Had another idea for a story I'm not going to write.
Yes, I do think of lots of ideas outside of the already-created worlds of others. Fanfiction ideas are, however, easier to explain.
(For instance...there was a real moment in history when Lenin tried out the experimental musical instrument of a certain Leon Theremin. According to onlookers he was "surprisingly good." Now put a fictional concert violinist in that audience and let him hear the uncanny music from this electronic violin and catch a glimpse of the future racing in all streamlined and chromed -- and realizing that even the dangerously intelligent Lenin is of nothing to a man who's very name means "steel"... I'm not going to write it, because first I'd have to sit down for ten years with histories of Russia).
So here's today's bunny.
Harry Potter universe, 1946. I've started to hate Sorting Hat scenes because I really dislike the entire idea of the Houses. I love challenging the rules. I love out-of-context problems -- crossovers provide these in spades -- even if they tend to break the original universe.
1946 and off the Hogwart's Express come four first-year students -- siblings -- who refuse to be broken up. Who don't even adhere to normalcy in their timing, as they are of different ages. They work as a well-honed team and are surprisingly talented with the sword and other unusual skills and can draw upon a poise and gravitas that should only come with full adulthood in a position of power.
Because once a king in Narnia, always a king in Narnia.
And that's pretty much it. Tweaking the HP universe. But this is also deconstruction of CS Lewis and The Problem With Susan and all and as uncomfortable as the situation may be to the Pevensies -- yet more reminders of a full and well-lived life yanked away from them by the caprices of gods and fate -- they make everyone else even more uncomfortable.
Because, really, four Narnian kings -- even without The Lion backing them up -- are damned scary. They break everything about Hogwarts just by being there. Not by magic, not by some sort of extra-narrative rule, just by being in character.
Especially if you follow through (if you are more honest than Lewis was willing to be with his creation).
Thursday, December 28, 2017
Brane and brane, what is "brane?!"
Been sick and staying in reading. Somehow found myself reading fanfics. Several fanfics. Set in the same universe. And reading them simultaneously.
So I'm basically flipping back and forth between multiple alternate worlds, having to adjust with each page with an, "Right, this is the one where they don't have brooms yet, but she's older and he's a girl. Or is this the one where everyone is a pony?"
In want-of-a-nail fashion a unique narrative spins away from every jonbar hinge, each step of the plot creating a new set of potential universes and discarding a previous. This is true of every book; every path not taken leaves a wondering horse. Reading a dozen simultaneous branches at once just emphasizes the process.
Being fanfic, every work must be a traceable variation on a single cantus firmus, that Earth One of the original work. And being fanfic, parallel evolution features more frequently than one might expect; the plot drifts back to that invisible melody like a long jazz solo winding up -- if only to hit certain well-known and well-beloved moments of the original in an exercise fanfic commentators have called doing the Stations of the Cross.
As with alternate history, there may be clockwork airships overhead and a sea monster in the Thames but there will always be a Queen Victoria. (One is tempted to say there will always be airships, but that's another issue.)
And that's my insight today. Historical fiction shares with fanfiction and serialized fiction the mingled joys of the surprising and the familiar.
You come to an episode of Buffy to be in the company of Wills, Xander, Cordy, Mr. Giles, and of course the Buffmeister again. You delight in the familiar, even as you expect to be shown something new and exciting as well. In a well-written series even the familiar ground will become more detailed over time, with season delivering a little more backstory, a little more character development, a little more nuance.
And this is why there is a Sorting Hat song in hundreds, thousands of fan-written stories. Even if the song itself is unique. The cantus firmus is not the song, it is the singing hat. (And I'm really looking forward to the story where Harry is sorted in Hufflepuff and the 'puffs get to demonstrate that Nice is not Weak but anyhow.)
When a reader decides to open a book set in a historical period, they frequently (but not always) expect to find something familiar. Readers drawn to history know history. And specialize. If they opened your book on the life of Seti I then they probably know something about Ancient Egypt.
That reader also expects to find something new. They want to learn -- or, at least, be surprised. This may be why Alternate History works so well. It is the familiar pieces, but re-arranged for freshness; Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, as the Vulcans would say.
Well, the second is going to be easy. The moment your book says, "Here's some Sea People, here's the siege of Wilusa," then you are writing an original take, one single splintered mirror of a reality largely lost to history. There isn't a consensus of historical opinion to diverge from, not here.
Which makes the first the more useful question for now. What are the touchstones for the Late Bronze Age? What familiar places is the reader hoping to see?
So I'm basically flipping back and forth between multiple alternate worlds, having to adjust with each page with an, "Right, this is the one where they don't have brooms yet, but she's older and he's a girl. Or is this the one where everyone is a pony?"
In want-of-a-nail fashion a unique narrative spins away from every jonbar hinge, each step of the plot creating a new set of potential universes and discarding a previous. This is true of every book; every path not taken leaves a wondering horse. Reading a dozen simultaneous branches at once just emphasizes the process.
Being fanfic, every work must be a traceable variation on a single cantus firmus, that Earth One of the original work. And being fanfic, parallel evolution features more frequently than one might expect; the plot drifts back to that invisible melody like a long jazz solo winding up -- if only to hit certain well-known and well-beloved moments of the original in an exercise fanfic commentators have called doing the Stations of the Cross.
As with alternate history, there may be clockwork airships overhead and a sea monster in the Thames but there will always be a Queen Victoria. (One is tempted to say there will always be airships, but that's another issue.)
And that's my insight today. Historical fiction shares with fanfiction and serialized fiction the mingled joys of the surprising and the familiar.
You come to an episode of Buffy to be in the company of Wills, Xander, Cordy, Mr. Giles, and of course the Buffmeister again. You delight in the familiar, even as you expect to be shown something new and exciting as well. In a well-written series even the familiar ground will become more detailed over time, with season delivering a little more backstory, a little more character development, a little more nuance.
And this is why there is a Sorting Hat song in hundreds, thousands of fan-written stories. Even if the song itself is unique. The cantus firmus is not the song, it is the singing hat. (And I'm really looking forward to the story where Harry is sorted in Hufflepuff and the 'puffs get to demonstrate that Nice is not Weak but anyhow.)
When a reader decides to open a book set in a historical period, they frequently (but not always) expect to find something familiar. Readers drawn to history know history. And specialize. If they opened your book on the life of Seti I then they probably know something about Ancient Egypt.
That reader also expects to find something new. They want to learn -- or, at least, be surprised. This may be why Alternate History works so well. It is the familiar pieces, but re-arranged for freshness; Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, as the Vulcans would say.
Well, the second is going to be easy. The moment your book says, "Here's some Sea People, here's the siege of Wilusa," then you are writing an original take, one single splintered mirror of a reality largely lost to history. There isn't a consensus of historical opinion to diverge from, not here.
Which makes the first the more useful question for now. What are the touchstones for the Late Bronze Age? What familiar places is the reader hoping to see?
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Is this just fantasy?
One year to first draft was the plan. Six months for basic research and outlining.
After four months I'm relatively certain that the original ideas either don't fit the real history or would be too difficult to pull off. That's as close as I've come to outlining the plot.
I looked at trends and genre classifications and what I've brought home from that is largely what I went in with; that there exists a contract with the reader, expectations that the book should try and fulfill. But I don't know what these might be.
I've followed a few attractive leads but I can't even say I've decided they are dead ends. It would be amusing to treat my Mycenaean mercenary as a displaced Homeric hero, applying classical Greek ideals to a rather different situation, for instance. And it is still a problem for research and a risk of going astray from what I really want to achieve.
Last week it was sort of historo-cultural thinking. The purpose of the book might be exploring the Bronze Age Collapse and trying to discover the reasons for it. And or the nature of the mysterious Sea Peoples. Trouble is, the locals don't know they are living in a Collapse. And the Sea Peoples? One of the things that makes them so frustratingly mysterious to us is the way period references strongly suggest that they were so well known there wasn't any reason to go into detail about them!
The Medinet Habu inscriptions aren't, "mysterious raiders from the sea!" they are more like, "goddamn, it's those guys again."
This week I'm thinking in terms of the Quest novel, which tends towards travelogue. With the point being if I can identify cool places to see, cool peoples to visit, cool things to do I might be able to arrange those like islands and then fill in around them as necessary.
Unfortunately it's a small list so far. I'd like to play barrow wights and looted weapons in a Tholos tomb. I'd like to do a little North by Northwest with some Hatti chariots against my protagonists. I really do want to see some of New Kingdom Egypt despite it being a real pain to do in so many ways.
And there's three other things that keep growing detail as I think about them, even as two of them may be impossible to fit into a reasonable plot. There's a confrontation with a god -- worse, a sort of sister of Eris, a being that even the other Greek gods are scared of. But I can't really make it work, and as I work on the rest of the story it seems more and more out of place with the rest. There's the Trojan War. I'm really liking it as something more than a move by some loot-hungry Mycenae, more a plot and counter-plot between Hittite and Kaska and others over the Luwian territories, with Mycenae on both sides of the fight. Leading to a small-scale anabasis as following the sack of Troy one band of warriors has to struggle their way down the coast through increasingly unfriendly territories (especially if they are just beating the Philistine/Sea Peoples en route).
The big problem with this one is the timing. Specifically, information timing. There are things I want the Egyptian scribe and eventual "head" of the party to learn in sequence. And I also want to develop the understanding of the reader about the collapse. And, to, give them a chance to experience the glories of the palatial age before it all starts coming apart at the seams.
And lastly there's the scene on the boat. Probably pirate, possibly more organized raider (aka Sea Peoples -- whatever that means!) With the Scribe and the Cretan girl acting out tropes of classical-era comedy (the drunken master, the clever slave) to keep the pirates entertained, whilst the exhausted mercenaries watch their dangerous game and try not to get involved, and a seemingly harmless Phoenician watches with too-astute eyes and is in turn studiously ignored by the pirates...
In the end, I think the road to my plot is going to look like the road to the Bronze Age Collapse. No single cause is sufficient. Instead it is a combination of things.
I put 150,000 words of fanfiction down playing in an attempted splice of the worlds of Stargate and Tomb Raider. I learned there the joys of research and the joys of history, and how to very efficiently turn raw research into prose. I also decided I am not fond of compressed text and info-dumps and that reaction, too, will get folded into what I do in this new novel.
From the same source, from spending so much time (via extensive podcasts) in the company of working archaeologists, comes a renewed intent to be honest to real history. Fortunately the Bronze Age Collapse is not a terribly fertile ground for the science wars. We really don't know a lot of key details. That sort of takes the sting out of telling a story where it was the fault of zombies. Or the Sea People were all Deep Ones.
Somewhere along there, though, I realized that watching a city burn on the horizon is no way to understand and experience the history. Fortunately, the idea of wandering sword-swinging heroes who pass by on their way to their own goals (whether selfish or world-saving), doesn't on examination match up with most actual examples. Even in an open-world RPG the characters get involved. They go into a community, pick sides in a local conflict, learn and become in turn part of the story there.
Which does mean, though, my inchoate thoughts of viewing Ugarit from a distance or Mycenae merely as ruins is not going to work. I really do have to get down into those places and cultures. And that's gonna take a lot more research than I had hoped to have to undertake.
Because it has become increasingly clear. As much as I have tried to seek out the most opinionated, polemic works, the worst I have found are still reluctant to commit. The Peleset have been identified by many with the Philistines, and they appear to have settled near modern-day Palestine, but the language is unknown, the origin unknown, the influence and/or connection to Mycenae unknown, and plenty of writers reject the whole thing anyhow.
So for me to say this is how this town looks, this is what they speak, this is who invaded them, and so forth, I need to be familiar with at least some number of the various primary sources and other texts used by the people who are currently theorizing about them. I can not, for this book, take whatever is up that day on Wikipedia and run with it as "good enough." I have to be historian myself, and come up with my own hypothesis.
After four months I'm relatively certain that the original ideas either don't fit the real history or would be too difficult to pull off. That's as close as I've come to outlining the plot.
I looked at trends and genre classifications and what I've brought home from that is largely what I went in with; that there exists a contract with the reader, expectations that the book should try and fulfill. But I don't know what these might be.
I've followed a few attractive leads but I can't even say I've decided they are dead ends. It would be amusing to treat my Mycenaean mercenary as a displaced Homeric hero, applying classical Greek ideals to a rather different situation, for instance. And it is still a problem for research and a risk of going astray from what I really want to achieve.
Last week it was sort of historo-cultural thinking. The purpose of the book might be exploring the Bronze Age Collapse and trying to discover the reasons for it. And or the nature of the mysterious Sea Peoples. Trouble is, the locals don't know they are living in a Collapse. And the Sea Peoples? One of the things that makes them so frustratingly mysterious to us is the way period references strongly suggest that they were so well known there wasn't any reason to go into detail about them!
The Medinet Habu inscriptions aren't, "mysterious raiders from the sea!" they are more like, "goddamn, it's those guys again."
This week I'm thinking in terms of the Quest novel, which tends towards travelogue. With the point being if I can identify cool places to see, cool peoples to visit, cool things to do I might be able to arrange those like islands and then fill in around them as necessary.
Unfortunately it's a small list so far. I'd like to play barrow wights and looted weapons in a Tholos tomb. I'd like to do a little North by Northwest with some Hatti chariots against my protagonists. I really do want to see some of New Kingdom Egypt despite it being a real pain to do in so many ways.
And there's three other things that keep growing detail as I think about them, even as two of them may be impossible to fit into a reasonable plot. There's a confrontation with a god -- worse, a sort of sister of Eris, a being that even the other Greek gods are scared of. But I can't really make it work, and as I work on the rest of the story it seems more and more out of place with the rest. There's the Trojan War. I'm really liking it as something more than a move by some loot-hungry Mycenae, more a plot and counter-plot between Hittite and Kaska and others over the Luwian territories, with Mycenae on both sides of the fight. Leading to a small-scale anabasis as following the sack of Troy one band of warriors has to struggle their way down the coast through increasingly unfriendly territories (especially if they are just beating the Philistine/Sea Peoples en route).
The big problem with this one is the timing. Specifically, information timing. There are things I want the Egyptian scribe and eventual "head" of the party to learn in sequence. And I also want to develop the understanding of the reader about the collapse. And, to, give them a chance to experience the glories of the palatial age before it all starts coming apart at the seams.
And lastly there's the scene on the boat. Probably pirate, possibly more organized raider (aka Sea Peoples -- whatever that means!) With the Scribe and the Cretan girl acting out tropes of classical-era comedy (the drunken master, the clever slave) to keep the pirates entertained, whilst the exhausted mercenaries watch their dangerous game and try not to get involved, and a seemingly harmless Phoenician watches with too-astute eyes and is in turn studiously ignored by the pirates...
In the end, I think the road to my plot is going to look like the road to the Bronze Age Collapse. No single cause is sufficient. Instead it is a combination of things.
I put 150,000 words of fanfiction down playing in an attempted splice of the worlds of Stargate and Tomb Raider. I learned there the joys of research and the joys of history, and how to very efficiently turn raw research into prose. I also decided I am not fond of compressed text and info-dumps and that reaction, too, will get folded into what I do in this new novel.
From the same source, from spending so much time (via extensive podcasts) in the company of working archaeologists, comes a renewed intent to be honest to real history. Fortunately the Bronze Age Collapse is not a terribly fertile ground for the science wars. We really don't know a lot of key details. That sort of takes the sting out of telling a story where it was the fault of zombies. Or the Sea People were all Deep Ones.
Somewhere along there, though, I realized that watching a city burn on the horizon is no way to understand and experience the history. Fortunately, the idea of wandering sword-swinging heroes who pass by on their way to their own goals (whether selfish or world-saving), doesn't on examination match up with most actual examples. Even in an open-world RPG the characters get involved. They go into a community, pick sides in a local conflict, learn and become in turn part of the story there.
Which does mean, though, my inchoate thoughts of viewing Ugarit from a distance or Mycenae merely as ruins is not going to work. I really do have to get down into those places and cultures. And that's gonna take a lot more research than I had hoped to have to undertake.
Because it has become increasingly clear. As much as I have tried to seek out the most opinionated, polemic works, the worst I have found are still reluctant to commit. The Peleset have been identified by many with the Philistines, and they appear to have settled near modern-day Palestine, but the language is unknown, the origin unknown, the influence and/or connection to Mycenae unknown, and plenty of writers reject the whole thing anyhow.
So for me to say this is how this town looks, this is what they speak, this is who invaded them, and so forth, I need to be familiar with at least some number of the various primary sources and other texts used by the people who are currently theorizing about them. I can not, for this book, take whatever is up that day on Wikipedia and run with it as "good enough." I have to be historian myself, and come up with my own hypothesis.
Sunday, December 17, 2017
A Little Night (Vision) Music
The Khajiit piece was a really poor choice for my first experiment in recording.
My vision has been to largely create with virtual instruments (aka MIDI) with recordings of real instruments folded in where possible. That was one of my goals in learning violin and, yes, penny whistle. The best thing I can say about the Khajiit piece is, due to the peculiarities of the arrangement, I can perform all the parts on physical instruments.
This is also one of the downsides. It depends on my performance, in every instrument above. There's no place I can use a keyboard or a drum track to give more of a gloss.
I would have done better with a jazz piece. See, this is almost a tone poem, using instruments coloristically. And that makes the parts very hard to perform. The thing that a more standard setting gives you is a well-defined rhythm and well-defined harmonic structure. Having that bass and drums behinds you pulls you along in the right meter and on to the right pitches. The Khajiit parts, instead, sort of float out there -- as witnessed by the fact I found it as easy if not easier to record some of them in isolation to nothing but a metronome track.
Most of this has been using the extremely basic Behringer U-control USB interface that came with my MIDI keyboard, with an AudioBuddy pre-amp and phantom power unit in front of it. I tried recording a couple of the violin tracks at work; I brought a Zoom recorder with me to the shop, and dialed up a metronome application on the iPhone.
Everything gets assembled in Reaper:
That's barely a quarter of the tracks there. Another disadvantage to this piece; it is all about changing tone colors, meaning I'm basically playing in little more than a couple bars at a time. There's not really a chance to get into the flow of the piece and the performance I'm trying to contribute to the mix. Just do my best to stay within the tempo and hit the right notes.
At the moment I'm at ukulele (my $40 Rogue) standing in for lute; plucked, slow-strummed, and fast-strummed with ras accents. There may be more. Violin (my student-model Pfetchner) in sustained lines and in some improvised harmonics for a spooky effect. Bodhran (my Pakistani-made 18" tune-able) with tipper, rolls, fingertip, scratching and brushing, and stick accents. The wooden soprano recorder I've had since childhood and a Yamaha ABS alto. Crumhorn (a sadly out of pitch Susato in brown ABS), and shawm (a bombarde from Lark in the Morning at Fisherman's Wharf, sporting a badly fit oboe reed these days).
So, back to working method. I imported the original version of the song into Reaper as track one. Then went through my libraries to find virtual instruments (instruments I could play from the MIDI keyboard) with similar sounds to those physical instruments I would be recording.
The opening riff was just a matter of using my ear and matching what was on the original recording. The "theme" was more difficult; as the original was spoke-sung, I had to go into notation mode, type in the lyrics, and line those up in time with the original recording. Then I could work out a melody track that sort-of echoed the speech patterns of the original, and stayed somewhere in range of the chord structure.
Since there are sections of multi-part harmony I worked that out here, too. Actually, I disliked the violin harmony and when I was at the shop recording those parts I took out some music paper and worked out new voice leading there. A not-small advantage of this technique is I can play the mock-up of the part back and learn the line by ear from there (I'm still not much of a sight-reader).
So call it a noble experiment. I'm still nowhere near ready to embark on the big Tomb Raider piece I have in mind. So I'm hunting around now for something jazzy. Something with a more straight-forward rhythm and harmonic progression I can really feel like I'm jamming to when I record in the parts. And, yeah...maybe something with a trumpet part or two.
My vision has been to largely create with virtual instruments (aka MIDI) with recordings of real instruments folded in where possible. That was one of my goals in learning violin and, yes, penny whistle. The best thing I can say about the Khajiit piece is, due to the peculiarities of the arrangement, I can perform all the parts on physical instruments.
This is also one of the downsides. It depends on my performance, in every instrument above. There's no place I can use a keyboard or a drum track to give more of a gloss.
I would have done better with a jazz piece. See, this is almost a tone poem, using instruments coloristically. And that makes the parts very hard to perform. The thing that a more standard setting gives you is a well-defined rhythm and well-defined harmonic structure. Having that bass and drums behinds you pulls you along in the right meter and on to the right pitches. The Khajiit parts, instead, sort of float out there -- as witnessed by the fact I found it as easy if not easier to record some of them in isolation to nothing but a metronome track.
Most of this has been using the extremely basic Behringer U-control USB interface that came with my MIDI keyboard, with an AudioBuddy pre-amp and phantom power unit in front of it. I tried recording a couple of the violin tracks at work; I brought a Zoom recorder with me to the shop, and dialed up a metronome application on the iPhone.
Everything gets assembled in Reaper:
That's barely a quarter of the tracks there. Another disadvantage to this piece; it is all about changing tone colors, meaning I'm basically playing in little more than a couple bars at a time. There's not really a chance to get into the flow of the piece and the performance I'm trying to contribute to the mix. Just do my best to stay within the tempo and hit the right notes.
At the moment I'm at ukulele (my $40 Rogue) standing in for lute; plucked, slow-strummed, and fast-strummed with ras accents. There may be more. Violin (my student-model Pfetchner) in sustained lines and in some improvised harmonics for a spooky effect. Bodhran (my Pakistani-made 18" tune-able) with tipper, rolls, fingertip, scratching and brushing, and stick accents. The wooden soprano recorder I've had since childhood and a Yamaha ABS alto. Crumhorn (a sadly out of pitch Susato in brown ABS), and shawm (a bombarde from Lark in the Morning at Fisherman's Wharf, sporting a badly fit oboe reed these days).
So, back to working method. I imported the original version of the song into Reaper as track one. Then went through my libraries to find virtual instruments (instruments I could play from the MIDI keyboard) with similar sounds to those physical instruments I would be recording.
The opening riff was just a matter of using my ear and matching what was on the original recording. The "theme" was more difficult; as the original was spoke-sung, I had to go into notation mode, type in the lyrics, and line those up in time with the original recording. Then I could work out a melody track that sort-of echoed the speech patterns of the original, and stayed somewhere in range of the chord structure.
Since there are sections of multi-part harmony I worked that out here, too. Actually, I disliked the violin harmony and when I was at the shop recording those parts I took out some music paper and worked out new voice leading there. A not-small advantage of this technique is I can play the mock-up of the part back and learn the line by ear from there (I'm still not much of a sight-reader).
So call it a noble experiment. I'm still nowhere near ready to embark on the big Tomb Raider piece I have in mind. So I'm hunting around now for something jazzy. Something with a more straight-forward rhythm and harmonic progression I can really feel like I'm jamming to when I record in the parts. And, yeah...maybe something with a trumpet part or two.
Sunday, December 10, 2017
Blue Horn Project
About three weeks.
That, for me, was how long to get to the point where I felt like I was playing tunes instead of struggling through exercises. The violin is truly the outlier here. It took six months to be in enough control of the bow and the fretting to think about assaying a tune.
Actually, my measure is a little different and a little more subtle. It is the "arbitrary tune" measure. Strictly speaking, the tunes aren't arbitrary, but it is the point where you take something you remember and try to play it by ear. See, "Twinkle Twinkle" and similar exercise pieces are chosen and/or designed to stay within a limited scope. On the violin, that's two strings, three stops, first position only. The equivalent starter trumpet piece would put you all within the same slot, two slots at the max.
I'm working the Grand March from Aida right now (that is, the melody, by ear) because it is a lovely slotting exercise. Big sections are just dancing back and forth between slots with just the first valve going up and down. I may not be smooth at it but it isn't a "crippled" piece designed for the student.
Okay, three weeks is also my personal measure, and won't hold for everyone. I've messed around with a post horn and blew a few notes once. I've worked with recorder and crumhorn and penny whistle so tonguing a note is already second nature, I have the breath control, and it is just one more set of fingering to memorize. For that matter, two of those instruments are overblow instruments.
Which is not exactly the same as changing partials on the trumpet. You do have to blow harder, but that is due to the real change you are making; pursing your lips tighter. After all, even I already have a two-octave range, with all the accidentals, and there's only three valves. The rest is all by changing partials.
Incidentally, the Bodhran was something like thirty minutes to find the basic stroke, and three hours to start the triplet going. I've put in about ten hours on it at this point. Unlike the trumpet and violin I don't have to take rest breaks to recover.
That's the terrible secret to trumpet, as it is with adult violin. Your lips simply do not last. When I started I could only practice for five minutes at a stretch. I'm up to fifteen now, but I can only do that two or three times a day. So looking at the number of days spent is not a good measure of the hours expended.
Oh, yeah, and I've cleaned it thoroughly twice and I pull and clean out the valves once a week.
However. I haven't made much progress on the Khajiit piece and I'm feeling less and less skilled by the minute. Or, rather, by the YouTube video -- lately I've been watching some crazy cover bands that do 20's jazz version of 80's pop hits. I've been around musicians. I hung out with a bunch back in high school, I worked sound for years. I am nothing but envious. I can sort of knock out something on an instrument or two but I am no musician. Not yet, and from the progress so far, not ever.
(As one more plot point on the graph, I've been playing piano since I was a teen. And, no, I'm still not very good. I've learned how to practice smart, and get as much as I can out of less than ideal practice -- time, and little things like lack of access to a good practice room -- but I really don't seem to have "it.")
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Watch this (Maker) Space
TechShop may be having a Mark Twain moment.
However, far from there being a "rumor" of its demise, it was the CEO who sent a mass emailing and open letter to the Maker community in which he stated Chapter 7 had been filed, the company was dissolved, and the assets were now in the hands of the court.
As of a week ago there's a new email drifting around (which much smaller circulation*) in which that same CEO says they've sold the company and it will arise anew as TechShop 2.0. And oh yeah; they didn't actually file the Chapter 7.
However, far from there being a "rumor" of its demise, it was the CEO who sent a mass emailing and open letter to the Maker community in which he stated Chapter 7 had been filed, the company was dissolved, and the assets were now in the hands of the court.
As of a week ago there's a new email drifting around (which much smaller circulation*) in which that same CEO says they've sold the company and it will arise anew as TechShop 2.0. And oh yeah; they didn't actually file the Chapter 7.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Ahhiyawa!
I think it was Mark Twain who said the world lost a perfectly good swear word when H. Rider Haggard chose to name a character "Umslopogaas." I've found myself saying "Ahhiyawa!" recently. But, really, half the names given on the funerary inscription of Ramses III at Medinet Habu would make pretty good swears as well.
Yes; "Ahhiyawan" is probably "Achaean" in yet another language (peoples of the Bronze Age had more names than a character in a Russian Novel), but where are they? Apparently in Southern Anatolia. Umm...isn't Greece, like, the other direction?
Welcome to the Late Bronze Age. As the potential itinerary of my novel expands, I've been having to read up on the Hatti (sorry...Hittites), Mitani, Khasa, Philistines, Phoenicians, Scythians, Assyrians, Babylonians (plus the various "neo" Assyrian and Babylonian empires), Canaan in general and outliers like the Ugaritic civilization...and that isn't the end of the list, I just got tired of typing.
And, yeah, Troy is back on the table. As Wilusa, of course. If there's anyone in ca 1190 BCE who even thinks that little siege would make a really spectacular story, they still haven't gotten around to adding random gods and damsels to the mix. Nor a wooden horse. They have no inkling at all that centuries later there's going to be Romans claiming descent from a survivor, and oh yeah if some old guy is still trying to row his boat back across the Aegean they haven't been talking about that yet, either.
A quick browse through the Kindle archives and there's at least two works of (recent) historical fiction set in Wilusa. Or at least starting there. Dunno if Homer is nodding or rolling but there it is.
So I started researching dates. And the first realization is that the progress of the Bronze Age Collapse can be roughly placed in three stages, with the middle one -- the time my story is set -- being as short as five years.
I could indeed cover most of the hot spots within a couple of years. It would be possible for someone to fight at Wilusa, observe the fall of Ugarit, visit the ruins of Mycenae, and still get back to the Nile Delta in time for Ramses III's big party.
(The other realization is more like a deepening appreciation for how much we still don't know and how much sources disagree. Boy do sources disagree. And that's after you take into account the huge changes that have been happening since the 90's and basically accelerating since; within this decade good data is finally starting to come out of Turkish and former Soviet Union excavations.)
Except that's also a change in plan on my part. It is a complex path I took to get there, but one of the big things to fold in is that many of the peoples moving about are refugees, not pirate gangs. Even in the inscription at Medinet Habu some of the attacking "Sea Peoples" are shown with families and oxen and everything else you need to do the Anatevka walk into a new land.
Match this with a peculiarity of the destruction in several places; that the palatial centers, the ostentatiously expensive palaces and temples and noble houses are the ones that got burned. And the reduced population continued to live in more or less the same area. This doesn't sound like an invasion.
It sounds like a peasant revolt. In any case, how ever you read it, I'm not seeing the massacre by Ramses III as being the happy ending.
Yes; "Ahhiyawan" is probably "Achaean" in yet another language (peoples of the Bronze Age had more names than a character in a Russian Novel), but where are they? Apparently in Southern Anatolia. Umm...isn't Greece, like, the other direction?
Welcome to the Late Bronze Age. As the potential itinerary of my novel expands, I've been having to read up on the Hatti (sorry...Hittites), Mitani, Khasa, Philistines, Phoenicians, Scythians, Assyrians, Babylonians (plus the various "neo" Assyrian and Babylonian empires), Canaan in general and outliers like the Ugaritic civilization...and that isn't the end of the list, I just got tired of typing.
And, yeah, Troy is back on the table. As Wilusa, of course. If there's anyone in ca 1190 BCE who even thinks that little siege would make a really spectacular story, they still haven't gotten around to adding random gods and damsels to the mix. Nor a wooden horse. They have no inkling at all that centuries later there's going to be Romans claiming descent from a survivor, and oh yeah if some old guy is still trying to row his boat back across the Aegean they haven't been talking about that yet, either.
A quick browse through the Kindle archives and there's at least two works of (recent) historical fiction set in Wilusa. Or at least starting there. Dunno if Homer is nodding or rolling but there it is.
So I started researching dates. And the first realization is that the progress of the Bronze Age Collapse can be roughly placed in three stages, with the middle one -- the time my story is set -- being as short as five years.
I could indeed cover most of the hot spots within a couple of years. It would be possible for someone to fight at Wilusa, observe the fall of Ugarit, visit the ruins of Mycenae, and still get back to the Nile Delta in time for Ramses III's big party.
(The other realization is more like a deepening appreciation for how much we still don't know and how much sources disagree. Boy do sources disagree. And that's after you take into account the huge changes that have been happening since the 90's and basically accelerating since; within this decade good data is finally starting to come out of Turkish and former Soviet Union excavations.)
Except that's also a change in plan on my part. It is a complex path I took to get there, but one of the big things to fold in is that many of the peoples moving about are refugees, not pirate gangs. Even in the inscription at Medinet Habu some of the attacking "Sea Peoples" are shown with families and oxen and everything else you need to do the Anatevka walk into a new land.
Match this with a peculiarity of the destruction in several places; that the palatial centers, the ostentatiously expensive palaces and temples and noble houses are the ones that got burned. And the reduced population continued to live in more or less the same area. This doesn't sound like an invasion.
It sounds like a peasant revolt. In any case, how ever you read it, I'm not seeing the massacre by Ramses III as being the happy ending.
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