The History of the (Whole) World

Check out the Princeton University Press catalog page for the Art of the Public Grovel!

Sundays are work days for us, so Mondays are our days off. It’s sprinkling a little this morning, but not too hard; the windows are open and the birds are singing. The neighbor’s cows are mooing (in fact they sound like they’re in the back yard–I’m going to go check as soon as I post).

Dan and Emily built a beautiful block city.

Christopher discovered that Emily fits inside my giant library bag.

Everyone is enjoying nature on this beautiful spring morning.

Well, OK, not quite. But I’m going to chase them all outside in a minute to do their chores.

It’s the last week of April, which means that I start travelling again at the end of the week. Off to New York for a conference, and then into Manhattan for a couple of days to have lunch with my agent and do a bit of research at the NYPL.

I scheduled my summer speaking engagements back in the days when I thought that I might actually have the History of the Medieval World finished by the deadline of May 1. Now my deadline is the end of August, and to meet THAT I’m going to have to work about three times as hard as I’ve ever worked before. (Which is scary.) While still travelling. And without destroying the rest of my life: I refuse to give up home schooling, or cooking fancy dinners for fun, or horseback riding, or working on the farm. So I’ve got to manage to be more efficient within my current working hours.

I reached this conclusion yesterday, after working out a detailed plan for finishing the book. Then I launched my new rigorous plan by sleeping right through my alarm this morning (I was going to do my 4 AM wakeup call…). And I was going to get to work on the Plague of Justinian, too. Here’s where I finished up work on Saturday…

*
The fighting had not gone well for the Byzantine army, but a blacker enemy hovered. In 542, just as Khosru was crossing over the Euphrates for yet another assault on the Byzantine frontier, a ship docked at the Golden Horn. It brought much-needed grain from the mouth of the Nile; the cold dark summers of the previous years had already reduced food supplies, and the population of the eastern Empire was already hungrier and weaker than normal. But not long after the ship threw down its anchor, a sickness began to spread along the waterfront. It was an illness known to the ancients, but new to the people of Constantinople: sudden fever, swellings in the groin and armpit, black pustules and bloody vomit, delirium and coma.
Physicians, dissecting the bodies of the dead in an effort to find the cause, found strange abscesses filled with pus and dead tissue at the center of the swellings. They were at a loss: nothing seemed to stop the spread of the disease. At first, the deaths from the illness were no worse than from any other epidemic making its way through the crowded suburbs of Constantinople. But within days the mortalities had doubled and then doubled again.
This was no mere epidemic. It had become a catastrophe without parallel: a pestilence, writes Procopius, “by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated.”
*

Cool, huh? I love disasters. Well, I’ll get back to it tomorrow. Assuming I can roll out of bed when the alarm goes off.

Pictures from the NY conference coming at the end of the week…

So I’m getting up at a dark and owl-haunted hour six days a week, laboring away morning by morning on a book which is impossibly huge and complicated.

(Excuse me for a moment. HISTORY OF THE WORLD? Are you KIDDING? Why did I say I would DO THIS? I mean, it’s a RIDICULOUS project anyway, and OH YES, I’M HOME EDUCATING FOUR CHILDREN and my husband is a MINISTER which means my weekends are already full, not to mention my weeks, and after getting up at 4 AM five mornings in a row I have written a total of four pages which appear, on second reading, TO BE NOTHING MORE THAN–)

Ahem.

Anyway, I had scheduled my speaking engagements so that they would all fall AFTER May 1. I’m usually booked up a year in advance, and a year ago I figured, stupidly, that I’d be finished with this book by my original deadline. No such luck. I’ll still be working on the thing in May, when I go to New York and Los Angeles; and in June, when I go to Seattle; and in July, when I go to Texas and Georgia ; and in August, when I go back to New York. (More dates in September and October, but theoretically I’ll be done with the book by then. Theoretically.)

So I bought myself a travel computer. I adore my MacBook Pro, but it’s not as portable as it could be, especially when I’m trying to fly without checking any bags. I needed something smaller.

I now own a MacBook Air.

It is absolutely the coolest thing I have ever seen. I can actually put the MacBook Air in my purse.

When I schlepped Christopher (still the proud owner of a learner’s permit and not a full license) to his weekly social outlet on Sunday night, I took it to my usual waiting-for-my-kid-but-at-least-I-can-eat-great-food hangout and sat at the bar with it, eating escargot and bittersweet chocolate ice cream and tinkering around with the settings. “You know you’re creating a stir with that thing,” the bartender said, which seemed to be the case when the dining room manager came out to see it and told me I should show it to the chef. Hey, if I can’t be known for the brilliance of my prose, at least my new computer stands out.

This is not a paid ad, by the way; I just drank the Kool-Aid.

More rational updates soon…

After struggling with the copyedits on the Art of the Public Grovel, I got exasperated and begged the good folks at Princeton to PLEASE assign another editor to the project. (I was actually coping with the multiple rewrites, although my red-pencilled STETS were growing darker and bigger as my pencil dug deeper and deeper into the paper, but when I discovered that the freelance copyeditor was actually introducing NEW errors into the text I gave up.)

So the MS went back to Princeton and has now been given a thoroughly competent copyediting. It’s been an interesting experience. Copyedited pages always look they’re bleeding because the editor makes typesetting notations all over them.

But these pages were really, thoroughly copyedited. The editor suggested a number of alternative phrasings throughout, some of which I accepted, some of which I didn’t. (Since there’s a fair amount of theology in this book I have to be particularly careful about word choice: for example, “privacy” and “secrecy” are not at all the same thing when you’re talking about the Catholic practice of confession.) I haven’t gotten this particular kind of copyedit before. My editor at Norton always says how nice it is that I can put clean sentences on a page, and the copyedits on the books I’ve done for them have pretty much been confined to correcting inconsistencies in punctuation, citation, and so on.

This copyedit has me pondering such questions as: Is it better to say that elected officials “had the duty of satisfying their constituency” or “were obliged to satisfy their constituency”? Is it clearer to say, “Randolph is here arguing that confessions progressively move the sinner closer and closer to salvation,” or to say “Randolph argued that confession moves the sinner progressively closer and closer to salvation”?

I generally read manuscripts out loud when I’m working on final phrasing; something I tell my freshmen writers to do (not that they ever listen). Those phrases sound very different to me. It’s astounding how much a small change can shift the feel and sound of a sentence, and the feel and sound are important. Language is like music. Add or subtract an instrument, change a note, and you’ve got something different, even if the melody remains the same.

I remember Madeline L’Engle saying how distressed she was when her publisher changed her spelling of “grey” to “gray” throughout one of her novels–A Wrinkle in Time, I think (although I could be wrong.) For her, “grey” was a soft, warm color, while “gray” was a hard, battleship color, and the spelling threw off her entire picture of the world she was building. I know exactly what she means.

Wish there were something interesting about publishing to post here, but for the last two weeks I’ve been either writing (that whole 4-10 AM thing) or dealing with my plague-stricken family, pretty much around the clock. A few weeks ago, Pete had the flu and then I had the flu. Then the kids got runny noses. Then it went away. (Or so we thought.) But a week ago Pete started coughing again, and he’s been down with a high fever all week. Apparently, you CAN get the flu twice if it’s a different strain than the first…

Then the kids started running fevers, one at a time….

And now the Last Woman in the House is Not Alone.

More on publishing next week, as long as…well, you know…

I’ve finally faced up the reality of my History of the Medieval World deadline, May 1. Which means I’ve now admitted that there’s very little chance I’m going to have a finished manuscript in another five weeks.

After an eerily complicated exchange of emails with my editor (for some reason I have lost the ability to make myself understood in everyday matters–maybe it’s a side effect of reducing medieval theological debates into straightforward prose–the obfuscation pops back out in another place, like a balloon squeezed in the middle), we have decided that as long as I finish the manuscript by the end of the summer, the book can still come out on schedule.

I’m pretty sure I can finish it in August. Not sure in a really absolutely CONFIDENT sense, like I sometimes am. (Of course I can cook dinner for twelve at two hours notice! I’ll be happy to check your Latin translations and supervise your brother’s violin practice at the same time! Yes, naturally I’ll call the church square dance, just let me get a couple books out of the library and read up on it!).

No, this is “pretty sure” more in the sense that I might say, “We’re going on family vacation in July.” (Providing that no one throws up or breaks a bone first.) Or, “Yes, we’ll have enough money to replace the tub in the kids’ bathroom this fall.” (Providing that the cars don’t break down and I balance my checkbook correctly.) Or, “We’ll go out and ride Max this afternoon.” (Provided that he’s still in the fence when we get out there and not chowing down on the neighbor’s priceless turf farm.)

However, I’m feeling a little more confident thanks to a schedule change. I’ve started writing from 4 to 10 AM every day except Sunday. Yep, every day.

I’ve heard of writers who do this for their entire working life, although I’d never tried it myself. But I’ve been feeling like I needed to do something totally different to shove myself off dead-center with this manuscript and get some new momentum.

I’ve been following this schedule for about a month now, and it’s having a truly fascinating effect. For one thing, working every single day (before this I was working every other day, for a longer period of time) creates a sort of continuity and flow that’s suddenly advancing me further and further forward. For another, there are NO interruptions. No matter how carefully I guard my writing time during the day, there is always SOMETHING that can’t wait.

At 4 AM, nobody wants to talk to me. It’s phenomenal.

Most of all, by 10 AM I have done my hard creative work for the day. I feel like I’ve finished the most difficult task in front of me, and all the hours to come can just be…fun. I can be with the kids or work on the farm without being preoccupied by undone writing. Even if I’m doing business later in the day, I don’t have that uneasy uncomfortable feeling that I’m taking time away from the original writing that’s the foundation of my professional life.

So it’s been great for my brain.

My body’s having a little more trouble adjusting.

(Ah, the glamour of Eastern Roman history before dawn.)

This has nothing to do with either the History of the Medieval World or the Art of the Public Grovel.

Max (aka Magnus Maximus), the Belgian draft horse I bought a couple of weeks ago, has arrived.

I grew up around horses and have ridden for most of my life (that includes a number of years riding jumpers, more years teaching for pocket money, and a weird summer when I galloped racehorses at a track in Ashland…that’s a long story), but I haven’t had a horse since I started having babies instead. They don’t necessarily go together. But now everyone’s old enough to help out, ride, and enjoy. So after months of saving up, fence-building, and planning, I bought Max. He’s huge. But also very calm and friendly…kind of like an eighteen-hundred-pound puppy with feet like Frisbees.

I’m hunting around now for one more horse…something smaller, for the beginners to ride, but still big enough for me to get on and school. That way the kids can go out riding together. Also Max will have company. He’s never been stabled alone, and he’s already broken out twice to go visit the neighbor’s cows. We’ve reinforced all the weak spots we can find, but he’s spending a lot of time staring out of the corner of the pasture at the woods (the cows are through the trees on the other side of the property line).

I’m very pleased to say that Princeton has done a GREAT cover for my upcoming book. My editor just emailed me the file.

You know, somehow I never imagined that my name would end up under that particular picture.

You’ll note, by the way, that after we considered all the subtitles you so kindly provided, PUP ended up keeping my original subtitle. Sorry! But I had a GREAT time reading all the suggestions….

Hi. Yes, I’m still alive, even though I haven’t posted for over a week. I think I’m finally over the flu. With any luck it will be ANOTHER eleven years before I have it again.

So…things are looking up slightly here. It’s still kind of winter-grey outside, but the sky is blue,

and February is over. And I know spring is coming when I can look out of the window and see Daniel sunbathing on top of the grape arbor.

I do, however, have one of my less-loved duties to finish up before next week…going through copyeditor suggestions, in this case on the confessions manuscript for Princeton University Press.

Right before a manuscript gets typeset, it goes to the copyeditor (usually a freelancer hired by the publisher), who goes through it word by word, makes sure you’ve been consistent with spelling, fixes punctuation errors, turns numbers into words where appropriate (29 vs. twenty-nine), catches errors (Roger Mudd interviewed Ted Kennedy on CBS, not NBC), and makes sure that your bibliography is properly formatted. In my case, the copyeditor also changes all my whiches to thats. I am a grammar fiend, but I have a block about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. The explanation as to when you use which as opposed to that has never made any sense to me.

I’m grateful for all of that…but sometimes there’s a fine line between correcting mistakes and rewriting someone else’s perfectly acceptable prose in the way that YOU would write it if it were YOUR book. This time around, I’m spending an awful lot of time writing STET (which is copyeditor-speak for LEAVE IT THE WAY I ORIGINALLY WROTE IT BECAUSE I LIKE IT THAT WAY) over top of the copyeditor’s changes.

I’m wondering if part of the problem is Princeton’s status as a university press…I tend to write informally, in what I flatter myself is a readable style, and the copyeditor (who is very conscientious and has corrected ALL of my restrictive/non-restrictive clause problems) has been re-stiffening a lot of my sentences. The copyeditor, I should make clear, is NOT a Princeton editor but rather a freelancer (as almost all copyeditors now are). But perhaps the knowledge that the editing is being done for a scholarly publisher is affecting the copyeditor’s approach?

One example among many:

I wrote, about Aimee Semple McPherson’s own account of her supposed kidnapping, “The account highlighted her essential vulnerability and weakness–largely by positioning her alongside the popular suffragists of the early twentieth century.”

The copyeditor changed it to, “The account highlighted her essential vulnerability and weakness–largely by accentuating those qualities in a manner that might put her in league with the suffragists, who were immensely popular in the early twentieth century.”

Er…nope. That’s not changing a mistake; that’s rewriting prose style. Most of the changes also add words, which I don’t like. Never use ten words if five words will do.

So I’ve spent a whole lot of time writing STET on this manuscript.

1. It takes forever to get over the flu.

2. Cough syrup gives me brain fog, with the result that I can no longer write a clear sentence or anything like that.

3. The “z” key on my MacBook has quit working, so I have to keep copying and pasting a “z” whenever I want a “z”. Do you know how irritating that is when you’re writing about Byzantine history and the Ziyarids and Ghaznavids???

4. At my current writing pace, I will be finished with the History of the Medieval World in another 3.5 years.

5. Boys are incapable of finding anything. I mean, the missing object could be tied to their bottom lip with a shoelace and they still wouldn’t see it.

6. I am out of shelf space.

7. I never did get my Valentine’s Day dinner.

8. There is nowhere in Williamsburg where a poor wretched writer can have a cup of tea in the middle of the afternoon as a break from the stacks of Swem.

9. Swem has fluorescent lights.

10. People keep asking me what I think of Gene Nichol.

11. No one who writes Chinese history uses the same transliteration system. Would it have occurred to YOU that Hwai Ti and Jin Huaindi were the same unfortunate emperor?

12. It’s sleeting.

I was just getting going on the second draft and finding some kind of momentum when I GOT THE FLU.

I haven’t had the flu (the real thing) in eleven years. Well, this is it. (My cousin, who’s a nurse, says, “You always think you’ve had the flu until you REALLY have it. And then you think…Oh. So THIS is the flu.”)

AGGHHH.

Will post again when I’m not delirious/dead.

Perhaps off-topic for this blog, but of great importance for historians: the Namdaemun, the ancient gate to the city of Seoul, has burned.

I saw this gate on my trip to South Korea; we went to the traditional market (open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year) near it, the Namdaemun Market.

As much as I love books and texts, there’s nothing quite as powerful as seeing and touching the past. Namdaemun, Hadrian’s Wall, the bits of Roman pavement in London…standing there, looking at them, touching them, is as close to time travel as we’re ever likely to get. I’m fortunate to have had that experience.

(France)

(Great Britain)

(South Korea)

This is a sad day.

So, just an update on how the second drafting is going….

Since my last post I’ve second-drafted chapters 49, 50, and 51, made two chocolate cakes, a corn pudding, three loaves of bread, two batches of cookies, and two different kinds of muffins (these were for breakfast).

At least there are plenty of boys around to eat them. Although even Dan is starting to look a little carbo-loaded these days. (Emily, this morning, faced with yet more muffins: “Can I have pastrami for breakfast instead?”)

And I DID run eight miles this morning. Honest.

And good food is NECESSARY if you’re going to do good work. Last night I worked at the library for most of the evening (I had to take Christopher to a Superbowl party and then hang around in Williamsburg until it was over, so it was the perfect time to polish off a bit of reference work) and then treated myself to dinner at the Blue Talon, my very favorite place to eat in all of Williamsburg.

I had mushroom tart and rice pudding, and then got into a conversation with the wonderful wait-staff about the joys of eating bread pudding…and I must have been waxing eloquent, because the chef (bless him) sent out a complimentary portion of bread pudding and creme anglaise already packaged up for me to take home.

Possibly I’m thinking a little too much about food these days.

But I hate dieting; I’d rather eat and run than not eat. Food is a wonderful thing. In fact, I’ve been thinking that I’ll quit this whole history thing and go to cooking school.

I always get great ideas for alternative careers when I’m second-drafting.

I would be a PHENOMENAL pastry chef. Or baker. Or I could go back to teaching riding lessons. Or riding training gallops on racehorses (that was my favorite college job). Or forget about the history and just write novels for fun. I’ve got one finished (needs one final polish), one three-quarters finished, one half finished, one a quarter finished. I mean, novels won’t pay for groceries, let alone braces and teenage-boy-car-insurance….but you’d all buy my novels, right? You don’t REALLY need to read more history, do you?

I’m picturing the good folks at Norton clutching their chests in horror. Yes, you DO need to read more history. It’ll be a great book, and I’ll enjoy rolling my round fat self into next year’s book-signings once it’s done.

So here it is, the first day of February. On my calendar I have a large red bar marking off the next three months. It says: Feb. 1 through May 1. History of the Medieval World. No Other Commitments. I’ve got fourteen weeks until the deadline for this book, and for the last three months before a deadline, I clear the decks and get ready to run down the home stretch. (Yeah, mixed metaphor, whatever.)

At this point, I figure there’s absolutely no way I’m going to finish the book by the deadline. I try to comfort myself by remembering that I always think this, three months before the deadline. Sometimes it’s even true.

The book is in first draft. I’ve got two drafts to go: the turn-this-mess-into-decent-prose second draft, and the polish-edit-cut third and final draft. That last process tends to happen over two intense final weeks. So I’ll be second drafting for the next eleven or twelve weeks. Prepare yourself for a whole slew of posts that say, “Today, I worked on the second draft.”

The challenge I have at the moment is that I’m not properly prepared for the second-draft push. It’s actually a physical process. When I’m second-drafting, I’m pushing very hard for an extended time…and when you’re pushing yourself in one area, you tend to compensate by indulging yourself in another.

In other words, when I second-draft, I bake, I eat and I don’t exercise.

I read about one writer who says that she always aims to go into her big writing push on any book “slightly underweight.” Er…yeah. I’m nearly forty, I’ve got four children, and I just finished up the Christmas holidays. I’m not particularly OVERweight, but that Christmas five pounds is still mostly with me. However, I’m not sure that dieting, running extra miles, and second-drafting are going to go together.

Maybe just a little chocolate….

My husband just killed a mouse.

With a frying pan.

MY frying pan.

It’s been nearly a week since my last post, which is a reflection not necessarily of how hard I’m working, but how many different KINDS of things I’ve had to do.

I’m drawing close to final-draft time on the History of the Medieval World.

I’m doing a number of different editorial tasks for Peace Hill Press: working on the final draft of Writing Workbook II, finishing the last edit of First Language Lessons, Level Four, and helping the PHP West team to get new message boards up (in this case, helping means “watching while you do all the tricky technical stuff and posting comments once you’re done”).

I’m educating the kids.

I spent some time corresponding with a friend in crisis.

I put together the worship service for church.

I finished that dratted author questionnaire.

It snowed,

so I had to dig out boots and mittens and coats and make hot chocolate.

And everybody except for Christopher and me got sick, so I spent four days out of the week carrying trays into bedrooms and wiping noses. (Not my husband’s; he can wipe his own nose, thank goodness. But if Emily had wiped her nose into her hair one more time…well, it’s worse than GUM once it dries. No kidding.)

And today I’m feeling fractured and scattered in my mind.

All this stuff needed to be done. None of it could be postponed. I’m already committed to the pub schedules on the writing projects. It only snows here about once every two years, so what was I going to say to the kids: Forget it, I’ve got to go write? (Don’t think so.) And it’s January. People get the flu.

Except for the sickness and the snow, none of this stuff was really out of the ordinary; and, individually, each task was entirely manageable. But I’m finding that my ability to switch fluently from task to task is NOT what it once was. I find that I have an incredible NEED to finish ONE TASK AT A TIME.

Yet, practically speaking, this is impossible. I have to turn from task to task, job to job. And every time I switch duties, it takes me exponentially longer to remember where I was and what I was doing.

Is this because I’m getting older? Is it because the projects I’m working on are more complex than they once were? I’m not sure.

And as for the sickness and the snow: it’s tempting to say to myself, “Well, this week was unusual. Next week it will be easier to find an uninterrupted stretch of time in which to shape the story of the medieval world.”

But I don’t think that’s true. Uninterrupted, peaceful weeks are the exception, not the rule. It’s so easy to think of crisis-free weeks as the standard of normality, and then to treat the weeks which are punctuated with sickness and urgent family demands and bad weather and crashing computers as abnormal, unusual, something to be waited out until real life resumes.

Sickness and snow are normal. Malfunctioning devices are normal. Sudden crises are normal. Disruption is normal.

So how do I do this? How do I acknowledge that life is a series of crises, that tasks do not divide neatly into uninterrupted chunks of time, and yet also finish projects which require continuity of thought and practice? And why do I feel this increasing need for continuity of thought, when I used to find it simple to rotate from project to project, subject to subject, class to class, crisis to crisis?

No answers today; just questions, and an enormous pile of medieval-history manuscript in which I have not yet found the story.

Over the weekend I finished the final revision of the ART OF THE PUBLIC GROVEL for Princeton University Press. Today I burned all the files onto a disk, printed it out (the subtitle is temporary, by the way–I’ve sent Princeton the list of suggestions you made on this blog),

put it all into a box and got it ready for the UPS pickup.

This is so much fun. One of the easiest jobs a writer has: Getting the manuscript ready for the UPS guy. And I don’t get to do it all that often. (Like, once every two years.) So naturally I have to take pictures.

I think that the next step with this book will be going through the coypedited manuscript, but I’ll keep you posted. (Also I’m guessing that some of the images I’m using for illustrations aren’t high res enough, so I’ll probably have to hunt down some better quality scans.)

And now back to the Middle Ages.

I’ll leave you with the final table of contents. Hope it sounds interesting….

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: From Private to Public Confession

PART I: The Shift Toward Public Confession
Chapter One: Grover the Good, Belshazzar Blaine, and the Rapacious Woman
Chapter Two: In the Presence of the Elect (With the World Looking On)
Chapter Three: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Devil
Chapter Four : Confession Goes Public
Chapter Five: Ted Kennedy Misreads His Public

PART II: The Age of Public Confession
Chapter Six: Jimmy Carter, Traitor to the Cause
Chapter Seven: Jim Bakker Shoots His Allies
Chapter Eight: Jimmy Swaggart’s Model Confession
Chapter Nine: Clinton and the Three Public Confessions
Chapter Ten: Unaware of Change

Conclusion: Predictions

Appendices: The Texts of the Confessions
Works Cited

So today I had a fourteen-hour work day. Thursdays are my favorite work days because I start as soon as I get up in the morning and don’t check back in with the family until I’m finished, no matter when that might be. (My husband does the same thing on Wednesday; we find it’s good for productivity and mental balance if each one of us has a day with no domestic commitments.) This makes Thursdays absolutely WONDERFUL for concentrated work on a big project; it generally takes me at least two hours to get myself restarted when I’m at the final-argument-stage of a book, so three-hour work periods don’t tend to be very useful. Today, all day, I worked on the final FINAL draft of the confessions manuscript, which should go on to Princeton very soon.

The problem with Thursdays is that I go down to my office when it’s light, and nine months out of the year, when I come back out of my office, it looks like THIS outside.

See, I live in the country. There Are No Lights. Here’s what my yard looks like from the porch of our house, with the porch lights ON,

and here’s what my office window looks like when I’m standing on the road,

and here’s what the house looks like when I’m standing down on my office step, wondering how I’m going to get back up there without tripping over maple roots/stones/beagles/the well cover and killing myself.

I have a dinky little flashlight that I try to remember to drop in my bag, but half the time I forget it, and even when I have it, it doesn’t do much to illuminate the woods behind my office, which look like THIS.

(Real picture. No kidding. I just took it tonight. No moon tonight, obviously.)

Generally I come out of my office, laptop in my shoulder bag, and begin to stroll up the hill towards the house. Then, after about five feet, I lose it and start sprinting in an undignified way for the lights, bag banging painfully against my hip. OK, with my brain I know that nothing has really come out of the woods to stalk behind me. The rest of me isn’t so sure. (Dorothy Sayers provides an etymology for this particular terror: panic, fear of Pan, god of the woods; the irrational fear of deep dark woods at night.)

So this Christmas, my oldest son gave me this.

It stays plugged into my office wall. I take it up with me when I go to the house at night. If I swing it around, I can practically see every leaf on every tree in the entire forty acres behind my office.

In fact, when I went into the house tonight, Ben said, “Oh, it’s you. We thought aliens were coming to get us.” So apparently we’ve exchanged one fear for another.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in this somewhere.

I’m a little slow on the uptake, obviously, but I’ve just discovered that Orson Scott Card READ MY BOOK. And commented about it on his blog.

Here’s what he says:

“Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World from the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome is, in a way, a ridiculous project — it simply can’t be accomplished. Yet this is a worthy attempt to put in one volume an account of the major events, people, and movements of ancient peoples who kept written records (or had significant encounters with people who did). She skips from place to place and time to time quite deftly; she organizes the account so that it’s easy to keep track of who is doing what at the same time that someone else is doing something else. Naturally, the history of each people and nation has to be sketchy, a mere synopsis of a summary. Wherever she wrote about a time and place I happen to have studied, it became painfully clear just how cursory and superficial her accounts all must be. Yet she is rarely inaccurate. If your first introduction to a particular ancient nation is this book’s version of their history, and then you read in-depth books, you will certainly learn and understand far more than she could possibly have offered, but you won’t have to unlearn much of what she told you.”

I guess I put too much sheer hard labor into finding, digesting, interpreting, and retelling the stories of the ancient world to completely agree with “superficial and cursory.” But that last sentence is a rare compliment, and Card’s remarks are generally dead-on….he has identified the enormous central dilemma of the world historian.

And I’m not saying that just because I’m a huge Card fan.

Ender’s Game was a book I read in one sitting, and have never forgotten it; I think it changed forever the way I think about war.

And on a less geek-fan note, here’s a notice that just came out in the William & Mary Alumni Magazine.

This was a surprise to me; thanks, Justin, for bringing it over. (OK, I am a bad alumna. I hadn’t even opened the magazine yet…)

“Susan Wise Bauer M.A. ‘94, Ph.D. ‘07 believes that history should be studied chronologically. In The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome (W.W. Norton, 2007), Bauer urges readers to make connections across countries and cultures linking Britain to the far coast of China. The book offers a complete chronological history of major human events all over the world, from the time of the Sumerian king Alulim to the fall of Rome. Each chapter includes a timeline and maps to help the reader make associations between simultaneous events transpiring in two very different and geographically separated countries like Britain and India. The book blends history with human emotions to reveal the relationships between various classes and people. Bauer combines historical events with the literature of the time, primary sources such as private letters, folklore and other materials to give the reader a human face of history and the causes behind world events.”

(In case you’re wondering, there were three babies in that gap between M.A. ‘94 and Ph.D. ‘07.)