All posts by andersen52

About andersen52

Mark is a writer living in Houston.

“Writing fiction is so easy … just make stuff up”

King Arthur, Merlin's Thread Series, Three Musketeers, , , , , ,

Before I get into my rant du jour, I’d like to remind you that my second book, Merlin’s Weft, is available for pre-order at a dollar off until Friday, November 18, 2016.

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What, Me Research?

Have you heard this comment before?

“Oh, it must be easy to write fiction. You get to just make stuff up.”

Those who say this really don’t know how much thought and work goes into “making stuff up.” Unfortunately, I’ve also heard that assertion from a few people who are trying to write their first book. After reading their work, I realize they have no clue about what it takes to tell a believable story.

In one case of a manuscript I saw, a character living in 1991 walked into a storefront parcel outlet to ship biological material across the Atlantic, which the corner shop happily packed in dry ice they kept in the back for just that purpose.

International shipping from a neighborhood storefront is common now, but not so much in 1991. I didn’t know whether the town of the story had such businesses, but what I found bothersome was that the concern hadn’t occurred to the author. And the idea that, even today, I could find a Fedex or UPS or DHL representative that kept dry ice in their back room astounded me. Not to mention questions over international protocols regarding the shipment of biomaterials, which I make no claim to knowing about, but then, neither did that author.

The author shrugged. “It’s fiction. I can make up anything I want.”

No, you can’t.

World building

Readers are willing to suspend their disbelief about a wide variety of things. They accept the existence of fantastical beasts, superhuman capabilities, faster-than-light-speed travel, and delicious Brussels sprouts. OK, maybe not that last.

However, the author has to build a world in which those things make sense. That’s hard work. Are feathered sentient beings present? What are their grooming habits? Are they otherwise birdlike, or something else entirely? How did they evolve? Or … perhaps they were created, and if so, why? Where are they in the social and political hierarchy? Are they genetically predator or prey? If they are a space traveling race, how do they keep from shedding feathers that might gunk up the Krapowski drive that powers their ship, regenerates their oxygen, and buffs their toenails.

Were you yanked from my narrative by that last bit because I just made up a pile of crap out of context?

Swashbuckling research

When I’m writing, I almost always have a window open to the Web. It’s great for checking facts, so long as you’re careful with your source. For example, when did the word swashbuckler appear? A number of sources indicate its origination in the sixteenth century—Merriam-Webster places its first known use in 1560. It’s a combination of two terms: swash, an imitative word meaning to make a noise like a sword beating on a shield, plus buckler, a small round shield. I had to look this up, because I wanted to give an early seventeenth century character a nickname of Swash. It would have been embarrassing to discover the word originated in the late nineteenth century, which is when the verb swashbuckle appeared. Not only did I confirm that I could use the name, but I had an origin for the word to work into the story.

For larger issues, reference books become necessary. I have about ten feet of bookshelf space of works relating to Arthurian times or sixth century Europe. I had a question about the use of carriages in France in 1625, so I bought a couple of books about the history of wagons.

May we waltz?

While most readers won’t have a clue about the number of carriages available for hire in Paris in 1625, its better to try to for historical verisimilitude rather than not. I read a book a few days ago that talked about a woman dancing a waltz at her wedding in the late 1620s. That throwaway detail completely pulled me out of the story. I didn’t know when the waltz was developed (Wikipedia: probably more than a hundred years later), but I knew it wasn’t that early.

Of course, occasionally facts or history have to be … bent … to conform to the story an author wants to tell. The degree to which knowledgeable readers let an author get away with it depends on how well the story is told—how well the world is built—and how far reality is distorted. I’ve knowingly departed from the world as it is for various reasons related to storytelling, but I don’t do it because I don’t care about the truth. Nor do I claim that I never inadvertently make a factual error. My own biases keep me from seeing some anachronisms. I just hope I keep them to a minimum, and keep the reader in the story.

Boners you’ve seen

Have you seen a huge boner in something you’ve read? Please don’t trash authors by name or books by title, but I’d like to hear what you’ve read that brought you out of a story because of anachronism or factual error.

My books

Merlin’s Weft will be released Friday, November 18. The eBook is available for pre-order on Amazon.com for a 25% discount until the release.

Merlin’s Knot is available on Amazon.com.

Go to my Web site to obtain a copy of the prequel, Merlin’s Shuttle. He doesn’t battle evil in that story, but he does face off against Mother Nature.

The Unending Story of Series Cliffhangers

Uncategorized

Before I get into my topic today, I want to give a thank you and shout out to Audra Trosper. On November 12, she’s featuring a snippet from my upcoming book, Merlin’s Weft, on her blog. Go check out her blog.

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Cliff, hanging

Have you read any books that end like the one described below?

Cliff Studley and Kate de Lion have endured 327 pages of excitement, thrills, romance, near-death experiences and feats of paranormal derring-do to save mankind. In the past few pages, they’ve vanquished 1,132 enemies from seventy-three tribes of people, marmots, were-marmots, and wriggly sixty-two-inch-long earthworms.

Kate wipes marmot-goo from Cliff’s face, and he laughs with relief. They lean together to touch lips.

<you turn the page>

A 212-foot wide hole erupts before the couple and the vast, black spaceship last seen on page 217 rises from beneath the earth, laser cannons flashing.

The end.
Read the next installment of the Studley-de Lion series in
Yet Another Apocalypse,
coming next year.

A good book ends

Maybe you’re like me. I love a good book. I even read a lot of books to the last page that I don’t absolutely love. Some because they present an interesting idea and I want to see how the author carries it through; some because I like the characters but not the plot, or vice versa; some that are just … well … they’re not bad enough to put down.

So I read to the end. But lately, I’ve had to hope that the book I’m holding in my hand or on my eReader has an ending.

Even if I love a book, I am greatly disappointed if I discover that the author has so little regard for my time that I’m not given a satisfactory conclusion to a story in which I’ve invested hours of my time.

The nature of publishing today

I’m a fledgling author. I understand the nature of publishing today. You want to build a platform that carries readers from one book to the next. But more and more I’m seeing low-star ratings that are given because the author didn’t publish a book. A 327-page entry to a 20,000 word serial adventure often lacks the satisfying ending that readers like me crave.

“But wait,” the guilty cry. “There are some great multi-book series.”

Yes, and if you have the talent of JRR Tolkien or George RR Martin, I’ll buy your books and read them one after the other. But even JK Rowling wrote seven complete stories as she was constructing her mega-series about a young wizard.

Epic stories

The Lord of the Rings and the Song of Ice and Fire tell epic stories. Many other series require too many words, too many pages, to put into one binding. I don’t have an objection to long stories, per se. What I object to is the attempt to suck me into a series without telling me.

“But my book is listed as a part of a series. You should know.”

No, I don’t. Just because a book is a part of a series doesn’t mean each book is vitally dependent on the next one to complete its story. I point to the Harry Potter books as an example. Yes, you get more from them if you read them all in sequence, but each book has a beginning, a middle, and—here’s the kicker—an end. Many series are constructed around a sequence of complete stories, with the main characters developing as the tale progresses.

What do I suggest?

I ask for upfront honesty. If a book ends with a cliffhanger that requires—I repeat, requires—the reader to go to the next book to finish the story, then put that in the cover notes and the on-line description of the book. “This is part two of a single six-book-long story.” If I want to invest six books worth of time in the story, I’ll read it.

To be honest, part of the reason I’m concerned about this topic is that I’m working on a book right now that has 180,000 words. That’s longer than the word-count sum of my two Merlin books—each of which tells a complete story, by the way.

Since it’s historical fiction, its length is not as extreme as if it were a contemporary fantasy, but still, I’m not sure what I’m going to do when it’s ready to publish. I do have a “pause” about halfway through that could be a break between two sub-books. Hence, my soul-searching.

If I do publish it as two parts, I want to be able to let readers know up front that they are making a two-book commitment.

It’s a swashbuckler. I think it’ll be worth your time.

Meanwhile, I’d like to know what you think about unending books. Please leave a reply or comment at the bottom of the page.

 

Merlin’s Weft will be released November 18. The eBook is available for pre-order on Amazon.com for a 25% discount until the release.

 

Merlin’s Knot is available on Amazon.com.

Go to my Web site to obtain a copy of the prequel, Merlin’s Shuttle. He doesn’t battle evil in that story, but he does face off against Mother Nature.

Slipping In and Out of Post-Roman Britain in a Contemporary Fantasy

British History, King Arthur, Merlin's Thread Series, , , ,

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What’s the point of writing a fantasy novel if the writer—me—can’t engage in a bit of it? My contemporary fantasy series, Merlin’s Thread, takes place in the twenty-first century in and around Houston, Texas. However, I wanted to provide a mechanism to ground the mythos in the time of King Arthur, in the late fifth and early sixth century.

The Merlin of my titles is King Arthur’s druid and Earth magician. He awoke from an extended slumber in his crystal cave and came to the New World to fulfill a quest. In my imagining, Merlin has two particular powers that he uses in a coincidental way to fulfill his quest.

What is not coincidental is the freedom I achieved to write about the times of the King.

Animal Experiences

One of the powers is his ability to share consciousness with his pets: birds and mice mostly, but also fish. That last is an admission that I borrowed the kernel of the idea from T. H. White, whose Merlyn turned the young boy known as Wart into a fish so the boy would learn self-reliance. I chose to move only a part of the mind into an existing animal, rather than actually converting into that animal. Like White’s Merlyn, my Merlin can perform the magic on another person. The protagonist of my first book, Merlin’s Knot, is rewarded with a stint as a fish in a koi pond.

Merlin’s second power of note here is to record those adventures in an animal and play them back into someone else’s mind. In that case, the recipient sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels what Merlin experienced while sharing with the animal, but the experiencer cannot influence the action in any way.

A Sense of Tense

Both books are written in first person past tense. I wanted the playbacks to have a feeling of immediacy, so I wrote them in first person present. In the following example from Merlin’s Knot, the protagonist Alfred suddenly experiences the first of Merlin’s visions without knowing what is happening to him. He’s on a tower a short distance away from a woman standing on another tower.

The woman looks my way again. This time her eyes focus on me for more than just a moment. She thinks, wonders about something. Something that relates to me. I see her sigh, then turn back to the distance.

I turn in the direction she has been looking. A cloud of dust hangs on the other side of the first hill, some distance away.

I glance back at the woman. She’s staring at me with intent and purpose now. I think she’s trying to send me a message, but I cannot think what it could be.

Without warning, I fall from the tower, hurtling toward the stone wall below. I shriek, knowing my body will be dashed and broken when I hit the rocks. Instead, the wall recedes. I glide along halfway down to it. My shriek becomes a cry, a call. I slide over the closed gate. I feel a rhythmic pulling on my back, on my shoulders.

Wings! Omigod, I’m a bird!

I beat my wings, rising toward the woman on the tower. She watches my approach. I see no surprise in her eyes, only expectation. I veer just before reaching her tower. My chest contracts and I hear another shriek.

Using My Device

Merlin gives Alfred visions as a sort of payment to induce his assistance. In the second book of the series, Merlin’s Weft, the protagonist is a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder. For her Merlin provides visions of strong women in unusual situations.

Of course, like any good dramatic device, once I created it I used it for other purposes. You’ll have to read the books to find out what they are.

 

Merlin’s Weft will be released November 18. The eBook is available for pre-order on Amazon.com for a 25% discount until the release.

Merlin’s Knot is available on Amazon.com.

Go to my Web site to obtain a copy of the prequel, Merlin’s Shuttle. He doesn’t battle evil in that story, but he does face off against Mother Nature.

Using Language as a Metaphor for Healing

King Arthur, Merlin's Thread Series, ,
Merlin's Weft available November 18
Merlin’s Weft available November 18

Multiple Personality Disorder

The main character starts the second book of my Merlin’s Thread series with her mind fractured into pieces. During the course of Merlin’s Weft, she fights to become one whole woman. Traumas in her past generated distinct personalities that are epitomized by fear, rage and lust.

While the struggle to heal her fractured soul continues throughout the book, a considerable amount of healing takes place during the first few chapters.

I wanted to show the reader the progress of her healing, especially in that crucial first third of the book. I used several mechanisms to illustrate her getting in touch with the different aspects of her former selves, but here I want to focus on one way that I used to show a gradual healing.

In a Manner of Speaking

Adele, the protagonist, suffered from multiple personality disorder. Although she is a thirty-four-year-old woman, parts of her mind are seven years old, and the dominant part is an uneducated seventeen-year-old girl. She speaks with an ignorant laziness that is extreme even for a teenager.

Here’s an example of her dialogue in the first chapter:

“I thought you were suppost-a be a healer. I thought you wanted the best f’r people. Amber always thought-a you that way. But you knew, too, did’n ya?”

Now, since Neve, her healer, has some schoolmarm tendencies, she focuses on improving the quality of speech in her charge. She starts with the laziness of the negated verb forms, such as “did’n,” and works up from there. The reader can see the progression of Adele’s healing through the changes in her dialogue.

Of course, throughout the book, stresses cause Adele to relapse and bring into question the efficacy of the whole healing process.

But She’s the POV Character

With lazy-sounding dialogue, a little goes a long way. The book is written in first person from Adele’s point of view. Not only do we sometime hear her internal thoughts, she provides narration from her perspective. Hearing that lazy child’s voice for so much of the book would drive even me crazy, and I like the girl.

I wrote her narration and internal dialogue without the sloppy diction.

How do I get away with that? Well, there are two threads to the explanation. First, one of the minor personalities that she is incorporating was an educated, adult person. Adele has access to that person’s vocabulary and speech patterns, and strives to overcome the verbal laziness of her main persona to emulate that one. Adele even voices that thought about having the internal adult speech patterns to Neve in the book.

The second explanation is that—I think—the voice people hear in their heads is more refined and polished than the one that comes out of their mouths. She hears herself the way she wishes she could speak.

Writing the Change

Frankly, I was reluctant at first to write scenes of Neve correcting Adele’s speech. In my early draft, I elided much of that into summary paragraphs. Who wants to sit through a schoolmarm’s language class? But my editor, Catherine Payne Jones, chastised me for my own laziness. “Show, don’t tell,” is the rule I was violating.

I needed to include background from the first book, Merlin’s Knot, for those readers who either hadn’t read it, or who had read it far enough in the past to have forgotten details. So I showed Adele’s relating her story to Neve along with her reactions to Neve’s corrections. I showed her struggles to speak better.

I hope you enjoy the result of my own language struggles.

Merlin’s Weft will be released November 18. The eBook is available for pre-order on Amazon.com at a 25% discount. From now until November 18, the eBook is only $2.99.

Merlin’s Knot, the first book of the series, is available on Amazon.com.

Go to my Web site to obtain a copy of the prequel, Merlin’s Shuttle. He doesn’t battle evil in that story, but he does face off against Mother Nature.

Dark Contemporary Themes in a Fantasy Novel

King Arthur, Merlin's Thread Series, , , ,
Merlin's Weft available in mid-November
Merlin’s Weft available in mid-November

Contemporary fantasy novels written for adults are not full of rainbows and lollipops. And really, who wants them to be? “Watch out Zameethia, the evil wizard’s forming a spell. Oh, no! He’s flooding the mall with jawbreakers!”

Be still, my beating heart.

Evil exists in the world. While it may not be exemplified by a bald megalomaniacal genius with an evil laugh and a hairless cat trained to push the button labeled “Destroy Earth,” it does destroy the lives of people just out to have a pleasant evening in places like Paris, Nice or Orlando. And it is found in not so random violence in too many cities and in war zones around the world.

Contemporary Fantasies

My Merlin books are contemporary fantasies. The ancient British druid wakes up in a society where ordinary people—people you might have passed on the street this morning—perform much of the evil. Plain old-fashioned greed drives men to brutally murder a farmer and his wife looking for gold hidden in the house. An attendant in a psychiatric hospital takes sexual advantage of a seventeen-year-old girl whose mind has retreated from the world. A criminal gang traffics human slaves into Houston. An ordinary, upscale suburban housewife owns one of those slaves.

In the first book of the series, even the narrator Alfred fantasizes revenge on the bosses who laid him off, and he considers acts of road rage.

Let me say right here that the books of my Merlin’s Thread series are not intended for children or teens.

Human Scale of Evil

It’s the human scale of this type of violence that is unsettling. What if three idiots broke into my home looking for gold I don’t have? What if someone grabbed my daughter, my son, my brother, sister, mother, father off the street to sell them into slavery?

Wouldn’t I like to have a druid magician step into my life about that time?

The Merlin’s Thread series isn’t unremitting tales of horrors against humanity. The books have an emphasis on characters and a modicum of sword and sorcery action. Some scenes are absolutely delightful, light and, I hope, funny. But sometimes evil steps into our path.

Heroes and Healing

Merlin’s Knot deals with what it means to be a hero. Merlin’s Weft examines the healing of a person whose soul starts out severely fractured. The action takes place around character development, rather than the other way around.

Maybe someday I’ll include a supersized villain out to destroy the world, but before I do that, I have to find a credible way to explain how anyone, megalomaniac or not, can train a cat to push that “Destroy Earth” button on command. Personally, I don’t think it can be done.

Merlin’s Weft will be released in November.

Merlin’s Knot is available on Amazon.com.

Go to my Web site to obtain a copy of the prequel, Merlin’s Shuttle. He doesn’t battle evil in that story, but he does face off against Mother Nature.

Why Write a Sequel?

King Arthur, Merlin's Thread Series, , ,

As I anticipate the release of my second book, Merlin’s Weft, my mind goes back to its genesis. I hadn’t conceived the first book (Merlin’s Knot) as the first of its own series. For a few years I’d been playing with the idea of writing a King Arthur saga that takes place in Britain in the fourth and fifth centuries. I’m still thinking about that one. The story idea sprawls over about a hundred years and includes twenty or more major characters spread throughout that period, I’ve restarted it several times. I just can’t find the right voice(s) to tell the epic.

Returning to the point, the contemporary Merlin book came to me as a story entire unto itself. Merlin shows up in current-day Houston looking for King Arthur, whose essence had been sent from his body and his time because he had suffered a severe head injury. The event fits into the saga I have in mind, explaining an absence of the hero that allows Mordred to take over the realm. Indeed, several flashback-type chapters of Merlin’s Knot relate events planned for the post-Roman saga.

When Merlin finds Arthur in Houston, unexpected complications arise. The point of view character, an unemployed engineer named Alfred, becomes more and more embroiled in Merlin’s attempts to return King Arthur to his destiny. The book has what I hope is an ending that readers find surprising, but upon reflection realize was inevitable.

Job done, let’s go home.

Except … I kept thinking about one of the characters in Knot, wondering what happened to her. A victim of several childhood traumas, in Weft Adele gets help from Merlin and a healer named Neve to stitch pieces of her former personalities together into one woman. The idea that appealed to me was answering the question: how do you heal a fractured soul. I needed to know what happened to her, and only by putting her story to paper could I find out.

The first decision I had to make was who the point of view character would be. I quickly realized that I had to tell the story from inside Adele’s head. That idea scared me. I’d written about her several personalities in Knot, and although none were saints, I liked and respected them. But I’d written about them from Alfred’s perspective, outside their minds. Nonetheless, going inside Adele’s head was the only way to tell the story, and I had to convert my feeling of “a scary idea” into “a worthy challenge.”

I’ll write a few more blogs over the next couple of weeks to give you an idea of how I went about solving some of the challenges. I’ll try hard to avoid revealing any spoilers for either the first or the second book. That’ll be easier to do for the second, so if you haven’t read the first, I recommend you get a copy of Merlin’s Knot and catch up.

When I hear of a series that’s already begun a question arises: Do I need to read the first book to appreciate the second? In the case of Merlin’s Weft, I’ve tried to incorporate the necessary information from the first book so a reader can appreciate the second as a stand-alone story. However, like many other series that use the same characters, it helps to read the earlier book to see how the characters evolve.

Merlin’s Knot is available on Amazon.com.

 

Join my mailing list to obtain a copy of the prequel, Merlin’s Shuttle.

Who Wants a Modern Fairy Tale?

Fairy Tales, Uncategorized, Writer's Life,

UpTreeI’ve been on a fairy-tale kick lately. It started when I was thinking about the backstory of a character in my second Merlin novel. It led me to think about the character’s maternal grandparents. I’d already established the character as being Slovakian, and the character himself was based around a mythical being common in Slavic folk tales.

Quick disclaimer here: so far as I know, I have no Slavic blood. I’m a quarter Danish and the rest is a mélange of Western European nationalities.

This character’s sister was introduced in my first Merlin novel, and she told me when I was working on that book then that she was Slovakian, so what could I do? Well, that’s an easy question to answer: research. That’s how I discovered her brother.

Back to the fairy-tale kick. I had the idea to tell his back-story in the form of a modern fairy tale. I suppose some people would call it magical realism, but let me stick with fairy tale. I wrote a story about a girl who gets lost in the forest while being chased by a couple of nasty two-legged beasts (men) until she is saved by a (mystical) woodsman. I like the two main characters, but there was a minor character in this fairy tale—Babka—who insisted that I should tell her story.

I’ve had an on and off fascination with myths and fairy tales. Back when I was in grad school, I audited an anthropology class for fun. The name of the class was something like “Myth, Symbol and Ritual.” I wish I still had the class notes for that. It was a lot of fun, and a definite diversion from physics. I don’t think it was part of the class, but that was about the time that I read Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment. But then life happened and I spent several decades doing science and technology. My shelf of folk and fairy tale books mostly sat unread.

One of those volumes was The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen. I’ve already written about the little gems I found there when I recently read that book cover to cover. It struck me that he seldom used the “once upon a time” formulation, and also how often he set the tales in (his) contemporary time. So, I wasn’t doing anything new by writing using a contemporary voice to tell a fairy tale.

Shoot.

I really only liked about one tale out of eight from H. C. Andersen’s stories. But I noticed that the ones that I did like had a magical feel to the writing. I decided, if I’m following in the footsteps of my distant not-relative, I should shoot for that quality.The story that old
Babka wanted me to tell is episodic, starting with her birth. Then, there are two vignettes of her as a girl, and the fourth occurs on the cusp of her adulthood, which also sets the stage for her role in the original girl-lost-in-the-woods story, where she’s an old lady. My intent is for each fairy tale to stand alone, but if you read them all together, they entwine. I’ve concentrated on making them feel magical.

I’m not sure that I’ve told her whole story yet. She might whisper something to me one day. But for now, I’ve got five tales.

I like the characters and what is happening to them. What I don’t know is whether contemporary readers want to read fairy tales. Would people buy a short book of newly made up folk and fairy tales? What do you think?

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Discover a Few Old Gems You Need to Read

Fairy Tales, ,

CoinsHave you heard the story of the coin that is accidentally left behind in a foreign country? The shilling knows that it’s good, honest, and true, but in this country it is yelled at and called false and counterfeit. It feels even worse when the people who discovered it in their pockets pass it to others in the dark, so in the light of the next day it is again called worthless. Now, imagine its pleasure when it’s finally returned to its own country, where it is hailed for its honest picture of the beloved king.

If you recognize that story, then you know “The Silver Shilling,” by Hans Christian Andersen. I found it charming, even if it’s not as famous as some of his other stories. His most notable tale is “The Little Mermaid,” but you might not recognize that tale in the original. Continue reading Discover a Few Old Gems You Need to Read →

Time Passes Oddly in The Three Musketeers

Three Musketeers,

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers. But if you’re a bit on the compulsive side, like me, you might’ve noticed that occasionally book-time passes more quickly than you’re expecting.

SPOILER ALERT: if you haven’t read The Three Musketeers but plan to, note that there are significant plot points discussed here.

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A French village. © Dennis Owusu-ansah | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Continue reading Time Passes Oddly in The Three Musketeers →

Me and Jose

Fairy Tales, Reminiscences,

A few months after I moved to Norway, a Norwegian colleague asked me if I was related to Jose Andersen. The person knew that I had lived most of my life in Oklahoma and Texas and that I was a quarter Danish. I just thought he was asking about some person he knew who had both Hispanic and Danish blood.

Since my grandfather emigrated from Denmark back in 1912 and all of the American Andersens that I’m related to trace back to him, there aren’t very many of us. So, without really giving the question any further thought, I answered that I wasn’t related to Jose.

three-swords-892245_1280-cropsmall

A few weeks later, another Norwegian who knew my background asked the same question. I answered “No” immediately, but later began wondering why everyone knew this famous Mexican-American Jose Andersen except me.

Sure enough, I was asked again. I replied with a question of my own.

“Who is Jose Andersen?”

Jon Erik—the Norwegian who asked me the lucky third time—looked at me in confusion. His look said that I must have been raised on a deserted island somewhere, not to know Jose. His answer began with a stammer.

“Uh … he’s a … writer. Very famous. And he’s Danish. He wrote in the 19th Century? You know? Children’s stories, like the Little Mermaid. Jose Andersen.”

It took me a moment to put what he said together with my rudimentary Norwegian lessons. We were both speaking English, which most Norwegians speak impeccably. Unfortunately, he—like the other two who had asked before—was saying the person’s name the way Norwegians do.

The man that Americans refer to as Hans Christian Andersen is referred to by Scandinavians by his initials: H. C. Andersen. But in Norwegian, the letter ‘H’ is pronounced “ho” with a long ‘o’ and the letter ‘C’ is pronounced like the English word “say.” What Jan Erik said was “Ho” “Say” Andersen, but what I heard, being raised in the land of Tex-Mex, was Jose.

Ain’t communication wonderful?

The famous Danish writer was born in Odense while my family hailed from the north of Jutland. Besides, in Denmark my family spelled the name Andreasen. My grandfather simplified it when he came through Ellis Island: Andersen is a much more common Danish name than Andreasen.

So it is highly unlikely that I am related to Hans Christian Andersen. I do admit to being an admirer of fairy tales, and long ago I devoured Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. As a writer, I can appreciate the significant symbolism of a young girl who becomes lost in the woods, being pursued by a wild beast, and waiting for the handsome axman to lead her out of the woods and into adulthood.

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