Patria Strikes Back!
You've heard of the U.S. Government's Top Secret Area 51. Have you ever wondered what's in Area One?
The Kingdom of Patria stories began with the Twillies. If my memory is accurate, it was one night after dinner in the very late 1990s, when my two small daughters and I were snuggled in that old blue hand-me-down chair in our house on Paisley Street in Houston, when I first told them a story about the Twillies. The inspiration came from J.R.R. Tolkien. I was reading at the time Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, and was struck by Tolkien’s revelation that he often began his stories with no more than a name. He was making the point that the name “hobbit” came to him before he knew anything about what a hobbit was, much less a plot for a story involving hobbits. So I followed Tolkien’s strategy and devised a name. Twillies. And I sat down that evening having no earthly idea what Twillies were and what they might do to entertain the girls.
What Twillies turned out to be were microscopic fairies who assisted their mistress, Princess Rose. The star of the show was a Twillie named Aurora. In the only plot point I remember, Aurora is tasked with helping Princess Rose untangle the knots in her hair while she washes it, a task which Aurora undertakes in her typically bumbling fashion. From the beginning, the Kingdom of Patria stories were never straight fantasy. There was always the note of comedy.
For a good while, Aurora of the Twillies had the show to herself. I remember, in the spring of 2002, while I was spending time with my parents in Indiana, emailing back to the girls in Houston (my son was then only two) chapters of a long, zany Patria story featuring Aurora.
But as the years went by and the kids came into the golden years of kid-dom, the world of Patria expanded beyond the Twillies—indeed, left them behind. We were living in South Bend, Indiana by that time, and my home office looked out onto our backyard and the woods beyond it. I began to imagine Patria, my secondary, fantasy world (to use Tolkien’s term) as accessed by kids from our primary world via a portal, a hole in a tree located in a woods like the one outside my window. Admittedly, the idea was deeply indebted to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books (wardrobe :: hole in a tree). And this fact always troubled me. I didn’t want Patria to be just a Narnia knock-off. So at some point, I can’t remember precisely when, I came up with the idea of Patria not existing in some secondary fantasy world, but existing as a hidden kingdom in our world. The stories came to be more historical fantasy.
The Narnia indebtedness troubled me mainly because I wanted to turn the Patria stories into a book. When I told bedtime Patria stories to the kids in Indiana, I even recorded them onto cassette tapes, thinking that these versions would be rough drafts or sketches for a future book. The development of the Patria books was never that neat, but I am nonetheless glad I recorded those stories. I still have the cassette tapes, though I have never listened to them and now I no longer have anything to play them on! One day I’ll digitize them, mainly in hopes of hearing the kids’ reactions in their childhood voices.
I made at least one false start on a Patria book. I remember in the early-to-mid 2000s beginning a draft entitled Aurora of the Twillies that didn’t get very far. When I got more serious about completing a draft the Patria idea had expanded into historical, comic fantasy. By the summer of 2010 I had a complete draft of a story, the title of which I cannot remember. Our family was then living in Texas, but we had, for a few months that summer, rented a house in our old hometown of South Bend. In the evenings after dinner I read that book aloud to the family. It wasn’t quite the book that would become Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits, but it was getting close.
The basic premise was this: an 11-year-old boy named Oliver Stoop discovers, on the other side of the woods behind his new house in northern Indiana, a secret hidden kingdom known as Patria, founded by refugees from the Trojan War 3,000 years ago.
The refugees made their way to the New World in a boat reconfigured from the remains of the Trojan Horse. And their kingdom had been kept secret since they were discovered by an American explorer in the early 19th-century and Thomas Jefferson declared Patria to be Area One, the U.S. Government’s first supersecret facility.
With this I felt I had found my best approach to Patria. I don’t think of myself as a fantasy writer. I don’t even think of myself, first, as a children’s author. But when I reflected on what Evelyn Waugh once said about P.G. Wodehouse, that he had made a “fairy tale world,” I was excited to try to write a real fairy tale, a children’s fantasy, that was laugh-out-loud funny in the way Wodehouse is.
In the late spring of 2011 my family moved to Virginia, and for some months I had been querying agents, unsuccessfully, about Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. By that time, however, self-publishing was becoming a more mainstream thing, and so I started a children’s entertainment company, Trojan Tub Entertainment, and started publishing the Patria books on my own.
Throughout the summer of 2011 I also developed, with the help of the good folks at Snap Design in Canada, the Kingdom of Patria website. After I had seen and was impressed by the website they had built for another children’s author, I gave them a call and soon we were off.
I was much taken at the time by what J.K. Rowling was doing with her new Pottermore website, and I wanted—on my much, much more modest budget—to build a similarly immersive world around Patria. On the website I published a good amount of ancillary Patria fiction, in both print and audio formats, I drew Patria cartoons, and I even developed a boys club and a girls club to match the single-sex education that existed in Patria at Mastodon Meadow and Madame Mimi’s Well-Mannered School for Ill-Mannered Girls. The site launched in late 2011, just as Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits went on sale in both print and digital formats.
I immediately began work on the second book in the series, Stoop of Mastodon Meadow, which appeared in March 2012. A Christmas novella, The Chronicles of Oliver Stoop, Squire Second Class: The Quest for Clodnus’s Collectibles, appeared in December 2014.
I made plenty of mistakes along the way. I way overestimated, for example, how attractive ebooks would be for middle-grade readers, naively thinking that the success adult genre writers were having with ebooks would easily translate into the children’s space. The Patria ebooks never did much business. I also way underestimated the amount of work it would take to create fresh content for the website, especially for the boys and girls clubs.
But on the positive side, the Patria books were generally well received. You can read the reviews on Amazon to get a sense of what the audience reaction was. Lots of parents told me that both they and their kids loved them.
Meanwhile, I marketed the books at Catholic homeschool conferences, sometimes combined with a talk on the state of children’s literature. I did interviews for various websites devoted to middle grade kid lit. As a philosopher-children’s author I also gave talks on children’s literature for the Center for Ethics & Culture at Notre Dame and at Villanova University.
The Kingdom of Patria website was most active for a couple of years before I could no longer afford to give it the time it needed. Still, I never lost the sense that the Patria books deserved a chance at a broader audience. So, sometime in the late 20-teens, I took the books down from Amazon and other online outlets in preparation to start querying agents again. Taking the books down was not necessary, I can see in retrospect, but at the time I thought that agents wouldn’t be interested in a children’s series that had already been self-published.
In 2018 an agent in New York did make me an offer, and in fact this agent was not put off by the fact that I had self-published the series. This person was even interested in seeing the Amazon pages for the books (still floating like ghosts on Amazon’s website) and was not unimpressed by how many reviews Stout Hearts had gotten. I did not, however, sign with this agent, whose name and agency I will not identify. Suffice to say that the offer made did not meet the best practices of literary representation, and so, with no little anguish, I walked away.
And with that I left Patria for a time. All through the years described I had continued to write fiction for adults, as well as stage drama and screenplays. Even as I was querying agents about Stout Hearts I was already at work on an early version of the novel that will appear in March 2023: The Good Death of Kate Montclair.
Oddly enough, it was Kate Montclair which brought me back to Patria. In putting together this Substack as well as my new website in preparation for the launch of the book in March, it occurred to me that it would be nice to give new subscribers to Daniel McInerny’s Studio Stories a freebie and that my Patria Christmas novella, The Quest for Clodnus’s Collectibles, would be a good one, especially here in the Advent Season. It then occurred to me to put all three books in the Patria series back online. In response to some feedback I had gotten from literary agents, I had actually in the late 20-teens done some revisions to Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits and even renamed it Area One. But, coming to my senses at last, I realized that the book and indeed all three of the books were fine as they were and that I should just put them back up for sale.
Due to some boring technical reasons I won’t go into here, I had trouble uploading the books to Amazon, and so I contacted the man who illustrated the three books and the Kingdom of Patria website, the hugely talented Ted Schluenderfritz. We hadn’t been in touch in a decade, but Ted generously leapt to my aid and, as of this writing, has exercised his digital wizardry to help me successfully upload the first two Patria books onto Amazon. The Christmas novella I hope will be available in the next day or two.
Amazon now appears to do print-on-demand hardcover books, as well, and so I hope, with Ted’s help, to have that option available within the week.
I’m delighted that Patria is back. I even have some ideas for a reboot of the series, one that reaches back into American pre-history and depicts either the voyage and landing of the original Trojan refugees or a generation not so far removed from them. What about the Twillies? To date, they have not appeared in any of the published Patria books, but I think my daughters, especially, would like to see their return. I will keep you updated on these ideas.
Meanwhile, if you’re interested, you can find the Patria books on Amazon (here and here). And all new subscribers to Daniel McInerny’s Studio Stories can still get a free pdf of the Christmas novella.