Anne Wormser was my father’s older sister, one of a batch of siblings and their mates who, perhaps inadvisably, took up writing as a money-making scheme, passing that inclination along to me. As a family profession it had its ups and downs, including the great McCarthy-era communist hunt during which just looking funny could get you blacklisted, a bit of history we look likely to repeat. Other than that, the trials involved were just the normal inconveniences of a freelance career. I sometimes went to the Unemployment Office with my father when we had errands to run in Los Angeles. I learned not to mention that to children whose parents weren’t in the industry. It gave them the wrong impression.

That’s my Aunt Anne top left, next to my father, in 1946.

Anne wrote novels and short stories, and during the Depression, when money was short and pulp magazines prolific, thriller serials that routinely left her hero hanging from a cliff, metaphorical or otherwise. In the next episode he would cleverly extract himself and get on with it.

Deadlines and the need for cash often spurred her to finish a chapter without quite knowing where the story was going from there. In one episode she allowed the villains to bind her hero with steel chains and throw him into a well, where she left him until next month’s installment.

Unfortunately, when the time came she couldn’t come up with anything even faintly plausible to get him out again. She sat down at the typewriter and after chewing the ends off several pencils, typed: “With one burst of superhuman strength, Jack broke his bonds and shot to the top of the well.”

My Aunt Anne remains an example for us all.

Here’s one of her more respectable stories, from Maclean’s magazine, 1938:

The president has now begun to fling the term Communist at anyone who displeases him, from hecklers to the entire Democratic party. This is not just an echo of that older time, it is an almost verbatim reenactment, featuring the bones of Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn rising from whatever poisoned ground they’ve been lying in.

So I wrote a novel, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? about the last time the political right began hunting the political left and calling them traitors.

Opposition to the government’s policies was considered grounds for harassment and even arrest, and those called before the House or Senate as suspected communists were pressured to turn in others to save themselves. It was not, I might add, actually illegal to be a communist, but writers and actors as well as others were hounded from their careers by the whisper of communist sympathies or just a refusal to accuse their friends. My parents watched friends’ careers be ruined by it, and waited to see if someone was going to name them, for any reason or for none.

That campaign was driven by both the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives and Joseph McCarthy in the Senate. Here he is with one of his charts displaying what he claimed were communist cells within the United States, always without presenting any actual evidence.

McCarthy’s chief counsel and the man who cheerled much of the worst of the persecution was Roy Cohn, later Richard Nixon’s advisor and then Donald Trump’s. It’s Cohn’s ghost I hear now, echoed by his modern day counterpart Stephen Miller, whispering innuendo and outright falsehoods about anyone who defies whatever it is that the president wants this morning.

My parents were fairly left-wing but were never, so far as they knew, blacklisted themselves. There were times when they just didn’t get work. It might have been the usual inconvenience of a freelance career. It might have been something else. Maybe someone had mentioned them, maybe their names were similar to someone’s, maybe their friends were under suspicion, maybe anything. Then they got work again, and didn’t ask, because you couldn’t ask.

They did have friends who were blacklisted. Michael Wilson, on the right at a weekly poker game, with my father in the middle, wrote the screenplays for The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Friendly Persuasion, among many others. In 1951 he appeared as an “unfriendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee, refused to answer their questions, and was subsequently blacklisted. When The Bridge on the River Kwai won the Oscar for best screenplay, it was given to the author of the book on which the film had been based, who was very surprised indeed.

Mike Wilson died in 1978. In 1986 he was given posthumous screen credit for that and other films, and his wife and daughters were presented with his Oscar, which must have been small compensation.

My mother told me she was grateful to have dodged it, both for the obvious reasons and because they would have been pressured to talk about their friends and anyone else they knew in the industry. They had a living to make, a child to support, and a refusal to cooperate would have jeopardized all that, just as it had done for Mike Wilson.

Mike managed to keep writing but some actors and writers, particularly those at the start of their careers, left the industry entirely, driven out, hounded by the ghost of the blacklist long after it was officially over. That’s the thing about this kind of damage. It has ripples that spread and spread, and take years to fade away entirely.

That’s the premise of this novel. It stars Liza Jane Sydney, a restless and imperious actress of the old studio system who has come to roost finally in Ayala, my fictional version of Ojai, California, where I grew up. (Tony and I had an apartment in the building on the lower right in 1990. The picture was our Christmas card that year.)

She kicks off the plot by leaving a will that stipulates that she be buried in the oak grove behind her house, or else the whole thing is invalid and the numerous beneficiaries and charities and all the nonprofits she has supported will lose out. Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? is the third of my novels to be set in “Ayala,” and it is absolutely a place where that might happen.

Her niece has to sort out the trouble the will makes. In the meantime not only the paparazzi but all of Liza Jane’s former lovers, and the representatives of her various charitable beneficiaries, descend on her with opinions.

Throughout the novel, they sift out why she demanded to be buried in that particular spot, and at the end they find the blacklist at the bottom of it.

So how did the blacklist get started? Who decided we needed thought police? And saw disloyalty in opposition politics? It didn’t spring up full blown overnight, it played on old suspicions and discontents.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, what we were doing didn’t seem to be working and what communism promised seemed as if it might be a fairer way. Membership in the Communist Party of the US increased, although by the late 30s many people had grown disillusioned with Stalin’s government. That by the way, wouldn’t matter. If you had ever been a member of the Party, or even gone to a meeting, you were toast.

Anyway, the government began suspecting links between the party and the film industry. A number of big stars were named as possible communists. They were cleared and things settled down because the start of World War II created an alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union. After the war when the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons, the hunt for communists in American heated up again, particularly for possible spies. As it turned out, there had been a spy, but he was at Los Alamos, not writing screenplays.

The persecution of writers specifically started with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, with backing from J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and launched by a column in The Hollywood Reporter that named a list of supposed communist sympathizers who were sneaking propaganda into American films. So-called “friendly witnesses” proclaimed themselves enthusiastic communist hunters. Anyone who refused to participate was an “unfriendly witness.”

The first highly publicized case was the “Hollywood Ten,” all screenwriters who refused to testify. Dalton Trumbo, the writer of Roman Holiday among a slew of others, may be the best known of them but they included writers like Ring Lardner Jr., Alvah Bessie, and Edward Dmytryk. The Committee charged them with contempt of Congress and began criminal proceedings. They were all sentenced to a year in prison and then blacklisted. Only Dmytryk recanted and named names. The rest served their sentence and suffered the destruction of their careers.

Bowing to political pressure, the studios declared they would not hire anyone suspected of being a party member or even of communist sympathies. Names circulated through the studios, built on suspicion or refusal to cooperate with the House Committee, and later with the Senate hearings spearheaded by McCarthy. Anything could put you under suspicion. Various supposedly patriotic organizations released lists of their own, producing a kind of graylist that could tank a career just as easily. Things like support for civil rights or protesting nuclear testing were enough to get a name on a list.

Blacklisted writers might still get work, under no name, or a pseudonym, or by using a “front,” someone who would claim to have written the screenplay and take a cut of the payment. No doubt producers looked the other way a lot. But a blacklisted writer could not get screen credit even if their script was produced, and in the film industry, screen credit is vital to a career.

The hearings produced exactly no evidence that anyone was spreading communist propaganda. That didn’t matter.

That’s the thumbnail on the blacklist. But it didn’t end all at once. It took years, and some writers’ careers never recovered. The first real break came in 1960 when Otto Preminger announced that Dalton Trumbo, one of the original Hollywood Ten, would get screen credit for his script for Exodus, and Paul Newman signed to play the lead. Following that, Kirk Douglas announced that Trumbo would also receive credit for Spartacus.

It’s made me think a lot about what my mother told me about that time. I was too young to notice as it was happening, but when I asked her about it years later, I began to remember small things, snatches of grown-up conversations overheard between my parents and their friends.

“They lived in France for five years, you know.”

“He was a front for a lot of people. He’d pitch a script for you, they’d pretend he’d written it as long as you stayed out of sight.”

“He’s teaching math in some high school, such a shame.”

“All he could sell was paperback thrillers that were nearly pornography to publishers who didn’t care.”

“There was an FBI man across the street in my neighbor’s driveway for a month.”

What would it have been like to see your friends become non-people, disappeared persons, a blank space in the air where they had been? How often would you wonder if it was going to happen to you? I wonder if my parents had an emergency plan. I never asked my mother. She might not have answered. I think a lot about what I might have done when friends were being betrayed by friends and by our country’s own government, and hope it would have been the right thing.

A lot of people turned on their friends, became “friendly witnesses” helping the government decide who to pursue next. A lot of people left the country. Writers, directors, actors, went to work in England or in France. Some never came back to the States.

As for us now, when writers and artists are the target of repression, it’s a sign they have something important to say. My Jewish husband introduced me to the concept of tikkun olam, which means to repair the world, with small actions or large ones. Sheltering the refugee, paying down a stranger’s medical debt, donating to a food drive, even feeding a stray cat, all come under that heading. Whatever we do to heal the world matters, and we all have the capability for the small action if not the large one. I think art too is a form of tikkun olam. Oppressive forces are afraid of art, in all its forms. They don’t trust it and never have, because art is made from a lot of people’s individual truths, making up one big one, unwieldy and often argumentative but stubbornly showing us things we need to see even if we would rather not. Maybe they’re right to be afraid of it.

When the Hollywood blacklist was in full force, there were people who fought back against it, at risk to themselves. Some picketed, protested, some quietly gave work to blacklisted writers even when they couldn’t give them screen credit. Some worked as “fronts,” marketing a blacklisted writer’s script to a producer under their own name. Not all of these actions were entirely altruistic, but they did help.

Trumbo’s screen credit for Exodus effectively ended the active blacklisting of writers but it came six years after McCarthy was discredited. He was finally brought down when he went after the Army. The Army’s lawyer Joseph Welch told McCarthy, when McCarthy tried to smear one of Welch’s staff, “Until this moment, I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. ... Have you no sense of decency?” The hearings were broadcast live on all three television channels, which were all there was, so the entire country saw them and those words somehow broke the spell of McCarthy’s immense national popularity. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, the Senate finally censured him, his party ostracized him, and the press ignored him.

Whether or not the internet will ultimately serve the same purpose remains to be seen, but until then what we can do as writers is to keep writing.

etaoin shrdlu was what you got if you ran your fingers down the first two rows of lowercase linotype keys, and it often appeared as a substitute for type still to be set, or as a test line when the machine was fired up. Occasionally it got left in by mistake, like a reappearing ghost.

Lorem ipsum is its direct descendant, a mangled Latin passage of garbled Cicero that’s been used as a placeholder since the late 60s to fill a text block in a graphic design when the actual text isn’t ready yet. Born as Linotype was disappearing, it began with transfer sheets and then invaded word processing programs and web content managers where it still resides. Occasionally it too gets left in when the thing goes to print, giving the phrase the same mythic quality.

I worked for a newspaper briefly in those days of hot type, cast on a Linotype from molten lead, and I spent a lot of time in the backshop staring at mirror-image copy in the forms from which the paper was printed. I had to read it upside down as well, because the backshop guy was always standing at the bottom of the page asking why he couldn’t just cut the last paragraph of the goddamn story, which was too goddamn long again. It took delicate negotiation to convince him to take out a less vital sentence in the middle of the third paragraph instead.

The backshop smelled like hot lead (and cigars) and the linotype machines fascinated me. They were monstrous and noisy, full of clanking wheels and levers and mysterious gears. They spat out slugs of metal type, an entire line at a time, properly spaced for the column width. The men who ran them were inclined to call me Hon and tell me dirty jokes, and occasionally came to work drunk, but they knew their craft. They were, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, the workers in words, as much as I was, and with a lot more experience. You had to know what you wanted to say with those machines because revision was not allowed for anything other than misspellings or mislaid facts.

Both were more likeable than stray AI prompts, and they weren’t trying to scam me out of money, other than by honest advertising, with perhaps a qualification for ‘honest’. Their names still have a mythic quality about them. Lorem Ipsum and Etaoin Shrdlu might be the proprietors of something eldritch. A bookshop perhaps, or an expensive hatter. Ipsum & Shrdlu, by appointment to the Elven Queen. They are certainly better than their cut-rate and disreputable cousin A. I. Slop.

We mostly didn’t stop much for touristy things because we were on a deadline, since I had already booked a talk at my hometown library in Ojai on the Hollywood blacklist and my novel about it, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? before the trip became pug transport. But we did make a side trip through the Vicksburg National Military Park on the site of the Civil War siege of Vicksburg, since we were going right past it. It has over 1400 memorials including elaborate Victorian edifices erected by states in honor of their divisions and plaques for individual commanders on both sides.

We failed to locate my great-grandfather who is there somewhere but did take pictures of some of the monuments and a fine collection of nineteenth-century whiskers.

We stopped in Austin to collect my goddaughter Jen and visit Doug and Lorna, her parents, then took Jen to California to collect her husband’s car, stranded in San Ramon as the result of previous elaborate attempts to organize a pug-collection route. I was struck again by exactly how much of Texas there is.

Love’s truck stops almost all have dog parks and we patronized nearly every one. This is one of the most brilliant marketing ploys ever conceived.

We began plotting our route from one Love’s to the next.

Once we got to the desert, Dogma was horrified to find that she was expected to pee on gravel. She’s a Virginia girl and expects grass. I think she was as happy as I was when we crossed the Tehachapis out of the desert down to rolling hills dotted with the live oaks that for me will always be the sight of home.

Our plan was to stay exclusively at Motel Chain I Won’t Name, which allows multiple pets. Unfortunately, said chain is not all it is cracked up to be. One was adequate, one had no towels, looked to be in danger of imminent collapse, and was probably haunted, and one clearly had not changed the sheets since the last customer.

Still, the California part of the trip was blissful, just to be home again. We picked up the pug boys, Darcy and Heathcliff, in Fresno and had a lovely visit with Tonda’s father Steve, my old friend Tim, and a bevy of Tonda’s friends I hadn’t met before.

Dogma may have been surprised that we took the pugs with us when we left Steve’s house but we told her they were sheep and she was in charge of them.

After we collected the pug boys in Fresno, we took Highway 33, the old country road, past the oilfields and up and down the hills into Ojai.

We spent a week in Ojai, where we both grew up, and found a dog daycare for Dogma and the boys. I gave a talk about my Hollywood blacklist novel, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?, set in a thinly disguised version of Ojai, at the Ojai Library.

Then we went to the Ojai Art Center where we met in 1966.

Ojai is always going to be my heart home.

The old catholic church, St. Thomas Aquinas, is now a museum, and only a still-consecrated church in my Ojai novels, because I can. It’s a wonderful museum though.

Our motel was in Carpinteria, a 40-minute drive from Ojai each day over Casitas Pass, a beautiful, winding, two-lane road through the hills. It was transitioning to a Vagabond Inn property while we were there, necessitating a strange check-out-and-check-back-in-again procedure that none of the staff could accomplish due to new software. New software always helps any situation. It was full of dogs. Our neighbors down the walkway left their door open on the chain so their Pomeranian could look out and bark. The pugs were firm about sleeping on the bed so I gave them a bath in the motel tub.

We dropped the dogs at day care every morning halfway between Carpinteria and Ojai, and saw one of Tony’s oldest friends, Lynne, his niece Lily, and had dinner with his nephew Eric and wife Jennie who kindly let us bring the dogs to mingle with theirs. New/old Ojai friend Drew came out for my talk at the library. So many people we wish we weren’t so far away from.

We drove by the Taj, a magical place where we had an apartment for 18 months in the early nineties. It’s grown a huge privacy hedge. The old picture is what it (and we) looked like when we lived there. It was our Christmas card that year.

On the return trip we discovered La Quinta Inns, which are run by Wyndham, and allow two dogs per room, and three if you plead nicely (or don’t mention the third). They were lovely. Dog-friendly rooms are at the back with a separate entrance so you needn’t parade said dogs through the lobby. Or show them how many dogs you actually have.

We set out through Santa Paula to catch I-40. I did some research years ago at the Santa Paula Oil Museum, housed in this impressive edifice. The murals (elsewhere in SP) are new, I think.

We staggered home bloody but unbowed and a day late after we realized we were burned out and took an extra day for the return tip. Traveling with three dogs takes half again as much time as with no dogs. The pug boys traveled in crates to keep them from bouncing around the van like ping pong balls, and so had to be uncrated, walked, encouraged to pee, and crated again at what seemed like five-minute intervals. There was so much dog hair in the van that we lost our security deposit. The people at the car rental were apologetic about it, but I’m surprised they didn’t charge us more.

Happily at home now, with a book to finish, another book’s copy edits to review and argue with, and a third’s OCR text to proofread. I have two new interns. They snore.

We’re going to California in May for a number of reasons but one is to give a talk at the Ojai Library about my Hollywood blacklist novel, out last December.

That book was a very long time in the making because I never could quite get it to come right. But even in its first draft it had the uncanny ability to make things happen. I wrote an earthquake into it and they had one in California, not in the town the book is set in, a thinly disguised version of Ojai, but in the same state, which unnerved me considerably. I didn’t actually think I had caused it but it was creepy. Even more unnerving, I made an old boyfriend with whom I had not been in touch in 20 years into the template for one of the characters and promptly got back in touch with him. When one thing led to another, a member of my writers group summed it up breathlessly with, “Amanda has run off to California with a character out of her book!”

Well, that put a stop to the book for a while. I rewrote that character and rewrote him and rewrote him until he was completely fictional since in the meantime I had married the boyfriend. We are still together. And then there were the pugs. I gave the main character a herd of pugs in what was probably the third or fourth draft, and we somehow acquired pugs of our own, some intentional and some distributed by the universal pug distribution system.

Time went on and I wrote more drafts and the damn thing still wasn’t right and eventually we had no pugs again, since they don’t live anywhere near as long as we do, which is the heartbreak of having dogs. And then the book was finally where it ought to be because I found an editor who knew what was wrong with it and wanted to publish it if I would fix it. And now the book is out and suddenly we have pugs descending on us, pugs requiring a cross-country drive.

We have made a lot of cross-country drives over the years, moving us back and forth from California to Virginia and my mother the same, always with dogs and cats, ours and hers, depending on who was moving where. Whenever we let my mother’s Black Pussycat out of his carrier, he would climb into the interior of the motel room bed. In the morning Tony would have to lift one end of the bed up so that Mother could extract Pussycat. My parents, on a previous move, once spent a week in Amarillo, Texas, recapturing their batshit crazy tortie Adelaide, otherwise known as Addled Egg. We have snuck a Newfoundland into a hotel and convinced a Hampton Inn that two pugs appearing at different times were actually the same one.

So this trip should be right up our alley. We are driving since we can’t take the pugs on a plane, and anyway I am not getting on a plane until they have more than one air traffic controller and his intern per tower.

We are taking Dogma, the border collie mix who is currently the Only Dog since we suspect that if she picks up the pugs with us and escorts them back to Virginia she will be a damn sight more receptive than if we left her at home for three weeks and returned with new dogs. She’s been needing something to herd and pugs are probably an adequate substitute for sheep.

And here are Darcy and Heathcliff, who belonged to my beloved goddaughter who died last fall, much too soon. I am not sure which is which.

We are renting a gigantic minivan with seats that fold down in the back and have found Motel 6, which gets excellent reviews and allows multiple pets so we will not be attempting to smuggle them in by night on this trip. What could possibly go wrong? We do not ask because the book also has rattlesnakes in it and I do not want to manifest those.

We spent the weekend in Charlottesville at the Virginia Festival of the Book, plugging my Hollywood blacklist novel about the last time the government decided that disagreeing with it was criminal, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? which has become gruesomely timely. It was a wonderful conference, and the table tent that misspelled Cockrell ensured I didn’t get a big head.

I hadn’t been to a conference since I retired from Hollins and I had forgotten what fun they could be, despite...well, everything. I got to moderate a panel too, with three terrific writers who write just the kind of book I like.

We had dinner at the same restaurant we ate at the last time I had a book in the festival, in 2011. The C&O is still there on Water Street, and still good. Charlottesville’s downtown mall is an example of how to make a street into a pedestrian mall and do it right. I have lived in two places that tried to do it and flopped, largely because there was nothing already downtown that anyone wanted to go to. Charlottesville’s mall has multiple good restaurants, pop-up vendors’ stalls, three bookstores, and a street musician with a sousaphone.

The hotel had succumbed to the current fashion for mid-century modern style and attempted to replicate it with a carpet of unparalleled hideousness, but the bed was heavenly, large and soft, and devoid of dogs and cats, unlike home. It was easy to feel as if all was as it should be, just for that weekend. Then we came home to a new war and all is as it should not be, but we turned out Saturday with signs and the dog, and swelled the crowd in Roanoke with two more infuriated citizens.

At a time when our world seems poised on the edge of yet another madness, and the madness is spreading, I thought it would be a fine time to re-read my mother’s classic fairy tale which we just republished in a lovely new edition. A short vacation in Fairyland sounded just right.

But there it was, war again, buried just deep enough not to notice on first glance. My mother wrote Shadow Castle during WWII. (The original 1945 hardcover has the regulation notice about being produced in accordance with government regulations on conservation of paper.) Her husband, my father, was a combat cameraman in the Marine Corps somewhere in the Pacific (Iwo Jima as it turned out). A trip to Fairyland must have seemed to her too like an escape from wondering if he was still alive.

That would have been the most awful part, not knowing. At one point in the book, Mika gives Gloria a magical bracelet to protect her. She puts it on and sees goblins all around her. They don’t seem to be able to get at her but they are clearly there. She takes it off again in a hurry. Then she puts it back on because now that she knows they’re there, she would much rather see them than not. My mother was never a woman not to look a situation in the eye.

There are echoes of the war in the goblins too. They haven’t bothered Fairyland for decades and so everyone relaxed, and set about a life that didn’t involve fighting off invaders. But now suddenly here they are again with their poisoned claws and their sense that they can have anything they want. Goblins are envious, resentful, and certain they are better, stronger, smarter than anyone else and therefore deserve...everything.

The actual tends to follow a writer into the fictional, sometimes without our noticing, in ways large and small. In the story, the fairies’ best defense against the goblins is goblin dust, magical and hard to make. One grain on a goblin’s skin is enough to send it into a frenzy of excruciating pain until it has covered itself with butter, which is rare in the goblin lands. My mother was living with her mother and sister and keeping a household running on ration stamps. Butter was a luxury, strictly rationed and expensive. A child reader in 1945 would get it immediately.

Even with the echoes of war, and two fierce battles between goblins and fairies, she somehow arranged it that no one died, not even goblins — The wizard Glauz enchants them into doorknobs. A child of 1945 would see enough death elsewhere.

I would give a great deal to know that doorknob spell just now.

The original hardback from 1945.

https://books2read.com/ShadowCastle

I have a new book out this past December on the Hollywood blacklist and one forthcoming in October about building Hadrian’s Wall, which is quite a time jump. The Roman books, which I write as Damion Hunter, have been my bread and butter in retirement since Canelo wanted to republish the early ones I had written for a book packager years ago. The blacklist book — my parents were screenwriters and they lived through it. They were never blacklisted themselves, so far as they knew, but some of their good friends were. And there were times when they just didn’t get work, and wondered uneasily if this was it. Had someone named them as suspected communists? It might have been the usual inconvenience of a freelance career. It might have been something else. Maybe someone had mentioned them, maybe their names were similar to someone’s, maybe anything. Then they got work again, and didn’t ask, because you couldn’t ask. While my mother was in the hospital after my birth, a very large-sum deal went south over a weekend. Maybe the producer just listened to the last person who talked to him, and that person said, “Oh, that will never make any money.” Or maybe instead someone said, “You know, Cockrell’s a friend of Michael Wilson,” a screenwriter who was probably under suspicion already, later refused to talk to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was blacklisted for years. When I started writing that one, it was just a kind of family story, something I wanted to tell about. By the time it was published it had become gruesomely timely. There are a hell of a lot of parallels between now and the last time that the government decided that disagreeing with its policies was criminal. I’ll be at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville on March 21 to talk about it.

The Roman books are, increasingly, a chance to get the hell out of the 21st century and go live in (currently) the second century. This is not to say that they were nicer people then, but just that they are a long way away and I can to some extent control how close to the bone the things they do (and have to put up with) get to me. Readers who have liked my previous Roman novels will find a few old friends from other series appearing as secondary characters in this new one, Hadrian’s Eagles, about the building of Hadrian’s Wall. I feel about a particular period in history as I do about a well-constructed fantasy world: when you have built a solid “secondary world” you don’t mess with it. That’s why a few from Legions of the Mist and The Wall at the Edge of the World appear. Using Felix Appius Julianus, son of Correus from The Centurions series, as a main character was simply a fancy of mine. I always wondered what he might be like when he grew up.

A reconstruction of one of the small turrets that dotted the Wall between the large forts and the mile forts.

We have also launched a beautiful new edition of my mother’s classic fairy tale Shadow Castle. There is a long backstory to getting the rights to this back, which is another whole post in itself, recounted here:

The Story of How the Fairies Put One Over on the Pirates

That is more book news that I have had in a long time, and very satisfactory. Writing is a jumpy profession and you never know when the universe will like your stuff and when it will tell you (rightly or wrongly) that it’s sludge.

I’ll end with a recommendation for two books that I recently read that I loved, Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher. Lavinia is a dreamlike reconstruction from the scraps that Virgil gives us of the woman destined to marry Aeneas and found Rome. Nine Goblins is everything best about fantasy that has a sense of humor and an undercurrent of things we really ought to think about as Sgt. Nessilka tries to shepherd her motley crew home through enemy territory.

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