Out here in pandemic land, the barley flour pancakes worked. Turns out I had a little rice starch tucked away, and that and olive oil and water is enough. They didn't fluff out much. But they were good with a bit of marmalade. As of this morning the line for groceries is still down the block all the way to the next street and it is too cold and wet to brave it just yet.
***
I'm 2,000 words in and I'm starting to learn what I can do, can't do, and shouldn't do in the book. Like accents. Fortunately for all concerned, writing accents phonetically is strongly deprecated these days. Apparently Dracula was written with a phonetic Yorkshire accent and there's a audio version out there that sounds like, "Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonating Sean Connery impersonating a drunken pirate."
My big get-out-of-Sheffield-free card, though, is that essentially people in England speak two dialects (like Italians). There's the local -- sometimes so strong as to be mutually impenetrable, and sometimes so identifiable a Yorky can tell which village you belong to -- and then there's the speaking-to-the-public one, a sort of softer RP. Well, these days, a full on RP is too "Tip of the hat old chum" for even Auntie Beeb, and has been largely replaced in Greater London by Estuary.
On the plus side, people can and do slide between accents, using whatever is socially appropriate. On the negative side, when they are with their own the dialect and usage is a truck load of shibboleths. The British are so finely tuned, the slightest trace of the wrong rhotic "r" will have them crying foul.
And it isn't just phonetics, which I don't have to put in text. It is word choices and grammar. And the former, naturally enough, changes over time -- within any one grouping, a word might be as perennial as "cool" or as over with as "Daddy-O."
The plan as of this moment is to print -- either by hand or to use the Author's Copies feature on Amazon to print without making the book available to the general public -- and enlist the help of the Geordies down at the pub. Assuming we're all still breathing when doors open again (and that includes the pub; businesses are hit hard.)
That's been another thing that's made it very difficult to keep writing. I can't help thinking how trivial this is, compared with the disaster unfolding outside. And I'm writing contemporary fiction which is rapidly turning historical. The world is changing. Possibly radically. The topical concerns of the book are going to look a lot different after this year is over.
Maybe I should be looking at what I can do to earn a bit of money during this enforced down time. There are people wanting entertainment and some of them still have money for digital content. But, hey, isn't writing that? 3D models might be more profitable, but in the last analysis this hasn't changed; I can at this time still afford to do the art I want to do.
So, yeah. Struggling on. I've reworked and revised those first scenes over and over again. Putting stuff in then deciding it doesn't work or might work but needs to be held back until later. Figuring out what I have to put in to establish the contract with the reader and the premise and the background that lets them ground themselves in what is happening and the conflict and personalities that lets them care.
Writing is discovery. That's why I don't believe in over-outlining. I had a cute idea for how to create a set of character types for the core cast of archaeology students, I needed a mouthpiece to say one line to make that concept an easter egg for the reader, and now I've discovered a way in which a character I thought was going to remain a beté noire can actually be won over in a late chapter.
I really am meeting these people as my protagonist meets them. So it is fun. Slow as hell, but fun.
***
And now I'm having leftovers and watching Good Omens and, yes, it's research! So technically still working on the novel,,,
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