Hello again, everyone! My name is Geoff Micks, and as this week’s episode is both the shortest and also roughly the halfway mark of Season Two, I thought it would make sense to do a short bonus episode for you in the same way I did under similar circumstances in Season One.
I believe I can also just about promise based on those ‘similar circumstances’ that I will almost certainly be doing another bonus episode again for the third and final season when the time comes.
As you know, The Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast is based on a series of books I wrote, Beginning, Middle, and End. The framing device is a man in 2015 who buys a tape recorder and over the course of three days dictates his life’s story as fast as he can while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him. That framing device gave me the freedom to write just about whatever I wanted throughout pre-history and history using the same unreliable narrator moving through time, but I did need to carve out space —and it was important it be roughly the same sort of space— across all three books to service that framing device so readers did not forget how it all was being held together, and also to bring resolution to that part of the story.
I hope at least some of you are wondering what is actually going to happen to our narrator and his mystery guest in 2015? How is the overarching story going to resolve itself at the end of the trilogy?
Being a framing device, it made sense to start and finish each book with a scene set in 2015 showing the narrator and eventually his mysterious guest outside the premise of the interconnected stories he is telling. Those are the scenes where you hear an older woman’s voice offering a third-person present tense omniscient narration of what is happening when the tape recorder is off. I also needed to ground each book in the middle too, though. If you don’t touch base at some point in all those hundreds of pages to remind readers they are hearing something dictated in 2015, it might be a rude awakening to some when they ‘snap back to the present’ at the end of each book, right?
In Beginning the narrator takes Chapter 8 to talk about how he came to buy the tape recorder while going on a little screed about the problems with technology and modernity, all of which will eventually inform the plot and character arc in the future, I promise. In Middle, Chapter 9 —the episode you just listened to— is where the narrator and his mystery guest meet for the first time. In End, Chapter 9 will again be a short scene where those two characters in 2015 engage with each other directly to set up the back half of the last third of the trilogy, which means almost certainly that is going to be the shortest episode of that season too, and a prime place for me to say something to you by way of extra content for that week.
Anyway, I hope all of this preamble has illustrated a point I want to make. A great deal of thought went into this project, including things I had to decide to do or not do as a writer behind the scenes that no reader ever gets to hear about beyond perhaps the odd superfan who goes to book signings or closely follows their favourite authors’ media appearances.
I suppose this is where I say for the record that I would love to do anyone’s podcast in support of this project or any of my other books and work. By all means reach out if you have a show where I would be a relevant guest. For many years I hosted a niche business podcast as part of my day job. I promise I can hold up my end of a conversation.
Returning to the purpose of today’s bonus episode, I want to talk about some of the ideas I had for this trilogy that did not make it into the final project, and also talk about some things that were not part of my plan that took over and pushed out stories and plots I wanted to do.
Let’s start with Pytheas, who you may remember from two episodes ago. He gets maybe thirty seconds of wrap-up in next week’s episode, and then he’s gone. Does that strike you as strange? It strikes me as strange, and I am the one who chose to do that to him.
I have known about Pytheas for more than 20 years now. I did a Classical Studies minor as part of my education at the University of Toronto, and there was a third-year course called, “Archaeology of the Ancient World” that I swear my professor had cooked up so he wouldn’t have to actually teach anything. The first week of class he told us we were going to write the first proper research paper of our lives, which was news to us, but I suspect he meant in terms of breadth and depth rather than just writing off everything else we had done in our post-secondary education up to that point.
Anyway, we would take the entire semester to do it. It had to be at least 20 pages long before citing sources, and there had better be a lot of sources. We could pick any topic we wanted provided it had to do with archaeology in broadly speaking the Greek or Roman world. For next week he wanted us to come in with a one-page proposal of what we were going to spend the next four months reading and writing about for his review, approval, and advice. He would then keep office hours when he would otherwise have been giving us weekly lectures, and we would have all that time to do our own research, write something impressively meaty and dense and academic on the topic of our choice, and then he’d read all our essays over the semester break and give us our grades electronically before we got back at the start of the following semester.
Again, doesn’t it kind of sound like an easy course for him to teach?
Moving on, most of my class thought this was going to be as easy for them as it was going to be for him, and they picked topics like the battlefield of Alesia or the gardens of Pompeii or the Roman road network. You know, stuff that already had whole books written about it where they could just go to the library a week before the essay was due, check out a few books based on their titles, and bang out the required page count in a couple of days of all-nighters.
I took the opposite approach. I wanted to write a ‘serious’ essay. You may have noticed I’m a little bit of a history nerd, and while I was persuaded not to pursue a life of academia, I saw this class as my chance to see if I had what it took. I also had a really crazy idea for a topic. You see, for my own reading pleasure I had recently bought a copy of Barry Cunliffe’s The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek. I had mentioned it to the professor in an earlier class, and he said, “Oh, Barry’s got a new one out, does he?” It tickled me a lot that he knew the author on a first-name basis.
Anyway, Pytheas was a Greek living on what is now the south coast of France 23 centuries ago who wanted to know where tin was coming from. It might have been the Iron Age, but a lot of really useful stuff was still being made out of bronze, and you need tin to make bronze, and tin came from far away through many hands before it got to the Mediterranean. Pytheas knew from middlemen that tin came from somewhere to the north and west. The trouble for Pytheas was to go overland would take him through strange lands the Greeks considered barbarous and dangerous. Meanwhile, to sail around Spain and out into the Atlantic as a Greek would bring him into conflict with Carthaginians and Phoenicians jealous of maintaining their secret trade routes. He did find a major source of tin —we are almost certain he visited Cornwall in the United Kingdom— and we suspect he then went on to circumnavigate Britain, sail far enough north that he saw pack ice floating on the ocean under a never-setting summer sun, and he may also have gone into the Baltic to find the source of amber. He wrote all about it in a book called On the Ocean upon his return to the Mediterranean, but like so many ancient tomes, his work has been lost to time. What we know about it today comes from later geographers quoting it to mock as impossible all the things he says he saw that we now know prove he was telling the truth.
With all that said, I couldn’t write a whole essay about Pytheas. That wasn’t about archaeology. So I decided to broaden it out. The next week I came into class with a one-page proposal for the professor saying I wanted to write about, “The History of the British Tin Trade from Before Pytheas to After the Roman Conquest.”
He returned my proposal to me with the word, “Wow” written in large letters diagonally from the bottom corner to the top corner of the page.
There is no one comprehensive book on the British tin trade in ancient times, or at least there wasn’t in the University of Toronto’s library 20+ years ago. There are hundreds of books with a chapter or two on it, and I read most of them over the course of four months. After I handed in my opus —which comfortably hit the page count, had appendices for maps and illustrations, as well as the longest list of end notes and citations of anyone in the class— he asked me to meet him in his office.
He explained to me with some padding —he used the word padding— it could have been a Masters dissertation, but as a third-year undergraduate essay where the essay grade was also the course grade, he could not offer me more than 95% without being brought up for academic review. Would I mind taking a 95% on the course?
Of course not, I said. Even today, the only thing I mind is that I no longer have my final copy of the essay. I have some drafts, but somehow the final version got lost over the course of moves and file transfers and changing memory media. It went the way of Pytheas’s On the Ocean. Ah, well.
Anyway, for many, many years now I have known far too much about the ancient tin trade, and I have also known far too much about Pytheas. If you’re listening to this, you listened to Season One. You heard me go on and on about tin. If you’re listening to this, you better have listened to the episode I put out a couple of weeks ago. That’s all you’re getting about Pytheas, and he hasn’t left his hometown yet.
Why?
Well, I also wanted to write about an Egyptian Pharaoh who hired Phoenicians to circumnavigate Egypt for him. I wrote that chapter first, and I think it’s a great chapter. It might be my sister’s favourite chapter. She read it on a beach while on vacation in the Caribbean, and she emailed me something to the effect of, “You don’t need flattery. Your ego is big enough, but you’re a helluva writer.”
That improbable journey around Africa —again, that we know about in large part from later geographers suggesting it never happened while referencing specifics that today we know suggest it actually did— really is something I am proud of and glad that I got to share with the world, and when I had the different pieces I knew I wanted to build into the trilogy roughed out in my head, I thought, “The Africa thing and Pytheas’s thing are hundreds of years apart. I’ll be fine.”
Then when I got around to writing it, they were only two chapters apart, and the chapter between them is on the short side. Meanwhile, the manuscript that would become Middle was already well on its way to being half-again as long as the manuscript that became Beginning. I just could not have two long voyages of exploration that close together. It would have thrown off the whole book and the whole trilogy. With deep regret, I had to come up with something else —and much shorter— for Pytheas to do.
Please, someone, read Barry Cunliffe’s The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek. I would love to think I inspired someone to do that with my work, even if I didn’t do it justice in my fiction. I guess as long as I’m telling you how to spend your time and money, I should also remind you this show is ad free because I didn’t want to break up the story with ads, but it is based on books you can buy on Amazon, and I also have a Patreon account with extra content if you want to support my work.
Well, enough of me rattling my tin cup. Pytheas got cut down from a starring role bigger than Dedi to a walk-on part smaller than Odysseus. Even with what I would have called total freedom to write whatever I wanted and more than a decade of thinking about his story in some detail, I just could not squeeze him into The Tape Recorder Trilogy. I hope that will serve as a great illustration of some of the limits writers have to put on themselves as they create a concrete ‘something’ out of a whole swirling mix of ephemeral possibilities.
Having used most of this bonus episode to do just the one example, I suppose I should also add the episode I did with Borlag and the horse lords trading tin that came across the Eurasian steppe to Black Sea traders? If any of you were to do a deep dive into the tin trade in antiquity, a lot more of the eastern flow of tin into the Mediterranean came over land through Mesopotamia from sources further to the East as opposed to taking the northern route I chose to write about, but I wanted to get up into what is now Ukraine and have an action scene with men on horses riding around shooting arrows. I knew I was going to touch briefly on Mesopotamia when my Narrator lived as a Phoenician, so I chose to highlight a lesser route to the point I do wonder if some historians are going to tut-tut my choice to highlight the flow of tin by sea, thinking I made it from a place of ignorance.
Ah, well. You can’t please everyone.
Speaking of Mesopotamia, why is there not more on the Land Between the Two Rivers in my trilogy? Well, for one, I had my narrator spending almost all his time in Europe up until the beginning of Season Two. I can do just about anything with the framing device I have created for myself, but I can’t have him be in two places at once. I also have ideas for books about Babylon in the time of Nebuchadnezzar and the decline and fall of Assyria that I hope I will get a chance to write one day, so I did not want to put too much of ‘the good stuff’ from those ideas into this wider trilogy. One scene I half-wrote but with deep reluctance I had to give up? I was going to have our narrator go lion-hunting from the back of a chariot while on a trade mission to visit a Mesopotamian king. It was going to be spectacular, but far too long. There’s a piece of advice attributed to William Faulker, “In writing you must kill all your darlings,” which is specifically in reference to the things the writer likes that don’t fit into the story readers will enjoy. My lion-hunting scene —and another very cool idea I had for people fleeing a pack of wolves in winter across a frozen lake during Europe’s Mesolithic era, and still other very hazy ideas about the arrival of Indo-Europeans into Europe and why the so-called Beaker People did not eat seafood even when they were living among peoples who did— I at least got to smother in the cradle before I had a chance to fall too deeply in love.
What else? Well, I will get into this more in the historical note for Season Two, but one of the blessings of writing a story where the immortal narrator is a Carthaginian is that he probably doesn’t want to spend too much time talking about the Romans. That was very handy for keeping the page count down on the second of three books that kept getting longer and longer. I will write whole books about the Romans in the future. I’m working on one right now, in fact. I had to pick and choose very carefully what to include in this trilogy. I feel I chose correctly, but I know there are some people I will disappoint by not including more Roman content. Or more Greek content or Egyptian content or Biblical content, for that matter. These are pillars of historical fiction as a genre, and I chose to do the less-covered side of Mediterranean history almost every time.
Speaking of the Bible, I will also add I have done a ton of research on the rise of Christianity since writing this trilogy for a new project, but that does mean there’s not nearly enough of that in this series even for where my tastes now lie. Again, it was very useful for me to have the narrator gloss over some of that for the sake of keeping the page count down, but I wonder now what I would have put in only to cut something else out if I was writing this trilogy today instead of a decade ago.
I will not talk too much about Season Three here. This bonus episode is already running a little long, and of course I want to save something to talk about in Season Three’s bonus episode too. I will say that where Middle is longer than Beginning, End is longer than Middle too. The first third of End is almost all stuff I came up with over the course of writing the trilogy as the story grew up and around some vague starting points, which means I had to cut a lot of early-stage brainstorming things out to make room for what I did end up doing.
The thing I perhaps most regret is that as a Canadian I had a very good idea for a way to put my Narrator into the vast red and white pine forests of Canada during the logging boom of the 19th Century, but when I got there —only a couple of centuries from the present at most— I had to do so much so quickly, I never got a chance to slow down and have him live a life as a lumberjack who makes his way up to being a timber baron, perhaps with a murder mystery set in a crude log cabin stuffed with forty men in the dead of winter surrounded by snow so deep they know no one has come or gone. One of them must be the murderer.
Oh, I was going to have so much fun with that.
I can and to an extent have repurposed the murder mystery into other projects, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to write a whole book set in Canada’s forests, much though I would love to do that. My Canadian logging story wasn’t even able to justify its presence in a collection of short stories with me as the writer rooting for it. Where I am both its only champion and the ultimate decider of its fate, and it fails to make the grade, I guess that is a pretty damning indictment on its merits as the premise for a whole work of historical fiction unto itself.
What else should I tell you? This bonus episode is getting on, and I also want to be careful not to give too much away about the rest of Season Two or Season Three to come as I explain why such-and-such is in and such-and-such is out.
One example by way of illustration that I might be able to turn it into a teaser instead?
At one point I was trying to think what might happen if the narrator runs into another person just like him. I will take a step back for a moment to walk through my inspiration here. I am a great admirer of the works of Gary Jennings, but I always caution people if you are going to read his stuff, you have to prepare yourself that there is going to be a sex scene every fifty pages or so, and because his books are all thick and weighty tomes, and because no author likes to repeat themselves if they can help it, especially when it comes to a sex scene, Jennings’ encounters can go to strange places fairly quickly. Having set the scene, Gary Jennings wrote a book called Raptor in 1992 that is very difficult to find these days. You could say it was decades ahead of its time in terms of bringing transgenderism and pansexualism into the mainstream, and to my understanding the book became a cherished cult classic by the LGBTQIA2S+ community of its day to the point where not a lot of copies float around used bookstores today.
Anyway, Raptor purports to be the memoirs of a Fifth Century Ostrogoth who was born a hermaphrodite who is able to pass at will as either a man or a woman. About three quarters of the way through the novel, the main character meets another person with the exact same gifts, or curses if you prefer. Finding each other is a wonder to both of them, and the next several pages were pretty mind-expanding when I read them for the first time at a very young age.
All this is to say as I was writing my own book about someone who is different from the society he is trying to blend into while feeling like he cannot possibly belong, I thought long and hard about what I would do if my immortal protagonist who has the ability to see flashes of the future met someone else just like him. How could I recreate that Raptor moment in my own fiction? In the end I did not think up a ‘wow’ moment that would be half as impressive as the conclusion I had already figured out for the framing device where making him a unique one-off in all of humanity’s shared story becomes crucial. I do like the idea —in fiction, if not in fact— of people having a limited ability to see the future. You will have already seen flashes of that in the characters of Melissa, Tabiba, and Elishat having some small powers of prognostication. I decided if I can’t have my immortal narrator meet a peer, what if he met someone who may not live forever, but who can see a future he can’t so clearly that it changes the worldview he was building his life around? That ended up being the fireworks I wanted to create as an homage to how Jennings made me feel when I read that scene in Raptor for the first time. You can look forward to what I came up with about a third of the way into Season Three. I am confident it will be worth the wait.
So with that, I guess I should wrap up this bonus episode as I did the last one by thanking you for going on this journey with me. A writer wants to be read, and a podcaster wants to be heard. I appreciate you, and I want to give you good value for the time you are willing to give to me.
Thank you again, and I hope you enjoy next week’s episode as we return to our regular story.
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Credits:
Voice Acting – Geoff Micks
Editing – Geoff Micks
Music – Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay
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