The Pericles Commission, on sale October 12

We have a title! We have a release date! We have an excited author!

Nicolaos, the ambitious son of a minor sculptor, walks the mean streets of Classical Athens as an agent for the promising young politician Pericles. His mission is to find the assassin of the statesman Ephialtes, the man who brought democracy to Athens. The killing has thrown the city into uproar. The steadily increasing number of dead witnesses isn't helping much either.

But amongst the murder, the mayhem and the desperate investigation, Nico faces two even tougher challenges: how to get closer to Diotima, the intelligent and annoyingly virgin priestess of Artemis, and how to shake off his irritating 12 year old brother Socrates.

The official title of my first book is The Pericles Commission, appearing in a bookstore near you on October 12.

Yay!

This story really happened, though not, perhaps, precisely as it appears in the book. There really was an Ephialtes. He really did create the world’s first democracy. He really was murdered days later.

The murder was never solved. Until now!

Autocorrect is your friend

Wow, after the massive response to my last post I'm getting the hint that Word tips are interesting. So here's another.

There's a feature in Word called autocorrect, which does what it says. If you type teh it auto-magically changes it to the. This saves lots of backspacing and retyping. You can find it on the menu under Tools -> Autocorrect Options. Autocorrect is on by default so you probably already know about it. But did you know you can add your own autocorrections?

You can distort autocorrect to do two things very useful for writers.

You can use autocorrect to make typing character names faster. My hero and heroine are Nicolaos and Diotima. After about 23 revisions of two books, I can type their names blindfold, in my sleep, with both hands tied behind my back. I have other characters with names like Pericles, Xanthippus, Themistocles and Sophroniscus. They're all real and fascinating people from the Golden Age of Greece!

So I've added these autocorrections:

N autocorrects to Nicolaos.
D autocorrects to Diotima.
P autocorrects to Pericles.
X autocorrects to Xanthippus.
thm autocorrects to Themistocles.
S autocorrects to Sophroniscus.

If I type:

"N, I want you and D to carry this secret message to X," P said.

Then what comes out is

"Nicolaos, I want you and Diotima to carry this secret message to Xanthippus," Pericles said.

That's 29 keystrokes saved, which frees up more time to spend playing with twitter and facebook.

You can add your own autocorrections by going to Tools -> Autocorrect Options. Type your N in the textbox labelled Replace, and your Nicolaos in the textbox labelled With. Then click Add. The entire list of autocorrections, including the defaults, are in the list at the bottom of the dialog.

The other use I put autocorrect to is to catch my noise words. Everyone has them. I tend to overuse the word just. To stop myself I put in this autocorrection:

just autocorrects to NO! NO! NO!

If I type:

"I'll just wander over to the Agora," N said.

What appears is:

"I'll NO! NO! NO! wander over to the Agora," Nicolaos said.

If you're wondering how I manage to write just when I actually mean it, jsut is set to autocorrect to just. So I have to deliberately misspell the word to get it in, which makes me think first.

Advanced searching in Microsoft Word

Writers are not always the most technical of people, and fair enough, but there's one techie thing worth learning about because it makes global editing easier, and that's regular expressions.

Let's say - to pick a random example, not that this would ever happen to me - that your dear agent thinks you have too many verbs of the form was ---ing. Was walking, was looking, was defenestrating, and so on. How to find them?

You can read through the whole ms. Which will take forever. Or you can search for was. This will cut the search time and you won't miss any, but you'll have to check 100 times more was words than you want. You might think to search for "ing ". Because you can have spaces in searches. But like searching for was, there'll be a lot of wasted time.

Or you can click Use wildcards on the find dialog (you need to click More to find it) and write a regular expression. They work like this:

* matches any number of characters

If you click Use wildcards and search for was *ing then that matches was followed by a space, followed by any number of characters, followed by ing. So was looking matches but was crooked doesn't.

You might think that would find everything we want, and indeed it will, but it will also match text like "The fence was crooked but John wasn't looking". The text in red matches because the * matches any sequence of characters, including spaces. We want something slightly trickier. We want to match was followed by a space, followed by and number of text characters ending in ing.

[a-z] matches any one character from a to z.

You can follow this by a @ to mean one or more of the characters between square brackets. So

[a-z]@matches one or more characters between a and z.

What if the first letter of the word after was is a capital? Not a problem, you can have more than one range inside the square brackets.

[a-z,A-Z]@matches one or more alphabet characters, big or small.

So a search string of was [a-z,A-Z]@ing will do the job beautifully. If you're totally paranoid about there being a weird character in the present participle (beats me why, but still...) then you can do this instead:

[!a-z] means any one character except a to z. The ! means match the opposite. So

[! ] matches any character except a space. If you can't see it, I typed a space between the ! and the ].

So a search string of was [! ]@ing is what I'm using to weed the excessive present particples out of my manuscript. It might seem like a lot of effort to work this out, but believe me, it's heaps faster than checking every was within 90,000 words.

There are more wildcards than these. They're all listed on the Special button in the search dialog, so you don't have to remember them all.

The Athenian navy versus the US navy

The Athenian Navy was the most powerful the world had yet seen. But how powerful is that? Here are some totally spurious comparisons with the most powerful naval force in the world today, the United States Navy.

Let's start with ships of the line.

Themistocles convinced the Athenians to build 200 triremes. By the peak of their empire they probably had close to 300 triremes.

The United States Navy today has 287 commissioned ships according to their own web site.

So the two fleets were almost exactly the same size.

Of course, you might argue the USN has aircraft carriers (11) and nuclear attack submarines (54), which were distinctly lacking in the Athenian fleet. But keep in mind both fleets are the absolute state of the art for their times.

You can be quite sure Themistocles, who clearly belonged to the peace-through-superior-firepower school of international diplomacy, would have had the Athenians building aircraft carriers if only he'd known about them.

In fact a trireme is the equivalent of a modern destroyer. The trireme was a floating battering ram, the first ship in history designed purely to sink other ships, and the fastest thing on the seas. They even had roughly the same crew size: 200 on a trireme versus 280 for a destroyer.

If you think of the Athenian fleet as being like 300 modern destroyers, you're not far wrong. That's a force strong enough to wipe out almost any navy afloat today.

But wait! We're still not making a fair comparison. America is much larger than Athens.

The population of Classical Athens was about 200,000. The population of the United States is slightly more than 300,000,000. Yet they put the same number of ships on the water. Clearly America can afford to invest much less per person and still get a bigger bang. Let's equalize the naval investment per capita.

Adjusting so there are the same number of ships per head of population, the USN is reduced from 287 to one fifth of a destroyer. My money's on the triremes, even if we don't adjust for 2,500 years of technological advance.

Let's try it the other way. If the US made the same per capita naval investment the Athenians did, they would have not 287 ships, but 430,000. No, I didn't type too many zeroes. Even if you count each carrier as worth a thousand destroyers there's still no comparison. Granted it's impossible to compare across such time with any accuracy, but it seems clear there's no nation today making anything like the naval investment Athens did.

The same outrageous ratios apply when you compare the Athenians to their neighbours. The next largest fleet at the time was Corinth, and they had all of 40 triremes. 40 against 300.

The Athenian fleet was huge.

Songs of antiquity

I think this deserves a new post. The comments on forthcoming titles has devolved (elevated?) into some punny song titles. I want to particularly point out:

Like A Rolling Stone. Duet sung by Bob Dylan and Sisyphus. Courtesy of Loretta.

Get Bacchae (to Where You Once Belonged). Courtesy of Peter Rozovsky. I note in passing this song includes a mention of a Loretta.

You Can Call Me Alcestis. Sung as a duet by Paul Simon and Peter Rozovsky.

My own inadequate contribution are these lyrics, to the tune of Rust Never Sleeps:

Hey, hey,
My, my,
Prometheus will never die,
It's better in Hades,
Than chained to a rock,
With your liver exposed,
To a ravenous flock.

To which Peter adds:

Liver And Let Die.

Any others?