I've been organizing my Kindle collection and adding even more history books (there's still several I really want to read that are either only in hardback, in the $150 and up range, or both).
Amazon Kindle seems to have gotten even more cagey about revealing publication history, especially when it is a reprint title. Fortunately, it is quite clear when you start reading the sample pages of what looks like a useful reference that it is a reprint of something from 1914.
And even if it isn't...if somehow I've stumbled on a modern but isolated academic writer who still ascribes to outmoded ideas and couches them in old-fashioned terms...well, I don't really need that book, either.
As I was telling a friend last night, writing fiction in the Late Bronze Age involves a strange paradox. On the one hand, so much is still unknown and what is seemingly knowable is hotly debated; this appears to offer to the writer free reign in creativity.
On the gripping hand, though, the archaeological and textual evidence is meticulous (meticulously collected and meticulously argued in precise, savage, point-by-point academic writings).
My feeling is you must know the data, and the most current data possible, if you are going to pretend to be writing history (the escape hatch is always open to chose to write clear fantasy).
Meanwhile my current plot is a drawing of a line. I've got this line with sweeps on it that represent the build through climactic events to the finale chapter. It also has two zero crossings to reflect the sort of Act II/III shift I've talked about in the past; the places where what had been the goal becomes changed or clearly impossible, the very shape of the perceived world changes.
And the smatterings of a cast. Who are still carrying around place-holder names; there's 163, the scrawny and unprepossessing official scribe of the Weaver's Hall (named for an apparently historical individual identified only by his handwriting). And there's the firebrand revolutionary, hiding a cruel pragmatism below his populist speech, and almost as dangerous as he thinks he is, whom I've saddled with the unfortunate place-holder Dildano.
And I have to say I'm really looking forward to Setna's appearance in the last couple chapters. He's almost an out of context problem to the situation on Crete; rich beyond the imagination of most of my cast, a representative of a nation ridiculously powerful, and an outsider with cutting insight into the larger context.
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