Becoming Charlemagne is not a racy book, but when I wrote it, I marveled at the rich potential of medieval history to perplex and offend. Wine-guzzling Muslims, Jews owning slaves, knife-wielding Christians who tried to relieve a pope of his eyeballs and tongue—to be honest, I had expected more complaints from readers who found that the eighth century either defied their Tolkienesque caricatures of the Middle Ages or failed to conform to their religious preconceptions. Instead, debates and discussions at book-talks and lectures have been downright genial, and to my knowledge, the harshest thing I’ve been called is a “Catholic apologist,” a charge that surprised and amused me. (Eat your heart out, Tertullian.)

Years ago, as a college cartoonist, I would have been disappointed by such a placid reaction, but today life feels way too short to make shocking the easily offended the highest goal of art. I’d much rather inform and entertain—but I do reserve the right to offend, a right I hadn’t thought to affirm until I read the review of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina in Sunday’s New York Times.

Jones’s novel is a highly fictionalized retelling of the story of A’isha, the third and youngest wife of the prophet Muhammad. Last year, after a scholarly expert on A’isha suggested that the novel might incite violence, Random House dropped the book and a small press quickly picked it up. In last weekend’s Times review, journalist and novelist Lorraine Adams lists some of the historical errors in The Jewel of Medina, dismisses the book as a bad example of genre fiction, and calls Jones’s prose “lamentable.” As a reviewer, she’s entitled to her opinion, even if the extent to which a novelist must hew to historical facts is debatable, but her conclusion is stunning and strange:

An inexperienced, untalented author has naïvely stepped into an intense and deeply sensitive intellectual argument. She has conducted enough research to reimagine the accepted versions of Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha, thus offending the religious audience, but not nearly enough to enlighten the ordinary Western reader. Should free-speech advocates champion “The Jewel of Medina”? In the American context, the answer is unclear. The Constitution protects pornography and neo-Nazi T-shirts, but great writers don’t generally applaud them. If Jones’s work doesn’t reach those repugnant extremes, neither does it qualify as art. It is telling that PEN, the international association of writers that works to advance literature and defend free expression, has remained silent on the subject of this ­novel. Their stance seems just about right.

That’s one bizarre paragraph, suddenly contrasting as it does Constitutional protections for “repugnant extremes” with what “great writers” applaud while suggesting that a book must “qualify as art” to be defended on the grounds of free expression. Sherry Jones may be no Salman Rushdie, but when it comes to The Jewel of Medina, the question of her free expression is not hypothetical: Adams notes earlier in her review that shortly after last year’s controversy, “somebody pushed a firebomb through the mail slot at the home office of Jones’s London publisher.”

Which leads me to wonder: If tomorrow I should find my car on fire, or death threats nailed to my door, or a dagger protruding from my sternum as I step outside my office, will Lorraine Adams think I had it coming? I suspect not, but in her zeal to pen a clever takedown of a book she thought was lousy, she implies that defending me from violent reader responses depends on whether or not critics and literary mandarins decide my book is art. Call me quaint, but I don’t have to like, or even read, The Jewel of Medina to know that Sherry Jones and her publisher deserve freedom from firebombing. I don’t have to read a novel by a glib reviewer to know that its author deserves the same defense as well.

That’s a photo of the bibliography of Becoming Charlemagne; I shot it the morning the final manuscript flew like the Winged Victory of Samothrace to my editor’s desk in New York. Large-scale maps scrawled with timelines and trade routes, teetering towers of library books—by that point, my workspace looked like a cross between the lair of a serial killer and Tom Hanks’ bedroom in Mazes and Monsters. So this past Thursday night, I was both honored and relieved to sit on a research-themed panel hosted by James River Writers, which taught me that this obsessive, it-puts-the-lotion-in-the-basket behavior is, at least among authors, something close to normal.

My co-panelists were Phaedra Hise, journalist and author of the meticulously reseached Pilot Error: Anatomy of a Plane Crash, and Maggie Stiefvader, whose young-adult novels about homicidal faeries and “werewolf nookie” are informed by her college study of medieval languages. (Her children are named Wulfnoð and Æðelðryð. She is hardcore.) Our trusty moderator, fantasy writer Bill Blume, did a great job. Bill writes the funny and trippy webcomic The Wildcat’s Lair, where he contends with stuffed dragons and technicolor cats in their natural habitat: the gaming table.

Writing is often dreary work. You’re up all night, flipping between the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and a twilight block of Felicity episodes (don’t judge me), paranoid that you might not meet your deadline, wondering if anyone is going to care about the ninth-century Islamic pistachio trade. Publishing a book rarely brings the wealth, the fame, or the power over life and death that many aspiring writers believe it will. When your book hits the shelves, it’s a happy day, but life just doesn’t change all that much.

…and then, once in a while, you’re invited to yak it up at a writers’ event, and you retire to a pizza joint for a late night of unrepeatable stories with smart, funny people, and you begin to understand the value of your 300-page calling card beyond the reviews and royalty statements. Writers like to gripe and whine, but when it comes to this one benefit, don’t let authors tell you otherwise, not even my fellow recluses. The social aspect, unlike the process of writing itself, is even more fun than you think it will be.

In recent weeks, Matt Gabriele at Modern Medieval has hosted a blog forum about communicating the relevance of the Middle Ages to people outside of academia. I took him up on his open invitation and wrote a short piece about the pleasures and pitfalls of “applied medievalism.” Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned after two years of book promotion, it’s that going on the road to talk about Charlemagne is a lot like touring with Mötley Crüe, if the Crüe attracted small, sober, courteous crowds whose health-care regimen never included a visit from “Dr. Feelgood.”

(That said, the next time a book festival fails to remove the yellow M&Ms from the candy dishes in my dressing room, I shall be forced to raise my voice. Surely Vince Neil would approve.)

Humidity be darned, here are some writing-themed links for a stuffy summer weekend.

At The Story’s Story, Jake revists the cheeseball novel Day of the Triffids and contemplates the signals he’s receiving from the publishing industry as he shops around his science-fiction novels.

Ephemeral New York finds written proof that the East Village never changes.

Steven Hart notes that Philip K. Dick’s Library of America editions are selling well.

Art Durkee says not to seek out advice about writing. (Link via Books, Inq.)

Market research may not be the publishing industry’s strong point, but Random House and Zogby International have started to put faces to pairs of anonymous eyes. Their nationwide poll (12-page PDF here) does help explain who purchases books, but it won’t tell you why people bought your book—so authors, keep those runestones and pigeon livers handy!

Finally, since it’s going to be a scorching outside, here are two videos to keep you cool: Jose Iturbi listening patiently to “Route 66” and then demonstrating the real way to play the song. After that, who needs air conditioning?

Want to be a writer? Want to be a better writer? At the end of a busy week, here are some useful posts by authors, agents, editors, and critics—perfect reading for a quiet, sunny weekend.

Noting that American writers tend to eschew the adverb, Kevin Wignall ponders a famous passage in which adverbs get things done.

New York Times readers debate the seven deadly words of book reviewing.

Kevin Holtsberry proposes Small Book Appreciation Week.

Richard S. Wheeler builds characters out of beliefs.

BookEnds readers point out books they’ve judged by their covers.

Steven Hart highlights vital advice for novice authors.

Leslie Pietrzyk identifies her best posts about the writing process.

Meg Gardiner summarizes “a few things that make writing ring false.”

For the past 16 months, I’ve relentlessly hawked my own book—which, in case you hadn’t heard, is now available in a compact, affordable paperback and even a Kindle edition—but as I glance over at my blogroll, I see an impressive roster of authors, novelists, and scholars whose productivity I admire and whose work deserves attention and praise.

Michael Drout at Wormtalk and Slugspeak is the author of How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century, an intriguing study of the Benedictine Reform. He also edited The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, to which a certain D.C.-based blogger contributed the first and last word on Tolkien and postage stamps.

Alexis Fajardo, the cartoonist who created the all-ages comic Kid Beowulf, has an online shop full of goodies, including Book One of Kid Beowulf, a preview of Kid Beowulf and the Song of Roland, and an anthology of mythological action tales.

Matthew Gabriele at Modern Medieval is the editor of the forthcoming The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, a collection of articles I am rather eager to read.

My Garden State broheim Steven Hart is the author of The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway. He also wrote a much-needed piece debunking the hallowed George Lucas-Joseph Campbell connection.

Michael Livingston, who teaches medieval lit at The Citadel, is a prolific writer of short stories. He also edited John Gower’s In Praise of Peace and The Siege of Jerusalem for the invaluable TEAMS Middle English Texts series. (His intro to The Siege of Jerusalem is an enlightening primer on a highly unpleasant medieval poem.)

The very busy C.M. Mayo, who divides her time between D.C. and Mexico, has written a traveler’s guide to literary Mexico, an award-winning story collection, and a forthcoming novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire.

My pal Scott Nokes at Unlocked Wordhoard co-edited Global Perspectives on Medieval English Literature, Language, and Culture, a new collection of articles about such wide-ranging subjects as Chaucer, Narnia, and the Popol Vuh.

Last fall, I met Work-in-Progress blogger Leslie Pietrzyk at a fundraiser in Virginia. She’s the author of two lovely novels, A Year and a Day and Pears on a Willow Tree. (The latter, which focuses on several generations of Polish-American women, recently won the Jeff’s Mom Seal of Approval, an honor not lightly bestowed.)

Alan Sullivan, the poetic helmsman of Seablogger, co-translated a strong and highly readable version of Beowulf for Longman.

The authors at Contemporary Nomad have more books to their credit than I can list, but I particularly recommend the haunting series of Eastern European spy novels by Olen Steinhauer, who writes literary fiction disguised as genre fiction.

I hope you’ll decide to learn more about these hard-working writers; please support their efforts by purchasing some of their books.