Interview with Award-winning Historical Novelist N.L. Holmes

  

1.      What inspired you to write this book? Although it's a completely free-standing story, this book is in a way a follow-up on a previous book, The Queen's Dog. In that novel, I told the story of a real historical event, a royal divorce in the Syrian kingdom of Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age. That was inspired by a class I taught some years ago, in which I gave my students the excercise of combining the few little clues we had about the divorce and then trying to figure out what happened. The results made it clear that with so little to go on, historiography came pretty close to historical fiction! The Moon That Fell takes place seventeen years after those events and is in part shaped by them.  

2.      What exactly is it about and who is it written for? Ehli-nikkalu is a real Hittite princess who is married into the royal family of Ugarit, a small maritime kingdom in Syria that is a vassal of the Hittites. Marginalized because of her childlessness, she finds herself involved with the plotting of a pretender and caught up in the rising of starving and dispossessed people from all over the Empire—these are true historical events. Aided by an orphan girl, a desperate and embittered former soldier, and a kindly poet, she manages to save the kingdom from a cascade of disasters and learns something about love along the way. I think the story will attract those who are interested in a lesser-known niche of ancient history but also anybody who likes a good yarn with a bit of adventure and a bit of romance, a pair of plucky heroines, and a cast of oddball characters. 

3. What do you hope readers will get out of reading your book? As a fiction writer, I have pretty much the same goal as I had when I taught history: to humanize the people of the past. If I can get readers to feel empathy for these real people, who had feelings like ours, they will have come a long way towards understanding why the past unrolled the way it did. Also, it's one thing to read "a lot of Bronze Age empires fell apart around 1200 BCE" and quite another to see what that meant in people's lives. 

 

4. How did you decide on your book’s title and cover design? The title is the name of a Hittite poem that describes how Arma, the moon god, falls to earth and gets impaled on the mountains. he flops around there in pain, unable to free himself, until his wife, Nikkal, calls out to him in love. He rises back into the sky on the waves of her love, but ever after, there are bits of the shiny silver rubbed off the surface of the moon, and it is instead found in the rocks of the mountains of earth. Ehli-nikkalu sees herself in this story, fallen from her prestigious and happy home into the misery of a bad marriage. My publisher decided on the cover, but I love it. The olive grove is significant to the story. 

 

5. What advice or words of wisdom do you have for fellow writers – other than run!? Get a professional editor or several. This is true whether you're shopping a manuscript to agents or you've decided to publish independently. Nobody, even an editor, can edit their own work perfectly. And I don't just mean a proofreader, but a content editor who will find plot holes, improbabilities, cases of switching point of view—you name it. Then a line editor to make sure every line is as intelligible and grammatically perfect as you think it is. Then a proofreader. It's pricy, but for me it's non-negotiable. Otherwise the book will always smack of amateurism. Of course, you have to be willing to listen to them! In any case, this isn't the same as a friend or relative who has agreed to beta-read. It should be somebody who knows your genre and who has no dog in the fight. 

 

6. What trends in the book world do you see -- and where do you think the book publishing industry is heading? This is tough, because I tend to keep my nose pretty close to the page. But it's cleaar that the sheer number of books coming out is exploding, partly as a result of self-publishing. And that's great: more books, more fun! But it makes writing more competitive, which means you'd better have a great product and you'd better advertise. The lazy author won't survive. As far as the publishing industry goes, I'm troubled by the increasing monopolies of a few enormous houses, and I'd put Amazon in that category for ebooks. I think independent publishing is going to become even more important, and it has to if we want to preserve quirky outsider voices—non-blockbuster books. 

 

7. Were there experiences in your personal life or career that came in handy when writing this book? Well, clearly the fact that I'm an archaeologist and a longtime professor of ancient history has given me a lot of ideas for stories. A friend of mine lived through the big Los Angeles earthquake some years ago, which was useful in Moon. My husband is an ancient literature person, and we have a poet character in the book. But on a more personal level, I think it's been emotional experiences that have come in handiest, although the provoking situation may be very different from what happens in the story. Who hasn't experienced fear, anger, tenderness? All that is the pith of a novel.

 

8. How would you describe your writing style? Which writers or books is your writing similar to? I'd say it inclines toward the literary, because that's the kind of book I usually read. As a visual artist and a big reader of nineteenth-century Realist novels, description is important to me. My books started out quite tragic and Dostoevski-ish, but have gotten lighter over time, because I think that with Covid and all the world's problems, people need something a little more positive and even humorous. Perhaps they resemble Mary Renault, in that they present an individual's personal take on an event from ancient history.

 

9. What challenges did you overcome in the writing of this book? I had actually written this story some years before, but it never quite met my expectations. I hadn't succeeded in making the characters come alive for me, and so I could never get a handle on the plot—it was somehow just episodic. So I stuck it away to cannibalize. Then, two years ago, the folks at RedAdept Publishing, with whose editorial services I had long done business, asked if I'd be interested in writing a book as a serial for Amazon's new test format Vella. I agreed, and since I had at least a skelton already ready in Moon, I pulled it back out and rewrote it completely, just salvaging a couple of scenes. But it was a terrible experience writing a serial! I was just a jump ahead of the publication of each 1500-word episode, and I was never able to go back and tweak things to fit the way the story was shaping up, as I usually do, being a "pantser." I can recommend serials to organized outline-makers, "plotters", but for my method of writing it was really nerve-wracking.

 

10. If people can buy or read one book this week or month, why should it be yours? If you like historical fiction and are willing to look at a story that isn't nineteenth century or Tudor, I think you'll find this a psychologically interesting bridge between big-scale royal stories and small-scale stories about people caught up in terrible times. Something is always happening (it was written as a serial!) and there are some interesting, odd characters who are nonetheless likable human beings with comprehensible motives. It has some funny parts, it has some romance. It's bittersweet in some ways, but a story of growth and change, and that's always uplifting. Plus, you'll learn a lot about a moment of history that is more or less unknown. 

About The Author : N.L. Holmes is the pen name of a professional archaeologist who received her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College. She has excavated in Greece and in Israel and taught ancient history and humanities at the university level for many years. She has always had a passion for books, and in childhood, she and her cousin used to write stories for fun. These days she lives in France with her husband, two cats, geese, and chickens, where she gardens, weaves, dances, and plays the violin—and reads, of course. For more information, please see : https://www.nlholmes.com/

 

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