My website is undergoing some renovations. It will look much the same, but it will have some essential technical updates and some design changes to suit my new life as a published author. Yeah! 
During the switch over there may be some rocky days when things don’t look like normal around here. Bear with my hardworking web designer. All will be well eventually. You probably won’t even notice, but in case you do, I thought I’d let you know no panic is required, the world of Judith’s website is not coming to an end, just changing.
I received yesterday from Historical Novels Review the usual email with a list of review books to choose from for the August edition. Only this list was very exciting because there, in front of my eyes, was Hand of Fire, my own book on the list. Wow. I’m feeling pretty official as an author. I hope whoever selects it to review has a good time reading it.
Here’s some of my favorites from around the web this week:
A.
Plot twists & the smells of a Renaissance kitchen Stephanie Thorton reviews KateQuinn’s The Lion & the Rose Link here
B.
Expulsion of Muslims fr 17th C Spain by the Inquisition. We generally think of the expulsion of Jews, but Deborah Swift focuses on this interesting other arena of persecution as part of her research for her novel A Divided Inheritance. Link here
C.
Treasure hunters in southern Turkey used dynamite to blow up a 2,000 yr old rock-cut tomb. This is so sick and bizarre. It isn’t clear why they did this—I presume to get access to things to steal. Apparently archaeologists foiled an earlier attempt, but a closed police station left the ancient city vulnerable. Yikes. Link here
D.
Redeeming Josephine: Heather Webb’s smart discussion about sifting out a nuanced, accurate picture of this notorious woman. Let’s just say Webb sees a different picture than the “dancing nearly naked & wild sex orgies” that Josephine’s contemporary chroniclers reported (wishful thinking?) So many interesting issues when teasing out women’s stories fr history. Link here
E.
An agent talks intelligently about dialect and language in historical fiction. I can think of some counter examples to his point, books where dialect is used to immerse the reader in a world with no seams showing, but I think he’s right overall. For my book, Hand of Fire, where I had to have my characters speak in English not their native Luwian and/or Mycenaean Greek (so many readers who could have enjoyed a book in Luwian!!!), it was a question of neutral contemporary English. I had to avoid words and phrases that say “21st C.” Short, smart post by Josh Getzler. Link here
Judith, point taken about Luwian and Mycenaean – my own equivalent would be proto-Canaanite and Egyptian. However a lot of books I have read and enjoyed use differences in language to signal social or cultural identity, ie deliberately to highlight differences. I think this is the point you are making about immersive dialect. Seems to me Josh’s point is far too generalised to be very useful. It’s hard to make a case to avoid obvious 21st century phrasing without having something positive to put in its place, and this very rapidly goes into value judgements, I think.
Good points, Richard. I did have to develop my own system of syntactical errors that different classes of people made. It’s tricky not to make people sound like some recognizable ethnic group (like Irish) when trying to create “social class” in dialect for a world as distant and non-English speaking as I work in (or you, clearly). I chose certain verb errors and subtle things that mark some of my characters as “uneducated” although that’s a pretty meaningless term in this context. I also chose characteristic patterns and phrases they used, but not to excess or it’s annoying. So yes, Josh’s article is a bit oversimplified in some ways. I had an entire self-produced lexicon for Achilles that I constantly referred to as I made his language sound like it rises from the sea.
I’m looking forward to Hand of Fire but don’t think it has been released just yet?
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