Holding Pattern

Sick most of the week. Work a half-day, collapse on the couch, stir long enough to eat a little and sleep ten hours. Not a lot done.

Better now...but still feeling overwhelmed by the creative projects. Even after winnowing out and concentrating down I still have two massive difficult things going on. One is trying to get some music done. The other is writing my first serious historical fiction.

Weird note on that. The last two fanfics were both subtly historical pieces. One was set in 1995, the other in the first decade of the 2000's. The later also involved me in fairly intense research about pre-dynastic Egypt, the Battle of Lepanto, the Siege of Marienburg, the reign of Rudolph II (and his Kunstkammer at Prague castle), and the Manhattan Project.

But I've only completed a novel once (it didn't sell) and it is a hell of a task. Making it historical fiction only makes it that much more insane.

Meanwhile I'm getting conscious again of just how poorly I play my selected instruments. The project currently in Reaper files is stalled because my fingers aren't fast enough for a guitar riff I want and I can't seem to move forward without it. And the other ideas percolating (so very, very many of them) depend on more music theory, more sight-reading. I've done ninety percent of the work towards setting up a keyboard so I can work at the piano again to problem-solve and try out ideas, but that last ten percent is rapidly declining under "Oh, here's a flat surface to put these bills and magazines on."

Last dozen practice sessions on the violin have all been bowing exercises. I picked up some bad habits. Or never learned the good habits. Had to go as far as simply holding the bow still and trying to rock from one string to another without making any noise. I've been dipping the bow, especially when chasing a scale up the neck. I've also been overcompensating when I cross strings.

But the worst is that I was starting the stroke before changing the bow angle. It is a millisecond difference in timing, but I'm finally getting programmed into my muscle memory to start the stroke after the angle change. And that cleans up my sound so very, very much I'm reluctant to do anything else, not practice tunes, not record, not do another video until I've made that instinctive.

That's gonna take another week worth of practice. Oh, yeah. And surgery is three days away.

Trumpeting at Intervals

I'm having a problem with the trumpet. Something it does that is unlike any other instrument I play. And I think the only way to fix it is to move into sight-reading.

The problem is intervals.

A melody or motif isn't a fixed set of pitches, it is the relationships between those pitches. This distance between two pitches, this interval, can be so distinctive it will still be audible from the first "dit-dit-dit-dah" to the last cadence of Beethoven's Fifth. So distinctive you know from that first minor seventh that you are about to hear "Somewhere" from West Side Story.

The various intervals have emotional content, they fit into certain classical relationships, they relate in various ways to the scale; they are all distinct structural elements that can often be inferred from the rest of a tune. So it follows that intervals is how we usually remember, or reconstruct -- or for that matter construct -- a melody.

And, yeah. I'm mostly playing by ear and I'm finding my way on the fingerboard or tone holes by thinking about the intervals I'm trying to play.

The guitar is the most straight-forward.

Each fret is a half-step. So to get that perfect fourth that opens "Amazing Grace" or "Oh Tannenbaum" you count up five half-steps; five frets. And the really cool thing is, as long as you remember how many steps are between your strings, you can always map from whatever arbitrary fret and string you are at to at least one place that meets the necessary interval. For instance, if you started on the open B string on a guitar, the top E is already that perfect fourth.

In one way violin is easier; all the strings are the same fifth apart. However, the academy finger position is spaced over what would be seven frets on the guitar; so that the fourth finger in first position is at the same pitch as the next higher open string. This is achieved by the same distribution of half steps and whole steps as underlies the classical modes or scales (of which the major and minor scales are most common in Western music). Still by shifting to a "low finger" or "high finger" the entire chromatic range is achieved -- thus it amounts to the same thing in the end.

Keyboards and most wind instruments present the pitches in a similar linear fashion, particularly if you are staying within the root scale; for piano, that would be the white keys. The full chromatic range -- the tones that fall outside the scale -- are presented in that example as black keys. On a recorder, they show up as half-holed and cross-fingered notes...but now is not the time for a lecture on accidentals and why there are transposing instruments.

Point is, the brass -- in the case I'm talking about, the trumpet -- don't present this way.

On a recorder, there are as many finger holes as there are scale tones in a single octave. On a trumpet, you have three valves. They each switch in an extra bit of tubing, increasing the length of the trumpet; nominally, to lower the pitch by a whole step for the first valve, a half step for the second valve, and a step and a half for the third (that is, the same decrease in pitch achieved by holding down the first and second valves).

So how do you get the 2 + octave range? By overblowing. Sort of. As you change your embouchure, you cause the air column inside the trumpet to vibrate at different multiples of the fundamental (you can actually play the fundamental -- known in those circles as a pedal tone -- but it isn't considered part of the usual written range of the instrument). If you look at the chart below, you can see the distance from the 1st overtone to the 2nd overtone is a perfect fifth; just one half-step more than what you get if you depress all three valves together. Thus the entire chromatic range is available to the performer.

Thing is, the harmonic series is a converging series of smaller and smaller intervals. The relationship -- the interval -- between any two notes is, unlike every other example I've given, dependent on what those specific notes are. At one set of pitches a major third might require first and second valves held down together, in another just a single valve, in another no valves at all!

(And yes, that means there are alternate fingerings for the higher notes; something that is of use in several advanced performance techniques). If it was just fingers changing, that would be bad enough, but the "slots" (brass player speak for the different harmonics) are achieved with subtle shifts in the tension of various facial muscles; more felt than targeted.

And that's the problem I have. There's no clear physical relationship between any arbitrary pair of pitches. You can't count frets to chart a path from one to the other. Each trumpet pitch is a unique entity. (Yes, yes...you can usually go down from where you are, but going up is...confusing).

This is why I need to move to sheet music. I can't approach a melody with intervals. I need to go to exact pitches; I need to link the dot on the page (or the written pitch) to the neuromuscular memory for that pitch. I need to sight-read if I want to expand my trumpet repertoire.

Pi-Ramses Lost

Since last September. That's how long it took me to cobble up an outline. Well, honestly, at least half that time was just doing general research.

It took me the last several months to work almost crabwise to an acceptance that all the stuff that had grown out of what was originally background detail for one of five characters was incompatible with the story of a group of adventurers on a whirlwind tour of the Bronze Age Aegean. But I wasn't willing to let go of all the stuff I'd been doing with my Cretan Weaver, or with the Egyptian Scribe, and I was blocked as I tried to figure out any way to cut between one and the other without destroying their story arcs.

Over the past week I read an article or two on fictional dystopias and watched most of Peter Capaldi's last season (the one with Bill Potts). And reading almost simultaneously an academic exploration of the origins of the Jason and the Argonauts story/myth and a light but well-done "Hornblower in Space" set of stories (no, not Honor Harrington. Alexis Carrew.) Oh, yes, and playing Fallout 4. And somehow all of these jumbled together to jolt me onto a fresh track. To wit; make the meeting between Setna and Kes earlier. Bring him to Crete while her story is still in progress, and make him part of it.

And it started spinning from there. When he shows up it is a shift in goals (which I'd intended already). Bring him in for Act III and it is a classic three-act structure. The first act is internally about her fitting in, finding her place (and geeking out about weaving, and later language). And externally about Knossos at peace, the height of the Mycenae koine, a good place that the later events will threaten.

And the second act brings in the threats. Crete is a good place to explore the Mycenae, and the history back to the Minoans, and look at some of the stressors that may have led to the Collapse. Among them being peasant flight and possible revolt. And Setna enters, but not as rescuer or even as coda to Kes' adventures on Crete. He brings the larger perspective, including historical and an elite's understanding of realpolitik, and this is when Kes really comes into her own, taking up at last the burden of the Birds of Stone. And, yeah, externally this is also about the transition from Mycenaean Age to Greek Dark Ages, from the bureaucrats of the Linear B tablets to the warlords of Homer.

And where does it climax and where do I end? Not sure yet. It very much ends with more story to be told because I very much want to continue in two or three other books. (Although I'm pretty sure, based on what the outline has done to the timing of external events, that by the end of the book significant parts of the population are moving inland to start up new towns in the protected fastnesses of the mountains.)

But all in all, I could do worse than end with a, "Here lies Hector, tamer of horses."

Golden Apples

While I was thinking about language in historical fiction I decided if I were to write the Atlantis story it would be in unapologetically modern language.

Trouble I have with that one is merging the two worlds. One thread is the Luwian Hypothesis, which puts a coalition of bronze-age Mycenaeans against a powerful empire based around Troy. Which in my particular conflation is also the Evil Empire of Atlantis, scourge of Plato's heroic Athenians.

And that's a lot of fun, a clash of technologies, chariots versus flying machines, crystal-powered rayguns versus spears. With all the gadgeteer type military SF fun of reverse-engineering and stealing and otherwise making rapid adaptations in the tech and methods of both sides.

The other thread is the Trojan War epic. Which is really two stories. One is the war, the other is the back-alley shenanigans of the gods. At various crisis points they intersect.

And when I think about the Atlantis story, it is this half I find myself inventing for. Moments like Oenone giving Paris a big dressing-down after his terrible lapse in Judgement, and then settling in to the long fight of a mere nymph against one or more of the Olympian Gods (conniving Aphrodite first on the list, of course.) Or, through connection to her sister Thetis (not canonical but why not?) a late-story turning of Achilles to the side of good. And particularly Paris as a young, callow, realistically flawed hero who grows and learns.

I don't know if those two worlds can ever meet but I sense a heck of a fun story in there if they could.

Well, if there's fake books...

Been so tired at work lately I spend my breaks, well, breaking. Too tired and no concentration for practice. Well, got the violin up on my shoulder yesterday anyhow and that was a good thing. (Worked almost entirely on string crossings, silent reverses, and vibrato.)

But I've put aside any illusion that I'm going to be able to come up with the practice hours many people describe. (I'm still not convinced those are entirely useful hours. I think focusing on time spent is the wrong way to go about it; better to focus on the actual learning. The best thing time gives you is comfort and familiarity -- which is also the best anodyne to stage fright.)

At the end of the day, though, I'm Theater. I never got into this to play an instrument. I got into it to make music. The violin is a sound I want for compositions and I'll make use of what I can do and work around what I can't.



I have a good variety of tonal options now. I can't play any of them well, but since I emphasized breadth over depth I have a variety of techniques to employ. I can't play that clean but I can play expressively; it works okay if I'm recording the best take and tweaking it in the mix. I keep having the window shopping urge, though. There's always new accessories, of course. Finally found a plunger mute for my trumpet but want the pixie mute to go with it now (plus I'm starting to outgrow that starter horn). Need a strap for my electric uke but resisted the urge to buy effects pedals for it -- and resisted with more difficulty the urge to build effects pedals for it -- because Reaper is fast enough to do good basic effects in software with almost no lag.

And the sax -- rather, Yamaha Venova -- is coming along better than expected, enough that I am having a longing for a real, alto, sax.

But I have enough to create music. And I'm backing off from the trap of thinking I have to perform everything -- MIDI still has a place. As does collaboration. Drummer friend of mine is quite open to doing some drumming for me.

At a price. His trade is he wants me to perform with him. Incidental music for stage plays. Live.

Maybe I do need to increase those practice hours after all.

"By Jove!" he thundered.

I've got voices in my head.

Character voices. It's a great method to work out details of their background and how they interact and their distinctive voices; set them to talking.

It is also a way to explore the idiosyncrasies of the Translation Convention.




The reader is going to read the book, dialog and all, in a language which is comfortable to them, regardless of what the characters might have been originally using. Thing is, this is one of those illusions that works best when it goes unremarked.

It may be an obscure example, but in the Japanese theatre the ninja-like garb of the kuroko stage hands is a signal to the audience that these people don't exist within the frame of the story. This approach reaches its height with the puppetry art of bunraku. On first glance the stage is crowded with people in black (three puppeteers are necessary for each puppet.) Blink, and most of them go away, leaving just the actors in the story.

The thing about invisibly accessible dialog is it is terribly easy to throw a stumbling block in front of the reader. The moment the reader notices a word choice, they are thrown out of that easy immersion. They stop hearing the character voices, and start seeing words on a page where an author has made choices.

The easiest way to throw the reader out is to use speech that sounds too colloquial. Never mind that "Okay" has citations going back to 1839, and "puke" was invented by Shakespeare; use either in a novel set much earlier than 1920 and your audience is going to stop, lift their eyes from the page, and ask, "Did they really say that then?"

What's funny is that this is not restricted to language that is plausibly correct for the period. (Strongly related to the Translation Convention is the unsaid understanding that dialog is edited for clarity and time; it is understood that no-one actually talked like that -- ever! -- but the reader is willing to pretend they do rather than wade through page after page of, "Um, well, the way we sorta did the thing, I mean the thing, um, the thing we were doing, was..." The same goes for overly exact replications of period speech patterns and slang.)

That is to say, an "Okay" can yank the reader out of a story set in Ancient Rome, too. Despite that the text is modern English, not Latin. As I said, the Translation Convention only works when the reader is able to pretend it isn't there.




Linguistic origins are another potential stumbling block. In my trunk novel Shirato the setting is an alternate world but the conceit is that the culture we spend most of our time with is speaking colloquial modern Japanese. So it is "understood" that the dialog on the page is translated from Japanese into nearest English equivalents. Then I had a nuclear reactor to describe and hit an interesting problem. They could speak of plutonium, and gamma radiation, but the blue glow of Cherenkov was off the table. Why? Because "Cherenkov" was obviously derived from the name of a Russian, and there's no Russia in the world of the story.

Of course there are no Roman Gods (Pluto), or Greek Alphabet (Gamma) in that world, either. The point of how the Translation Convention works is not that the words are somehow right or wrong, it is whether the words are obvious enough to the reader to attract their attention in the moment. 

Randall Munroe pointed this out in a strip he did about Star Wars. Han Solo has just identified his ship, the Millennium Falcon, and Luke Skywalker asks, "What's that?" When Han starts in the Kessel Run story, Luke stops him, "No, I mean; what's a falcon?"

Of course many, many writers try to get around the terrestrial animal problem with what James Blish dismissively called the, "Call a rabbit a smerp" method. This is usually a failure. Even David Weber is guilty with his "near-bears" and "psuedo-corn" and whatever, despite there being good reasons for those terms in-world. It still stops the story while you think about it.

So is the related, "Hold your hippogryphs" attempts to localize.  On a really good day, a character can yell, "By Toutatis!" or "Great Hera!" and it slots into the "interesting and different thing a character says that helps make them distinctive" place in the reader's brain. But try out, "A Flying Greebix in the hand is better than two in the Vorus-Fruit thicket," and the reader will find themselves contemplating your cleverness -- or lack of it.

It's the sort of thing that some writers and some texts get away with better than others (Sir Pterry was a master). And often there are no good solutions. If you write "Cat" then the reader may ask, "They have cats on Alpha Centauri?" If you write "Smerp" they'll wonder what that is. If you write "Neo-Cat" they'll also take note; which is a good way to intentionally attract the eye to the way things are different there, but in many cases to the local it fills the cat-shaped hole and even if it doesn't look exactly like a cat or meow exactly like a cat, it is, for all intents and purposes, just a cat.

In short, if it is there for color then, sure, give it an interesting name and remark on it. But if the point is getting from point A to point B so the plot can progress, it is better to call it a horse.




And then there's where the language is successfully transparent but is saying the wrong things. The horse of the late Bronze Age had yet to be bred and trained to riding; they pulled chariots. And the sheep had yet to be selected for sheering (bronze makes louse scissors) so they were more hairy than wooly. Not a real problem; if chariots or wool come up in the story you can explain then how it works in period.

Thing is, we have language to describe many of the places and things of the Bronze Age. But that language is foreign. Spear and shield and sword have become invisible enough to use. But what of, say, amphora? There are a great many understood Greek terms for things that were common in the late Bronze Age. But they are Classical Greek, in some cases originating in the archaic Greek of Homer, which is on the other side of the Greek Dark Ages from Mycenaean Greek. Which we don't really know; it is so poorly transcribed in Linear B most academic works chose to spell out the words rather than try to give a more colloquial transcription.

And many of the common words for people and things of the Egyptian New Kingdom are...Greek. Also Classical Greek. Again there is a transcription problem, as the older Hieroglyphs do not preserve vowels.

So there is a terrible balance necessary by the writer here on whether to try to use an anglo-saxon (or a franco-germanic-latinate loan word incorporated so long ago into English it merely reads as "English,") or a Greek word that has more color and specificity but might cause the reader confusion, or a best attempt at a Mycenaean term which would be nearly impenetrable.

This gets really basic. "Crete" sticks in the reader's eye because it is clearly modern. "Kriti" gets a semi-pass except that it is at best early Greek -- but I read a book recently in which the author chose that for his Minoan characters. (Oh, and don't get me started on "Minoan!")

What I meant by misleading above is that the more you use words from Classical Greece, the more you lose the distinctions of this earlier and quite different Bronze Age society. Just as if all you have is "pots" and "boats" it loses all distinctiveness as a culture.

(Yes, you could go on to describe the thing in detail, as I did with the horse and sheep above, but there are always tradeoffs. Sometimes you need the text to move more efficiently than that.)

And then comes those places where the easy, familiar, nearly-invisible term is saying the wrong things.




I was doing a trial sketch of a scene for the novel. There's a mild earthquake, and my POV character ascribes it to "The Earth-Shaker." Which is one of the sobriquets of Poseidon. Or perhaps aspects. And this already is a problem; that gods are rarely immutable points in most cultures. They have different local versions, different faces for different occasions, different personalities that are often treated as distinct entities. And they change with time.

It's a problem I had my characters point out in my Stargate fanfic; when you say, "Hathor is the goddess of fertility and music" you are making a mistake.

In any case, I chose "Earth-Shaker" because that fit the voice of the character. The Earth-Shaker can be identified with Poseidon, but this is not quite the Poseidon of Classic Greece. In Homer's time Poseidon was connected to earthquakes, the sea, and horses. (Sure, why not.) In the Mycenaean times the sea was more the bailiwick of other gods and Poseidon's role was closer to that of being chief honcho (although there's also a Zeus, and a female Zeus...and it gets complicated).

So, even though calling him "Earth-Shaker" is uninformative to the reader, calling him "Poseidon" can give the reader the wrong impression. Just like using any other Classical Greek terminology can give the wrong impression. And part of this is educating the reader; Athens always had an Acropolis, because an Acropolis is a hill (or, rather, the use of a height for a structure). That's the name, that's what it means, but the reader is going to be imagining the Parthenon up there and it has too good a chance of dragging them out of the story while they ponder when that was actually built.




As usual, there are no simple solutions. Worth noting that there are distinct approaches. If you start a book with a bunch of italicized words that are very much calling attention to themselves as foreign and/or technical terminology the reader will adjust and, in time, be reading smoothly again.

If you start ultra-colloquially, that also will vanish in time (although you still risk dragging the reader back out of the story when they notice just how much someone is sounding like, say, a pulp noir detective.)

The most invisible, and the way most writers go especially for English earlier than King James and all historical periods before that is to use slightly more formal language. Full sentences, an avoidance of contractions. This does become problematic when you want a character or a speech to stand out for being rough-talking; if your Roman Legate has instructed, "Have the men draw up in equal ranks, and we will proceed across the marsh to engage the enemy directly," it is difficult to follow this with the grizzled old Centurion turning to shout at his troops, "Roight, you lot!"

Key to the Past

NOT a free plot bunny. It might be, instead, the archaeology novel I should have set out to write.



See, when I was working on my Stargate/Tomb Raider cross-over fanfic, there came a point where I wanted to separate Lara Croft from SG1 and have them both working on the mystery from different angles. Best way to have some time pass was for her to go low-profile and instead of flying direct to the next McGuffin, have to hitch a ride and drive across the US.

Which turned out to be the American Southwest (she started in Colorado and was heading to California). And I had the idea of her hooking up with a cable television pseudo-archaeologist, and there was a real one who had a whole team, a paramilitary look, and some unusual cars. So why not take this further: especially since I had by this point determined I was going to visit the Trinity Site (the first atom bomb), why not follow the people who have rebuilt the Landmaster from Damnation Alley and give my fictional team a reproduction Ark II from the television show of the same name.

I didn't flesh out the team too much because they were strictly side characters; there for atmosphere, with the Tomb Raider and Stargate casts continuing to do the heavy lifting. But I did flesh them out a bit; R. Barringer Newberry, the huckster and showman that might underneath it all believe in the greater truth he claims to seek. Barry Wentworth, the "tame scientist"; a shy, out of shape Aggie (Texas A&M) who pursues cryptids (that is, creatures like Bigfoot and Nessie) with intellectual honesty and scientific rigor.

Stan, Newberry's quiet older brother, who built Ark II, shows a surprising reserve of personal courage, and could in a longer novel be the required resident mechanical genius. Sarah Cojuangco, a driven athlete trying to make a name for herself in the extreme sports field, who does all the climbing and caving. And Wendy, who didn't get a last name in the credits of Key to the Past on the History Channel (she was only there for the eye candy) and in any case dropped out before Lara Croft came on the scene.

So all you need is to flesh out the team a bit more with a few drivers and someone to handle the high-tech instruments, and put in a legit archaeologist who fell into doing this when they couldn't find steady work in CRM (Cultural Resource Management; basically the legal requirement to make sure a new building project isn't going to destroy a significant archaeological site). So the conflict, between pseudo-archaeology and real science, and between cash and publicity versus professional anathema, is built into the protagonist themselves, with Newberry both companion and foil in the adventure.



And, well....!

So this would be all in the United States. We may not have history going all that far back (even the First Nations history is relatively recent, at least compared to Europe, much less Mesopotamia). But we have it and there's a lot of interesting stuff to delve into, from the Civil War to Cahokia. And there aren't so many of the monuments of pseudo-archaeology; no Giza Pyramids, no Yonagai Formation, but there are the Mounds, and Roswell -- there's enough (enough in the real world to have spawned a half-dozen cable television shows).

Plus a novel could do what I did with the fanfic; play with the back roads and the roadside Americana, all that Muffler Man and Googie diners and museums for giant balls of string.

I've been across the US a few times and wouldn't be against some more exploration. And I've mucked around some of the corners of the pseudo-history world, mostly in re various long-lived conspiracy theories and associated nonsense (JFK, the Apollo Program, Young Earth Creationism). And I'm not uninterested in the history of the US, going all the way back to the prehistory; back to Clovis and pre-Clovis (and very much not including any damned Solutreans, thank you very much!) So research would be fun and isn't entirely unfamiliar ground.

And doing boots on-the-ground research to get the look and feel of a Nevada ghost town is a lot cheaper than paying for flights to Greece and trying to recreate the look-and-feel of the Bronze Age Aegean!

Of course the essential problem of an archaeological fantasy is still there; how to have a secret which is dangerous to uncover and awesome when found but still stay within the bounds of honesty to real science -- particularly since the real history is so recent, there are peoples and cultures and even families who are still around.

About the only loose thread I have to pull on so far with this is the idea that what they find is never what they were originally looking for. As in, they might look for the truth of the Kensington Rune Stone, end up showing to the reader just how ridiculously wrong the KRS theories are, but while they are there finding something............else.

I'm not sure this actually helps, but it is an idea.