We went to the Earth Trust/Dig Ventures festival of discovery on Sunday. We listened to two talks by teams of young, enthusiastic archaeologists discussing the finds from digs around Wittenham Clumps. One was on everyday objects, and the other was on ancient animals. In between, we had a very nice lunch, strolled around the local landscape, and went to the pop-up museum where a small selection of the thousands of finds was on display.

I expect many of us have seen Roman tiles with cat and dog prints left when the clay was still wet. This is the first time I’ve seen a fox leave its mark.

Then there were the mystery objects, such as this. I always ask Husband what he thinks. After studying it for a few moments, he proposed a use that one of the archaeologists confirmed is their experts’ current best guess.

Apparently a feature of Bronze Age sites is ‘pots in pits’, and there’s much discussion about what deliberate deposits of selected items might mean. Rituals linked to ‘end of use’ are generally proposed, though it’s impossible to know whether these marked, for example, a death, the demolition of a dwelling, or moving away from an area. One such pit here is particularly interesting as the objects deposited are a well-used, smashed pot, broken loom weights and a 4 year old sheep. When swords and other weapons are deposited in water or pits, they are deliberately broken to put them beyond use. Is this a similar ritual involving objects associated with textile production? Sheep for meat were usually slaughtered by the end of their second year. Beyond that, they were primarily kept for wool. What does this tell us about spinning and weaving and those who did it? That these women and their skills were respected with such rituals? What does that tell us about these ancient people and their society? Maybe it wasn’t all mighty-thewed warlords defending helpless women and children?

Another speaker observed that ‘hillfort’ is increasingly considered a misnomer for enclosures ringed with ditches and banks, as modern archaeology increasingly indicates they weren’t built for defence, not primarily at least. People could retreat into them at need, but for most people, most of the time, these appear to be trading and gathering centres, possibly seats of power for tribal leaders. Where did the people come from to trade and meet? DNA work on burials on this site is still pending, but at least two skeletons have been interpreted by bone experts as likely of African heritage.

This got me thinking about where that term ‘hillfort’ had come from. Field archaeology pioneers from the 1850s onwards started surveying and excavating these landscapes. The British Empire was at war with someone or other through most decades of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. How much did that background noise of perpetual conflict influence these men to see such earthworks as military and defensive? What assumptions followed? You only build defences when there’s an enemy out there. Therefore anyone new must be an invader! But what if that initial assumption is wrong? The the whole framework collapses. Finds that have been interpreted to fit that world view should be reassessed. This is just one reason why I find current archaeology so fascinating.

Since one of my personal lenses for viewing history is its use in world-building for fantasy writers, it’s apt that the next creative writing article from my archive is on this very topic.
The Uses of History in Fantasy

Is it still called ego-surfing? That term was coined in the 1990s as more and more people got online, and would put their names into a search engine to see what came up. It soon became clear this was hazardous for authors. A few months after The Thief’s Gamble came out in 1999, I found two very negative reviews. According to one, the book proved I was a patriarchy-enabling betrayer of the sisterhood. The other reckoned it showed I was a ball-breaking man-hater. I was all set to respond, to explain, when a friend working in IT told me to take a breath, step away from my keyboard and think this through. I remain eternally grateful to him for explaining my chances of success were minimal, compared to the significant possibilities of things going badly for all the online world to see. As a more experienced writer told me soon after, ‘Arguing with a critic is like starting an arse-kicking contest with a porcupine. Even if you win, the cost to yourself won’t be worth it.’ The decades since have seen memorable catastrophes when authors have challenged reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

So no, checking reviews and comments is not what I’m talking about. But another online saying in the 1990s was three things make a post. So here are three solid reasons for writers to stay vigilant over what’s being said about them online these days.

Generative AI has seen an explosion in misinformation. This year’s hobby among writers has been asking ChatGPT and similar for their biography. The inaccuracies that result can be hilarious, as very-far-from-intelligent software scours the Net for anyone with the same name and produces a mishmash of results. After that initial laughter though, this isn’t so funny. How can someone without any prior knowledge of the subject untangle the truth from the nonsense? How can they fact-check when search-engine results are increasingly poisoned by this rubbish?

This gets much worse when some inaccurate statement could have negative professional consequences. Tobias Buckell recently discovered he was being cited as an author praising AI for helping him finish writing a novel, in a lengthy and entirely made-up quote. He was justifiably furious. The excuse that the article was AI-generated so no one is to blame is ridiculous. A human decided to put that lie online – unless no one checked what was being posted, which just makes this worse.

There’s also been an upsurge in online impersonation, especially of literary agents, editors and other people working in publishing. Hopeful writers are being contacted with wonderful offers, and some will be too naive to know this is not how the book trade works. Generative-AI makes these scams more plausible and more common. Writers are being impersonated by scammers creating supposedly new stories in much-loved and long-ago completed series. They find themselves listed as authors of books they have never heard of on Amazon and other sites. These ‘books’ are AI-generated garbage, but how is a reader to know that before buying one and finding out that it’s trash? If the reader doesn’t know what’s happened, the danger of reputational damage for that writer is very real.

Not all of this misinformation can be blamed on generative-AI. I have been checking in on a particular Wikipedia page for over a month now, since I noticed a major rewrite that stripped away an individual’s positive achievements and inserted highly critical and inaccurate material. By which I mean paragraphs that no newspaper’s lawyer would let go to print as some statements would be legally actionable. The person making these edits was doing so under a pseudonym, while Wikipedia culture does not accept the subject of a page making changes themselves. (I have written before about issues with Wikipedia.)

I discussed this with several friends who are active on Wikipedia, who were naturally concerned. They undertook to take a look, and assured me that Wikipedia does have systems to deal with such situations. I have observed these systems in action, and I am glad to say that the page now offers fair and balanced content. But resolving this has taken quite a while, and there have been periods when that seriously inaccurate content remained visible. Two things follow from this. Firstly, if you are the subject of a Wikipedia page, check it from time to time. You need to know if inaccurate material has appeared before you can find help to get the facts straight. Secondly, if you are using someone’s page as a source, and something doesn’t seem right, do click on the Talk tab to look for any current disputes between Wikipedia editors.

In conclusion? All these things strengthen the arguments for an author maintaining and updating their own website, to ensure there is at least one source of accurate and up-to-date information about them online, which they control.

Back in 2020, when Elsewhen Press were about to announce the forthcoming publication of Bloodsworn – the first instalment of my Avatars of Ruin series – I had a sudden stroke of inspiration whilst reviewing the press release they had prepared. I decided to email them with an idea that had been playing in the back of my mind for a while, as I realised that it was now or never.

See, in the original version of the press release they had referred to Bloodsworn as ‘Book 1 of the Avatars of Ruin’ followed by a word that I asked for them to redact and replace with a more ambiguous one; ‘series’.

Now that I have told you this I am guessing the first suspicion that has popped into many of your minds is that I was worried this series might befall the fate of others and birth more sequels than originally intended, but no. That wasn’t the reason. I am – mostly – a planner, and do have a good grasp on the overall arc this series will take. When I first submitted Bloodsworn to Elsewhen Press back in 2019 I told them precisely how many more there were to come, and it was something they considered when they committed to publishing it.

There are a few reasons for I decided to make this suggestion to them. Some of them are specific to the arc it takes, so I won’t – for the sake of spoilers – go into them here, but one of them is a more general point I would like to discuss.

For me, knowing how many books are in the series that you are reading can often feel like a bit of a spoiler, especially when it comes to genres such as epic fantasy, and its various cousins such as grimdark. For example; if you know that the book you are reading is the finale in a trilogy, quartet, pentalogy, etc, the reader will feel some form of reassurance that, no matter how high you up the stakes in that climatic battle, there is a good chance that something will happen to give this book the closure that they have been waiting for. Whether that be a hearty resolution, something bittersweet, or the death of your villain-protagonist and restoration of a bleak status quo, will likely depend on what kind of vibe the series has taken, of course. There are various ways that one can still surprise people with a twist at the end, but most books will have some kind of closure that fits its particular subgenre and for good reason. To not have this will often be a disservice to the narrative, its characters, and leave readers feeling cheated.

Elsewhen did accept my proposal, and the reaction so far has been quite mixed. This series has done fairly well for one published by an independent press. It does not automatically make it onto all the high-street stores nor have all the publicity that comes with one of the bigger houses, of course, but some good reviews and a bit of luck have drawn a bit more attention to this series than my previous urban fantasy duology that didn’t get as much attention than I would have liked. I am certainly more on the map now but far from being a household name, and I am not the kind of author where this experiment has drawn enough attention to be scrutinised much online. I have noticed – on a few occasions – people referring to my series as a ‘trilogy’, but that is an assumption they have made based on its genre. I have not gone out of my way to correct people when this happens – as to confirm or deny either way would be revealing – but neither have I told any lies. Some reviewers (and even, on a few occasions, readers) have reached out to me and asked for clarification, and, whenever this has happened, I have always been honest and told them that this is something that myself and Elsewhen Press are choosing not to disclose for now. I haven’t had any negative reactions to this so far. Some have commented that they find this approach intriguing.

I feel that it will be in the coming months that I will finally find out how successful this little experiment has been. The third instalment – Blood War – is to be released on the 2nd of February. Its name and the blurb do hint at a climactic battle, and I certainly don’t think it will disappoint in that regard. But whether this battle ends up being the closure to a trilogy or the instigator for more volumes to come is something my readers are yet to discover. The only thing that I am certain about is that many people have made assumptions either way so there are going to be at least some who will be surprised, and it will be interesting to see what their reactions will be.

Tej Turner is an SFF author and travel-blogger. His debut novel The Janus Cycle was published by Elsewhen Press in 2015 and its sequel Dinnusos Rises was released in 2017. Both are hard to classify within typical genres but were contemporary and semi-biographical with elements of surrealism. He has since branched off into writing epic fantasy and has an ongoing series called the Avatars of Ruin. The first instalment – Bloodsworn – was released in 2021, and its sequel Blood Legacy in 2022. The third – Blood War –is due to be published in early 2024.

He does not have any particular place he would say he is ‘from’, as his family moved between various parts of England during his childhood. He eventually settled in Wales, where he studied Creative Writing and Film at Trinity College in Carmarthen, followed by a master’s degree at The University of Wales Lampeter.

Since then, Tej has mostly resided in Cardiff, where he works as a chef by day and writes by moonlight. His childhood on the move seems to have rubbed off on him because when he is not in Cardiff, it is usually because he has strapped on a backpack and flown off to another part of the world to go on an adventure.

He has so far clocked two years in Asia and two years in South America, and when he travels he takes a particular interest in historic sites, jungles, wildlife, native cultures, and mountains. He also spent some time volunteering at the Merazonia Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in Ecuador.

Firsthand accounts of Tej’s adventures abroad can be found on his travel blog.

For links to his website and travel blog, social media etc – http://linktr.ee/tejturner