I lost track of the other point I meant to make in the last post. And that is how ridiculously easy it is to justify a certain kind of set dressing in-story. I set up up a situation in my last fanfic where Teal’c — having promised “not to go shooting up the place” — ends up defending Croft Manor by making use of the museum’s-worth of ancient arms and armor displayed in the lavish halls. To the extent that the mercenary leader responds to the increasingly bizarre reports he’s getting on the radio with, “Is this a SITREP or a game of Clue?”
But that was just for the amusement factor. Since I'm doing a story in Athens about antiquities smuggling it would be both far too tempting and far too easy to end up with a climax that's drawn straight from one of the duels in The Illiad. Bronze armor and all. But I don't want to go there, not with this. I did a whole set of short stories in which I played this game and hopefully that got most of it out of my system.
(I'm trying to think of a clearer example of what I'm talking about, this sort of taking a theme and putting it on everything. Say the plot de jour is a pirate treasure. It would just so happen that the only marine salvage vessel they could get their hands on was an old sailing ship, it would just so happen that one of the bad guys lost an eye and a leg in the Gulf War, and it would just so happen that a major chapter takes place on Talk Like a Pirate Day.)
Sure, classical subjects are going to come up. People are going to quote Homer. But they'll also quote modern authors, and talk about the current economic woes of Greece, and use FaceBook.
And that sort of segues to my current issue. My plot is getting pedestrian. Sure, there's some amusing stuff happening; my protagonist is going to almost fall from the Acropolis, be thrown from a ferry boat, and try to wrestle a giant mook (he's about to smash the titular antiquity). But I came up with this idea as a way of excusing or at least smoothing an acceptance (okay, let's be honest; my acceptance) of both some pseudo-archaeological discoveries and some crazed stunting around. Plus the conceit that untrained amateur without legal standing is going around discovering things and fighting crooks and whatever.
I don't want to do a story that only verges on the implausible then drop the reader into a sword fight on a submarine as it sinks into Atlantis in the next book. If I mean to write more than one, I'd like to avoid as much "early installment weirdness" as I can.
Even if I’m dry of ideas right now for some new action. In fact, all I can think of at the moment is...to look towards The Odessey for inspiration.
Friday, November 30, 2018
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Disclaimer
Authors writing historical or history-themed fiction cover a spectrum of research ability. Oddly, though, they don't seem to plot in a bell curve. Instead the numbers cluster nearer two ends. On one, there are writers with a frighteningly good grasp of their subject. (They do vary in how well they can carry along the reader; some bring the reader in painlessly and some overwhelm the reader: reaching some sort of uncanny valley with Umberto Eco, where being overwhelmed and confused by the wealth of detail is actually a large part of the draw in reading him.)
On the other peak, there are writers who are indirectly frightening. As in, it is frightening that they managed to get published (and get positive reviews!) Now I've said before that accuracy isn't everything and there is more to good historical fiction than getting the date of Caesar's assassination right.
Still, it is somewhat comforting that few people are writing straight historical fiction from this kind of poor grasp of the material. This is more a tendency of what I've been calling "Artifact Stories," where some Lost Ancient Object of Power drives what is otherwise a standard thriller/adventure/mystery. (I'm going to give a pass to historical romances, first because there's no blanket statement, but second because their goals are generally different.)
In any case the middle ground is less occupied. I have a special fondness for those authors who inhabit it. I suspect it is a transient position; a writer might assay one book set in 44 AD Rome, but by the time they've written two or three they've probably became rather informed about the era.
That's just random musings and has no bearing on where I am now with my own attempts at historical fiction. As I develop the current book, I've been discovering what it is I'd like to do if it were a series. A bit late for this one, though. For instance; I think it would be a nice pattern to always feature two eras of history and/or two distinct cultures. My plot, however, is pretty much centered on Greece, although there's bits from both Classical and Pre-Classical eras.
And oh yeah. And maybe the answer to one of my research woes is to just put in a disclaimer. I want to use my own travel experience both for the time it saves and for that intangible authenticity of actual lived experience. But I don't want to strand some poor traveler by gushing over a shop that was there twenty years ago and was in another town anyhow.
So what the hell. Go right ahead and spell it out in the front matter. "The scenes in Town X are based on my own experience in Town Y in the summer of 2011..."
On the other peak, there are writers who are indirectly frightening. As in, it is frightening that they managed to get published (and get positive reviews!) Now I've said before that accuracy isn't everything and there is more to good historical fiction than getting the date of Caesar's assassination right.
Still, it is somewhat comforting that few people are writing straight historical fiction from this kind of poor grasp of the material. This is more a tendency of what I've been calling "Artifact Stories," where some Lost Ancient Object of Power drives what is otherwise a standard thriller/adventure/mystery. (I'm going to give a pass to historical romances, first because there's no blanket statement, but second because their goals are generally different.)
In any case the middle ground is less occupied. I have a special fondness for those authors who inhabit it. I suspect it is a transient position; a writer might assay one book set in 44 AD Rome, but by the time they've written two or three they've probably became rather informed about the era.
That's just random musings and has no bearing on where I am now with my own attempts at historical fiction. As I develop the current book, I've been discovering what it is I'd like to do if it were a series. A bit late for this one, though. For instance; I think it would be a nice pattern to always feature two eras of history and/or two distinct cultures. My plot, however, is pretty much centered on Greece, although there's bits from both Classical and Pre-Classical eras.
And oh yeah. And maybe the answer to one of my research woes is to just put in a disclaimer. I want to use my own travel experience both for the time it saves and for that intangible authenticity of actual lived experience. But I don't want to strand some poor traveler by gushing over a shop that was there twenty years ago and was in another town anyhow.
So what the hell. Go right ahead and spell it out in the front matter. "The scenes in Town X are based on my own experience in Town Y in the summer of 2011..."
Monday, November 26, 2018
Jumping Jack Splash
So, writing a novel set during the late Bronze Age was turning into years of research. So, I took a step back to do something that didn't have "any" (well, "much,") research. So, now, I'm having some real problems with that concept.
Italy is one. I'm sending my protagonist to Athens and to a small town in Germany because I've been there or near enough. But geography is not my friend, and as the plot evolved it looks to be sending her to Italy as well.
And, yeah, it is disheartening how easy it is to fake a certain kind of shallow flavor. Way back when, I wrote a short story about a game of Assassin at UC Berkeley that goes...strange. In the first draft I went for a 1980's techno-thriller flavor. It didn't work for me, and in the next draft I went film noir. And in a surprising number of places I could literally cross out "black catsuit" and write in "battered fedora" and not have to change another word.
(The old role-playing game Champions institutionalized something like this in the "power effects" mechanism. Say your character could leap tall buildings in a single bound. It didn't matter if they did it with spring-loaded boots or by turning into water and splashing. It was just...color. The referee couldn't say; "It is below freezing on this day and SplashMan can't use his water-based powers" because if that were true, SplashMan's player would have gained character points creating that disadvantage.)
In any case I find this shallow and cheap and these days pretty much shows the reader you can use Google. The good stuff, the stuff I think adds value, is when I've got insight or deep understanding or the personal experience to give a boots-on-the-ground impression. And -- as the bronze age novel was proving -- it is really hard to get to this kind of stuff without a lot of work.
And then there's something else that's bothering me now. It first hit me when I was reading about the rather complicated situation of people in the UK who use metal detectors, but before that I'd been thinking about the Solutrean Hypothesis and how you can't engage with the problem comprehensively without talking about the modern-day experience of Native Americans.
What his me is the problem of cultural appropriation. Which is sad and amusing because that's an underlying theme in the very book I'm working on. I guess I'm reversing myself again; I'm uncomfortable putting stuff in about living people, existing organizations, etc., etc., unless I can be really sure of my facts.
And for that, even having been there or done that, I'm not entirely comfortable. Maybe my experience in Athens was personal and atypical and I mistook a lot of what I was seeing. Heck; this blog started with me assuming my technical theatre experience was both typical and comprehensive enough to justify my pontificating about it.
And after all of that...do I even remember enough? I remember going through some rigamarole with automated ticket sales/trip planner machines in Germany. But do they still have those? Heck, I'm not sure I remember how the Ath.ena transit pass worked; where you bought it, what it covered...and I was just buying and using one last month!
And after all of that...do I even remember enough? I remember going through some rigamarole with automated ticket sales/trip planner machines in Germany. But do they still have those? Heck, I'm not sure I remember how the Ath.ena transit pass worked; where you bought it, what it covered...and I was just buying and using one last month!
Saturday, November 24, 2018
Morning becomes electric
Didn't feel writerly (or up for much of anything). Went to breakfast. Brought my folding keyboard (it goes practically everywhere with me now).
And boom. You know, though, I've changed my opinion. I don't think the morning is necessarily the most creative time. I think it is because it is your first time back at work after a long break to mull over stuff.
I was typing like mad all the way through breakfast.
So I've figured out my gods. And most of the remaining holes in the plot. I'm still sort a Big Bad, and there needs to be something else going on in the climax. And there's a "stuff happens here" sequence after my protagonist crawls out of a Roman Cistern she's been thrown into near Rothenburg.
And there's at least one more little hole. I want to do an echoic scene, an eerily similar moment to something from her very first video. I even have the character for it (another character who doesn't fit the Campfire template, as he has no name that anyone in-story uses). But I don't know where on the trail from Germany to the Peloponnese it fits.
And boom. You know, though, I've changed my opinion. I don't think the morning is necessarily the most creative time. I think it is because it is your first time back at work after a long break to mull over stuff.
I was typing like mad all the way through breakfast.
So I've figured out my gods. And most of the remaining holes in the plot. I'm still sort a Big Bad, and there needs to be something else going on in the climax. And there's a "stuff happens here" sequence after my protagonist crawls out of a Roman Cistern she's been thrown into near Rothenburg.
And there's at least one more little hole. I want to do an echoic scene, an eerily similar moment to something from her very first video. I even have the character for it (another character who doesn't fit the Campfire template, as he has no name that anyone in-story uses). But I don't know where on the trail from Germany to the Peloponnese it fits.
Friday, November 23, 2018
Round Earth Atheist
I've been trying out a new piece of software called Campfire. It is a writer's helper; not a word processor optimized for writing books, like Scrivener, but a story planner.
It is practically public beta so it might seem unfair to rate it now, but in the current state I don't find Campfire useful to me. At the root of the problem is the problem of being prescriptive without also being proscriptive.
Okay, take the character page as example. It prompts you to fill in a box for first, last, and middle name. That's prescriptive; it is reminding you that you might need to come up with the full name of the character because it may very well come up in the story. This is why this software exists; it is a planning software, an outlining software, that helps you nail down details and get them all in a form where it is easy to look them up again in the middle of writing an action scene.
But. Commander Spock doesn't have a first name. His culture doesn't apparently do those. But he does have a naval rank. So this first, last, middle name format is proscriptive here. My new protagonist has at least three names and they are situational, which is an approach that clashes completely with the "this is the real name, it has surname and family name just like everyone we hang out with."
As I said above, this isn't necessarily a criticism of the software as executed. I know they are working on it and will give more flexibility in later versions. (Top of my list is the mandatory background images for all the work pages are pre-installed. I have to look at either Watercolor Portland or Romantic Sunset and that really throws me off when I'm trying to think about sun-drenched Athens and Classical Greek architecture.)
The real conflict is that between having something that will hold your hand and make sure you dot your t's, that puts things in a format where you can easily find, search, compare across file; and with having the freedom to go outside of those rules.
(In the current version the, well I have to call them compromises, are that you can add additional custom blocks on top of the required blocks. Sort of. They appear in a second screen and the primary screen can't be edited. And as for sorting, all of that is handled by meta tags which are not abstracted from any of the previously mentioned blocks but have to be added by hand.)
For the moment, then, I'll stick with Scrivener. (Out of the things I would really love to see in Scrivener, the ability to add string between the index cards would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. It does do some sharing of meta data and will actually track things like character names across files, but being able to visually track connections between elements...)
I'm doing this because I'm trying to solve a little plotting problem. Well, it looked like a little plotting problem ("who thought it was a good idea to invite her?") but it turned out to be just the corner of a big carpet. In the back of my head, events are being manipulated. Manipulated by people that basically are the Greek Gods as presented in Homer.
But I haven't solved if this is obvious to the protagonist. Or to the reader. Or if it is actually a thing and some book down the line we'll actually meet them. Right now the gods are being deniable. It might just be a string of coincidence.
And that's the problem. If "Guilleo" (this character's place-holder name, and that's another thing that clashes with the name block scheme of Campfire) is talking the people at the gallery reception into letting "Athena Fox" visit the archaeological dig in Germany, is that because he is an honest art dealer and doesn't like looters, or because he's an undercover cop possibly pretending to be a crooked dealer himself, or because he's actually in Venice right now and this is the Goddess Athena herself indulging in her second favorite past-time (impersonating a mortal)?
If he is just what he seems I have a cute little scene in which the two of them are bonding with some language games -- but then who thought inviting her to the dig was a good idea? If he is undercover then I get both that scene and a later scene when he is surprisingly hostile (because he's trying to maintain his cover) and I can use him again at the climax -- but then why did he think it was a good idea to get them to invite her, a civilian? (The goddess's motivations are no problem; she figures tossing an Athena Fox into the henhouse is going to stir up things usefully. She's right.) It could even be that the goddess is working at cross-purposes to the cops, but that still begs the question of...are there actually gods in play, and does anyone notice?
This is even getting into my map, because if "Guilleo" is actually Italian then I have an excuse to stop off there on the way back from Germany, and that means I'm going the Venice-Patras ferry boat. (I am dead set on a ferry boat scene but my experience -- and the first draft in my head -- was based on the particulars of the Pireaus-Heraklion ferry. And I know the final action is on an island off the mainland but another thing I am absolutely going to get into the finale even if it makes no sense is The Olympias.)
So, gods. I'm also on for the deniable...but even this is tricky. I have a spooky little girl showing up early on (to do a short info-dump) and there's going to be hints all over her that she's not what she seems. Hints that my protagonist isn't seeped enough yet in the classics to pick up on; for instance, Spooky might give her a necklace with the head of Medusa on it. And there may be owls later.
I mean, Penny has got to figure this stuff out eventually because that's how her character works. She figures stuff out. And the reader needs to figure it out otherwise why waste the paper on it. But what is it that they are figuring out....and is it actually necessary and functional at some junctions of the plot?
I had hoped that if I could stick all these characters and their relationships in Campfire I might be able to figure it out. But as I said at the top......nope.
It is practically public beta so it might seem unfair to rate it now, but in the current state I don't find Campfire useful to me. At the root of the problem is the problem of being prescriptive without also being proscriptive.
Okay, take the character page as example. It prompts you to fill in a box for first, last, and middle name. That's prescriptive; it is reminding you that you might need to come up with the full name of the character because it may very well come up in the story. This is why this software exists; it is a planning software, an outlining software, that helps you nail down details and get them all in a form where it is easy to look them up again in the middle of writing an action scene.
But. Commander Spock doesn't have a first name. His culture doesn't apparently do those. But he does have a naval rank. So this first, last, middle name format is proscriptive here. My new protagonist has at least three names and they are situational, which is an approach that clashes completely with the "this is the real name, it has surname and family name just like everyone we hang out with."
As I said above, this isn't necessarily a criticism of the software as executed. I know they are working on it and will give more flexibility in later versions. (Top of my list is the mandatory background images for all the work pages are pre-installed. I have to look at either Watercolor Portland or Romantic Sunset and that really throws me off when I'm trying to think about sun-drenched Athens and Classical Greek architecture.)
The real conflict is that between having something that will hold your hand and make sure you dot your t's, that puts things in a format where you can easily find, search, compare across file; and with having the freedom to go outside of those rules.
(In the current version the, well I have to call them compromises, are that you can add additional custom blocks on top of the required blocks. Sort of. They appear in a second screen and the primary screen can't be edited. And as for sorting, all of that is handled by meta tags which are not abstracted from any of the previously mentioned blocks but have to be added by hand.)
For the moment, then, I'll stick with Scrivener. (Out of the things I would really love to see in Scrivener, the ability to add string between the index cards would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. It does do some sharing of meta data and will actually track things like character names across files, but being able to visually track connections between elements...)
I'm doing this because I'm trying to solve a little plotting problem. Well, it looked like a little plotting problem ("who thought it was a good idea to invite her?") but it turned out to be just the corner of a big carpet. In the back of my head, events are being manipulated. Manipulated by people that basically are the Greek Gods as presented in Homer.
But I haven't solved if this is obvious to the protagonist. Or to the reader. Or if it is actually a thing and some book down the line we'll actually meet them. Right now the gods are being deniable. It might just be a string of coincidence.
And that's the problem. If "Guilleo" (this character's place-holder name, and that's another thing that clashes with the name block scheme of Campfire) is talking the people at the gallery reception into letting "Athena Fox" visit the archaeological dig in Germany, is that because he is an honest art dealer and doesn't like looters, or because he's an undercover cop possibly pretending to be a crooked dealer himself, or because he's actually in Venice right now and this is the Goddess Athena herself indulging in her second favorite past-time (impersonating a mortal)?
If he is just what he seems I have a cute little scene in which the two of them are bonding with some language games -- but then who thought inviting her to the dig was a good idea? If he is undercover then I get both that scene and a later scene when he is surprisingly hostile (because he's trying to maintain his cover) and I can use him again at the climax -- but then why did he think it was a good idea to get them to invite her, a civilian? (The goddess's motivations are no problem; she figures tossing an Athena Fox into the henhouse is going to stir up things usefully. She's right.) It could even be that the goddess is working at cross-purposes to the cops, but that still begs the question of...are there actually gods in play, and does anyone notice?
This is even getting into my map, because if "Guilleo" is actually Italian then I have an excuse to stop off there on the way back from Germany, and that means I'm going the Venice-Patras ferry boat. (I am dead set on a ferry boat scene but my experience -- and the first draft in my head -- was based on the particulars of the Pireaus-Heraklion ferry. And I know the final action is on an island off the mainland but another thing I am absolutely going to get into the finale even if it makes no sense is The Olympias.)
So, gods. I'm also on for the deniable...but even this is tricky. I have a spooky little girl showing up early on (to do a short info-dump) and there's going to be hints all over her that she's not what she seems. Hints that my protagonist isn't seeped enough yet in the classics to pick up on; for instance, Spooky might give her a necklace with the head of Medusa on it. And there may be owls later.
I mean, Penny has got to figure this stuff out eventually because that's how her character works. She figures stuff out. And the reader needs to figure it out otherwise why waste the paper on it. But what is it that they are figuring out....and is it actually necessary and functional at some junctions of the plot?
I had hoped that if I could stick all these characters and their relationships in Campfire I might be able to figure it out. But as I said at the top......nope.
Monday, November 19, 2018
The Adventure of the Carmelite Scapular
Titles are hard.
In the modern marketplace, the title of your book has to do more than attract the wandering eye. It also has to identify which of an ever-increasing number of ever-so-much-more-narrowly defined genres it belongs in.
The casual browser doesn’t want to have to read blurb, description, worse yet sample pages in order to find out whether it is actually the near future military werwolf vampire urban fantasy romance that they've been binge-reading these days, or a retro high fantasy action adventure with space ships instead.
Not that this is exactly new. The very idea of SF and Fantasy as definable (and different) brands is this. Brian Aldis did an amusing riff in his encyclopedic history of the field in which he talks about “rich autumnal colours” as one of the signifiers of a Fantasy cover. And someone commented (possibly on Charlie’s blog?) that if they saw another cover of a young woman in tattoos and a leather skirt looking back over her shoulder against a background of night and CO2 ground fog they'd puke up.
Out in the world of historical fiction, there are two kinds of covers I’ve been seeing a lot of. There’s ones which feature a young woman with a challenging expression and lots of diaphanous vaguely-period stuff blowing about her. And there’s ones that are a picture from a pot. Or a fresco — especially for Bronze Age tales, the Minoan frescoes and Mycenaean pottery get a LOT of play.
So my "Crete" should really have The Saffron Gatherer on the cover. Dammit. (Yeah, it's Minoan. Deal with it.)
The novel I'm struggling to name now is modern-day archaeology. Sort of. There are two dominant genres I am aware of that are set in the present day but involve archaeological and historical investigations. One are largely thrillers, the other are more solo adventures.
The lines blur, but the thriller is more likely to have “An international team” in the blurb, one that's “racing to stop a global threat,” and the solo adventure is more likely for the blurb to start with the name of the protagonist. Also, the solo adventurer tends to wear their series nature more openly, if only in the sub-title. (The Swabian Earspoon: a Rake Briskly adventure.)
And especially the later seems to go for artifact titles. Or you could call them MacGuffin titles. Sword of Destiny and Aztec Mask and so forth. Which often matches the content inside; an artifact-centered vision of archaeology, a MacGuffin-driven plot.
So. The fact that I'm both using and deconstructing the formulae means I should probably use an artifact title. That's the way to attract the mainstream audience for this sort of adventure-archaeology romp. But at the same time I'd like to clue in the reader.
So it is tempting to do an Artifact Title that would make the reader go "Wait, what?" In fact, I'm leaning more than a little towards something like The Münster Kylix. A Greek pot in Germany is a clue that something is going on. Also tempting is place names and thing names that just plain sound funny. That's why I used The Enceladus Oinochoe* in my last post.
But at the same time, I'm also tempted to go completely off this formulae with something like, Owed on a Grecian Urn. (Which would be appropriate to the plot, but...would make it look like a quirky detective novel, not an archaeology-inspired adventure.)
* Also appropriate to the plot; Enceladus is a giant met by Athena in a battle that's a frequent subject across several periods of pottery art. And an oinochoe is a small round bottle used to hold scented oils and often apparently worn tied to the wrist of athletes. If I can make the archaeology work out I want to reference that particular fight in the novel in just this way -- pottery art -- as a subtle foreshadow of a later incident. Except for plot reasons the pot should be larger, large enough it can be broken into several pieces -- what they call "orphans" in the antiquities trade -- but broken in such a way the figures aren't damaged.
And then there's the minor problem that more people have heard of Enceladus the prominent moon of Saturn than Enceladus the prominent figure of the Gigantomachy. It would give the title rather more a science fictional flavor than I intend at this early stage.
In the modern marketplace, the title of your book has to do more than attract the wandering eye. It also has to identify which of an ever-increasing number of ever-so-much-more-narrowly defined genres it belongs in.The casual browser doesn’t want to have to read blurb, description, worse yet sample pages in order to find out whether it is actually the near future military werwolf vampire urban fantasy romance that they've been binge-reading these days, or a retro high fantasy action adventure with space ships instead.
Not that this is exactly new. The very idea of SF and Fantasy as definable (and different) brands is this. Brian Aldis did an amusing riff in his encyclopedic history of the field in which he talks about “rich autumnal colours” as one of the signifiers of a Fantasy cover. And someone commented (possibly on Charlie’s blog?) that if they saw another cover of a young woman in tattoos and a leather skirt looking back over her shoulder against a background of night and CO2 ground fog they'd puke up.
Out in the world of historical fiction, there are two kinds of covers I’ve been seeing a lot of. There’s ones which feature a young woman with a challenging expression and lots of diaphanous vaguely-period stuff blowing about her. And there’s ones that are a picture from a pot. Or a fresco — especially for Bronze Age tales, the Minoan frescoes and Mycenaean pottery get a LOT of play.So my "Crete" should really have The Saffron Gatherer on the cover. Dammit. (Yeah, it's Minoan. Deal with it.)
The novel I'm struggling to name now is modern-day archaeology. Sort of. There are two dominant genres I am aware of that are set in the present day but involve archaeological and historical investigations. One are largely thrillers, the other are more solo adventures.
The lines blur, but the thriller is more likely to have “An international team” in the blurb, one that's “racing to stop a global threat,” and the solo adventure is more likely for the blurb to start with the name of the protagonist. Also, the solo adventurer tends to wear their series nature more openly, if only in the sub-title. (The Swabian Earspoon: a Rake Briskly adventure.)
And especially the later seems to go for artifact titles. Or you could call them MacGuffin titles. Sword of Destiny and Aztec Mask and so forth. Which often matches the content inside; an artifact-centered vision of archaeology, a MacGuffin-driven plot.So. The fact that I'm both using and deconstructing the formulae means I should probably use an artifact title. That's the way to attract the mainstream audience for this sort of adventure-archaeology romp. But at the same time I'd like to clue in the reader.
So it is tempting to do an Artifact Title that would make the reader go "Wait, what?" In fact, I'm leaning more than a little towards something like The Münster Kylix. A Greek pot in Germany is a clue that something is going on. Also tempting is place names and thing names that just plain sound funny. That's why I used The Enceladus Oinochoe* in my last post.
But at the same time, I'm also tempted to go completely off this formulae with something like, Owed on a Grecian Urn. (Which would be appropriate to the plot, but...would make it look like a quirky detective novel, not an archaeology-inspired adventure.)
* Also appropriate to the plot; Enceladus is a giant met by Athena in a battle that's a frequent subject across several periods of pottery art. And an oinochoe is a small round bottle used to hold scented oils and often apparently worn tied to the wrist of athletes. If I can make the archaeology work out I want to reference that particular fight in the novel in just this way -- pottery art -- as a subtle foreshadow of a later incident. Except for plot reasons the pot should be larger, large enough it can be broken into several pieces -- what they call "orphans" in the antiquities trade -- but broken in such a way the figures aren't damaged.
And then there's the minor problem that more people have heard of Enceladus the prominent moon of Saturn than Enceladus the prominent figure of the Gigantomachy. It would give the title rather more a science fictional flavor than I intend at this early stage.
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Black Forest Hams
Plotting on The Aurelius Dupondius or whatever the novel's going to be called. I put an archaeological dig in Germany because I felt I could fake Germany a little better than I could fake Italy.
And then I remembered some of the things I'd seen there (besides Rhine Castles. Lots and lots of Rhine Castles).
Things like this medieval street faire. Along the narrow cobblestone alleys (well, not this pic, but mostly) between more-or-less older looking houses, were craft stands and food stalls and lots and lots of beer (which many people drunk from cow horns...probably because then you didn't have to return your stein for the three euro deposit.) Many people in costume (some better than others).
And there was even a tournament:
Which besides being fun in itself is also probably explanation for why some of the people at the street faire were walking around in steel armor. Which means it is the kind of detail that's very cool to have in there for Penny (with her near-lack of any spoken German or much local knowledge) to try to puzzle out.
Yes it is cool but yes that’s a problem. Because it is cool enough for the reader to want to visit themselves. That is, it is reproducible. That is, I do a disservice to the reader if I name the wrong town. And, heck...six years later, I don’t even remember the name of the town I was in.
So now I’m trying to track down an actual location that’s preferably in East Germany and/or in the Black Forest and has a medieval faire and is on the circuit for the Jousting associations and preferably has a nice schloss in town as well. Oh, yeah. And includes a potential Iron Age archaeological site. Romans I can leave or take but a cistern or two would be lovely.
Yeah, so much for “no research.”
Okay, where I was appears to have been Bad Münster am Stein-Ebernburg, a small and rather quiet town mostly rehabilitation spas and clinics. The only record I've pulled up so far of a medieval festival is from 2013, which sounds like about the date I was there. They do claim it is annual, though.
I'm leaning quite a bit towards Rothenburg ob der Tauber, in the Franconia district of Bavaria (Bad Münster is West of Frankfurt). Rothenburg has one of the bigger medieval faires, including a torchlit parade. The central Old Town is very medieval, very backlot Bavarian, so much so it featured in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (along with King Ludwig's wedding cake Disney castle, Neuschwanstein).
There have been some experimental archaeologists casting bronze and smelting iron in a nearby forest. As far as other archaeological digs, I have no idea. I need to hit the more academic resources for that (my membership to JSTOR has to be worth something.)
Another problem to contemplate is it is a long way back to Athens for my protagonist. Especially if she's avoiding airplanes. It is either a long train ride to the Italian coast and a 30+ hour ferry to Greece, or an even longer train ride.
But then, there was that Danish princess who according to stable isotope analysis was not only born in the Black Forest, but went home for a visit before finally being buried in Denmark. In the Bronze Age. I hope she made a big detour around the Forest of Tollense, though.
And then I remembered some of the things I'd seen there (besides Rhine Castles. Lots and lots of Rhine Castles).
Things like this medieval street faire. Along the narrow cobblestone alleys (well, not this pic, but mostly) between more-or-less older looking houses, were craft stands and food stalls and lots and lots of beer (which many people drunk from cow horns...probably because then you didn't have to return your stein for the three euro deposit.) Many people in costume (some better than others).
And there was even a tournament:
Which besides being fun in itself is also probably explanation for why some of the people at the street faire were walking around in steel armor. Which means it is the kind of detail that's very cool to have in there for Penny (with her near-lack of any spoken German or much local knowledge) to try to puzzle out.
Yes it is cool but yes that’s a problem. Because it is cool enough for the reader to want to visit themselves. That is, it is reproducible. That is, I do a disservice to the reader if I name the wrong town. And, heck...six years later, I don’t even remember the name of the town I was in.
So now I’m trying to track down an actual location that’s preferably in East Germany and/or in the Black Forest and has a medieval faire and is on the circuit for the Jousting associations and preferably has a nice schloss in town as well. Oh, yeah. And includes a potential Iron Age archaeological site. Romans I can leave or take but a cistern or two would be lovely.
Yeah, so much for “no research.”
Okay, where I was appears to have been Bad Münster am Stein-Ebernburg, a small and rather quiet town mostly rehabilitation spas and clinics. The only record I've pulled up so far of a medieval festival is from 2013, which sounds like about the date I was there. They do claim it is annual, though.
I'm leaning quite a bit towards Rothenburg ob der Tauber, in the Franconia district of Bavaria (Bad Münster is West of Frankfurt). Rothenburg has one of the bigger medieval faires, including a torchlit parade. The central Old Town is very medieval, very backlot Bavarian, so much so it featured in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (along with King Ludwig's wedding cake Disney castle, Neuschwanstein).
There have been some experimental archaeologists casting bronze and smelting iron in a nearby forest. As far as other archaeological digs, I have no idea. I need to hit the more academic resources for that (my membership to JSTOR has to be worth something.)
Another problem to contemplate is it is a long way back to Athens for my protagonist. Especially if she's avoiding airplanes. It is either a long train ride to the Italian coast and a 30+ hour ferry to Greece, or an even longer train ride.
But then, there was that Danish princess who according to stable isotope analysis was not only born in the Black Forest, but went home for a visit before finally being buried in Denmark. In the Bronze Age. I hope she made a big detour around the Forest of Tollense, though.
Saturday, November 17, 2018
Project List
It is come to my attention that it may be a bit hard to figure out what novel I'm writing at the moment. Well, welcome to the club. I find it a bit much to keep track of myself. So let me try to write things down in some way that makes it easier to keep track of them.
First of what is projected to be a trilogy set in and around the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The first book features a young Cretan weaver at the semi-ruined Palace of Knossos (c.f. the Linear B archives), who encounters a visiting Egyptian nobleman and, eventually, the mysterious Sea Peoples.
This is my Honest History Novel and is taking a horrible amount of research and is so overwhelming I've had to put it aside for a month or two while I gather strength.
A fanfiction cross-over of the Stargate, SG1 and Tomb Raider worlds. The book that got me interested in archaeology and gave me the courage to start writing actual history. It's fanfiction, meaning it doesn't get published and doesn't earn me anything but the infrequent comment by people who read it on Fanfiction.net
Currently on hold, even as it is only a few chapters from the conclusion.
A lighter and fluffier (sort of) fanfiction work, an alternate vision of the 2013 Tomb Raider game that tries to get not quite as crazy and dark as that flawed game. Never got a lot of follows or comments at fanfiction.net so I only update it sporadically.
The only real reasons to mention it now is it underlines my continued obsession with the adventurer archaeologist template. Plus some of the character voice I developed for Samantha Nishimura is informing the voice I'm developing for the new, intended-to-be-published (if only on Amazon) novel.
Atlantis can't possibly be real. But that's okay; Athena Fox isn't a real archaeologist, either.
That's the basic idea for a book that I hope will be quick to write and not so ghastly to research, either. I want to do the Indiana Jones stuff but have fun with it and even deconstruct it.
That's not the real title, either. I'm still fumbling around with concepts. With format, even; I've always wanted to write something about history, and the idea of a YouTube artist who has created an adventure archaeologist character is one that could support more than one novel.
A Conspiracy in Their Islands
First of what is projected to be a trilogy set in and around the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The first book features a young Cretan weaver at the semi-ruined Palace of Knossos (c.f. the Linear B archives), who encounters a visiting Egyptian nobleman and, eventually, the mysterious Sea Peoples.This is my Honest History Novel and is taking a horrible amount of research and is so overwhelming I've had to put it aside for a month or two while I gather strength.
Day of the Falcon
A fanfiction cross-over of the Stargate, SG1 and Tomb Raider worlds. The book that got me interested in archaeology and gave me the courage to start writing actual history. It's fanfiction, meaning it doesn't get published and doesn't earn me anything but the infrequent comment by people who read it on Fanfiction.netCurrently on hold, even as it is only a few chapters from the conclusion.
Sam I Am
A lighter and fluffier (sort of) fanfiction work, an alternate vision of the 2013 Tomb Raider game that tries to get not quite as crazy and dark as that flawed game. Never got a lot of follows or comments at fanfiction.net so I only update it sporadically.The only real reasons to mention it now is it underlines my continued obsession with the adventurer archaeologist template. Plus some of the character voice I developed for Samantha Nishimura is informing the voice I'm developing for the new, intended-to-be-published (if only on Amazon) novel.
The Enceladus Oinochoe
That's the basic idea for a book that I hope will be quick to write and not so ghastly to research, either. I want to do the Indiana Jones stuff but have fun with it and even deconstruct it.That's not the real title, either. I'm still fumbling around with concepts. With format, even; I've always wanted to write something about history, and the idea of a YouTube artist who has created an adventure archaeologist character is one that could support more than one novel.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
You say Potatoe
I'm working on a plotting problem.
That's not really a good description, though. I find myself once again reaching for more precise terminology. There's plot and there's plot. There's drama and there's drama.
Okay, the later. You could say that a light-saber duel over a lava pool is more "dramatic" than a guy buying soap. Of course "dramatic" is contextual. Some people are heartily bored by light-sabers. And buying soap may be part of an intense and moving odyssey...just ask Leopold Bloom. But "dramatic" in the sense of emotionally stirring is only one meaning; the word also is made to serve the workmanlike function of turning incident into narrative. I might need to talk about the dramatic arc, or even how to dramatize an incident or a theme or a character attribute, and at no time be implicitly saying I am trying to put more action or emotion into it.
Plot, too. In my mind there are at least two major parts of plot. There's the mechanics of where they went and what they did there. And there's the reason -- the writer's reason -- for why they went there and why they did the thing they did there. In the former are problems that can be solved with a map. In the latter are problems of pacing and structure that need, well, other tools.
Sometimes the two are separable. "We rode to the next town" can be the action under the emotional arc (fleeing the Shire), the dramatic purpose of the scene itself (the midnight ride of Paul Revere), or a mere setting detail placed beneath the real purpose of the narrative (and along the way each of us told stories).
At other times they are more tightly bound. And that's where I am now; one of those "interesting" plotting problems where the greater themes and character arcs and the basic look and feel of the novel are all being examined simultaneous to trying to solve a mechanical issue of who knew what when and did what with it.
Not to reveal too much too early but I'm struggling with an archaeological dig in Germany and some looted Greek antiquities are involved. My first idea was that this is a laundering scheme. It might still be one step in a triangulation, but Germany has recently tightened up its antiquities laws and in any case few nations are happy to have people sell what they dig up. So if the purpose was the laundry, getting near an active dig is the last thing you want to do.
So...is this a clandestine dig, and/or are they being wink-wink nudge-nudge about the trafficking the site is enabling? Or more along the lines of "Cool discoveries, eh? Well, by sheer coincidence, I happen to own a small gallery in London where some similar -- but entirely legal, I assure you -- items can be obtained."
Who is the dig for? The big artifact sales are largely done with private contact between major dealers and the curators at museums, through their social circles. The smaller traffic, though...that's a bit more plausible. But given the context -- a dig that in the eyes of some is demonstrating a clear connection between Germany and Greece during the Greek Dark Ages -- are the illegal sales here selling the sizzle or selling the steak? Are these "Look at this beautiful pot" or are they "Look at this ugly pot that proves something mainstream archaeology is trying to hide?"
I don't really know. I'm in a yarn tangle, viewing Venn diagrams distorted through more than three dimensions, trying to balance what is believable, what tells the story of actual trafficking, what advances the character arcs and the overall story arc, and what is dramatic in the "light-saber duel over the lava pool" sense.
This is a really tough spot in the plot for the novel because this is what I've been calling the Yamatai moment. What Campbell called the Abyss, the belly of the beast. A place where my character, who has been up to this point rather bemusedly falling down the rabbit hole, suddenly hits dirt and it is nasty mud with all kinds of sharp pointy rocks in it. Basically, this is when shit turns real.
All the themes of not just this book but the projected series are showing up in this one small spot. And I'm early enough in the development process (I plan to be doing a fair amount of Discovery Writing) there's not much that isn't up for grabs. Even Germany is largely there because I've had boots on the ground and don't have to rely exclusively on Wikipedia to describe it. (Yes, there are themes a German site advances, but I'm on the fence about whether it in the end helps or hinders my various purposes).
About the only thing I can't change is that these are stolen Greek antiquities. Because if I change that so much of the structure goes away I might as well start a different book.
That's not really a good description, though. I find myself once again reaching for more precise terminology. There's plot and there's plot. There's drama and there's drama.
Okay, the later. You could say that a light-saber duel over a lava pool is more "dramatic" than a guy buying soap. Of course "dramatic" is contextual. Some people are heartily bored by light-sabers. And buying soap may be part of an intense and moving odyssey...just ask Leopold Bloom. But "dramatic" in the sense of emotionally stirring is only one meaning; the word also is made to serve the workmanlike function of turning incident into narrative. I might need to talk about the dramatic arc, or even how to dramatize an incident or a theme or a character attribute, and at no time be implicitly saying I am trying to put more action or emotion into it.
Plot, too. In my mind there are at least two major parts of plot. There's the mechanics of where they went and what they did there. And there's the reason -- the writer's reason -- for why they went there and why they did the thing they did there. In the former are problems that can be solved with a map. In the latter are problems of pacing and structure that need, well, other tools.
Sometimes the two are separable. "We rode to the next town" can be the action under the emotional arc (fleeing the Shire), the dramatic purpose of the scene itself (the midnight ride of Paul Revere), or a mere setting detail placed beneath the real purpose of the narrative (and along the way each of us told stories).
At other times they are more tightly bound. And that's where I am now; one of those "interesting" plotting problems where the greater themes and character arcs and the basic look and feel of the novel are all being examined simultaneous to trying to solve a mechanical issue of who knew what when and did what with it.
Not to reveal too much too early but I'm struggling with an archaeological dig in Germany and some looted Greek antiquities are involved. My first idea was that this is a laundering scheme. It might still be one step in a triangulation, but Germany has recently tightened up its antiquities laws and in any case few nations are happy to have people sell what they dig up. So if the purpose was the laundry, getting near an active dig is the last thing you want to do.
So...is this a clandestine dig, and/or are they being wink-wink nudge-nudge about the trafficking the site is enabling? Or more along the lines of "Cool discoveries, eh? Well, by sheer coincidence, I happen to own a small gallery in London where some similar -- but entirely legal, I assure you -- items can be obtained."
Who is the dig for? The big artifact sales are largely done with private contact between major dealers and the curators at museums, through their social circles. The smaller traffic, though...that's a bit more plausible. But given the context -- a dig that in the eyes of some is demonstrating a clear connection between Germany and Greece during the Greek Dark Ages -- are the illegal sales here selling the sizzle or selling the steak? Are these "Look at this beautiful pot" or are they "Look at this ugly pot that proves something mainstream archaeology is trying to hide?"
I don't really know. I'm in a yarn tangle, viewing Venn diagrams distorted through more than three dimensions, trying to balance what is believable, what tells the story of actual trafficking, what advances the character arcs and the overall story arc, and what is dramatic in the "light-saber duel over the lava pool" sense.
This is a really tough spot in the plot for the novel because this is what I've been calling the Yamatai moment. What Campbell called the Abyss, the belly of the beast. A place where my character, who has been up to this point rather bemusedly falling down the rabbit hole, suddenly hits dirt and it is nasty mud with all kinds of sharp pointy rocks in it. Basically, this is when shit turns real.
All the themes of not just this book but the projected series are showing up in this one small spot. And I'm early enough in the development process (I plan to be doing a fair amount of Discovery Writing) there's not much that isn't up for grabs. Even Germany is largely there because I've had boots on the ground and don't have to rely exclusively on Wikipedia to describe it. (Yes, there are themes a German site advances, but I'm on the fence about whether it in the end helps or hinders my various purposes).
About the only thing I can't change is that these are stolen Greek antiquities. Because if I change that so much of the structure goes away I might as well start a different book.
Saturday, November 10, 2018
wait just a minotaur...
I'm watching a TV show that is not known for its historical accuracy. After "Athens, 3000 BC" flashes up we see some guys in ragged tunics underground, fleeing from what appears to be a minotaur. Present day, the characters discuss the well-known myth of the roll of golden thread (the what?) and the less well-known myth (yes, they got that part right!) of the "key to the labyrinth."
But it is when they bring out a medallion and confidently identify it as being made of a white marble only found on Crete that I couldn't take any more. Labyrinth in neolithic Athens, no problem. But the only distinctly Cretan marble I've been able to turn up in my own research is a silvery grey. If you are looking for a famous white marble, you want Paros, in the Cyclades. Well, at least the minotaur carving looked vaguely appropriate to neolithic cycladic art.
Yeah, for someone who is in the middle of plotting a book that is actually designed to be under-researched, I sure do get hung up on details that don't matter.
(Speaking of: my core reading list for THIS project is Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, The Medici Conspiracy (about antiquities trafficking), and -- as soon as I can stomach the $17 price tag -- Donna Zuckerberg's Not All Dead White Men.)
Later on they claim Daedalus was scared of water and so wouldn't have gone to Crete. So at least they remembered something of the traditional myths. No explanation as to how Minos ended up in the wrong town, or why Daedalus could apparently write decent modern Greek (3,000 BC being a wee bit early for the Phoenician alphabet to take hold, much less the miniscule!) Or why the show just can not say the word "labyrinth." It is always referred to as a maze.
But it is when they bring out a medallion and confidently identify it as being made of a white marble only found on Crete that I couldn't take any more. Labyrinth in neolithic Athens, no problem. But the only distinctly Cretan marble I've been able to turn up in my own research is a silvery grey. If you are looking for a famous white marble, you want Paros, in the Cyclades. Well, at least the minotaur carving looked vaguely appropriate to neolithic cycladic art.
Yeah, for someone who is in the middle of plotting a book that is actually designed to be under-researched, I sure do get hung up on details that don't matter.
(Speaking of: my core reading list for THIS project is Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, The Medici Conspiracy (about antiquities trafficking), and -- as soon as I can stomach the $17 price tag -- Donna Zuckerberg's Not All Dead White Men.)
Later on they claim Daedalus was scared of water and so wouldn't have gone to Crete. So at least they remembered something of the traditional myths. No explanation as to how Minos ended up in the wrong town, or why Daedalus could apparently write decent modern Greek (3,000 BC being a wee bit early for the Phoenician alphabet to take hold, much less the miniscule!) Or why the show just can not say the word "labyrinth." It is always referred to as a maze.
Digital Nomad
I've travelled before. Paris, London, Tokyo, Berlin. (And a bit beyond those capitals; Kyoto, city of a thousand shrines; the Rhine Tal and a train to Salzburg; the forest -- and boulders! -- of Fontainebleau; down the Thames to Greenwich...)
I pack light. I write everything in a little notebook, all the directions and hotel addresses and travel dates I'm going to need to know.
This time, though, I made a change. A big one.
I didn't pack a map.
On previous trips I've packed around a camera and even a laptop, plus a paperback book or two, and a travel guide or two. I did have a camera in my bag but this time everything, from journal to light reading to, yes, the map was in my hip pocket.
Yeah. iPhone. I got permission from IT for roaming and up to a gig of data. I loaded up with a tourist guide and a couple of books (including a copy of that great new translation of The Odyssey). I made sure I had plenty of space for pictures.
Also picked up a folding keyboard which made it so vastly much easier to take lengthly notes on the road.
In the column of "That worked fairly well" the GPS was a boon from the gods. The streets in the Greek cities I was exploring never ran in the same direction for more than a handful of meters, were narrow enough to block all possible landmarks from their confines, and street signs were often hard to come by. Not that they helped. Maybe if I had been forced to read street signs I would have eventually gotten the hang of written Greek, but most of it remained "egg nog, egg nog" to me.
Not helped by the inconsistent romanization. On a bus schedule I had, the "Heraklion" route went from "Iraklion." On a pair of street signs I found, you were either entering "Tylissos" or "Tylisos." Even "Chania" was sometimes "Hania." Yeah...I recommend learning your Greek alphabet because that's a wee bit more consistent (there, the problem is that the characters are simplified and substituted in very odd ways on the electronic signs inside and around public transit, meaning it's not enough just to know it; you need to be comfortable with it.)
Also, between Apple's "Map" ap and Google Maps, fire roads and trails were all wrong and coverage of even major museums was spotty. Nor could either ap really handle public transit or even figure out a driving route that didn't put you going down a public dock. Or a walking route that didn't put you on the highway.
The digital bubble worries me here. I don't mean the way you might be wandering around with your eyes on the GPS direction widget instead of, you know, traffic. I mean that even in my home town, close to the heart of Silicon Valley, restaurants and shops I know damn well exist aren't listed on the Maps ap. It was worse in Heraklion, where I could find the local Gap store but not a knitting supply store that way.
So. For pictures, the phone was good enough. Most of what I was taking was museum exhibits anyhow. I wasn't trying to make pretty pictures, I was documenting what I found so I would be able to look it up later.
Okay, mostly.
In the column of "needs work," I had aps for the companies where I had reserved hotels and purchased flights, but those aps rarely told me what I needed to know. The only time one was of any use at all was to display the address of a hotel in proper Greek for my cab driver, but the ap insisted on truncating the address and could not be convinced to scroll or re-scale.
There was an odd experience at the Agora (around the foot of the Acropolis); a bunch of people had some kind of pre-printed ticket that was scanned through easily, but the rest of us were blocked from entry because the credit card reader was down (for some reason that meant cash was off limits as well. Or the staff was so focused on one problem they didn't want to take time to do the other). That actually worked out well for me in the end because I barely had time to get to the Acropolis then out to meet my ferry after all.
Every experience at a clerk or boarding agent, though, no ap or printout was needed or wanted. Just my name and my passport. Just as well. My experience with e-tickets is every single one has a different ap, and all those aps are bloatware, a drag on your data, and possible spyware to boot.
The nadir had to be the Pireaus-to-Iraklion ferry; there you take a printout of your receipt (you must have this) to the ferry company's office in town where they print you an official boarding pass (sometimes for a small charge). Not terribly efficient. Or obvious.
I brought a power adaptor and a battery pack good for up to two full charges.
That's the first thing you notice about doing everything with a smart phone. I don't know if it is the GPS (and running two different map aps at the same time) or all the photographs but battery charge goes like that. I ended up spending significant time with the phone in one pocket and the battery pack in another, trickling in more juice as I walked.
This is something the primary manufacturers haven't quite gotten yet. Apple continues to make their gear smaller and thinner, but as the customers are using their devices more continually and at higher consumption rates (brighter screens, streaming videos, flashlight aps) those internal batteries are no longer sufficient to get through a day. Charging stations are springing up. There's a new version of Wardriving out there as people search out unguarded outlets in coffee shops and other places. I changed seats on the ferry to hog an outlet I found on the floor there (eventually I gave it up to someone else after I had enough charge to hold me).
And of course battery packs, battery packs everywhere.
Other odd follow-on effects. Payphones are long gone, of course. But clocks in public spaces are also on the way out. It is odd to be in an airport and not be able to find a single clock anywhere. Not even on the departures board is there a time display. Which is pretty stupid if you think about it. Sure, everyone has a smart phone (supposedly) and those automatically synch to local time...but only if they get a signal! When you are changing time zones, you are also roaming, and possibly out of coverage for the frequency range of your phone, which means no automatic updates.
So all in all, it worked, but I'm not giving up on the old ways completely. A little notebook with everything important copied to it is still the most important thing you can pack.
This time, though, I made a change. A big one.
I didn't pack a map.
On previous trips I've packed around a camera and even a laptop, plus a paperback book or two, and a travel guide or two. I did have a camera in my bag but this time everything, from journal to light reading to, yes, the map was in my hip pocket.
Yeah. iPhone. I got permission from IT for roaming and up to a gig of data. I loaded up with a tourist guide and a couple of books (including a copy of that great new translation of The Odyssey). I made sure I had plenty of space for pictures.
Also picked up a folding keyboard which made it so vastly much easier to take lengthly notes on the road.
In the column of "That worked fairly well" the GPS was a boon from the gods. The streets in the Greek cities I was exploring never ran in the same direction for more than a handful of meters, were narrow enough to block all possible landmarks from their confines, and street signs were often hard to come by. Not that they helped. Maybe if I had been forced to read street signs I would have eventually gotten the hang of written Greek, but most of it remained "egg nog, egg nog" to me.
Not helped by the inconsistent romanization. On a bus schedule I had, the "Heraklion" route went from "Iraklion." On a pair of street signs I found, you were either entering "Tylissos" or "Tylisos." Even "Chania" was sometimes "Hania." Yeah...I recommend learning your Greek alphabet because that's a wee bit more consistent (there, the problem is that the characters are simplified and substituted in very odd ways on the electronic signs inside and around public transit, meaning it's not enough just to know it; you need to be comfortable with it.)
Also, between Apple's "Map" ap and Google Maps, fire roads and trails were all wrong and coverage of even major museums was spotty. Nor could either ap really handle public transit or even figure out a driving route that didn't put you going down a public dock. Or a walking route that didn't put you on the highway.
The digital bubble worries me here. I don't mean the way you might be wandering around with your eyes on the GPS direction widget instead of, you know, traffic. I mean that even in my home town, close to the heart of Silicon Valley, restaurants and shops I know damn well exist aren't listed on the Maps ap. It was worse in Heraklion, where I could find the local Gap store but not a knitting supply store that way.
So. For pictures, the phone was good enough. Most of what I was taking was museum exhibits anyhow. I wasn't trying to make pretty pictures, I was documenting what I found so I would be able to look it up later.
Okay, mostly.
In the column of "needs work," I had aps for the companies where I had reserved hotels and purchased flights, but those aps rarely told me what I needed to know. The only time one was of any use at all was to display the address of a hotel in proper Greek for my cab driver, but the ap insisted on truncating the address and could not be convinced to scroll or re-scale.
There was an odd experience at the Agora (around the foot of the Acropolis); a bunch of people had some kind of pre-printed ticket that was scanned through easily, but the rest of us were blocked from entry because the credit card reader was down (for some reason that meant cash was off limits as well. Or the staff was so focused on one problem they didn't want to take time to do the other). That actually worked out well for me in the end because I barely had time to get to the Acropolis then out to meet my ferry after all.
Every experience at a clerk or boarding agent, though, no ap or printout was needed or wanted. Just my name and my passport. Just as well. My experience with e-tickets is every single one has a different ap, and all those aps are bloatware, a drag on your data, and possible spyware to boot.
The nadir had to be the Pireaus-to-Iraklion ferry; there you take a printout of your receipt (you must have this) to the ferry company's office in town where they print you an official boarding pass (sometimes for a small charge). Not terribly efficient. Or obvious.
I brought a power adaptor and a battery pack good for up to two full charges.
That's the first thing you notice about doing everything with a smart phone. I don't know if it is the GPS (and running two different map aps at the same time) or all the photographs but battery charge goes like that. I ended up spending significant time with the phone in one pocket and the battery pack in another, trickling in more juice as I walked.
This is something the primary manufacturers haven't quite gotten yet. Apple continues to make their gear smaller and thinner, but as the customers are using their devices more continually and at higher consumption rates (brighter screens, streaming videos, flashlight aps) those internal batteries are no longer sufficient to get through a day. Charging stations are springing up. There's a new version of Wardriving out there as people search out unguarded outlets in coffee shops and other places. I changed seats on the ferry to hog an outlet I found on the floor there (eventually I gave it up to someone else after I had enough charge to hold me).
And of course battery packs, battery packs everywhere.
Other odd follow-on effects. Payphones are long gone, of course. But clocks in public spaces are also on the way out. It is odd to be in an airport and not be able to find a single clock anywhere. Not even on the departures board is there a time display. Which is pretty stupid if you think about it. Sure, everyone has a smart phone (supposedly) and those automatically synch to local time...but only if they get a signal! When you are changing time zones, you are also roaming, and possibly out of coverage for the frequency range of your phone, which means no automatic updates.
So all in all, it worked, but I'm not giving up on the old ways completely. A little notebook with everything important copied to it is still the most important thing you can pack.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
Molop Labs
Ah, drat.
There's a problem with doing hasty, incomplete research: there are still real people at the other end of it.
The Dorians led me to Golden Dawn (not the Hermetic Order, but the one with seats in the Greek Parliament), back to Metaxas of the apocryphally Laconic "Ohi!"and off with Alexander the Pretty Durned Competent to Macedonian Nationalism...and passing through some rather familiar territory along the way, white marble statues and Ovid as a PUA and all that rot.
I don't want to be insulting political parties or whole people. As tempting as it is to have the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei show up to toss a few bombs when the action has flagged, how is that different from having random Apache show up to shoot arrows at the heroes in some schlock Western? At least make some effort to get it right and be balanced in how you describe it.
Right. You are going to give offense no matter how careful you are, because there's always someone who wants to accept it. Is this, though; is mischaracterizing a movement or stereotyping a people, in the same class as getting the history or science wrong?
I do believe there exists the idea of a higher standard, and that is for reproducibility. My star example there being CPR; if you are going to show CPR in a work, get it right. Because as unlikely as the chain of events might be, what you wrote might be what someone uses in a real life-or-death situation.
On a lesser scale, I like to get directions and addresses correct because I have personal experience and the recounted experience of friends of navigating by what they read in a work of fiction. Now, I'm not saying you'd better make sure the A Train is the quickest way to get to Harlem, but it doesn't take that long to get the right road...or put in clues that the building in question is thoroughly fictional.
It sort of goes with the territory that in a cheap adventure people (individuals, organizations, crowds, entire cultures) are going to be variously incompetent and emotional. Entire villages will spontaneously grab pitchforks and torches to follow the hero after a monster, and two-dollar hoods will empty their guns at Superman (before throwing them, of course).
Perhaps the trick is to be even-handed in one's insults; that everyone comes off badly. Just make sure, if you want to be really fair about it, you include the hero...
There's a problem with doing hasty, incomplete research: there are still real people at the other end of it.
The Dorians led me to Golden Dawn (not the Hermetic Order, but the one with seats in the Greek Parliament), back to Metaxas of the apocryphally Laconic "Ohi!"and off with Alexander the Pretty Durned Competent to Macedonian Nationalism...and passing through some rather familiar territory along the way, white marble statues and Ovid as a PUA and all that rot.
I don't want to be insulting political parties or whole people. As tempting as it is to have the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei show up to toss a few bombs when the action has flagged, how is that different from having random Apache show up to shoot arrows at the heroes in some schlock Western? At least make some effort to get it right and be balanced in how you describe it.
Right. You are going to give offense no matter how careful you are, because there's always someone who wants to accept it. Is this, though; is mischaracterizing a movement or stereotyping a people, in the same class as getting the history or science wrong?
I do believe there exists the idea of a higher standard, and that is for reproducibility. My star example there being CPR; if you are going to show CPR in a work, get it right. Because as unlikely as the chain of events might be, what you wrote might be what someone uses in a real life-or-death situation.
On a lesser scale, I like to get directions and addresses correct because I have personal experience and the recounted experience of friends of navigating by what they read in a work of fiction. Now, I'm not saying you'd better make sure the A Train is the quickest way to get to Harlem, but it doesn't take that long to get the right road...or put in clues that the building in question is thoroughly fictional.
It sort of goes with the territory that in a cheap adventure people (individuals, organizations, crowds, entire cultures) are going to be variously incompetent and emotional. Entire villages will spontaneously grab pitchforks and torches to follow the hero after a monster, and two-dollar hoods will empty their guns at Superman (before throwing them, of course).
Perhaps the trick is to be even-handed in one's insults; that everyone comes off badly. Just make sure, if you want to be really fair about it, you include the hero...
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Owl Really?
Yeah, so much for no research.
I kinda like the new idea. The new, simple, fast, cheap, no research idea that can be finished and on Amazon in 6-8 months idea.
But...reading right now a book on the Medici Conspiracy (no, not that family...a much later antiquities smuggling ring), and about the (grr!) "Dorian Invasion" and a wee bit about Aristotle (no, not that one; the one that hung out with Callas and married Jackie).
Still, this is probably not going to be in-depth and since I'm using a contemporary setting a lot of the smaller details are a Google Maps browse away.
The plot as it is right now leverages my interest in the Bronze Age, my recent trip to Athens, less recent travel experiences in Germany, and a vague familiarity with YouTube monetizing, the German language, and various strands of pseudo-history. Oh, yes. And my protagonist has a theater background, which I'll try hard not to make into the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook of the series.
What's it about? Fun. Adventure and travel and a bit of history. And about becoming the mask, on various sides of the experience; the fun of pulling off an impersonation, the lingering chill of impostor syndrome, and of course the way a role can change you. And I'll try not to get too preachy about archaeology and the endemic problem of looting.
And I haven't decided yet about the gods. Or Atlantis. I'm going to cheat, at least in the first one. I'm going to do that thing I said I hate; a supernatural element that appears in such a way as to be totally deniable.
Now on to the place where at least one previous novel died; the outline. Does the plot stretch to a proper page count? I should know in a day or two -- by the end of the week I should know if I have a "go."
I kinda like the new idea. The new, simple, fast, cheap, no research idea that can be finished and on Amazon in 6-8 months idea.
But...reading right now a book on the Medici Conspiracy (no, not that family...a much later antiquities smuggling ring), and about the (grr!) "Dorian Invasion" and a wee bit about Aristotle (no, not that one; the one that hung out with Callas and married Jackie).
Still, this is probably not going to be in-depth and since I'm using a contemporary setting a lot of the smaller details are a Google Maps browse away.
The plot as it is right now leverages my interest in the Bronze Age, my recent trip to Athens, less recent travel experiences in Germany, and a vague familiarity with YouTube monetizing, the German language, and various strands of pseudo-history. Oh, yes. And my protagonist has a theater background, which I'll try hard not to make into the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook of the series.
What's it about? Fun. Adventure and travel and a bit of history. And about becoming the mask, on various sides of the experience; the fun of pulling off an impersonation, the lingering chill of impostor syndrome, and of course the way a role can change you. And I'll try not to get too preachy about archaeology and the endemic problem of looting.
And I haven't decided yet about the gods. Or Atlantis. I'm going to cheat, at least in the first one. I'm going to do that thing I said I hate; a supernatural element that appears in such a way as to be totally deniable.
Now on to the place where at least one previous novel died; the outline. Does the plot stretch to a proper page count? I should know in a day or two -- by the end of the week I should know if I have a "go."
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Sesshu and the Fish
There's this story about a master sumi-e painter. I can't remember where I read it or who the figure was. Basically, he agrees to do a painting of a fish for a local merchant to hang in his store. Two years pass, with the merchant becoming increasingly agitated. Finally he demands his fish or the return of his money. The painter wordlessly takes down a sheet of fresh washi, mixes the ink, then one stroke, two, three, and there's a koi so lifelike it seems to leap from the page.
"That took you ten seconds," the merchant complains. "Why did I have to wait two years?"
"That's how long it took me to learn how to do it in ten seconds," the artist replies.
A lot of my projects are like that. A lot of projects are like that, period. For all I talk about iteration and the freedom to fail and so on, what sometimes feels like half the time spent on a project is time I spend planning. No, more than planning; pre-planning, parameterizing -- trying to figure out what the actual project goals are and how I'm going to approach it.
As a contrast, my Sutton Hoo lyre took two afternoons to put together. It seemed an adequate parameterization to build "something fast and cheap out of available materials," and it seemed likely to serve useful goals. (It did.)
I'm in that horrible lingering pre-planning stage on most of the things I really want to do at the moment. And that's bad, because it is heavy lifting to try to hold an entire proposed project in the palm of your hand, then jump upwards to examine the box it is in. And maybe the box that box is in.
It is the kind of concentrated thinking I can only do for an hour or two before I burn out. The time that is really bad is when I don't have anything exciting enough that's in the "mindless sanding" phase that I can work on after I burn out. And I'm still back-braining the thing, so I don't even have the concentration left to do general research. Heck, I have trouble even getting a good practice session in on my collection of instruments.
(If for no other reason than the back-brain project will bubble over on the back burner, forcing me to drop everything else and jot down a few more notes and sketches).
The "Crete" novel is feeling too daunting again. Every page is going to have something I have to research, or verify, or borrow, or create. And so much of the research I've done so far has just made things more complicated. If my weaver was at Pylos she might be at the palace, but she's at Knossos, which had a different system. So I have to depict both the ruined palace of Knossos and the village (very probably Tylissos) where she is staying the rest of the year. And yeah she comes from a Peak Sanctuary and will return and it is just too tempting not to try to show an actual ceremony. And that's just the opening chapters!
So I've broken out Scrivener to try again to see if there's something I could write that's simpler, faster, cheaper. Something to get some writing done while I'm still slogging at trying to plan out the Big, Serious Novel.
I picked up a bunch of Kindle books to take traveling -- mostly non-fiction of course -- but that led me down new routes and new explorations and I'm still finding new caches of stuff that's...well let's just say it isn't quite Barbara Hambly. And I'm not just talking historical accuracy or depth of research. Fiction is more than that. Fiction is not a Wikipedia article. You've got to be able to handle description and POV and dialog and pacing and all that. And, seriously, I'm seeing a lot of writers that need help there.
But again if that were all there was, some of the fanfic I've been reading would have millions of views and all the reviews they'd ever want at fanfic.net. There's obviously other things, possibly intangible things, that makes a book a good read.
All of this is a bit beside the point, though. As much as I try to chart around the basic issues I have with historical fiction, they are still there. I've spent all my useful thinking hours this weekend hammering at the latest germ of an idea and I still don't know if it is workable.
The idea of the Adventure Archaeologist (as TVTropes calls it) is potent and rich in possibilities and has been generating stories since at least the Victorian Age (arguably, from as far back as New Kingdom Egypt, if you take the Tale of Setna as an example). It also is inherently problematic, from both a realism point of view and the implicit insult to working academics and to cultures past and present.
Of course, one can argue that two out of three thrillers similarly insult law enforcement and entire foreign nations (depending on the details). Too often the hero is an everyman who wouldn't even be in that position if the entire infrastructure of society hadn't utterly failed him, and who proceeds to succeed in a way that throws into further question the competence of everyone else around him.
Amateur detective stories and lost world stories are both unlikely, and Adventure Archaeologist stories are generally both; the one person who does what the academic mainstream can't seem to do, and in the process discovers something global satellite coverage should have revealed decades ago.
But that's an old, old rant.
I have the bones of something that doesn't violate my sensibilities and would be fun to write. Not to give away too much at the moment but I do love fish-out-of-water situations, out-of-context problems, and orthogonal solutions.
Or at least I did have an idea until the Greek Gods showed up. They would be so much fun and add so much story potential that now that I've thought of them I'm loathe to leave them out. But they break at least one of the conceits I started with...and I have yet to figure out how they work.
There is this exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science, simulating using a cyclotron to infer details of atomic structure. It's a sort of pinball machine with a blank disk hiding the central target. You have to observe how the balls are deflected to try to figure out the shape of the hidden object. Well, that's basically where I am right now; shooting different approaches at the core idea and trying to get a better idea of its basic shape.
And every now and then taking another big step back to ask; is this still something that is cheap, fast, and fun?
"That took you ten seconds," the merchant complains. "Why did I have to wait two years?"
"That's how long it took me to learn how to do it in ten seconds," the artist replies.
A lot of my projects are like that. A lot of projects are like that, period. For all I talk about iteration and the freedom to fail and so on, what sometimes feels like half the time spent on a project is time I spend planning. No, more than planning; pre-planning, parameterizing -- trying to figure out what the actual project goals are and how I'm going to approach it.
As a contrast, my Sutton Hoo lyre took two afternoons to put together. It seemed an adequate parameterization to build "something fast and cheap out of available materials," and it seemed likely to serve useful goals. (It did.)
I'm in that horrible lingering pre-planning stage on most of the things I really want to do at the moment. And that's bad, because it is heavy lifting to try to hold an entire proposed project in the palm of your hand, then jump upwards to examine the box it is in. And maybe the box that box is in.
It is the kind of concentrated thinking I can only do for an hour or two before I burn out. The time that is really bad is when I don't have anything exciting enough that's in the "mindless sanding" phase that I can work on after I burn out. And I'm still back-braining the thing, so I don't even have the concentration left to do general research. Heck, I have trouble even getting a good practice session in on my collection of instruments.
(If for no other reason than the back-brain project will bubble over on the back burner, forcing me to drop everything else and jot down a few more notes and sketches).
The "Crete" novel is feeling too daunting again. Every page is going to have something I have to research, or verify, or borrow, or create. And so much of the research I've done so far has just made things more complicated. If my weaver was at Pylos she might be at the palace, but she's at Knossos, which had a different system. So I have to depict both the ruined palace of Knossos and the village (very probably Tylissos) where she is staying the rest of the year. And yeah she comes from a Peak Sanctuary and will return and it is just too tempting not to try to show an actual ceremony. And that's just the opening chapters!
So I've broken out Scrivener to try again to see if there's something I could write that's simpler, faster, cheaper. Something to get some writing done while I'm still slogging at trying to plan out the Big, Serious Novel.
I picked up a bunch of Kindle books to take traveling -- mostly non-fiction of course -- but that led me down new routes and new explorations and I'm still finding new caches of stuff that's...well let's just say it isn't quite Barbara Hambly. And I'm not just talking historical accuracy or depth of research. Fiction is more than that. Fiction is not a Wikipedia article. You've got to be able to handle description and POV and dialog and pacing and all that. And, seriously, I'm seeing a lot of writers that need help there.
But again if that were all there was, some of the fanfic I've been reading would have millions of views and all the reviews they'd ever want at fanfic.net. There's obviously other things, possibly intangible things, that makes a book a good read.
All of this is a bit beside the point, though. As much as I try to chart around the basic issues I have with historical fiction, they are still there. I've spent all my useful thinking hours this weekend hammering at the latest germ of an idea and I still don't know if it is workable.
The idea of the Adventure Archaeologist (as TVTropes calls it) is potent and rich in possibilities and has been generating stories since at least the Victorian Age (arguably, from as far back as New Kingdom Egypt, if you take the Tale of Setna as an example). It also is inherently problematic, from both a realism point of view and the implicit insult to working academics and to cultures past and present.
Of course, one can argue that two out of three thrillers similarly insult law enforcement and entire foreign nations (depending on the details). Too often the hero is an everyman who wouldn't even be in that position if the entire infrastructure of society hadn't utterly failed him, and who proceeds to succeed in a way that throws into further question the competence of everyone else around him.
Amateur detective stories and lost world stories are both unlikely, and Adventure Archaeologist stories are generally both; the one person who does what the academic mainstream can't seem to do, and in the process discovers something global satellite coverage should have revealed decades ago.
But that's an old, old rant.
I have the bones of something that doesn't violate my sensibilities and would be fun to write. Not to give away too much at the moment but I do love fish-out-of-water situations, out-of-context problems, and orthogonal solutions.
Or at least I did have an idea until the Greek Gods showed up. They would be so much fun and add so much story potential that now that I've thought of them I'm loathe to leave them out. But they break at least one of the conceits I started with...and I have yet to figure out how they work.
There is this exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science, simulating using a cyclotron to infer details of atomic structure. It's a sort of pinball machine with a blank disk hiding the central target. You have to observe how the balls are deflected to try to figure out the shape of the hidden object. Well, that's basically where I am right now; shooting different approaches at the core idea and trying to get a better idea of its basic shape.
And every now and then taking another big step back to ask; is this still something that is cheap, fast, and fun?
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Always coming home
Odysseus had the right of it. Hang out with the swineherd for a while. Scope out the place and see what your friends and co-workers are up to safe behind the anonymity of a disguise. It is tough re-shifting your priorities back to job and friends, especially when you've been out on your own adventuring.
Travel gives you perspective. Hell of it is, the first thing I noticed is how filthy my place is at the moment. That's now shot up to the top of the priority list, and not just dusting but the big repairs I've been putting off, like re-doing some plaster, hanging new blinds, etc.
And the novel? Yes I learned things. I could say I am ready now...I gathered enough of what was important to me so I could start writing actual scenes.
But I have new perspective there, too. I saw a lot, I thought a lot. I crossed the Aegean with a copy of The Odyssey in my hand. I strolled the hills and listened to the goats and walked the stones of Minoan buildings.
It has become oddly much less clear where the demarkations are between Minoan, Mycenaean, Iron Age and Classical Greece are. Seeing so many of the artifacts close-up this way illuminates the similarities and connections as much as it illuminates the differences and changes. There are continuities of language and religion and material culture.
It is these continuities archaeologists are forced to use to expand upon the material they are able to gather. We don't know anything of Mycenaean religious practices, for instance, but there are familiar names which appear and we do know something of how the later Greeks worshipped the gods with those appellations.
And this is particularly true for the writer of fiction, who can not just turn the camera away from those parts of the scene that are inconvenient, inconclusive, or entirely impossible to verify with ground data.
More, there is a dark reflection of this; just as the historian has to borrow from the better-known to fill in the gaps of our knowledge, the writer is moved to borrow from what is better known to the reader in order to smooth their entry into the world of the story.
The place where this has currently become an impossible snarl for me is that many people have written many kinds of stories within this setting. Within the past few days I've been reading a vigorous and insightful new translation of Homer, browsing (with the filter of yet another language to bear with, as it is in French) a children's book of The Odyssey with the cutest illustrations, and sample chapters of a book that re-tells The Illiad from the point of view of the women of Troy (Euripides got there first), and of yet another Lara Croft clone that purports to be about an artifact from late Bronze Age Crete. Oh, yes; and reading way too many attempts by way too many museums to batter a public-friendly description into two hundred words or less.
And it should be obvious to everybody but getting it right (even if it were possible to get it all right) has little to do with making it readable. Or getting it to sell.
I made this argument myself before I set off. As I alluded to above, if look and feel is important to me, then I am ready, now, to reproduce the smells and sounds of the landscape of modern Crete (and only a few academics will know or care that not all the fauna I describe is properly contemporary). If getting that gut punch of five-senses description and strong characters and conflict and a little action is what is important (as I believe it is) then being sloppy with the research is okay. Being intentionally "sloppy" with the research is even better (that is, borrowing from what we can know, such as worship practices of 1st century Greece and Rome, or horticulture of the Christian age, but using details that came from life and thus carry that ineffable aura of veracity).
And so, yeah, research generated new questions. And some of those have sent me back to the top of the stack; what am I trying to write, and who for?
Travel gives you perspective. Hell of it is, the first thing I noticed is how filthy my place is at the moment. That's now shot up to the top of the priority list, and not just dusting but the big repairs I've been putting off, like re-doing some plaster, hanging new blinds, etc.
And the novel? Yes I learned things. I could say I am ready now...I gathered enough of what was important to me so I could start writing actual scenes.
But I have new perspective there, too. I saw a lot, I thought a lot. I crossed the Aegean with a copy of The Odyssey in my hand. I strolled the hills and listened to the goats and walked the stones of Minoan buildings.
It has become oddly much less clear where the demarkations are between Minoan, Mycenaean, Iron Age and Classical Greece are. Seeing so many of the artifacts close-up this way illuminates the similarities and connections as much as it illuminates the differences and changes. There are continuities of language and religion and material culture.
It is these continuities archaeologists are forced to use to expand upon the material they are able to gather. We don't know anything of Mycenaean religious practices, for instance, but there are familiar names which appear and we do know something of how the later Greeks worshipped the gods with those appellations.
And this is particularly true for the writer of fiction, who can not just turn the camera away from those parts of the scene that are inconvenient, inconclusive, or entirely impossible to verify with ground data.
More, there is a dark reflection of this; just as the historian has to borrow from the better-known to fill in the gaps of our knowledge, the writer is moved to borrow from what is better known to the reader in order to smooth their entry into the world of the story.
The place where this has currently become an impossible snarl for me is that many people have written many kinds of stories within this setting. Within the past few days I've been reading a vigorous and insightful new translation of Homer, browsing (with the filter of yet another language to bear with, as it is in French) a children's book of The Odyssey with the cutest illustrations, and sample chapters of a book that re-tells The Illiad from the point of view of the women of Troy (Euripides got there first), and of yet another Lara Croft clone that purports to be about an artifact from late Bronze Age Crete. Oh, yes; and reading way too many attempts by way too many museums to batter a public-friendly description into two hundred words or less.
And it should be obvious to everybody but getting it right (even if it were possible to get it all right) has little to do with making it readable. Or getting it to sell.
I made this argument myself before I set off. As I alluded to above, if look and feel is important to me, then I am ready, now, to reproduce the smells and sounds of the landscape of modern Crete (and only a few academics will know or care that not all the fauna I describe is properly contemporary). If getting that gut punch of five-senses description and strong characters and conflict and a little action is what is important (as I believe it is) then being sloppy with the research is okay. Being intentionally "sloppy" with the research is even better (that is, borrowing from what we can know, such as worship practices of 1st century Greece and Rome, or horticulture of the Christian age, but using details that came from life and thus carry that ineffable aura of veracity).
And so, yeah, research generated new questions. And some of those have sent me back to the top of the stack; what am I trying to write, and who for?