering Inferno
The Prestige
Frances Hunter's Journal
March 2008
Winner, Violet Crown Award for Fiction
Silver Medal Winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Finalist, Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards
March 20, 2008: How to Speak 19th Century
Busy this week with writing and other insanities, but here's a really fun link:
Great for historical novelists and fans, interpreters, or anyone who likes to get in the mindset of the past.
March 12, 2008: William Clark's Trouble-Making Ancestors
The genealogy of Meriwether Lewis is very well documented. There was a funny statement written in an 1881 magazine article about the Lewis family that stated, "The love of ancient ancestry is said to be laughably displayed by the Lewis family of England who are said to have in their possession a picture of the Ark with Noah emerging from it bearing a large trunk labelled 'Papers belonging to the Lewis Family.'" The Lewises hailed from Wales; the Meriwethers from either Wales or England.
William Clark's ancestry is more difficult to trace, primarily because of the difficulty in tracing such a common surname. The earliest known Clark ancestor of William Clark settled on the James River in 1630, very early in the settlement of the New World. Some traditions hold that he was Scottish.
On his mother's side, Clark was a Rogers (a name immortalized in history by Clark's older brother, the swashbuckling George Rogers Clark). Amazingly enough, the Rogers family can trace its genealogy all the way back to the 12th century to no less than Roger II of Sicily. Roger (1095-1154) was the son of a Norman adventurer who operated in the Mediterranean a few years after his compatriots had conquered England. He inherited his father's domains in Sicily, then went on to a remarkable career of his own, spending his life fighting wars to conquer and unite the many Norman areas of Italy under his own rule. Roger was truly one of the great kings of his era, and in his last years supported the Crusades and waged war well into Greece. His family continued to rule in the area for about 100 years.
Some 400 years later, one of Roger's descendants, the Reverend John Rogers (1505-1555), was one of the early Protestant rebels in England. Rogers abandoned the Roman Catholic priesthood and was one of the conspirators working on a secret English translation of the Bible. Rogers was arrested by the government of Queen Mary and tried for heresy. He was burned at the stake for his crime.
For more Clark family genealogy, check out the very good website on Lewis and Clark's roots, Anchored in the East.
March 5, 2008: Deus Ex Machina
I've mostly written about travels or historical topics related to our book lately, so I thought this might be a good time for a more "writerly" post. The other day, we watched a movie called "The Prestige." This atmospheric thriller concerned two 19th-century magicians (Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale) who conceived a rivaly that eventually turns into obsession and murder.
The movie was well-acted, with lots of twists and turns. But what struck me was the ending.
(SPOILER ALERT - Don't read on if you don't want to know how "The Prestige" turns out!)
It turned out that ... one of the magicians had a special machine that enabled him to make perfect copies of himself.
Once I got through saying "Huh?", I realized that "The Prestige" is a textbook example of the dramatic device known as a deus ex machina -- Latin for "God is the machine." Back in the old days of Greek dramas, a story would sometimes be resolved by lowering a god from the ceiling to set everything right. These days, deus ex machina happens when a writer paints the plot into a corner, and cannot think how to resolve it by any means previously set up in the story. To escape the situation, the writer resorts to creating a deus ex machina. Like the Greek god, this is an arbitrary and improbable outside force that puts the story to rights. In modern language, it's often called a "cop-out."
A famous examples of a deus ex machina story is War of the Worlds, in which the invading Martians suddenly die of an earthly virus. In Jurassic Park, the heroes are saved from being eaten by the sudden arrival of a T. Rex who destroys their opponent. Perhaps the most notorious use of a deus ex machina is still the TV show Dallas, in which an entire season of the show turned out to have been a dream by one of the main characters. Anytime the cavalry arrives, or a sudden benefactor shows up with a big check, or a plane crash kills off a troublesome character, you've just been hit by a deus ex machina.
In almost all cases, the use of a deus ex machina is considered bad form for a writer, because it's not fair to the reader (or viewer). If you set up a suspenseful drama that is unwinnable or unresolvable, you're cheating the reader out of most of the fun of the story's payoff. The writer's job is to set up the story so that it doesn't seem possible for the situation to be resolved, while planting clues all the time so that it can be.