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lenora_roseSo, with my history quiz done (Less painful than the first, though I think I misidentified someone's wife as their sister. Ick.) I decided I could take this weekend for some shameless reading and writing time before I start into research for the next essay.
Progress notes for February 23, 2007:
Soldier of the Road
Total words new or revised : 3400
Probable percentage actually new: under 50%; the first half was mainly tidying and editing, the final third almost entirely changed.
Reason for stopping: I've been here hours already.
Tea: Dr Pepper, Milk, limoncello. Not together.
Music: Jim Moray - Self-titled, Emmylou Harris - Red Dirt Girl
Mean Things: Snowstorms. Also, it's harder than he thinks to pretend not to be a Prince.
Darling du jour: The most disturbing thing was that the eyes did not close as they moistened and the flesh around them grew plump. He came back to life aware of just what was happening to him, and I cannot think it is much less horrible to return from such a state than it is to sink into it.
tyop du jour: indiveted. (SB: invited)
To-read pile: Midori Snyder - The Innamorati, Euripides - the Bacchae (Too modern a translation), Sir Philip Sidney - Astrophil and Stella.
Reread pile: Barry Hughart - Bridge of Birds.
Inevitable Asides:
Things I am unabashedly a sucker for:
Benign or at least righteously annoyed ghosts (I hate the ones that are all malevolence beyond whatever wrong was done them, and poltergeists.)
Not least, lovers come back from the dead. Usually on a temporary basis, just to see someone or point out a murder, though evidence suggests not always.
I'd been thinking about just this mainly because I had a "Wouldn't it be cool to tell one of these stories again?" thought earlier, which made the smart part of me answer "Um, self? Soldier of the Road? Full of ghosts? The Molly Bond bit happening Real Soon Now?"
Naturally, it's the very scene after I stopped for tonight that will have the fun ghosties. Though, as above, we're not short of undead weirdness. After digressions of inspiration and/or research for this, that, and the other story, I'm actually happy to be feeling an urge to get back to the work I'm meant to be doing.
This led to the realization that I set up the entire afterlife of this whole world to explain how some of those folk songs could happen. My way of disguising this is to have the different cultures misunderstand what's happening due to their own assumptions and prejudices, but that's the real root of it. I wanted to tell Molly Bond, The Unquiet Grave, Standing Stones, and Nightvisiting* and have it make sense. I mean, I knew I was borrowing elements of some of those already, but not to the level of root worldbuilding.
__________________________________
Things writers do that annoy me, version umty-somethingth:
"We have guarded this bloodline for a thousand years..."
Simple mathematics of reproduction wipe this out in about two hundred years, if not less, when the children are so widely scattered and the line so diluted that... forget it. Even with some branches dying off on the spot, forget it. Never mind that; find me an unbroken succession anywhere in the real world that's that long, and doesn't skip off into cousins technically related on the wrong side at least once.
I know the Tudors tried to do it, but... well, anything that linked them to Arthur and Brut was a blatant *fabrication*. Even the attempt to link to Cadwallader, who at least can be documented as existing, is pretty much bunk and even they seemed to know it, if not publicly.
The only place I have a noble mention a direct descent from a God (accurately), she does so in passing, with near indifference; half the noble families in the country, and two surrounding countries, can claim the same bloodline to the same degree via the same daughter of the god, and most people gripe about the matrilineal descent anyhow.
This is not apropos of any immediately current reading.
______________________________________
Random observation:
In language debates lately, there's been some discussion of using "shot" for arrows, because of its gun associations. Loose is more medieval, I concede, and I can read that without blinking because it's what we use in winter shoot, but I've never blinked at shot.
I just saw it -- twice, I think, but I'd have to double-check -- in sixteenth century poetry, in references to Cupid/Love. Not medieval, but I don't think it's yet a borrowing from guns.
____________________
*Actually a shameless blurring of two folk songs, one of which, I Will Put My Ship In Order, doesn't have a ghost but should, and one I don't have a version of but sounds like just the ticket.
Progress notes for February 23, 2007:
Soldier of the Road
Total words new or revised : 3400
Probable percentage actually new: under 50%; the first half was mainly tidying and editing, the final third almost entirely changed.
Reason for stopping: I've been here hours already.
Tea: Dr Pepper, Milk, limoncello. Not together.
Music: Jim Moray - Self-titled, Emmylou Harris - Red Dirt Girl
Mean Things: Snowstorms. Also, it's harder than he thinks to pretend not to be a Prince.
Darling du jour: The most disturbing thing was that the eyes did not close as they moistened and the flesh around them grew plump. He came back to life aware of just what was happening to him, and I cannot think it is much less horrible to return from such a state than it is to sink into it.
tyop du jour: indiveted. (SB: invited)
To-read pile: Midori Snyder - The Innamorati, Euripides - the Bacchae (Too modern a translation), Sir Philip Sidney - Astrophil and Stella.
Reread pile: Barry Hughart - Bridge of Birds.
Inevitable Asides:
Things I am unabashedly a sucker for:
Benign or at least righteously annoyed ghosts (I hate the ones that are all malevolence beyond whatever wrong was done them, and poltergeists.)
Not least, lovers come back from the dead. Usually on a temporary basis, just to see someone or point out a murder, though evidence suggests not always.
I'd been thinking about just this mainly because I had a "Wouldn't it be cool to tell one of these stories again?" thought earlier, which made the smart part of me answer "Um, self? Soldier of the Road? Full of ghosts? The Molly Bond bit happening Real Soon Now?"
Naturally, it's the very scene after I stopped for tonight that will have the fun ghosties. Though, as above, we're not short of undead weirdness. After digressions of inspiration and/or research for this, that, and the other story, I'm actually happy to be feeling an urge to get back to the work I'm meant to be doing.
This led to the realization that I set up the entire afterlife of this whole world to explain how some of those folk songs could happen. My way of disguising this is to have the different cultures misunderstand what's happening due to their own assumptions and prejudices, but that's the real root of it. I wanted to tell Molly Bond, The Unquiet Grave, Standing Stones, and Nightvisiting* and have it make sense. I mean, I knew I was borrowing elements of some of those already, but not to the level of root worldbuilding.
__________________________________
Things writers do that annoy me, version umty-somethingth:
"We have guarded this bloodline for a thousand years..."
Simple mathematics of reproduction wipe this out in about two hundred years, if not less, when the children are so widely scattered and the line so diluted that... forget it. Even with some branches dying off on the spot, forget it. Never mind that; find me an unbroken succession anywhere in the real world that's that long, and doesn't skip off into cousins technically related on the wrong side at least once.
I know the Tudors tried to do it, but... well, anything that linked them to Arthur and Brut was a blatant *fabrication*. Even the attempt to link to Cadwallader, who at least can be documented as existing, is pretty much bunk and even they seemed to know it, if not publicly.
The only place I have a noble mention a direct descent from a God (accurately), she does so in passing, with near indifference; half the noble families in the country, and two surrounding countries, can claim the same bloodline to the same degree via the same daughter of the god, and most people gripe about the matrilineal descent anyhow.
This is not apropos of any immediately current reading.
______________________________________
Random observation:
In language debates lately, there's been some discussion of using "shot" for arrows, because of its gun associations. Loose is more medieval, I concede, and I can read that without blinking because it's what we use in winter shoot, but I've never blinked at shot.
I just saw it -- twice, I think, but I'd have to double-check -- in sixteenth century poetry, in references to Cupid/Love. Not medieval, but I don't think it's yet a borrowing from guns.
____________________
*Actually a shameless blurring of two folk songs, one of which, I Will Put My Ship In Order, doesn't have a ghost but should, and one I don't have a version of but sounds like just the ticket.
