I won’t spoil the full effect, but here’s a taste:

The writer’s apprenticeship — or perhaps, the writer’s lot — is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment. In the 20 years that I’ve been publishing books, I have fared better than most. I sold my first novel while still in graduate school and published six more books, pretty much one every three years, like clockwork. I have made my living as a writer, living off my advances while supplementing my income by teaching and writing for newspapers and magazines.

As smooth as this trajectory might seem, however, my internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can’t do it. This time, the voice taunts me, you will fall flat on your face. Every single piece of writing I have ever completed — whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review — has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.

That’s the cheery part of the essay. Read the rest with the job ads on Craigslist nearby.

And the more recent the history, the more hazardous the occupation.

The most recent exhibit is a Washington Post article by Christian Davenport (Feb. 28, E 1) about the backlash being launched by some Iraq soldiers and veterans against the Oscar-nominated movie, ‘The Hurt Locker,’ a gritty drama about a bomb-defusing specialist who becomes addicted to the adrenaline rush of his near-suicidal job.

The story compares soldiers’ reactions to ‘The Hurt Locker’ and “Generation Kill,’ an HBO drama set in Iraq, adapted from a book by Evan Wright.

Davenport writes:

Each writer’s search for truth lands at a different point on the spectrum between art and reality. When screenwriter David Simon made the series ‘Generation Kill” for HBO, he considered it more important to have Marines find his work an accurate portrayal of their culture and experience invading Iraq than to win critical acclaim. “The real fun isn’t trying to convince the average viewer” that we have it right, he told the Marine Corps Times. “It’s trying to convince people who have been in the game.”

The article recognizes that filmmakers often worry that maintaining “spot-on” accuracy in depicting modern military life would leave audiences “cold.”

When Davenport posed the conundrum of accuracy to Dr. David McKenna, the Columbia University film professor said that the movie “isn’t as much about Iraq as it is about one soldier’s addiction to war. It’s a character study, an exploration of courage, bravado and leadership told through ‘a series of suspenseful situations. I suppose it could have just as easily been set in outer space.”

McKenna added that if veterans have a problem with such interpretations, “well, this is an opportunity to go make your own movie.”

This is tough enough to accomplish in a novel; the author has a few more tricks and a bit more license to take his time in developing the story. But in a movie or miniseries, the task is  even more daunting. A screenwriter has to quickly capture and hold the attention of the audience while at the same time avoid confusing it with front-loaded images and dialogue needed to slip in essential background information.

History on the ground rarely unfolds in the traditional mythic structure. Thus, it as always been the bard’s job to sift the grains of history into a mandala of sorts that will satisfy our yearning for a sense of fate, inevitability, and meaning.

In his preview of the new HBO miniseries, ‘The Pacific’ (The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 28, D1), David Ferrell offers a fascinating glimpse into how the creative team solved the problem of relying on true-life accounts of the bloody World War II campaign against the Japanese while carving out a narrative that could be sustained over ten hour-long  episodes.

Bruce McKenna, the primary screenwriter, chose to apply what he called the ‘Traffic’ approach, a reference to the 2000 movie that explored the war on drugs with a collage of four separate stories.

Inundated with research material and hundreds of interviews with veterans, McKenna related to Ferrell how he finally gravitated to the stories of three soldiers. Yet he faced a conundrum: All three men fought in different battles. How could avoid writing what in essence would be three different movies?

McKenna did what all great writers do–he kept digging, determined to find a thread. His luck turned when he discovered from interviews with family members that one of the featured soldiers, Eugene Sledge (who fought on Okinawa) had a best friend who served in the same company on Guadacanal as another of the series’ heroes, Robert Leckie, a Marine machine-gunner.

McKenna discovered what he calls his “handoff” from scene to scene. “They weren’t buddy-buddy, but it was a good-enough connection that I knew we had a miniseries,” he told Ferrell.

HBO is taking a big gamble with the Spielberg/Hanks project, which premieres March 14 and has a production tab of $200 million. Yet if it meets the high standards set by its predecessor, ‘Band of Brothers,’ the miniseries will be one for the ages.

That’s the gist of a sobering new article by Russell Shorto in The New York Times Magazine (Feb. 11) about the campaigns being waged by religious fundamentalists to pressure Texas school administrators and textbook publishers to portray the founding fathers as devout proponents of a Christian nation.

I always shake my head with a mixture of bemusement and chagrin whenever I see a reviewer of historical fiction take an author to task for deviating from “history.” More often than one might think, the charge is lodged by an embittered grad student who cannot abide a novelist stepping onto his small patch of supposed expertise and gaining a hundredfold more readers than will suffer through his dry dissertation on the subject.

If you had any doubts about the unreliability of accepted history, you must read Shorto’s chilling account of how so-called facts and interpretations only a few decades old are skewed and twisted by the demands of ideology, religion, and propaganda.

I dare say you’ll not soon forget Shorto’s description of a cowed Texas State Board of Education. With a swift show of hands, its fifteen members pass proposed conservative amendments  offered by Christian activists to school curriculum like the Committee on Public Safety sending off aristocrats to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The process became so cavalier and unsavory that one board member, a Republican, exclaimed in embarrassment, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!”

Shorto quotes one long-time observer of the process: “It is the most crazy-making thing to sit there and watch a dentist and an insurance salesman rewrite curriculum standards in science and history.”

None of this is surprising to historical novelists, whose job it is to dig into the source material and underweavings of history. If such blatant revisionism can take place under the scrutiny of modern communications technology, just imagine how many of the so-called “facts” of history during medieval times and earlier were shaped and sifted by the royal courts and the Church.

If early reviews are any indication, the creative team for Blood Done Sign My Name has succeeded.

The movie is based on the award-winning autobiographical account of the period by historian Timothy B. Tyson, a former professor of African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now a Senior Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In his 2004 book, Tyson described how the death of Henry Marrow in 1970 ignited a resistance movement in Oxford, North Carolina, where Tyson’s father was a minister of a large church.

In the movie, actor Nate Parker plays high school teacher Ben Chavis, a former civil rights organizer who led a march on the capitol in Raleigh, a turning point that eventually spurred a boycott of white businesses in Oxford and resulted in full integration of the city.

The film is a personal triumph for my friend and former Columbia Journalism School classmate, David S. Martin, who is a co-producer on the movie.

Martin and a college buddy obtained the film rights to the book and persisted in their belief that Tyson’s account needed to reach the silver screen. Their instincts proved prescient when financier Robert K. Steel came on board and brought in director Jeb Stuart to shoot the film in the North Carolina cities of Shelby, Monroe, and Gastonia.

One can only hope that this is the first of many Hollywood projects for Martin, who has developed his keen eye for story material as a senior producer for CNN. I predict that the smartest of the development executives at production companies and studios in Los Angeles will soon be beating down his door.

Well done, David!

No more grinding book tours, begging publishers to pay for expensive front-shelf space, or competing for dwindling review space in newspapers and trades.

In a Feb. 2 blog article for the Huffington Post, the author of eight historical novels (including The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn and Signora da Vinci) describes her journey from traditionalist to digital publicist par excellence.

Maxwell recounts how she was taken under the wings of two younger historical novelists, Michelle Moran and C.W. Gortner. Fellow scribes in the genre will of course know those two accomplished authors from their tireless and generous participation in forums such as Historical Fiction Online. According to Maxwell, they opened her eyes to the near-miraculous marketing possibilities available from the use of blogs, websites, interactive communities, and online reviewers.

Two truths among many can be drawn from Maxwell’s fascinating journey. First, it indeed seems essential for an author to find a publicist who is on the cutting edge of the digital revolution. Second, the author must now shoulder most of the marketing roles once performed by the publisher.

In academia, the old saw was “publish or perish.” In commercial fiction, the new law apparently is “become interactive, or perish.”

Pity the poor writer who merely wishes to write. One wonders how the late J.D. Salinger would have fared entering anew this modern publishing world.

Although Parker was best known as a crime writer, he also delved into historical fiction. Two novels of note included Double Play, which dealt with Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in baseball, and Appaloosa, one of his trilogy of Westerns that was made into a movie in 2008 by Ed Harris.

Sarah Weinman, who blogs about the mystery-suspense genre, wrote an appreciation of Parker in the Jan. 20 edition of The Los Angeles Times (Section D, Page 2).

For me, two things about Parker stood out: His remarkable proclivity and his disdain for editing.

According to Weinman, Parker told The Wall Street Journal in 2009: “I normally write seven to 10 pages a day, which means I generally finish a new book every three months. It comes easily, and I don’t revise because I don’t get better by writing a new draft.”

I’m not sure which is more astounding: Parker’s collection of nearly forty novels and other non-fiction works, or his ability to churn them out with little or no revision.

Yet his penchant for speed and production may have come at a cost. Weinman noted that “[a]s a consequence, even as he remained a fixture on bestseller lists, Parker’s most ardent fans turned into his toughest critics, pointing to ever-increasing white space, decreasing word counts and long passages of dialogue that barely moved the action.”

Herodotus and Thucydides probably wrestled with the same problem that now confronts Nancy Dubuc, the president of the History Channel.

Her answer–one that has garnered the cable channel higher ratings–is to create shows that meld reality TV with subjects that sometimes have a tenuous connection to traditional history: “Ice Road Truckers” and “UFO Hunters,” for example.

In the Jan. 3 edition of The Los Angeles Times (Section D1), media correspondent Matea Gold looks back on the three years of Dubuc’s tenure and canvasses both critics and admirers of the History Channel’s evolution.

I’ve long since given up shaking my head when I see one of those stubbled-jawed Indiana Jones wannabees crawling through a tunnel while breathlessly wondering if he will ever get out. No one ever seems to worry about the cameraman with him.

Even better entertainment is provided by the readers’ comments about the article on the LA Times website. One tortured lover of history wrote:

“Hysteria” Channel would be a better nickname as everything that I see deals with doomsday predictions found in ancient documents or obscure writings of medieval mystics or cheery thoughts like “life after humans” – - all told with the melodrama of a bad 19th century play.

Sweet was the experience because Perkins was that rarest of the breed: Self-effacing, light with the critical touch, rock-solid in loyalty, intuitive, a friend always even when subjected to the alcoholic rages and depressions of his authors. Bitter because his kind seems long extinct. How many editors today would courteously escort an unknown (and unannounced) writer to a local hotel bar to spend hours listening to his troubles?

Perkins had a fondness for history and historical fiction. Those rare days he managed to spend away from work were often spent trudging over Civil War battlefields.

He guided the career of the prolific Taylor Caldwell toward historical fiction and encouraged her to read Sire Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas to gain a mastery of the genre. “What you have chiefly,” he wrote to her, “is the superb talent for telling a story on a grand scale. It is a might rare talent.”

Berg’s description of the editor’s philosophy of historical fiction  is instructive:

Perkins generally believed in letting characters direct the plot of novels, but he instructed Miss Caldwell to think this book [The Earth is the Lord’s] entirely through before setting pen to paper. He sent her all the historical information on Genghis Khan within his reach and books that described central Asia. He suggested that instead of making Genghis himself the central figure she should write a strong personal story about someone who accompanied him and suspend the novel from that.

Berg also found an editing note that Perkins had written to Caldwell:

Sometimes a book about periods far back like that, and about great epic movements, becomes too generalized, too little about a particular individual or particular individuals. That is a danger you must guard against, particularly with your imagination that tends to see things in the large.

Is there another Max Perkins out there today? I’d love to hear from fellow historical novelists or from agents and editors with recommendations on editors who have a particular talent for shaping and guiding the historical novel.

Later that day, I read an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times written by James Reston Jr., whose splendid book, Warriors of God: Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin in the Third Crusade, has been rumored on its way to the big screen. Mr. Reston lectured former President Bush on his failure to study the Crusades and for his inability to understand why Muslims still consider Saladin a hero for driving back the Christian occupiers.

Given the current prevalence of such hand wringing, I have little doubt which of the two rivals—Saladin or Richard—will be depicted as the hero in the movie.

Crusaders, after all, have become politically incorrect.

Consider just a few of the remarkable events that have occurred in the last decade. During a visit to Syria in 2002, the late Pope John Paul II visited a mosque with the grand mufti and asked Muslims to forgive “Christian offenses and violence of the past.” Two years earlier, on the 900th anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, five hundred Christians claiming to be descendants of crusaders marched around the walls of the Old City in an act of public repentance. In 2001, a Catholic school board in San Juan Capistrano, California, vetoed the team name “Crusaders” because of its offensiveness.

In his propaganda pronouncements, Osama bin Laden has repeatedly attacked what he calls “the new American Crusade against Islam.” One can’t turn on the television or read a newspaper today without encountering some ill-informed pundit decrying the Crusades and their destructive legacy for the Middle East.

Mr. Reston was partially correct in his lament. Not only former President Bush, but all Americans, need a history lesson on the Crusades.

But it’s not the lesson that Mr. Reston intended.

I find it both alarming and dangerous that so many Americans have purchased into this myth of the bloodthirsty medieval Christians invading peaceful Muslims without provocation.

Nearly four hundred years before the First Crusade, Muslim armies conquered Christian communities in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. They then swept across the straits of Gibraltar and invaded Christian Iberia (now Spain and Portugal). Those Christians who survived this onslaught were forced to take refuge in the mountain keeps along the Pyrenees. Most of Europe might well be Muslim today had Charles Martel not defeated the invaders at Tours in France.

By the time Pope Urban IV issued his call for holy war at Clermont in 1095, the Seljuk Turks had already pushed across Asia Minor and were clamoring at the gates of Constantinople, the capitol of Christian Byzantium. The reasons for the Crusades are complex and controversial, but the immediate catalyst was a desperate plea from the Byzantine emperor for assistance against the rapacious Muslim Turks.

The longest occupation of another religion’s territory was enforced not by the Christians in the Holy Land, but by the Muslims in Spain. For 800 years, the militant orders of the Knights Templar, Santiago, and Calatrava fought to regain Spain from the fanatical Almoravids and Almohads.

Yet I’ve never heard of a mullah or mufti apologizing for the Muslim invasion of Spain and for the Christian lives lost during the Reconquista. Muslim fundamentalists choose not to mention this war when they rage against the ruthless Christian armies in Palestine.

No visitor can return from Spain without a deep appreciation of the scars that the Moorish invasion and Reconquista left on that country. Churches at Roncevalles and Burgos still display the chains of Christian prisoners who were herded around the caliph at the Battle of Los Navas de Tolosa. Depictions of Spain’s patron saint, James the Moorslayer, lopping off infidel heads are ubiquitous. Yet our Western sensibilities are such that these icons are often covered over when Muslim dignitaries visit Spain.

Muslim extremists have succeeded in perpetuating the myth that the sacrilege of holy sites is a peculiar Christian perversion. Spaniards, however, have not forgotten the Moorish desecration of the Cathedral of Santiago Compostela, which was plundered and abused by the dictator Almanzor.

I’m no apologist for the crusades, having written two historical novels critical of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but I believe the Western media has failed in its responsibility to expose the error in such revisionist history.

Dr. Jonathan Riley-Smith, a renowned authority on the Crusades, eloquently warned against such a misapprehension in the April 1, 2002, issue of Crisis magazine:

“I am fairly sure that those who are now demanding an apology for the Crusades are themselves, without knowing it or understanding how rapidly the ground is shifting beneath them, sharing in a new consensus which is au fond not very far from the war theology they are condemning. A stance that justifies a “humanitarian” war on moral grounds has placed itself at least in the same field as that once occupied by crusader theorists. The language that demands that our ancestors be posthumously anathematized is not too distant from that of the men who wanted the corpse of Pope Boniface VIII to be exhumed and burnt. We may be entering a period of conceptual uncertainty about the most difficult of all society’s dilemmas—when or when not to use force—and we need not emotion, but cool heads and an objective analysis of the past.”

Both Christianity and Islam have taken up the sword to enforce a belief in a monotheistic god who endures no rivals. Neither faith can claim the high ground in pacifist sanctity.