Writing

Dancing King Stories: Buckingham Palace

March 5, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

It’s likely the most recognizable royal residence in the world.

The site of Buckingham Palace in London has been a royal residence since 1761, when George III bought Buckingham House for his wife, Queen Caroline. It was architect John Nash who transformed the building into more of what we know today, creating a three-winged building with the Marble Arch in front of it (the arch was later moved to Hyde Park). Victoria was the first monarch to live in the palace, moving in in 1837, and it was during her early reign that a fourth wing was added, especially to provide more bedrooms and a nursery. The fourth wing created the quadrangle design.

The palace has experienced some significant changes over the years. In 1911, the forecourt was added (where the changing of the Guard takes place) as part of the plan for the Victoria Memorial statue. The gates and railings were also added at this time. In 1913, the palace was refaced – the stone was deteriorating because of air pollution. During World War II, a German plane flew right up The Mall and bombed part of the palace – in the area where the Queen’s Art Gallery and the palace gift shop are today on Buckingham Gate.

Today, the palace has 775 rooms, including 19 State Rooms, 52 royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms, 92 offices, and 78 bathrooms.

In 2018, the palace’s state rooms are open for public touring from July 21 to September 30, roughly corresponding to when the Queen is staying at Balmoral in Scotland and Windsor Castle.

I’ve taken the tour of the State Rooms twice, in 2012 and 2015. I bought our tickets online once we were in London and chose the day and time (tickets are timed). The tour entrance is on Buckingham Gate, and friendly (and usually caped) attendants guide you where you need to go. The tour starts with a security check, and then you walk through a part of the interior courtyard to the main interior entrance. You’re given a headset and tape in the language of choice, and you follow it through the tour.

The tour ends at the ground level on the terrace facing the back lawn and gardens. There is a refreshment tent where you can buy tea, coffee, water, and soft drinks, as well as cakes and other sweets. (We were ready for a piece of sponge cake and tea by the end of the tour.) There’s a restroom pavilion nearby, and then a large gift shop (one last opportunity for tourists to spend). To exit the grounds, you follow the graveled walk and exit on to Grosvenor Place, a busy street on the west side of the palace complex. Walk north to Hyde Park, west to Knightsbridge, or south toward Victoria Station.

A considerable portion of Dancing King is set in Buckingham Palace, including two crucial and related scenes, one in the Green Room (one of the State Rooms), where Michael Kent-Hughes will meet with protestors, and the other by the Victoria Memorial in front of the palace.

Michael and his wife Sarah find the palace generally sound (Michael’s childhood friend Tommy McFarland, will lead a team of architects and building experts to determine the condition of the various royal properties). A number of internal systems – heating, kitchen appliances, and basic systems – will need to be replaced or repaired. The chief gardener, Richard Brightwell, will be directed to begin a major renovation of the gardens. The art gallery will be renovated and plans made for an exhibition. The staff will begin planning to reopen the palace for summer tours.

Michael and Sarah, overwhelmed by the size of the palace and trying to figure out how to call it “home,” will have a space on the upper floor of one of the wings renovated for the entire family, resembling their home in San Francisco.

The desire for their own “home” within the palace is an indication of how different this royal family is from all of its predecessors. Michael was not raised in class privilege; Iris and Ian McLaren worked as a garden designer and horse veterinarian, respectively. He attended regular schools in Edinburgh rather than a school like Harrow or Eton. He has no “old boys” relationship with the aristocracy, and no military background like so many royals before him. Where his friendships in Britain will develop will be more with professional and business people.

And what most sets him off from his predecessors is that no previous monarch was first a priest.

Top photograph: Buckingham Palace, September 2017. Middle photograph: the rear of the palace, with the tented refreshment area. Bottom photograph: the gates on the right side of the palace; it is through these gates that Michael walks to join the crowds in front.

Talking with Megan Willome about “Dancing King”

March 2, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Writer Megan Willome and I had a long conversation about Dancing King, writing, fiction, characters, the use of emotion, crowd scenes, and even bicycles in London. She had read all three books in the Dancing Priest series.

“The stories haunt you, and not in a scary way. They serve as almost an alternate history: What if the Athens Olympics unfolded like that? What if England had a king on the throne instead of a queen? Like any good alternate history, it has enough true details to make it seem real. So real that I find myself thinking The Violence from book 2, A Light Shining, was as real as The Troubles.”

You can read her discussion and our conversation at Megan’s blog.

Writing to Make Faith Attractive

March 1, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

It showed up as a comment on a blog post, and it stopped me in my tracks.

“Whatever your plan is…I do hope you continue this series of books. May God direct your thoughts and plans with His plan. I loaned the books to a friend of mine to read, and her comment was after reading the first one (Dancing Priest), ‘If I wasn’t already a Christian, this book would make me want to be one.’ That is a powerful testimony. Keep writing. There is power in the written word when it directed by God.”

A comment like that leaves you surprised, almost shocked, humble, and then almost fearful.

You ask yourself, “What is it I’m doing here?”

I’ve been known to answer that question about the novels I’ve written with “I’m just telling a story.” It’s a story that was on my mind and my heart for years – almost five years – before I typed the first word. By the time I began writing it down, it was almost uncontrollable. I couldn’t type fast enough.

I came to a stop at 250,000 words. I still hadn’t poured it all out.

The Dancing Priest series is now three published books. More may come. One is in process. But I read a comment like that and I tremble.

The books haven’t exactly been blockbuster bestsellers. I’d starve in about four days if I had to live off the royalties (and the royalties would cover only food for four days). But when you hear things like “the best description of lifestyle evangelism I’ve ever read” and “that scene, that scene of Sarah’s speech in the hospital, I cried” – and you hear them from men – you know something else may be going on.

At the end of 2013, I almost stopped writing. Two novels and a non-fiction book in three years, my mother increasingly ill and reaching the end of her life, absolute craziness at work, keeping up a blog, writing two weekly columns – it all nearly did me in physically and emotionally. When Michael Kent-Hughes says in Dancing King that giving a sermon physically exhausts him, in many ways that’s me saying writing physically and emotionally exhausts me.

But after three novels, I know that I’m about more than “telling a story.” It’s that comment: “If I wasn’t already a Christian, this book would make me want to be one.” These may be “Christian novels” but they’re not really written for Christians (although Christians seem to like them). Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes may be attractive and sometimes inspiring heroes, but it is their faith that’s the real hero of the story. It carries them through separation, through tragedy, through mistakes they make, through literal attacks on their lives, and through constant attempts to smear their reputations. If this series continues, their faith will carry them through a lot more. And they don’t emerge from all of this unscathed; Michael bears literal and figurative scars. But it is faith that inspires these characters to carry on.

It took a reader to help me understand that a good part of what I’m about is making faith attractive.

Photograph by Samantha Sophia via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Can Fiction Predict the Future?

February 22, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

The comment came in a tweet: “Finished my reread of A Light Shining last night. I found the section ‘The Violence’ to be remarkably prescient.”

The section has to do with a relatively short-lived religious upheaval in Britain – short-lived but turning the country upside down. Even when I reread the section, I see the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, in London in 2017, in Brussels, in Orlando, in San Bernardino, and other places.

Except that section of the novel was written in 2005.

My wife says there are some things in my novels that give her the creeps, as if I knew what was coming.

I didn’t. I just wrote the story that was in my head. It’s all fiction.

In 2012, I outlined the main ideas of the rest of the Dancing Priest series to my publisher. The fourth novel (now in process) would be about a specific issue, taken largely from a similar issue in the United States but transported to Britain. Two weeks later, he sent me reports from several British news media. My idea was sudden news in Britain, and it wasn’t fiction.

I didn’t predict what happened. Instead, what I think was happening was picking up an idea here, a suggestion, there, and something related over there, and then the ideas fusing into something that became part of a fictional story.

This is not unlike the situations I found myself in during my professional career. Developments, trends, and emerging issues would often look obvious to me, and they wouldn’t look obvious to anyone else. I wouldn’t “predict the future” but I would say “This is what we’re dealing with, and this is what I think we need to do.” It became even more difficult with the arrival of social media, because the company would need to respond in minutes when the company often didn’t think social media mattered at all. Until it did. Which was almost all of the time.

I can see the same processes working through my novels. I read a lot – magazines, blogs, social media, books. I read people I agree with and people I don’t. I try to break out of my worldview bubble to understand what people are thinking and, more importantly, how they think. If there’s any predictive element to any of this, it’s understanding how people think.

The chief villain in my third novel Dancing King is a PR operative named Geoffrey Venneman. The character is not based on any real individual. But how he thinks comes from a composite of people I’ve known. He’s not a type but a composite of types, and not all of them bad. He’s resourceful, does his research, and verifies things himself. He’s also an astute judge of character, except when he sizes up Michael Kent-Hughes, the story’s hero. While the reader (and author) are appalled at what he does, the fact is that he’s operating in a time when it’s not about right or wrong but about winning.

In 1898, an author named Morgan Robertson published a novella called Futility. He created a ship called the Titan, loaded it with wealthy people, and wrecked it on an iceberg. Fourteen years later, people remembered it, and drew the uncanny parallels (including ship length, top speed, and claims of being unsinkable) to the Titanic. Robertson didn’t predict the sinking of the Titanic; but he more likely considered the culture and how people thought, which shaped the story in his head.

Fiction can’t predict the future. But it can give the future a good run for its money.

Top photograph by Aziz Acharki via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Every Writer Needs a Plan, Right?

February 15, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The inspiration for my three novels, Dancing Priest , A Light Shining, and Dancing King, was a song. The story was gradually written in my head, and only there, for four years. When I began to pound the keyboard, it poured out – gushed, actually – for almost 250,000 words. Eventually, I shaped the equivalent of two novels from that original manuscript and had enough to write the third. But the story arc for the series was set by 2006.

Along the way, the outlines, drafts, and ideas developed for five more novels using the same characters, ranging from a 4,000-word treatment to a 70,000-word manuscript. Somewhere in there two entirely different novel ideas popped up, one becoming a 60,000-word manuscript and the other a 1,000-word summary. And the ideas for three more novels in the Dancing Priest series have been rattling around my head, following the same process as the original – creation in my mind as I go to sleep at night.

Did I mention the 30,000-word novella?

This is not exactly what I would call a deliberate writing plan. Including the three that are published, this would mean a total of 14 books.

It makes my head hurt just to think about it.

I look at these manuscripts, these words, and the characters waiting in the stage wings, and I’m not sure if there will even be another act. I’m working on the fourth novel in the series, but I’m plagued by all the usual doubts.

My plan will likely be something like “just plow right on ahead.”

For most of my professional career, I worked for a company where this absence of planning would have been anathema. Planning means control, and whether they realize or not, all corporations were created with the idea of reducing uncertainty by creating or extending control. Control your market. Control your environment. Control your raw materials. Everything is a process and has a plan. Measure the results of your plan. Repeat.

Corporations took a function like mine – communicating with the great, messy, unruly, uncontainable, obnoxious, and unwashed public – and expected it to control that environment. (“Tell the reporter not to ask that question.” “Tell Twitter to remove that tweet.”) Result: #totalfail. The communications revolution we’ve been living since the creation of the worldwide web has, if nothing else, proven that no one can control anything. In fact, it’s not about control any more, if it ever really was. (Watch what happens when you tell corporate executives that it’s not about control; it’s about letting go of control. Result: #careerfail.)

The way I’ve written my novel manuscripts likely compensdates for the writing rigidity I experienced at work. Now I let inspiration move me. In one form or another, there are likely some 500,000 words of published and unpublished manuscripts, with at least that many words to go if all of these books ever see the light of day.

Yes, I need a plan. And I need to take to heart some words I’ve read about planning your writing.

“Some stories can’t be written now,” says Charity Craig in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Ann Kroeker). “They don’t fit together, or they compete…Or maybe the stories refused to be written. Either the story is not ready, or I’m not ready to write it…having a plan doesn’t mean having all the answers.”

Having a plan doesn’t mean having all the answers. That may be one of the most encouraging things I’ve read about writing. Ever.

Top photograph by Matt Artz via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Luke Herron Davis Reviews “Dancing King”

February 11, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Author and teacher Luke Herron Davis is the author of the fascinating and St. Louis-based Cameron Black mysteries. At his blog For Grace and Kingdom, Davis reviews Dancing King.

The novel, says Davis, shows “a main character in Michael Kent who continues to mature in his faith and leadership. He does so remembering with John Donne that no man is an island, and true leadership occurs in community with others, not in isolation. Not a bad picture of what God’s family should be like, incidentally.”

Davis also noted how the structure of the novel differs from its predecessors, Dancing Priest and A Light Shining. He solidly grasped what I was trying to do. (The structure, in fact, was the limiting factor when I was writing the novel; what I had simply wouldn’t work and kept leading me down rabbit holes. Only when I heard one character clearly speak about “writing this down” did what I had to do become clear.)

You can read the entire review here.

Writing

Footer

Meet the Man