e-ni-jo-te

I just realized I've been here before.

I've been reading an exhaustive analysis and comparison of the Linear B archives of Knossos and Pylos. Also reading a series of papers by John Younger which attempt to infer something of the lives of Minoan and Mycenaean women through surviving art.

And then I remembered. Way back when, I was reading a ton about contemporary (or at least post-war) Japan.  At some point I wrote a novel set in a pastiche version of that world. You could cast that as anthropological research, especially as the material was about a living culture (a big chunk was oral histories, even). And I'd cast the stuff I'm reading now as primarily archaeological and epigraphic. But it comes down to the same things; trying to understand a society, its material culture, and the way individuals within it experience it.

For the Mycenae, the depths of time are so great and our windows so narrow and strangely-shaped. It is like trying to reconstruct the economic functions of the poultry farm through Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. We just don't have the deep cultural understanding to be able to detect biases in the material.

(I think the primary difference between my study of post-war Japan and my study of pre-collapse Mycenae is I'm in much closer proximity to the primary materials. To properly understand the conclusions based on the available epigraphics you have to understand a little of how those actually work, and the majority of scholarly writers make sure to aid this understanding. Plus, the Linear B tablets are not just documentation of the world of the novel, they are props within the novel. So I'm making some smallish efforts to understand how you read it).




Every day I discover new resources. I had to start a new Scrivener doc to start actually organizing the research. Thing is, I can't just collect data. This isn't like writing something in a well-documented period where you can just add to your notes; "Made in Detroit, introduced in 1937, seats four." Especially within papers (which is half of what I'm reading now) the presentation is more, "Based on this one specific data set that is the focus of this study, a potential conclusion is that the object came from somewhere outside the empire and was larger than the better-documented one that is known to only seat two. And a pen case marked with the serekh of Seti I was found in the same archaeological context giving it a tentative dating of in or after the latter part of the 19th Dynasty..."*

So I've been typing out quotes from the material, with full citations so I can look back at the full context if need be. Not the easiest way to document research. I haven't figured out how to cross-link within Scrivener, either. (Worse, half the stuff I'm reading is in scanned form only so I can't cut-and-paste. Unless I learn and am prepared to go through the whole OCR stage as well.)




And I'm still dealing with the word count problem. As close as I can estimate, the Crete material is going to hit around 60,000 words. That's too short for a novel and too long for anything else. If it was under a third of the page count it would let me collect it with other material, but you can't go over half way with one plot then spend the remainder of the book doing something completely different.

I do mean to decompress. I've been aware over several of my recent efforts in fiction I'm overloading my paragraphs, right down to the sentence level. Yes, every paragraph should accomplish more than one thing, but I've been trying to stick too much detail and too much nuance, and doing it badly; doing it with comma splices and stacks upon stacks of adjectives. I need to give each concept, and each moment, each "beat" of dialog the room to breathe.

But that's not going to get me to 90K. Sure, it seems easy to add material (it certainly was for the Tomb Raider/SG1 fanfic. Too easy; I'd dream up two or three interesting things for each chapter and discover that between them they'd bloat the word count over 10K). You can pad description. You can pad dialog. You can even add incident. But none of these are story. And it is story that I need.





* "...although Evans argues convincingly that the Seti I pen case had slipped from a higher level during the original excavation and can not be used to date that particular horizon..."