Yes, it's been a thousand years and I'm sorry. I hope everyone is well.
Just in case anyone fancies reading it - I'm going to be attempting Nanowrimo again this year. I'll be posting at
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alea_nano like last year. Leave a note here if you'd like to be added.
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I suppose if I went out with any regularity, it might be a good idea for me to have a notebook for my purse. [duck] I really don't, though. Since the slashy retreat at the beginning of August, I've been out... three times, I think. Twice to the movies and once to the symphony. I just don't crave running around like most people do, for whatever reason. When I was a kid, sending me to my room wasn't much of a punishment (yay, time for reading!) and I haven't changed much since then. :) And since my knee is still messed up from said slashy retreat, I have even less desire to go running around. [wry smile]
I hadn't thought about the idea of the invaders playing off the different states against each other. Hmm, that has interesting posibilities. :)
Feel free to pinch the idea, then. [ties it up in a bow and hands it over]
Angie
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And there's always sitting in the waiting room at the dentist and so on.
I just had a sudden unexpected new idea for a completely different story. Not sure whether to leap on board and see what I can do with it, or not. It's taking a legend (the story of Branwen from the Mabinogion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branwen) and playing around with it. I'm not sure how yet, so it might be something to keep for another day, but it just popped into my head.
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On landing in Wales at Aber Alaw in Anglesey Branwen died of grief that so much destruction had been caused on her account, crying "Oh Son of God, woe to me that I was born! Two fair islands have been laid waste because of me!"
Is it typical or what that the central female character is shown expressing such remorse over all this death and devastation, which is clearly her fault [eyeroll] and ends up dying of it, doubtless the only way she could possibly have redeemed herself for this wickedness she'd "done." When in actuality she was just a pawn handed around by a bunch of whack-job men who were the cause of all the violence. [facepalm]
And don't mention dentists. :P I really need to go soon but I hate going.... [hides under the bed]
Angie
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How are your thoughts progressing? You picked an idea yet or waiting to see what happens on November 1st?
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I don't want to just wait and start from ground zero -- I think last year's NaNo was a lot more stressful for me than it needed to be because of that. I need to finish two jobs before I really work on mine, though. I'm working on one of them (the critique/commentary one) around e-mails, and I'm about sixty pages from being done, huzzah. Even a couple of days to just think about what I'm doing and do some keyboard-babbling would help immensely. [crossed fingers]
And yeah, that part of the Branwen story could definitely use a bit of updating. [wry smile] The evil brother is an interesting character, although the whole murdered-his-baby-nephew thing is a bit O_O you know? Very common -- there's crap like that in the Bible, and in a lot of other older literature from various cultures, from when children were considered the property of their parents, especially their fathers, and people seemed to think nothing of killing or maiming a child just to punish the parents. But still. Ick.
And I know what you mean about it possibly requiring more work than making up something from scratch. I think it depends what you're good at, though. I've seen writers opine, in clear type in front of everyone, that they like fantasy "because you can just make it all up." With the implication being that you can just make up each individual chunk as you need it, and that the writer is completely unaware of any necessity for the society they're writing about to actually hold together in a logical way, for the parts to fit and relate logically to one another. Creating a good fantasy (or SF) culture from scratch is hard, and it takes a lot of thought and work. But if you have a good grounding in anthropology and history and a variety of literatures from various cultures, it's easier than if you're starting from scratch intellectually.
At the same time, doing something historical is a lot of work because you need to look everything up. Sources aren't always readily available, and there's a lot of crap out there that's been published with a straight face. (But of course you know that.) And some info just doesn't exist, so you have to absorb what is available well enough to get a decent feel for it, so you can reason or intuit what people would have done to accomplish some task, or how they'd have thought about some issue, in a way which fits with what's known about their society. Here too, it's really hard if you're starting from scratch, especially if you have a lot of garbage (like from movies, for example) to un-learn, before you can start building an accurate picture in your head about what, say, 15th century Florence was like.
So it depends where a newbie writer is coming from. Depending on the newbie, if they realize how much work a historical is, they might decide to write a fantasy because they think it'll be easier. And if they realize how much work a fantasy is, they might decide to write a historical because it's "easier." (After all, you can just look stuff up -- that's what Wikipedia is for. [facepalm])
Which one is actually easier depends on your background and how much relevant info you have in your head already. Neither way is actually easy, but one might be easiER than the other if you start out with some of the background you need.
None of which is anything you didn't know, of course, but I've been up all night and I'm babbling. [duck] Actually, I could probably get a column out of this.... :)
Angie
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My thought on Branwen (I've been at work and mulling it over when I should have been concentrating...) are currently that I would write it as a story about telling stories. Parts of it are so fantastical - the scale of her brother Bran, for example - that I wouldn't be happy telling it without some further explanation, which of course currently doesn't exist. So what I'd like to do is explore how a story is formed out of events, how it is related and which bits are remembered. Who are painted as the villains and who are the heroes?
That said, I also had some new ideas for the invader story, so I might do still do that one and retire Branwen until December. We shall see.
I'm going to see my sister tomorrow so probably won't have internet for a couple of days. Will probably kill me :P
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Absolutely. [cringes and reaches for a blunt weapon] I used to OD on historical romances pretty regularly and since I started when I was twelve I didn't always realize when a writer was taking liberties. [cough] Looking back, though, it was pretty grim sometimes. And the ones I read later, after I'd actually started studying history, were pretty bad.
For example, I mean, OK, I see the reason why someone would mess with this particular historical reality, but just once I want to read a medieval where the Lord and Lady of the castle slept in a curtained niche in one wall and everyone else had a pallet on the floor of the great hall. There -- let's see you hide your illicit sex in that environment! :P I mean, you could, but you might actually have to get creative, what a concept. And it's just amazing how many of these fourteenth century castles came complete with a dozen private bedrooms. [facepalm]
there are of course people who deliberately mess with history, but in order to do that they still need to have done the relevant research
Absolutely again. [nodnod] I love alternate history, or even a historical story where the writer changed some particular thing or a few things, deliberately and to support the plot. But to do it well you have to know how things were to start with so you can make intelligent changes. And it's nice when the writer owns up to the changes they made -- Judith Tarr does that in a lot of her books, in the Author's Notes. Too many "historical" writers just change whatever out of apparent ignorance, though, because it's easier to do what five hundred other historical romance or fantasy writers have done than to actually look something up. [sigh]
So what I'd like to do is explore how a story is formed out of events, how it is related and which bits are remembered. Who are painted as the villains and who are the heroes?
That could be a very cool story. [nodnod] Mercedes Lackey did something like that in a short story once. She had this series of short stories about two female adventurers, one a mage and the other a mercenary, and there was this minstrel guy who wrote songs about them but got everything wrong, painting them as impossibly heroic when the actual stories had been very down-to-earth. She did this one story about the first time he actually caught up with them on their travels and was able to observe them in action for himself, rather than relying on travellers' tales. It was hysterical -- she showed what actually happened and then how he wrote the song, and all along the way we were in his POV so we saw how appalled he was about exactly how un-heroic his great bardic heroines really were. It was a great comic treatment of the subject. :)
Doing something serious would be cool as well. It's an important point to make, that stories are told and later written for different reasons. Everyone knows the old "the winner writes the history books" thing, but there are other factors as well. If you're telling a story as a cautionary tale or a moral exhortation or an explanation of some rule or doctrine or principle, then you've got a specific purpose you're trying to achieve in the telling and changing details, even fairly major ones, in service to that purpose probably won't seem like a horrible thing to do. You could make a great story out of how the story of some event changed and why.
Good luck with the next couple of days. Hang on, hon -- it's horrible being disconnected but it is survivable! ;)
Angie
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I think I'm probably going to run with the invaders story rather than the Branwen one, because I've had some new ideas about the invaders homeland that I'd like to explore (although when and how I have yet to discover!)
I have horrible double shifts tomorrow and Saturday (meaning I'm working 6.30am to 12.30pm, then 6pm to 12am) which seems like a really cruel way to start nano. But I am determined I will get my wordcount done (in between the essential naps!) and then Sunday I will breathe and maybe even plan.
How go your thoughts? Have you narrowed down the plans are are you just going to see what happens when you open up a new word document tomorrow?
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I still haven't decided. [headdesk] I finished a commentary on a novel manuscript for a friend a few days ago (the thing was thirty pages longer when I sent it back to her -- it took a while to do but she was very happy with the comments so that's good) and then I finished the edits on "Spirit of Vengeance" last night. Or actually this morning, since it was after midnight. Then I waited until Torquere put the Halloween stories up so I could post around with a link to mine. Then the usual BSing around with e-mail and stuff, talking to some of the other writers -- one of whom was also waiting for the stories to go up, and then afterward discovering a continuation to a favorite series and then chatting with that writer about it, which took a while so I was up all night till around 6am. I finally got to bed but couldn't sleep. [headdesk]
I should be fiddling around with NaNo ideas but my head's all buzzy, you know? Like, I'm too tired to do anything useful but I still can't sleep. I'll probably zombie around all day and then just start typing in a blank file tomorrow and see what it turns into. :P
Major suckage on your double shifts. :( Hopefully that's the last of that for a while?
Angie