Off on another writing retreat in Tangier

I'm headed back to Tangier today for two weeks of writing and avoiding holiday craziness. I'll be back in time for Los Reyes, the gift-giving day here in Spain, also known as Epiphany. No father can avoid that! In the meantime I'm getting back to my Tangier novel. It's contemporary fiction set in the city.

The last time I was in Morocco I wrote 26,000 words. I've been looking over what I've written and see that I have a lot of work ahead of me. While I have a theme and a general mood, plus lots of local color, the nature of my protagonist and the full plot haven't gelled in my mind. That will come in time. The American Legation has been kind enough to let me set up in their library, where I'll be distracted by their excellent collection of books on Morocco.

I probably won't be blogging much for the next two weeks. The blogosphere tends to get pretty quiet at this time of year anyway!

Photo of the Tangier medina courtesy Julian Henderson. I don't bring a camera along on these trips.

Military History Photo Friday: A German Halberd Pistol

On my recent trip to Vienna I got to see some great museums. One of my favorites was the collection of Hapsburg arms and armor at the Neue Berg. I'm working on an article about this place, which has one of the greatest collections of medieval arms and armor anywhere.

Here's one interesting item: a combination halberd and double-barreled rifle made in Germany c.1580. You can see it at the top of a case of other early firearms.

Here's a closeup. As you can see it has two wheellocks, firing mechanisms that are wound up and then released by the pull of a trigger. Given the ornamentation on the halberd, I'm thinking this was intended more for show as a curio than as an actual weapon. A lot of these combination weapons have survived from the Middle Ages and Renaissance but I've never read an account of one actually being used. They all tend to be similarly ornamental, which may explain why so many have survived.

Civil War Photo Friday: The tomb of the Emperor Maximilian

On last week's trip to Vienna I visited several sites of historical interest. One of them was the Imperial Crypt of the Hapsburg dynasty, including this grave for the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. He was the younger brother of Franz Joseph, the Hapsburg who would later be ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and draw his country into World War One.

As a younger brother, it seemed unlikely that Maximilian would ever sit on the throne, so when France extended its influence into Mexico in the 1860s and was looking for a European monarch, Maximilian was the man for the job. He took over as Emperor of Mexico in 1864. The United States didn't recognize him as the rightful ruler of Mexico, but was too busy with its own Civil War to do anything about it.

Maximilian was a liberal ruler, granting extra rights to the peasants and taking steps towards land reform, but that couldn't stop the revolutionaries who were fighting to make Mexico into something closer to a democracy. Once the Civil War was over in 1865, the U.S. government started arming the revolutionaries and Maximilian's position became precarious.

He got a bit of help from former Confederates who fled to Mexico after the war. This included many Missouri figures such as Confederate Generals Sterling Price and J.O. Shelby. They couldn't tip the scales, however, and when France pulled out its army in 1866 Maximilian's days were numbered. He was defeated and executed in 1867. He now lies back home in Vienna. Note that someone put a little Mexican sombrero on his tomb. He still has his admirers in Mexico.

I'm a winner in the 2013 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition

I'm happy and humbled to announce that I'e won the 2013 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition, taking the gold in the Personal Comment category for my article Video Games with a Refugee, part of my Iraq travel series on the Gadling travel blog.

The annual competition is sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. Winners of the awards, the most prestigious in the field of travel journalism, were announced Oct. 21 at the SATW convention, held this year in Biloxi, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This is the 29th Lowell Thomas competition and drew 1,257 entries. Judges were members of the faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In honoring my work, the judges said: "Is it possible that we can have our hearts broken while playing with a child? The author demonstrates that it is. In this extraordinarily touching piece, Sean McLachlan recounts a hotel lobby visit with a Syrian refugee, 9, who wants to play video games with him. In one short piece, he delivers the pathos of the Syrian conflict with the innocence and joy of a child. This crisply written piece is not weighed down by sermonizing. Its impact comes from the story, sharply told."

This made my week! Oh, and I big shout out to my friend David Farley, who won gold in the Short Article on Travel for his article “Mama Knows Best” in Afar magazine!

Wild West Photo Friday: Hotel in Contention, Arizona Territory, 1880

When I started working for Gadling, the editor interviewed me as a way of introducing me to the readers. One of his questions was what was my worst hotel experience. I answered, "Oooo, tough one. The Peruvian hotel with sand in the halls and no working bathrooms? The British bed and breakfast where the owner walked into our room without knocking? The Pakistani flophouse with the junkie staggering around the courtyard at all hours? I really can't decide."

At least I didn't have to stay in this place. This was the one hotel in the dusty mining town of Contention, Arizona Territory, which sprang to life in 1879 when silver was discovered there. It became one of the Wild West's many boomtowns until an earthquake a few years later made the mines flood. Now all that's left of Contention are a few weathered foundations and an overgrown cemetery.

During those few years of life, Contention had its share of shootouts and craziness. I wonder what it was like to stay in this little adobe hotel, hearing the drunken miners carousing outside your window after a long day underground? Did you have to contend with fleas and bedbugs, or just the usual Arizona problems such a cockroaches, scorpions, black widow spiders, and rattlesnakes?

Ah, the good old days, when going to Arizona was still considered adventure travel!

A Pagan Grove and Norman Church in Iffley, England

As regular readers of this blog know, we spend our Easters and summers in Oxford. one of our favorite local places to visit is just a couple of miles south of town. Heading downstream on the Isis (the local name for the Thames), and past a nice riverside pub of the same name, is the little village of Iffley.

Its main claim to fame is a fine Norman church built in the late 11th century that's is almost perfectly preserved. Early on, it changed hands from the local lord to an estate further away, and while the absentee owners paid for its upkeep, they didn't do much to change it, making it one of the most pristine Norman churches in the country.

The front is very Romanesque, and the door is decorated with the zodiac. There's also an atmospheric old cemetery and a 1,500 year-old yew tree. The local priest thinks it was part of a sacred pagan grove and that under the church there's probably an old Saxon church from the 5th or 6th century. Since early church builders liked to build in sacred groves, I'm thinking the Saxons cut down the center tree of the grove, which was probably as old then as this one is now, and built the church on top of it. You see this sort of behavior with mosques, churches, and synagogues in the Middle East depending on who won the latest war.

The surviving tree was probably little more than a sapling then, young when its religion was old, and escaped the notice of the Christians. Perhaps cutting down the central, most sacred tree in the grove was all that needed to be done to destroy it as a place of religious significance. I remember reading in some early Christian accounts where they destroyed sacred groves, and they usually only destroyed the main tree. The sole surviving sacred yew can be seen on the righthand side of both the photos of the church here.

Researching and writing in Oxford

As I mentioned in my last post, my family and I are in Oxford, England, for our usual working summer vacation. So what does a Civil War/Wild West historian do with himself in Oxford? Luckily, quite a lot!

Oxford University's Bodelian Library is a copyright library, meaning they have a copy of every book ever published in the UK. Since many American books have UK editions, I have acess to them. There's also a special library building specifically dedicated to American studies.

Right now I'm working on the second edition to my Outlaw Tales of Missouri. This includes two new chapters, one on the famous shootout in Springfield involving Wild Bill Hickok and the other about Francis Tumblety, a quack doctor in St. Louis who was a prime suspect for being Jack the Ripper.

I'm also working on an article about the Civil War experiences of several key figures in the O.K. Corral shootout and Arizona War. For more UK-centered research I'm also doing a behind-the-scenes article on the British Museum. Of course I'm busy with fiction too, both the sequal to A Fine Likeness and the novel I stated in Tangier.

All this writing won't keep me from enjoying a sunny British summer and some pints of real ale!

What are your writing plans for this summer?

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

A new country, a new blog, and a guest post about castles

Hello from Oxford! Wait, wasn't I in Valencia? Why yes I was. Hard to keep up with me, isn't it? My family and I are enjoying our usual summer working vacation here in Oxford, where I'll be researching some magazine articles and writing fiction, and my wife will be working at the astronomy department. My son will be at a great daycamp he's been going to since he was three.

If you look at my blog roll, you'll see a new addition. Roads to the Great War is an excellent new blog about World War One run by the same folks that gave you the World War One website. With the centennial coming up next year they've decide to do a blog! If you like military history, check them out.

Speaking of blogs, I have another guest post up on the Black Gate blog, this one about Spanish Castles reused during the Spanish Civil War. I have two more posts in the pipeline for them, this time about an Italian castle.

Oh, and don't forget you can still get my fantasy novella The Quintessence of Absence free on Smashwords. Please blog, tweet, and share!

Military History Photo Friday: The Torres de Quart in Valencia, Spain

These impressive towers are called the Torres de Quart. I saw them this week when visiting Valencia, Spain. My wife had an astronomy conference there and I tagged along so I could write a travel article on Valencia.

The city dates back to the Roman times but sadly most of its early remains are gone. The only parts of the old city walls still standing are two city gates dating to the Renaissance. The Torres de Quart defended the city against various invaders, the most recent being the forces of Napoleon. The French emperor had take over Spain some time before and in 1808 the Spaniards rose up in rebellion. Soon Valencia was in their hands.

Napoleon tried to take the city back on 26 June 1808. The Valencians flooded the surrounding plains so that the French were forced to attack the relatively higher ground on which the fortified gates, the strongest parts of their defenses, stood. As you can see, the towers still bear the scars of cannonballs.

The Spaniards put up a stout resistance and soon the French had to withdraw. The pockmarks on the Torres de Quart are a testimony to their determined defense.

A Civil War veteran in Tangier

While I was in Tangier I learned of an interesting connection between the American Legation, pictured here, and the Civil War.

In December of 1777, Morocco became the first country to recognize the United States. Diplomatic relations soon began and the American Legation, now a museum, was built in 1821.

One early consul was Felix Mathews. Mathews was living in California when the war broke out and organized a Union cavalry force in the California militia to patrol the area. He rose to the rank of colonel.

His service had started earlier than that, however. He had been in the navy and served with Admiral Farragut, who later commanded the Union navy during the Civil War. He spent time sailing the seas and suppressing the slave trade off the coast of Africa. Once he left the navy he went hunting silver in Utah and got into several skirmishes with the Indians.

His real name was Felix Mateo. He was born in Spain and immigrated when he was young. Like many immigrants, he Anglicized his name. Mateo/Mathews was appointed consul by President Ulysses S. Grant, another Union veteran, in 1869. His connections with Admiral Farragut probably played a big part in getting the job.

Tsarist coastal artillery in Estonia and Jesse James in Italy

While I was away on my writing retreat in Tangier I popped up on the Web a couple of times. The organizers of the èStoria Festival, who hosted me for the release of the Italian edition of my Jesse James book, have posted this video of my panel on the outlaw. Everyone's speaking Italian except for yours truly, so I'll forgive you if you don't watch it.

I also did a guest post for the Osprey Publishing blog on a shore battery in Estonia dating to the Tsarist era. It’s located near the village of Suurupi, overlooking the Gulf of Finland. It's an interesting bit of military history and nearly gave us a nasty surprise!

More on writing in Tangier

As I mentioned in my last post, I just got back from a writing retreat in Tangier. Not only was it hugely productive but it shifted my thinking about my career.

I originally got into writing with the dream of having a successful career writing both fiction and nonfiction. Well, the nonfiction part happened and the fiction didn't. Oh, sure, I've had several short stories published and a novel that has received good reviews and poor sales, but the vast majority of my effort has gone into developing my careers as a history and travel writer.

I need to change that. No, I'm not quitting my day job unless one of you happens to be rich and wants to be a literary patron, I'm just shifting emphasis. You see, I was really happy for those ten days on Tangier. I was doing nothing but writing a novel and getting into random situations that informed my novel. Like meeting Arabs, Berbers, and Saharawis. Like meeting French millionaires and children addicted to sniffing glue. Like wandering through the market at night and discovering that it smells of popcorn.

I'd spend long hours in cafes and in the courtyard of my pension writing it all down and working some of these details into the developing story. I delved into my protagonist's head. I immersed myself in the story.

I haven't been doing enough of that. Over my 13 year writing career I've squished my fiction writing time in between my nonfiction research and writing. It's always been secondary; now it's going to be a priority.

So I've changed my habits. Now the first thing I do in the morning is fiction, not email or blog posts or the thousands of other things that demand my attention. The email is being drastically cut down. When I returned after ten days offline I found more than 500 new messages in my inbox. In half an hour I was done looking at them. I read and responded to all the important one and the ones from friends and deleted the rest. Yes, it's really that simple.

Have you had a shift in your writing career? What prompted it?

Back from my writing retreat in Tangier

I'm baaaack!

After ten amazing days in Tangier, I'm back in Spain. I went there on a writing retreat to work on my next book, a novel set in contemporary Tangier.

I cut myself off from the internet, music, video, and all those other distractions that are only important when we have them around. I wrote 21,000 words in longhand and outlined the whole novel. It's amazing the progress you can make when you have nothing else to do.

It was nice to fully reconnect with my fiction, something I haven't been able to do for far too long thanks to all the other writing responsibilities that demand my time. Writing longhand was wonderful too. It made me write more slowly and focus on each word and phrase.

Of course I didn't spend all my time hunched over a notebook, although I did carry it everywhere. I explored the city more than I had time for on my previous visit and met lots of interesting folks who I'm looking forward to seeing again.

Yep, I'm already planning my next trip. This time I'm going to rent a cheap room in the medina and stay for a whole month, probably in November. The kind folks at the American Legation have given me access to their excellent library, complete with a desk and wifi. If I'm going for a month, I'll have to take my computer. I don't think my editors would take kindly to me disappearing for that long!

Going on a writer's retreat in Tangier

I'm heading out, folks! I will be spending ten days in Tangier working on my next novel, which not surprisingly is set in Tangier. While I'm there I'll be focusing exclusively on fiction and will not be getting online and will only be answering calls from family. I'll be completely out of circulation from June 21-July 2.

To avoid distractions I won't be bringing a computer, camera, or music. I'll have some reading, of course, and a couple of notebooks to write in longhand. All I'll be doing is writing and getting into all those random weird situations that fuel my writing. While I'm still working on the sequel to A Fine Likeness I feel I need a break before finishing the final 20,000 words on that one.

The genre of this new project is a departure for me. It's contemporary fiction (or "literary fiction" if you want to get snooty). No Chaos demons, gun battles, or sword fights in this one! A new genre and ascetic surroundings will make for an exiting experiment.

See you at the other end of the rabbit hole!

Photo by Almudena Alonso-Herrero of yours truly at the Tomb of Ibn Battuta, the greatest traveler of all time.

Military History Photo Friday: Medieval Handgonnes in Slovenia

When I started researching my book Medieval Handgonnes: The First Black Powder Infantry Weapons, I discovered the Balkans were early adopters of the earliest handheld firearm technology. Many of the photos for the book, for example, come from Croatia.

Just north of Croatia is Slovenia, the subject of my current travel series for Gadling. While in the National History Museum in the capital Ljubljana I came across two examples of early firearms.

This top one of from the early 15th century. It's of the earliest of the three main types I outlined in my book. It's only a little more than a foot long with a touch hole at one end. The hook at the bottom was for hooking over a wall or shield in order to steady it. The handgonne may have been fixed to a wooden shaft but I couldn't see any evidence for that.

This is from the late 15th century and as you can see it's a much more advanced model. Well, hopefully you can see. It's really hard to take good photos through glass! Anyway, it's about three feet long and has the familiar hook. It also has a pair of gunsights and a pan for the gunpowder that was originally fitted with a swiveling top in order to secure the loose powder.

Here's a closeup of the back end, showing the pan, maker's mark, and rear sight.

As you can see, there's no trigger on either of these pieces. Triggers of the matchlock type only came into use slowly near the end of the 15th century.

You might also want to check out a guest post I did about the accuracy of medieval handgonnes.

Castles in Spain and Slovenia

I was traveling in Italy and Slovenia for the past ten days and didn't get a chance to announce that another guest post of mine is up at the Black Gate blog. It's the second in my series on Spanish castles. This time I'm talking about the castle at Chinchón near Madrid.

While I was in Slovenia I got to see plenty of castles too. The country, which is slightly smaller than New Jersey, has about 700 of them! You can read my article on Gadling about the castles in Slovenia. It's part of a new series called "Slovenia: Hikes, History, and Horseburgers."

You never know where your books will end up

A couple of days ago I needed a new book to read. Luckily my hotel in Ljubljana had a book exchange, one of those handy take-a-book-leave-a-book services. I dropped off the novel I'd just finished and rummaged around their selection.

Immediately I came across a name I recognized. Jane Toombs is an experienced midlist writer with almost a hundred books under her belt. I interviewed her for an article on midlist writers and have chatted with her online many times over the years. The book was Designated Daddy, a Silhouette Romance.

Not my kind of thing, so I picked a different book, but it made me realize that you never know where your books will end up. It looked a bit tattered, like it had been on the road for a while and had changed hands more than once. Of course, all the English-language books on that shelf had traveled a long way. It's just that seeing one by an author I know really brought the point home to me that our work is an enduring thing with a life of its own.

Who knows? Maybe I'll come across one of my own books one day.

My book launch in Italy

I'm baaaack!

As I mentioned before, I was in Gorizia, Italy, for the ninth annual èStoria Festival. This history/book fair is hosted by my Italian publisher, who recently came out with these Italian-language editions of two of my books. For three days, a park in Gorizia was filled with tents. Several book dealers set up shop and the other tents were given over for talks and panels.

The theme this year was Bandits, and I was on a panel about Jesse James. I was the only non-Italian in the room but luckily they provided me with a translator. This guy was amazing. He grew up speaking four languages and went on to learn a dozen more. He gave a simultaneous translation so seamless it almost felt like the other panelists were speaking two languages at the same time.

My fellow panelists were a historian, a journalist, and a philosopher, and so we were an eclectic bunch. I gave a talk on "Jesse James, Inc.", on how the James legend was commodified even in his own lifetime.

The others put him in the context of the greater theme of banditry, and compared him with some of the famous bandits of southern Italy. Italian unification in the 19th century was mostly led by northern Italians, and while the southern Italians went along with it, there was some grumbling over the loss of independence. Some bandits took advantage of this by branding themselves rebels as well as thieves. Hmmm. . .sounds familiar.

I managed to slip away to do some sightseeing as well. Hit the link above about Gorizia to learn about this interesting town on the border with Slovenia. I also went to visit the Isonzo World War One battlefield.

I had a great time and hope to go back some other year. After the festival I headed over to Slovenia for a week. I'll be starting a series on Gadling this week about that.

Military History Photo Friday: Hemingway at the front

Hello from Gorizia, where I'm a guest speaker at the èStoria annual history festival. Today Gorizia is on the Italian-Slovenian border, but during World War One it was on the border between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

Just east of Gorizia flows the Isonzo River, and to the east of the river rise steep mountains. Go a little north of here and there are mountains on both sides of the river. Both armies wanted to advance, but that meant crossing an exposed valley to storm entrenched positions on usually steep terrain. Mostly it was the Italians trying to push east, again and again. There wasn't just one Battle of Isonzo, there were twelve.

Most were utter failures leading to heavy loss of life. Only during the sixth Battle of Isonzo did the Italians actually make any significant gains, and then they lost it all and more in battle #12, also known as the Battle of Caporetto. It was this battle that Ernest Hemingway immortalized in A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. Here he is, young and unknown.

This painting by R.A. Höger (1873-1930) shows some of the fierce fighting between the Austro-Hungarians and the Italians on a front that is rarely discussed in the English speaking world. Tomorrow I'm touring the battlefield. Stay tuned for a full article!

Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Heading to Italy and Slovenia

Tomorrow I'm off to Gorizia, an Italian town on the border with Slovenia. I'm going to be a guest speaker at the town's annual history fair, sponsored by the publisher Editrice Goriziana, who have come out with the Italian editions of a couple of my history books.

The theme this year is Bandits, and of course I'm on the Jesse James panel! My talk is called "Jesse James, Inc." I'll be talking about how Missouri's most famous outlaw was used to sell books, movies, tourist attractions, and generally make money. The process started even while Jesse was still running around robbing banks!

I'll have four days to meet other historians and enjoy views like this one, and then I'm off to Slovenia for a week to write a travel series for Gadling. I'll have regular access to email and I've scheduled some posts, but I may be a bit slow in replying to comments and emails.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. My photos coming soon!