We're pleased to announce that our book, Kali's Eye, has made it to the Quarter-Finals in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. I doubt it will make it any further, but it's tremendous to have gone this far. If you're interested in reading the excerpt, we'd be tickled to death if you decided to review it. It's only the first chapter and I'm sorry now that I didn't do more, but I honestly didn't think we'd make it past the first round...
So far, the reviews have been very nice, though someone pointed out that you can't see Westminster Abbey from King's Cross Station (if you read the excerpt, you'll know what I mean). I have never been to London (or England...which makes me wonder why I wrote the story in the first place), but I have tried my best to keep buildings and land formations from moving around too much. The whole manuscript is going to be read by an editor from Publishers' Weekly, and I must admit that I'm feeling very nervous.
On another note, keep your eyes peeled for a piece of Narnian fanfiction, called The Thread that Runs so True, that we hope to start posting soon. It's nearly finished and we can't wait to see what you think of it.
Don’t tell anyone,
but the oldest thing I've ever touched was a 3,000 year old Assyrian relief. It
was worth it. You could still see some of the original paint in the cracks and cuneiform
covered it. At one time that panel, and its fellows, were brilliantly painted
and adorned the walls of a palace.
The majority of
old things that I’m familiar with are much more recent than those stone reliefs,
but I still have a similar thrill when I handle them. Not long ago, we came
into possession of a box full of hundreds of glass slides taken by my great-great
uncles at the turn of the last century. They’re more than a hundred years old
and depict a lost time that we will never see again. Holding them up to the
light transports you suddenly into the past in a way that I can’t describe.
We know my
great-great uncles were prolific travelers, sometimes crossing the Atlantic
more than once a year for business. They traveled first class, stayed at the
finest hotels, and one of them even went as far as Algeria and Spain. Those
were the days of globetrotting.
Postcard of the Lusitania my uncle sent just before his departure from New York.
He writes: Just a line to say au revoir. Hope all is well during my absence. Oct 21, 1908.
Unfortunately, my
great-grandmother, who collected the slides and letters and postcards, had an
odd way about her. She often labelled things wrong and instead of keeping the
letters they sent home, she only clipped the insignia of the hotels they stayed
at out of the top of the letters and threw the rest away. She was a strange
one.
However, as we've
been scanning the slides, we've been able to do a bit of detective work of our
own. Sometimes there are words in the pictures…the names of hotels, the name of
a ship on a life preserver, street names…things like that. Slowly, we've been able
to piece together the places that my great-uncle visited back in the years
before the Great War.
Unidentified passengers, c. 1907-1908
Part of the name 'Lusitania' can be seen
just behind the man in the foregrounds' left elbow
One of the most
fascinating things Rose discovered was the name of a ship printed on a life
preserver in one of the photographs. It was the name Lusitania.
The RMS Lusitania was the queen of her day. She
was one of the fastest liners afloat and her interior rivaled that of the
later Titanic. Unfortunately, like
the Titanic, the Lusitania was also an ill-fated ship. In 1915, she was torpedoed
off Ireland by a German U-Boat. The first explosion wasn't enough to sink her,
but after a second explosion, she went down in 18 minutes with the loss of 1,195 lives, in one of the most devastating
sinkings of a civilian ship in history.
It’s almost certain that her sinking, along with the Zimmerman Telegram,
prompted the United States to declare war in 1917.
Later it was speculated that the Lusitania was carrying a secret cargo.
Her hold was packed with war supplies, as well as several million bullets, but theories that she was carrying Aluminium dust or the explosive, guncotten, disguised in crates of beef ran wild. These theories have never been proven, but no
one is sure it wasn't the Lusitania’s
cargo that caused the second explosion that sank her so quickly.
Of course, my uncle wasn't aboard the Lusitania when she went down. He
traveled aboard her shortly after her maiden voyage in 1907, but it’s still odd
to think that he walked those same decks that Robert Ballard revealed when he
explored the wreck in 1993.
A post card sent by a family friend from Hamburg in 1915, before America's entry into the war. The Lusitania was sunk the spring of that year.
He writes: Hamburg 1/10/15. Have returned here. It appears now that my trip will be successful. I will probably sail back [to New York] on Frederick VIII leaving Copenhagen on the 6th of February. During these days the first train between Berlin and Constantinople will run. Today the news of the evacuation of Gallipoli arrived.
The First World War really put an end to the great
transatlantic liners. There was a short resurrection in the twenty years
between the wars, but ocean liners were doomed. The only ocean liner in active
service today is the British liner, Queen Mary 2; the rest have either been scrapped or turned into floating hotels.
I wish liners would come back; not only are the
fares cheaper than flying, but they have a sense of the old world about them.
My wish may soon come true; a slightly crazy, Australian billionaire wants to
bring back the Titanic. The replica, Titanic II, is due to be launched in
2016. I do not jest.
~Psyche PS: The following video was released in 1918 by American animator Winsor McCay. It was the longest piece of animation at the time, and the first animated documentary. It was afterwards verified that only one torpedo struck the Lusitania.
