Progress Report

Making Headway Despite *handwaves at the world*

I thought I’d update you on my progress with The Fall of Acre. As of Tuesday evening, the project has a full three-page synopsis! Why is this important? Well, besides being more progress than I’ve had with any of the other novel ideas I’ve been swirling around, here, a bare-bones three-page synopsis sets the story in the mortar of my imagination. It gives me something to build upon.

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An alternate pic from the UK Publisher of The Lion of Cairo

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The Elevator Pitch:

A Venetian mercenary hiding a deadly secret is blackmailed into killing a Genoese rival, an assassination that accidentally triggers a massacre that dooms Acre, the last stronghold of Christendom in Outremer; the Venetian must choose between survival and redemption when Acre is besieged by the Sultan of Egypt in the spring of 1291.

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The story blends history with fiction; the lives of those who truly existed with the lives of made-up characters. The Venetian, Enrico Caravallo, is fictional — equal parts Porthos from The Three Musketeers, Doc Holliday from Tombstone, and Tannhauser from The Religion. A “blighted giant of a man, Venetian by birth but barely two generations removed from the Croatian highlands of his grandfather’s day”; a man whose features “could have been carved by a Roman master, with features as sharply cut as the ancient busts the Venetians plundered from Constantinople — the high-bridged nose and prominent chin. Under that craggy brow, the eyes that pierce the gloom are pale blue and red-rimmed from exhaustion.” We first meet him over a game of dice in Messina, verbally sparring with a Catalan viscount who is down on his luck and desperate for Fortune’s favor . . .

Caravallo exists in the same world as Guillaume de Beaujeau, Mathieu de Clermont, and Roger de Flor; he rubs elbows with the son of a former Venetian doge, with the Pope’s chosen legate, and with the silent brothers of the Order of St. Lazarus. My task is to make the fictional seem real.

What’s next? I’ll expand the three-page synopsis into a proper Draft Zero, then embark upon the writing proper. I’m aiming for about 100,000 words — which means I’ll need to tighten a couple of places in the middle where the synopsis seems a bit flabby.

For now, though . . . onward!