Last year I hit ten years since I published Amgalant One and Two in 2012.

A lot has happened, to me and to the world, in ten years. A lot of bad stuff, frankly. I am not the same person, and Amgalant – can’t be the same book.

I dread turning out one of those delayed series finishers or sequels that either don’t fit, or prove to be unreadable. It’s common and a distinct possiblity. Too, I am afraid that I have deteriorated and do not own the brain space (cognitive issues, though perhaps now solved, have interfered in those ten years). Sales remain low to nonexistent for weeks at a time, and I have been tempted away into writing short fiction that people actually read.

Ten years is time to draw a line. I’m drawing a line under Amgalant – which, true to its title, now stands as the story of the unification of the steppe. This is how I have framed the series description:

Amgalant series

‘Amgalant’ means unity.

This story is about the unification of the steppe under Tchingis Khan (Chinggis, Genghis). From the shattered condition of the Mongol tribes before him, up to 1206 when Tchingis is acknowledged khan over the different peoples of the steppe.

Amgalant likewise follows Temujin, the boy who becomes Tchingis Khan,
from an outcast life of poverty to the achievement of his dreams.

The forty years from 1166 to 1206 saw great drama on the steppe, although settled societies off the steppe scarcely noticed. That remains true to this day.
Temujin’s rise to instatement as Tchingis Khan is the heart and guts of the Secret History of the Mongols, more important to its Mongol creators and audience than
the off-steppe conquests afterwards.

The Secret History of the Mongols is a gorgeous source for a novelist,
rich in human interest and incident. Amgalant follows this source
with humble fidelity to the history and faith in the art of the original.

The series does not end abruptly. I never believed in publishing unfinished story, and on principle, each book finishes its business. Yes, Tchingis is still alive at the end. His eyes are on the horizon. It ends upbeat (oh, I notice both the books do — hell, so do those of the four-set), and I like that.

Whatever comes next won’t be Amgalant. It’ll be post-Amgalant. That half-million words of raw material and draft I have for the projected third (see last January’s report)? Presently I am extracting strands and gobbets to shape into a novella or short novel. Another novella has suggested itself beyond that. I’ll tell the story. But in different ways. Not locked into a trilogy, I am free to reconfigure that material, even in radical ways, that suddenly seem doable to me. Whatever else, it’ll be short works. My thinking has become short-term.

I want to go on writing other short fiction too, whereas Amgalant (2003-2012) was a drown-out-everything-else commitment (moreover, when I deliberately didn’t have a life and didn’t do social media). Those days are gone, whether or not my writing self can turn out work to the standards of Amgalant. I’m not even pessimistic on that point, as I am excited and enthusiastic about the novella I have in hand.

(Its working title is ‘The Khan’s Orchestra’, and I tend to let off steam about it on my Twitter).

You can buy the Amgalant series direct from me here at my Payhip storefront.

I owe you a status report on Amgalant and related matters.

Amgalant Three, Scavenger City, sits in a doc of 490,000 words. This includes some of its notes, although most of that is draft. I had the cover for Scavenger City made at the same time as those for Against Walls and Imaginary Kings. The cover’s no secret — it’s better that you see I have serious intention to finish, than wait for a cover reveal.

My doc has less word count than it did a year ago, because I extracted a standalone, but Amgalant-adjacent novel, which I’ve titled An Ingratitude of Goats. It’s told from the perspective of three Tanguts — two captives of the Mongols, and one volunteer. This novel has an arts focus: one of my three is a musician from Temujin’s (historical) Tangut orchestra, and one is involved in the early flourishing of zaju, or popular opera. Extracting these storylines left Scavenger City more workable, and with a concentration on Temujin that continues from Against Walls and Imaginary Kings. But I’d love to write Goats.

The world being in the state it is, I need to add a note in case I am incapacitated. If worst comes to worst and I never finish Three, I’d like you to think of Amgalant not as an incomplete trilogy. I have treated each book as a novel in itself. They have ends, and I have allowed them to have their own stylistic features, as suited the individual work. Aside from that, Against Walls and Imaginary Kings together run through the chief content of the Secret History of the Mongols. In the Secret History, the post-1206 off-steppe conquests are almost addendums, written in much more cursory fashion than Temujin’s life on the steppe. In a way, my re-telling of the Secret History is done. The creators of that history, too, weren’t cut off, but wrote to the interests of their audience. If I fail to finish — which has been my nightmare — I’ll comfort myself that the original creators knew what was important, and their work has a sense of conclusion. Maybe I’m unwise to be writing Three at all, without the Secret History to rest on.

Nevertheless, that is my goal this year.

My ebooks are 50% off in the Smashwords Read an Ebook Sale, March 3-9.
Find them here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/232290

In other news, I had meant to finish several posts for this blog over Jan-Feb — ‘A Bastard Art’, the other three parts of which await me in draft. But I have plunged into full-time work on Amgalant Three. I have ambitions to publish 3.1 in ebook this year or early next — if I throw side projects to the wolves.

Where side projects belong, frankly.

I am honoured to be reviewed by novelist Dmitry Kosyrev in the Asian Review of Books.

‘I happen to know this world: I’ve been to Mongolia three times and, recently, in Russia’s Altai, which is about the same. I know that Bryn Hammond did a miracle of transporting the reader there, but I’ve no idea how she did it (that’s a real compliment from one writer to another). That’s a wolf’s world, whatever it means, a world of strange talk in strange places; it’s in fact another planet.’

“Against Walls” by Bryn Hammond

Our magnificent new covers by Black Kat Design.
Click on the images to read the text.

ebooks and paperbacks out now.

ebooks from:

Amazon US, Amazon UK, or your marketplace
Smashwords and their distributors
Apple iBooks US, UK, or your country
Barnes & Noble
Kobo

Paperbacks from Amazon in these marketplaces: US, UK, DE, FR, ES, IT, JP

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If you have a first edition One and want Two to match, you can contact me — I have a cupboard of the old stock. However, Three already has its cover. Here’s a look:

Scavenger City won’t be out soon. You, dear reader, can speed the process by that classic strategy of Tell Your Friends. Sales of Amgalant help me free myself from other work.

This short entry is to link to a most observant discussion of my historical fiction project by John Caviglia: a post on the blog of Rounded Globe, who have just published my ‘Voices’ essay.

Observant is what I might expect from John Caviglia, who is both a writer (premodern, epic-in-scope historical fiction) and in his past a professor of comparative literature. I particularly enjoy his remarks on Elizabethan theatre-style staging. Certainly I imitated theatre in a few ways. There are scenes where I cease to write in anything other than people’s spoken lines, to be like a play script: because these ought to do, they ought to stand by themselves. And I several times had in mind Elizabethan resemblances. My acquaintance with theatre is largely Elizabethan, let’s face it; and for reasons unspecified I did often want a theatrical air.

“He can tell a hawk from a hatchet flung at his head.” – Jamuqa misquotes Hamlet.

Update. I’ll copy the review here for preservation.

This week Rounded Globe released Bryn Hammond’s essay on her discipline of historical fiction. Today fellow author John Caviglia discusses Hammond’s historical fiction itself.

Amgalant One: The Old Ideal, and Amgalant Two: Tribal Wars, by Bryn Hammond

These two extraordinary works launch a novelized exegesis of The Sacred History of the Mongols—which recounts the life of Genghis Khan, penned sometime after his death in 1227. Hammond’s initial volumes expand this slender inspiration (fewer than 200 pages in one English edition) to genuinely epic proportions, creating a rich, compulsively readable, immersive work. And as the two novels—totaling about 1300 pages—begin a trilogy, a reader might ask why, and how, Hammond has so amplified the original…

As to the why, it is clear that—Medievalist to the marrow—she is herself enraptured by the Mongols of the time, above all by the fascinating characters in this history of conquest without parallel, rendered “secret” by time and culture, language and abbreviation. Implicit, in the cryptic text she studies, are secrets of the soul embedded in the acts and words, the entwined intricacies of these Mongols’ lives, a tribal psychology she unfolds.

Hammond has exhaustively studied every aspect of her enterprise, and it is upon that ocean of research that her prose effortlessly floats, ensuring that the reader will travel in space and time to the cultural moment. And in that richly elaborated context the Temujin of her text—one day to be known as Genghis Khan—is fashioned into what was prophesied when he was born with a blood clot in his fist. You learn what the Mongols eat (a lot of sheep) and drink (black milk!). You encounter much more about day-to-day tribal life. But, essentially, the novel takes you into the minds of the protagonists…

The reader comes to see Mongols as Mongols saw each other … and the larger world (I got a new take on ancient China, and that wall intended to keep “barbarians” out). And that kind of vision is where much of the action takes place in this essentially psychological work. Interior conflicts…. Interior/exterior conflicts…. Interior monologues…. Interior dialogues…. Plain old dialogues…. And then there are the tribal conferences. Alliance with the Tartars? War? Questions are at the heart of this version of the Mongol enterprise, when the future of much of the world hinged on a shaman’s reading the cracks in a sheep’s scapula. The rise of Genghis Khan was prophesied indeed, but Hammond portrays it as a chancy, supremely complicated and unfolding thing, lived out in the minds of those who—on horseback and in tents—crafted the largest empire known to man.

As the fate of Tchingis Khan continues its extraordinary course in Tribal Wars, the tale expected of a conqueror—his unification of the Mongols (thus the enormous sweep of the steppes) by dint of martial talent, native wit and bloodshed—is well and intricately told. But less expectedly the story of Temujin, conqueror as human being, is brought to the fore. In particular his tortured relationship to his blood brother, lover and erstwhile enemy, Jamuqa, is here deepened, developed, and brought to an ending dramatic, and deeply tragic, as any that I know.

It is not unfair, I think, to state that Hammond’s writing is intimately epic—immense in the necessity of its scope, intimate in the attention devoted to relationships: Tchingis/Temujin and Jamuqa, Tchingis and Borte (first wife and queen), he and his various generals and subordinates, he and his many allies and antagonists…. This, as opposed to the lovingly lingering descriptions of combat stemming from classic epics such as The Iliad, which culminate in modern historical novels depicting medieval war, such as Bernard Cornwell’s. In Tribal Brawls a battle supremely important to Tchingis is depicted in two pages….

Hammond’s portrayal of conquest echoes the intimacy of Elizabethan theater—principal characters on stage, the larger war in the wings revealed by alarums and the tidings of messengers. Not having read The Secret History of the Mongols, I do not know how much of such ‘staging’ she imports. However, she has her own Tchingis say, “Wars are fought in the head, always.” And it seems to me right to have the reader’s attention led to what is personal in this epic, for in the second volume civil war is eponymously depicted, the steppe fighting itself, so to speak (iconically condensed into the lover/enemy relationship of Tchingis and Jamuqa). Such steppe people as Tchingis did not woo, he had to conquer to embrace. Hammond’s Tchingis states: “The whole point of me is freedom for my people.” Tough love, indeed….

As for Hammond’s prose, it is wonderfully her own, rich with word play, sometimes lyrical, at times formal and hieratic, often chortle-out-loud funny, and always dense with resonance. But there’s an aspect to her voice that at first surprised me. Hammond is—could it be gleefully?—anachronistic, both in authorial comments and through her Medieval Mongols, who speak contemporary, sometimes slangy language (British at that … so that I had to look up “ta”). If you are bothered by such anachronism, you will be bothered. As for me—after brief adjustment—I thoroughly enjoyed the read, for Hammond’s writing, nuanced, never usual, is a good in itself. And to me at least, her authorial anachronism suggests a Shakespeare play staged in a radically different time and place, so to convey—bass beat under melodies—that the drama is universally human at its core.

Speaking of surprises, one more thing—I love the strength, depth and wisdom of the women in Amgalant, given a society and a time in which they were a spoil of war.

In sum—as begun—this trilogy is unique and wonderful (though not necessarily easy). Hats off to Hammond for her long, loving and genial discipline.

Hammond’s acclaimed Amgalant series can be purchased (in print or electronic form) from her website. Her recent essay on the craft of historical fiction can be downloaded for free from Rounded Globe.

Images
Book art from the Ilkhanlig: a Mongol court travelling, talking…
The Diez Albums, courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Today my digital book for Rounded Globe, Voices from the Twelfth-Century Steppe, is published. Available here.

There are two aspects to this essay. Chiefly, it is source criticism – a study of my primary source the Secret History of the Mongols – and on the side, it is a creative writer’s interactions with the body of secondary work on this source.

Academic historians may or may not be aware that outside of other historians and history students, they have a large readership among historical novelists. I’ve become conscious of this since I joined Goodreads: often I look up a history book and find its single review, or its most in-depth review, is from a novelist who engaged with it for her material. These reviews frequently enter into passionate conversation with the historian – as I know I do in the privacy of my home. Novelists rarely hide their investment in their subjects; although this need not mean we do not strive to be fair-minded.

Novelists, inevitably, have a different perspective on the source material (unless a historian moves along the spectrum towards a novelist’s position). We weigh things differently; we seek out things of less concern to historians. Or so I have found in my fifteen years spent with my primary source and the secondary work upon it. I began with no preconceptions (I had not thought about these issues); and at the end I know that my experience, which I write about in this essay, is a case study, that is, a single case, whose applicability to other cases I cannot guess at. Other novelists might nod along, see familiar trends, even an analogue. My source is a peculiar one in its own level of artistry (to an extent it is written ‘like an epic’). No doubt every source is a peculiar one, and every novelist’s engagement singular. I believe in the worth of case studies, and have simply written out my experience: the three-way conversation between source, novelist and historians.

On the specifics of the Secret History of the Mongols, I have reached a few conclusions which are not in the main history books, or the major commentary. I offer these as the arguments a novelist uses for her own purposes. Perhaps she does tend to interpret differently because she is a novelist: I do not say for certain; no doubt her ethos is different, probably her method. I am happy for the chance to make a few arguments, which otherwise I have only had the opportunity to put (persuasively or not – you be the judge) in fictional format, in my set of novels Amgalant. The original argument most likely to catch people’s interest, I imagine, has to do with Temujin’s own contributions to the Secret History: the idea that we have his memories, as he told them, and with this, we have insight into his psychology.

I owe great thanks to Simon Cook, co-founder of Rounded Globe. Firstly, for seeing worth in my Mongol novels; secondly, for seeing value in my account of how I came to write them, and commissioning this essay.

I’m 50 today and kids, it’s tough to turn 50. I’ve had a questioning week. You’re lucky you’re not getting a post called Futility at Fifty, but instead, by grace, I’m in the mood to thank a few people.

First my sister, without whom. Every book of Amgalant has this dedication:

My sister has been godmother to the book. Amgalant, what’s written and what isn’t written yet, is dedicated to her, with waves from Tem and Jam, and no sight or scent of a goat. In steppe epic, a steed and a sister are your trustiest, most intelligent and indefatigable aid: the hero doesn’t have to be heroic, but these do.

When gloomy in the past week, I browsed writers’ blogs for the harsher side of the writing life. The sad experience is, numbers of writers operate without support from those closest to them – or with active sabotage of their attempt to write. One comment I saw this week I understood: a writer said she found dedications in books hard to read. A few years ago, I did too. You don’t like to confess it. But those dedications that go, ‘my wife lived with this novel for five years, and listened to my instalments every evening at dinner…’ I mean, frankly, you think, poor wife, don’t you? And if you’re me you think, I don’t know how to ask that of another person, even if I believed you should, and I have to believe you shouldn’t. Neither do I happen to know, in person, of writers with this sort of husband; if you do have a significant other like this, value them and for God’s sake don’t ask too much. It can hurt to see dedications. Because of the ones you don’t see: ‘I wrote this alone and nobody helped.’ I felt like that a few years ago, but I was with a man who gave me daily discouragement. I think he sensed – and he was quite right – that the novel was the only thing to have come along that mattered to me as much or more than he did; and it was a shock to him, who had been the centre of my attention. I left the man and kept the book, as any sensible writer does. People don’t write dedications such as that in published books, and so struggling writers only see the nice ones. On blogs, in writers’ groups online, is where you see admissions of the real situation. There are writers who have to function in the total absence of support from husband, children, family and friends. I know how lucky I am to have my sister. Without whom, I’d be a worse person and possibly no writer.

At slight risk of embarrassment to him, I next want to thank Don Jansen, because he’s the perfect reader, of whom we writers dream. Why is he the perfect reader? He’s an intelligent, curious reader who ranges widely, without prejudices. He reads at the high end too but has no genre prejudice; and nor does he avoid the self-published. Bless his socks. While one can count one’s readers on one’s fingers (or at least, readers who don’t wish I were Conn Iggulden – because folks, I never set out to be, I never shall be; live and let live, I wish him well) – in that situation, a single reader can make it feel worthwhile. Sorry to embarrass you, Don.

Thanks to fellow novelists. For instance, I assured Gary, twice, he shouldn’t feel he has to read mine – his subject had been a hook to me but I couldn’t see he had any earthly interest in Mongols – still, he read it on the quiet and surprised me. John, no doubt, is too much of a gentleman not to have returned a read; even so, it was in no way incumbent upon him to read Two.

Thanks to Joseph. It’s hard even to place mine with book bloggers, I think, and therefore, to have his professional reviews, of both One and Two, is invaluable. To be honest I can’t work out how ‘professional review’ is defined in the indie context – I certainly don’t mean paid reviews, which I abhor. Whatever, I know he’s a professional, and his opinion has mattered as much to me, in its own way, as the coveted ‘reader-only’ opinion.

That’s it. I’ll go away and be fifty now. You’ll excuse that I complain about this fact online; I’m a solitary creature and when I talk I tend to tweet or blog.

When I was 49, with heavy book on shoulder. I tried to do an imitation-shot after Joy Hester’s ‘Girl with Book on Head’ – which is such an identification-picture for bookish girls – but the shot didn’t work out.