Wordplay

Congratulations, Brenna! She correctly answered this week’s question and was drawn as the second of two runner-up winners to receive an autographed copy of Behold the Dawn. Check back tomorrow to learn the winner of the Grand Prize and get all the details on Behold the Dawn’s official launch!

Congratulations, Jacob Parker! He correctly answered this week’s question and was drawn as the first of two runner-up winners who will receive an autographed copy of Behold the Dawn. Check back tomorrow to discover the second runner-up and on Thursday to learn the winner of the Grand Prize and get all the details on Behold the Dawn’s official launch!

Anyone who doubts the subjective nature of art need look for persuasion no farther than Amazon’s review pages. For instance, Stephen R. Lawhead’s Hood received opinions varying from the effusive “Lawhead at his best” and “rip-roaring good story” to the insistent “no real plot, resolution, or drama” and “slow, uninspired and pointless.” How could the same piece of writing inspire such wildly differing reactions? You have to wonder if these reviewers were even reading the same book!

For better or worse, art (like life) is subjective. Not one of us looks at a story, a painting, a movie, or a concert in the same way. We each see the same structure; we each read the same words; but we all take something individual, and therefore indefinably precious, away from the encounter. Experiencing art is like watching clouds. Two people can lie on the same grassy hill, watching the same cloud formations. But how they interpret the shapes of the clouds is an entirely individual experience. You may see a poodle on a leash, while in the same cloud, I see a drag race.

Part of the magic of the artistic experience is its endless evolution. It is never static. Even once the writer has put the final touch on his piece, it continues to live and morph and grow through the experiences of the reader. When we hand our writing over to others, we’re unavoidably surrendering our control over it. We can’t sit at the reader’s shoulder and dictate how he envisions our characters or how he reacts to the themes. If we could, it would largely defeat the point of art, not to mention the enjoyment.

Subjectivity is sometimes a hard notion to accept. Because we’re limited by our own visions of the world, it isn’t automatic for us to realize that other visions are not only out there but, in fact, they are everywhere. It’s a natural human reaction for us to suppose that our own reactions and beliefs should be shared by everyone. As a result, it can sometimes be quite a shock to realize that everyone isn’t going to view our writing the same way we do.

Despite its universalism, this is a truth that few of us manage to grasp right off. However, it’s very important that we do grasp it. Until we do, we’ll never be able to take advantage of it.
Once we embrace the subjectivity of art, we can:

• Accept that the painful rejection of our work by some of our readers is inevitable and even warranted, given the wide range of personalities who will read it.

• Realize that bad reviews aren’t necessarily reflective on the quality of our work. Everyone and his mother’s uncle is entitled to his opinion. And no two people’s opinions are going to be exactly alike. If one person adores your work, then you can expect that someone else will hate it with equal fervency. Your work can’t speak to everyone. The sooner we accept this fact, the easier it will be to brush away the sting of negativity.

• Open our eyes to the fact that differing opinions give us the opportunity to widen our scope and deepen our work. Occasionally (and sometimes more than occasionally) your negative reviewers may just have a point or two. If you can handle the negativity, you may just gain more from reading your bad reviews than you do from your good reviews. The varying vantage points of other people can help you see yourself, your writing, and your flaws more clearly.

• Embrace the wide variety of humanity. If everyone in the world shared our opinions down to the last dot, it would be a ridiculously dull place. Despite the drawbacks and occasional nicks of pride, subjectivity, at its very heart, is the only reason art is worth pursuing. It allows us all a broader canvas on which to paint, experiment, fail, and succeed.

Related Posts: The Importance of Art

The Importance of Pleasing Ourselves in Our Writing

Putting Your Ego in Your Back Pocket
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This week’s Winning Wednesday winner is Sheila. In order to win the Behold the Dawn poster, she answered the question “What was a scriptorium?” A scriptorium was a room in a monastery for storing, copying, illustrating, or reading manuscripts. The Dark Ages ruled nowhere more fully than in the medieval church, which was crippled with corruption, ignorance, and superstition. The Pope delivered the final word on all doctrinal (and social) matters, but most people, including even many bishops and lower officers of the church, lived in profound ignorance even of Rome’s teachings, much less the Bible. Some facts about the medieval church:

• The church taught that participation in a Crusade would absolve one of all past and future sins.

• Whenever a traveler passed a roadside shrine, he had to pause and cross himself.

• The pope alone had the power to punish kings (although it was often ignored, although never so famously as by Henry VIII).

• The sacraments had to be administered only by the church of which one was a member.

• Upon confession by a penitent, the parish priest was expected to probe for further, undeclared sins and to inflict a lengthy cross-examination.

• Many monks flocked to the holy orders of the mendicant (or begging) friars and the hermits, in no small part because it freed them from the stifling rigors of parish life.

Congratulations, Sheila! Your prize is in the mail! Please feel free to enter again.


Next week, the final Winning Wednesday (or Thursday, in this case) will mark the release of Behold the Dawn. In celebration, I’m revealing our grand prize!


This week’s prize: Autographed copy of Behold the Dawn, poster, mug, keychain, and pen.


Runners up: The winning starts on Tuesday and Wednesday, when I’ll draw for the two runners up, who will each receive an autographed copy of Behold the Dawn!


This week’s question: “A misericorde was what kind of weapon?”


In Behold the Dawn, Marcus Annan, the Lady Mairead, and Annan’s servant Peregrine Marek are set upon by pursuing enemies:

Annan and Marek were watering their horses, the reins looped over their elbows as they knelt beside the animals’ heads and drank. The Baptist led his donkey along the brim of the oasis to a spot clear of rocks. But Mairead stayed behind to straighten the ache from her bones and wait until Annan or Marek brought her the wineskin.

She watched Annan’s broad shoulders as he shrugged out of his ruddy jerkin before again dipping his hands into the water. The animosity that had clogged the air between him and the Baptist had been suffocating— so thick she could have reached out a hand and squeezed it with her fingers.

Marek had said the Baptist trusted Annan. But it had not been trust she had seen in the man’s flashing eyes. It was closer to hatred.

Gooseflesh prickled on her arms, and she reached to rub her sleeves. For as long as she had been Lord William’s wife, months before she had even known the name of Marcus Annan, she had trusted the Baptist.

How was it then, that in the short time she had known this tourneyer, he had gained the power to make her doubt the brave devotion of the monk in whom she had so long put her faith? She bit her lip, her gaze shifting to where the Baptist urged his donkey to the edge of a clean shallow.

Pounding somewhere in the back of her head, she heard thunder. She turned to look. Rolling down from the edge of the valley, already close enough for her to see the flash of the crosses on their tabards, charged a dozen knights on horseback.

Her breath caught so hard it felt like someone had tried to tear her breastbone from her chest. “Annan—”

“Annan!” Marek repeated her shout, and Mairead spun around, heart hurtling against her ribs. “It’s him—” Her fingers clenched in her skirt. “It’s Hugh—”

Annan, his jerkin a forgotten splash of red on the ground behind him and the cold fire of his eyes raging to life, yanked his sword from its sheath on the saddle. “Get behind me.” Not once did he look at her. All his focus was on the approaching riders. “Marek! Give me that misericorde, and get the countess on her horse.”

Marek hesitated. “What about y—”

“Now!”

To enter this week’s contest, use the form at the bottom of the left-hand column to email your best guess. Deadline is Monday, September 27, 6:00 p.m. MST. Three names will be selected from the correct entries and announced on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Authors write to be read. We write not only for ourselves, but to share our thoughts, our words, our stories with others. Unless we happen to be Emily Dickinson, we inevitably realize that our words will be read by someone other than ourselves (even if it’s only our mothers). In short, we write for an audience.

When we write our first story, who are we writing it for? What spellbound audience are we envisioning somewhere in the backs of our brains? Chances are the only audience you had in mind at that point was yourself and, perhaps, your family. Most of us write that first story for no other reason that because we want to satisfy and entertain ourselves. At that point, we’re writing almost entirely for an audience of one. But should we be lucky enough to grow our audience in the interim between Story #1 and Story #2, the simplicity of our focus has a way of evolving, and not necessarily for the better.

As we add more people to our audience, not only will the pressure to perform multiply, but so will the pressure to conform to what we think our audience wants to hear. No longer are we able to please only ourselves; suddenly, we have a whole host of readers to think of. And, naturally, we want to please them. We want to give them exactly what they want, for reasons of personal pride as well as professional necessity. But the simple fact is that we can’t please everyone. And when we start trying to please everyone, we’ll very likely end by pleasing no one, including ourselves.

“Know your audience” is a common tenet of all media. After all, if you don’t know your audience, you can’t give them what they want, right? Yes and no.

Writing for an audience, instead of merely to an audience means you’re molding your artistic vision to please the whims of the public. You’re risking the creativity and the uniqueness that only you can bring to your writing. When you catch yourself censoring a passage or altering the direction of the plot simply because you feel this is what someone else would want you to do, you’re sacrificing the artistic gift that is distinctly yours. You weren’t meant to write stories the way others would have you write them; you were given the gift of storytelling so that you might tell the stories you were meant to tell.

It’s tempting, particularly with a sophomore novel, to pander to what we think readers want. But if they loved your first book enough to become your rapt audience, then likely what they want is more of the same, more of you.

Believe it or not, none of this is to say that writing with a specific audience in mind is necessarily a bad thing. It’s essential to know your audience and to know what they expect from you. When, how, and if you decide to fulfill those expectations needs to be an educated decision. Also, we need to avoid the pitfall of thinking that just because our artistic vision is ours that it’s 20/20. It’s not. Period. No one’s is. Therefore, it’s vital to obtain the objective influence of a select part of your audience.
In their book Writing Life Stories, Bill Roorbach and Kristen Keckler suggest:

Think of your writing as a conversation with a reader—just one. Two people intimate over a meal, say, or over a cocktail or coffee, head-to-head. What if your audience was not a huge roomful of frighteningly various souls but one single person, the king or queen of good listeners, always nodding in interest, always with you, and a genuine friend, always ready to question your logic? What if you started to think of your writing as a conversation?

Pick a dear friend with whom you enjoy conversation and argument. Now picture that friend reading over your shoulder as you sit down to write or revise your story.

What must change? ….Tailor your sentences to the needs of one reader, and you’ll tend to make your work more accessible to all.

Writing to an audience is one of the inevitable joys and frustrations of the writing life. We can’t avoid it, despite its pitfalls, but we can channel it by narrowing that audience down to specificity.

Related Posts: The Making of the Perfect Novel

The Importance of Pleasing Ourselves in Our Writing

Writing Buddies
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This week’s Winning Wednesday winner is Sherrinda Ketchersid. In order to win the Behold the Dawn mug, she answered the question “What was a bailey?” The term bailey applied to both the outermost wall surrounding a castle and the courtyard inside the walls. Some interesting facts about castles:

• A man’s wealth could be calculated by the thickness of his walls. Castles dating from the eleventh century often had walls more than six feet thick.

• The complete lack of sewers or drainage systems meant that a prolonged rain could transform the courtyards into swamps.

• A busy castle would reek with the smell of blood, freshly tanned hides, roasting meat, and the odors of horses, dogs, hawks, and men.

• Any windows at ground level were kept very small on the outside to protect against arrow fire. They were wider on the inside to allow as much light as possible.

• Some gatehouses featured holes in the ceiling, through which stones or boiling water could be poured on the heads of invaders.

• Carpets were basically nonexistent, but the floors of personal rooms were sometimes covered with fresh straw, rushes, or sweet-smelling grasses.

Congratulations, Sherrinda! Your prize is in the mail! Please feel free to enter again.


This week’s prize: A Behold the Dawn poster.


This week’s question: “What was a scriptorium?”


A) A writer of religious texts.
B) A room in a monastery for writing or reading.
C) A preacher sanctioned by the church.
D) The personal secretary of a bishop.


In Behold the Dawn, Marcus Annan and the Lady Mairead discuss his past:

She looked back at him, and the softness of her hair tickled against his neck. “And I prayed for peace and for happiness and for joy.” She looked away, and he laid his chin on top of her head.
“Those are things that I have never found—save with you.”
“What about when you were yet a child? What about before—” She stopped, and he could sense her embarrassment.
He would have said before St. Dunstan’s. But she had no knowledge of the ill-fated monastery. Her meaning was more along the lines of before you became the monster you are now. She did not think those words, of course. But they were there, nonetheless, lurking in the blank, unread depths of her.
“Yes. I was happy before.” Even after the fight with his brother, and the deaths of his sister-in-law and her unborn children, he had found happiness. The fiercest, most spectacular joy he had ever known had been in the dark scriptoriums of the monastery, reading and learning from the sacred manuscripts as he copied them. He had drunk them in, making the words of Heaven so much a part of him that even now they sometimes echoed in his head.
But that time was long past. And the irony of it bit hard.

To enter this week’s contest, use the form at the bottom of the left-hand column to email your best guess. Deadline is Tuesday, September 22, 6:00 p.m. MST. One name will be selected from the correct entries and announced next Wednesday.

Just for the record: I hate beginnings. The first fifty pages of my novels are inevitably torture to write. I’m always sure I’ve lost my touch, convinced that every successful story in the past was a fluke, absolutely certain that I’ll never make these opening scenes gripping enough to hook a reader. And it’s no wonder. Beginnings are hard. And important.

They are the sales pitch for your entire story. Doesn’t matter how slam-bang your finish is, doesn’t matter how fresh your dialogue is, doesn’t matter if your characters are so real they tap dance their way off the pages. If your beginning doesn’t fulfill any of a number of requirements, chances are readers won’t get far enough to discover your story’s hidden merits.

Unfortunately for us harried writers no surefire pattern exists for the perfect opening. However, most good beginnings do share a couple traits. Following are ten.

1. Don’t open before the beginning. Mystery author William G. Tapley points out, “Starting before the beginning… means loading up your readers with background information they have no reason to care about.” Don’t dump your backstory—however vital to the plot—into your reader’s lap right away. No one wants to hear someone’s life story the moment after they meet them.

2. Open with characters, preferably the protagonist. Even the most plot-driven tales inevitably boil down to characters. The personalities that inhabit your stories are what will connect with readers. If you fail to connect with them right off the bat, you can cram all the action you want into your opening, but the intensity and the drama will still fall flat.

3. Open with the hook. Every story begins with a hook, the first domino, which, when knocked over, starts the chain of dominoes tumbling. This catalyst is the moment your story officially begins, and, presumably, it’s also the first moment of high interest. Use that to your advantage and get right to the point.

4. Open with conflict. No conflict, no story. Conflict doesn’t always mean nuclear warheads going off, but it does demand that your characters be at odds with someone or something right from the get go. Conflict keeps the pages turning, and turning pages are nowhere more important than in the beginning.

5. Open with movement. Openings need more than action, they need motion. Motion gives readers a sense of progression and, when necessary, urgency. Whenever possible, open with a scene that allows your characters to keep moving, even if they’re just walking down the street.

6. Open with something that makes the reader ask a question. Unanswered questions fuel intrigue; intrigue keeps the reader’s interest. If you can present a situation that immediately has your reader asking questions, you’ve significantly upped the odds that he’ll keep reading.

7. Anchor the reader to avoid confusion. As a caveat to #6, make sure you have your readers asking the right questions. You want to give them enough information so they can ask intelligent, informed questions, not “What the heck is going on here?!” As soon as possible, anchor them with the pertinent facts: who the characters are, what the current dilemma is, etc.

8. Establish the setting. Modern authors are often shy of opening with description, but a quick, incisive intro of the setting not only serves to ground the reader in the physicality of the story, but also to hook their interest and set the stage. In Worlds of Wonder, David Gerrold explains that opening lines “that hook you immediately into the hero’s dilemma almost always follow the hook with a bit of stage setting” and vice versa.

9. Orient the reader with an “establishing” shot. Anchoring the reader can often be done best by taking a cue from the movies and opening with an “establishing” shot. If done skillfully, you can present the setting and the characters’ positions in it in as little as a sentence or two.

10. Set the tone. Because your opening chapter sets the tone for your entire story, you need to give the reader accurate presuppositions about the type of tale he’s going to be reading. Your beginning needs to set the stage for the inevitable denouement—without, of course, giving it away.
If you can nail all nine of these points in your opening chapter, your readers are likely to keep the pages turning all the way into the wee hours of the morning!

Related Posts: Utilizing Character in Beginnings

Dostoevsky and the Art of In Medias Res

Backstory: The Importance of What Isn't Told

The Necessity of Conflict

Review of Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress

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This week’s Winning Wednesday winner is Benjamin Farnum. In order to win Loreena McKennitt’s CD The Book of Secrets, he answered the question “In medieval times, what was the role of the bailiff?” The term bailiff originated in England, where it was used to denigrate certain of the king’s officers, particularly those who fulfilled the duties of a sheriff or mayor. Even today, the extent of an English sheriff’s jurisdiction is known as a bailiwick.


In some instances, bailiffs were more particularly the stewards of great manors, with the extension of their power being applied as an agent of the lord of the land. Bailiffs possessed a large measure of authority, and it was in their power to punish criminals as they saw fit, even going so far as to confiscate property and cut off hands. Should a bailiff chance to see a man lingering around a corpse, he could arrest and convict the man with little to no evidence that he was the murderer. Most bailiffs were of common blood, as evidenced by their clothing, which was usually of the same cut as that of the common laborer, but of much better material. The bailiff was inevitably a landowner, as opposed to a serf. In addition to his duties as a keeper of the law, he was responsible for making certain that the serfs and peasants under him fulfilled their various duties.


Congratulations, Benjamin! Your prize is in the mail! Please feel free to enter again.


This week’s prize: A Behold the Dawn mug.


This week’s question: “What was a bailey?” (Hint: Look it up in a dictionary.)
In Behold the Dawn, Marcus Annan and the Lady Mairead arrive at the home of a friend, Stephen of Essex, after being separated from Annan’s indentured servant Peregrine Marek:

Mairead woke as Annan drew rein at the gate of the estate belonging to Lord Stephen of Essex. Only a rim of red marred the smoky gray morning that filled the sky. The road, which would lead them to Constantinople when came the time, passed before the Englishman’s walls and carried on, a mere flaw etched in the rippling hills.
The road lay empty. Marek, on his bay palfrey, was not to be seen. But that coin had two sides: Lord Hugh and the Templar weren’t awaiting them either. For that, Mairead was profoundly grateful.
A servant admitted them to the bailey, gave the reins of the tired courser to a groomsman, and escorted them to the Great Hall. Mairead hugged her cloak round herself and stayed close at Annan’s shoulder, almost brushing against him, as the servant inclined his head and asked them to be seated.
Annan made no motion to sit, and she stayed beside him.
“Did a Scottish lad come through here yesterday?” Annan asked.
The servant shook his head, the gray hair of his brows flitting with the motion. “Your pardon, Master Knight, but I do not know. I think not.”
Annan grunted, and the servant bowed once more before leaving. “Wretch.” Mairead didn’t ask if the comment referred to the servant or to Marek. Annan had said nothing all morning; but she could sense the deep, knotting tension within him.

To enter this week’s contest, use the form at the bottom of the left-hand column to email your best guess. Deadline is Tuesday, September 15, 6:00 p.m. MST. One name will be selected from the correct entries and announced next Wednesday.

This week, I’m pleased to share a guest post by Carolyn Kaufman, author of the wonderful Archetype Writing Blog. Carolyn received her Bachelor of Arts in English/Writing from Otterbein College and her clinical Doctorate of Psychology from the APA-accredited Wright State University School of Professional Psychology. She completed her internship at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

As a clinical psychology therapist, she has worked with individuals, couples, and groups, with specialized training in issues relevant to college students, crisis intervention, domestic violence, media psychology, and relationship problems. Her areas of interest include crisis and trauma, relationships, creativity, business psychology, and media psychology.

In addition to her freelance work, Kaufman is an assistant professor at Columbus State Community College and occasionally teaches at her alma mater, Otterbein. She always emphasizes the practical application of psychology to everyday life, which has transferred well into her work with writers. I’ve no doubt you’ll enjoy her introspective look at the effect of mental illnesses and “angst” upon the creative life!

Angst, Mental Illness, and Creativity
Everyone talks about angst-ridden creative people, and I’ve had several readers ask me if angst is in fact a necessary ingredient for creativity. Since angst means different things to different people, I decided the best place to start was the dictionary:

Angst (n.) (ängkst)
1. A German word that refers to “a feeling of anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression.”
2. Fanfiction writers also use the word to help categorize some forms of fanfic: “Putting the characters and by extension the readers through deep emotional and possibly physical pain.”

Mental Illness
Some people take the definition of angst a lot farther. They believe writers need to be at least a little touched by madness. Interestingly, there is a strong positive correlation between bipolar disorder (aka manic depression) and creativity. According to Frederick Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, both giants in the study of bipolar disorder:

It is counterintuitive that such a destructive illness could be associated with imagination or great works of art. Yet the perceived association is a persistent cultural belief and one that is backed by data from many studies… The argument is not that manic-depressive illness and its related temperaments are essential to creative work; clearly they are not. Nor do we argue that most people who have bipolar or recurrent depressive illness are creative; they are not. The argument is, rather, that a disproportionate number of eminent writers and artists have suffered from bipolar spectrum disorders and that, under some circumstances, creativity can be facilitated by such disorders.

From Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan to Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, depression or bipolar illness is disproportionately common in creative geniuses.

Is Angst Necessary?
Now, if bipolar disorder and depression are common in creative geniuses, and angst is a description of how people with those disorders often feel, does that mean angst is necessary to the creative process?

Looking at the psychological research… no. Interestingly, people who are creative have more in common with people who are bipolar than they do with “normal” people, but the commonalities lie not necessarily in mood disturbances, but rather in idiosyncratic thinking patterns, in enthusiasm and passion for their art, in how easily they can produce new and strange ideas. In many cases, people who are bipolar and creative are better able to express themselves creatively when they are being appropriately treated for their disorders.

Part of what makes being creative with a mental illness so difficult is the behaviors that result. Alcoholism is found in over 50% of the people with bipolar disorder. Drug abuse is also extremely high. Periods of despair can be so intense that the individual can hardly get out of bed, let alone create something. And of course the rate of suicide and suicide attempts is much higher than in creative people who aren’t also struggling with a mental illness.

The way I think of it is like this—there is an overlap between “creative” genes and “bipolar/depressive” genes. And while some people, like Kurt Cobain, feel much more creative when they’re in the manic phase of bipolar disorder, they may also be less coherent (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” lyrics, anyone?), and they also have to deal with the crash of depression (Cobain committed suicide). Research also suggests that over time depressive/bipolar illnesses gnaw away at creativity. In a study done with children, “we found a negative correlation of illness duration with…creativity; the longer the children were sick, the less creative they were.” So overall, the illness becomes a hindrance to creativity, rather than a help.

Angst vs. Soul
An ex of mine was an amazing artist, technically. He could reproduce anything he saw, often without ever lifting the pencil. I’ve never seen someone who could draw like he could without ever needing to erase. He didn’t need to work the image over and over from rough to smooth—he just produced an immaculate image the first time.

He spoke at one point to some galleries about displaying his work, but he was turned down. One director was kind enough to give him some feedback. She told him something was “missing” from his work.

He thought it was angst. But it wasn’t. (He got to share mine, and it didn’t affect his art at all. I checked.) What he was missing was soul.

So I don’t think it’s angst that we all need to produce good stuff. It’s soul.

My Angst
So that brings us to me. Do I need angst to produce good work? I honestly don’t know, because precocious creative works started around the same time my angst found me. I do have an emotional state that I think I write in better than any other. I call it “melancholy.” It’s a calm, quiet state that for some reason makes it easier to sink into a creative state. But maybe the reason that’s helpful is that I enjoy writing fiction with “angst” in it.

I have met people who become extremely distraught about putting their characters through a tale of angst. Some cry, some sink into a depression, some feel guilty. I’m not sure why they write it if they feel that way. (The only time I sink into a depression as a result of writing is when I finish a novel—I always worry I won’t be able to write another one!) For me, writing angst is like an outlet for my own. If I’ve got it, why not plumb it for material?

Related Posts: Conscious vs. Unconscious Creativity

5 Ways to Create Inspiration
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This week’s Winning Wednesday winner is Hannah Covington. In order to win the Behold the Dawn T-shirt, she answered the question “The Crusaders shortened the name of their opponent, the famed Turkish sultan, to Saladin. What was his full name?” Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb was one of few Moslems famous enough to warrant a westernized version of his name. Called Saladin (or, sometimes, Suleiman), he was the son of a Kurdish emir of humble extraction. Because of his bravery and brilliance as a soldier, he was appointed by the Sultan of Persia to govern a small town in what is now Baghdad. From this lowly beginning, he rose to become one of the greatest Muslim generals in history, eventually reuniting Syria and Egypt under the Ayyubid Sultanate.


Congratulations, Hannah! Your prize is in the mail! Please feel free to enter again.


This week’s prize: The CD The Book of Secrets by New Age/Celtic singer Loreena McKennitt.


This week’s question: “In medieval times, what was the role of the bailiff?” (Hint: Check out Wikipedia.)


Instead of posting an excerpt from Behold the Dawn, this week I’m going to share the book’s “soundtrack.” When writing stories, I will often collect a playlist of songs related thematically, and thanks to Playlist, I can share them with you for your listening pleasure! Be sure to listen to the first song, which is featured on this week’s prize CD:




To enter this week’s contest, use the form at the bottom of the left-hand column to email your best guess. Deadline is Tuesday, September 8, 6:00 p.m. MST. One name will be selected from the correct entries and announced next Wednesday.