Under Pressure

Actually, according to my new Omron sphygmomanometer (uncalibrated)  I'm running at the high end of the normal range. (My Kaiser doc says bring it in and they'll calibrate it).

Dracula is going into tech next weekend and I'm in rehearsals this weekend. I bowed out of Enemy of the People and Pinocchio but I've offered to advise, train, mentor and loan equipment. So it would be wrong to say there's no strings on me.

The sewing is going...meh.

The first muslin was way off. My friend pinned it up, I transferred the markings to fresh pieces, then laid the Simplicity patterns I'd just purchased on top as a sanity check. Turns out our alterations had brought my original pattern very close to what was on the Simplicity. Did a little further adjustment, stitched up a fresh muslin and that one fit decently. So now I can start cutting the real fabric.

The first fit of the bass case went poorly as well. On the plus side, turns out I don't like the look of piping on this one so would have re-done it anyhow. And now I know how to do piping. In any case, I'm disheartened by how long it is taking for what I thought was a simple build.




I still have hopes of finishing a few things. Priority now is things that are in the way of straightening up my room (there's so many half-built projects I can't even move a broom around). Bass case is one of those. So is repairs on the bass itself.

And, yeah, there's a bit of a stack. And I can't help thinking (especially as I make stabs at organizing and prioritizing) how many other things I've started that are now taking up closet space or, at least, mental space.

Worst offender is Holocrons. The three "final" holos are spread out over my desk waiting for detail paint and final assembly. Cluttering the floor by the desk are Sterilyte bins of Holocron parts, and taking up the shelf over the Behringer is the reflow oven.



Over by the futon are many of my metal-working tools, as well as another bin of metal stock and parts-in-progress for work. Half of those tools used to be in a bin dedicated to M40 builds. I've had a few people ask about them over the years since the last run and it is tempting to log a few more hours on that lathe I spend so much membership money to ensure access to.

Somewhere in there are also the prints for caseless rounds I should really finish up so I can determine how the 3d file needs to be modified.

Of course I'd like to make a new tool roll for those metal working tools. And the sewing machine has a nice big table to itself at my workplace (it is a work mate I'm helping with the costume for his kid). So seems like a logical time to do a little more stitching. In a moment of ludicrous optimism I even purchased three yards of a cute ukulele print and a Hawaiian shirt pattern...

It is amazing how much closet space fabric can take up. Between that and the sewing machine and the box of associated tools (zipper foot, spare bobbins, seam gauge, Fiskers, etc.) I would really like them out of the way. There's no room here for laying and cutting anyhow.

And, yes, before I got my present full-time job I was having some serious cosplay thoughts. Even
purchased a frock coat pattern, although those are a huge pain to stitch up. Not that these thoughts have quite ended, although my main wearable goal at the moment is Bronze Age gear -- sandals at the least -- for research purposes on the new novel.

Every now and then get tempted towards something like the Dragon Priest mask from Skyrim (there's a nice PDO I have right now and that's supposed to be fast....) And of course my next big personal prop project continues to be the Wraith Stone. And of course, one day would love to revise the 3d files and try to make a more "screen accurate" version of Lara's 2013 necklace...*

Fixing the bass reminded me that I have back in the closet (and, yes, taking up space) a fretboard and neck and the start of a body for a solid-body electric ukulele. I've pretty much decided I'm too impatient these days (and too conscious of how much money I get if I actually show up to work instead of doing stuff at home) to do the hand-carved hard wood trilobite I was working on, but there was the simpler Vulcan-Lyre inspired teardrop design...

Fixing the bass and putting it in a case will take care of some clutter. The Pfetchner is getting a new bridge but that doesn't take up any more room (I've got it at work anyhow, where I have a nice quiet space to practice). The Behringer is however currently useless to me because I have no simple way of firing it up to try out musical ideas.

And part of the fill of the various parts boxes taking up floor space at the foot of the overstuffed bookshelves is drivers and amps and other stuff to make "some" sort of keyboard amp/tone box. Very possibly based around a Raspberry Pi -- which also cleans out another Sterilyte bin full of Pi parts and accessories.

Still, a bigger hole in the pile will come from just putting the old mics and mixers and speakers in storage. I gave away the e-drum stuff and sold off many of the rack modules and can dump old cable (especially the to-be-repaired XLR I simply don't have patience to deal with anymore). Not as much fun as building, though.

I am at the moment terribly tempted by a brass casting of what appears to be a Mycenean sword. Would be quite a few hours of shaping and polishing and fitting a hilt, of course. Possibly as time consuming as getting back to my flint-knapping kit (which also could use a cute roll to protect the tools -- but in that case, something quite far from machine-stitched).

My prop weaponry desires also include, however, revisiting the Retro Raygun. Besides revamping the speaker and power supply for more volume, I'd really like a more Diesel Punk; less spray chrome, more well-used metal. And productionize it while I'm at it; fix the 3d files and run off a new circuit board so the thing could be a kit that anyone could assemble in a few hours.

And you know, that's not that scary a list, not right there. I'm still logging off to finish a Red Trolley and play some Skyrim.



* I have a new head canon on that protean prop. Hyperdiffusionism is real in the Tomb Raider universe, and an Ainu jade-carver was exposed to Maori greenstone carvings, thus producing a weird hybrid of at least two different cultures; a little bit Koru, a little bit Magatama. Well, that's what I'll carve. Would be a good preparation for the Wraith Stone; carve this somewhere between 2-up and at scale in clay, then scan it for a new printable 3D file.

Snowball

It's been nice and cool, finally -- though not enough to help with all the fires. I sometimes wonder if it is like the experiment with the long-lived rats; if I keep the bedroom a little colder than I'd like, eat less than I'd like, and sleep just slightly less than I'd like, I seem to feel stronger overall.

Monday I was at the peak of the sine wave, 180 degrees out of phase from Aug 27 when I was lying under my desk trying not to pass out. Did a long and busy day at work, did laundry, did errands, and still had enough left over to go out to dinner. Experience says I'll be forced to slow down soon enough but at the moment I'm finally getting things done.

Right, so that's when I volunteered to help a co-worker out with a costume for his kid.

And of course that snowballed. I've made six visits to fabric stores, been researching dyes and re-reading my old costume books and re-learning the tricks of my sturdy Bernina Record 830 (thank you again, Wendy, for such a fantastic gift). I've got a table at work covered with fabric and patterns and all those bits and pieces and scraps and small strange tools of the trade.

Maybe I'll actually finish my bass case -- after my friend's costume is done -- if I haven't gone back into fatigue before then. Of course I also need to build two rolling carts and write up two sets of assembly instructions for work. At least I finished the parts I needed to machine.

(Yes, the lathe at TechShop is looking pretty scummy by now. It also needs some maintenance. I've written them one nasty email already.)

Holy Cow

Learning more and more useful stuff about Egypt.

Previously I mentioned The Book of the Heavenly Cow. Basic idea is Ra gets pissed at humanity and sends one of his "eyes" (in this case Hathor, a fertility goddess, operating as a sort of cosmic enforcer of Ra's will). Hathor starts the slaughter, driving humanity out into the desert, and in the process of giving into her blood lust becomes essentially Sekhet (a chaos god). In any case, Ra rethinks the whole "kill all humans" bit and this is when we have the thousands of gallons of beer dyed red to look like blood. And fortunately for humanity Hathor isn't a mean drunk.

(I'm reading the Budge translation right now, and there's real blood in the beer, along with mandrake roots for an extra-special sleepy-time potion. Two thirds of the story is basically about Ra's retirement and a re-organization of heaven. It opens with a description of the aged Ra whose bones have become like silver and hair like lapis lazuli...what strange sea change indeed!)

So after this (and on Ra's urging) it becomes an annual festival, part of the ever-moving cycle of seasonal festivals. This is one where the Egyptians both celebrate and re-enact by getting blind stinking drunk then (apparently) having group sex. Very typical solstice sort of thing here. (The bit about moveable feasts is that the Egyptian calendar had 360 days, plus five "don't really exist" spooky days, but no leap year; so over a thousand years or so the calendar would rotate through a whole cycle until the harvest festival was actually at harvest time again, instead of in some entirely other month. Anyhow).

So I also caught a program on Exodus from an Egyptian History perspective. Which is pretty much a "what Egyptian history?" perspective; there's no Hebrew slaves, no massacre of chariots, Pharaoh and all in the Red Sea, and of course the Pyramids were built a thousand years earlier and by paid labor to boot (we have copies of their pay stubs). But there are some tantalizing glimpses into what the writers of Exodus may have been inspired by. Including the Hyksos, a somewhat mysterious and seemingly Semitic people who controlled Egypt during the Second Interregnum. 

And the plagues struck me at this time as a strange echo of the Hathor story. There's all sorts of weird little not-really-parallels, like the role of the ureas and the staffs of Pharaoh's court magicians turning into snakes. And, you know, the whole driven-into-the-desert thing. But then, if you are going to be a bronze age people in that corner of the world sand, snakes, floods, fertility, locusts, and blood are pretty much to be expected.

And, yes, the way the court magicians act is not unlike how court magicians act in stories like Teta the Magician.

It still makes me think that some sort of red tide, a scarlet sign much like the weed that mysteriously sprung up around London in the H.G. Wells novel, fits for my story. There's stuff in Heavenly Cow about Nu as well, a goddess of, well, call it the primordial soup; a god of the outer chaos/water but also the fecundity that water brings (annual flooding of the Nile, after all). And of course a primary duty of Rameses III is maintaining maat, order; which makes the appropriate thematic climax of the story the Battle of the Delta.

(And if I ever opened a small restaurant Primordial Soup would definitely be on the menu. What's in it? I dunno...all the essential amino acids, I suppose...)

And I'm realizing more and more that so much of the fun here is the interaction between cultures. Between people from a Mycenaean Greek and a New Kingdom Egyptian viewpoint, at the very least. It would be so much fun to write with. It will also be a heck of a lot of work to get there. 

Images are all from Nina Paley's series of short animations from Exodus, collected with other stories under the general heading "Seder-Masochism."

Stepping in the River

Monday was a diagnostic procedure. Non-zero chance of negative outcomes (6% chance of injury up to and including death). I wasn't scared, per se, but I spent the weekend in a sort of existential ennui, unable to think about future plans.

I got there and it was the full routine; surgical prep, shaving and sterile draping, IV and drugs. One of those threshold experiences. Like travel, like going off to school. Continuity of identity is an illusion, after all. We change constantly, our behavior altered and our very thoughts running in different patterns when we are in different environments.

And I'm still not back. Over this week I just haven't emotionally re-connected with the life I was living last Friday. I'm left floundering as the things that held enough meaning to be my motivators just aren't there right now.

Not helped by recovery. Under instruction to avoid straining my right wrist, which included driving, practicing violin, lifting heavy objects or really doing much of what I normally do. I made up for it with long walks, walking to work through the rest of the week.

And the news is good. My heart is healthy. So at this point heart, lungs both normal, blood chemistry seems normal, vitals are all in a nice healthy range (surprisingly healthy for my age and lifestyle). So the engine is good. Still no clue why every couple of months it just stops answering the engine room telegraph.

Magic Elephant

I don't have a plot yet. But I'm making progress on the engine that drives it.

First conceit is that magic and gods are real, but human understanding of them is incomplete. This sounds like a reversal of my previous "no out of context problems" but it really isn't. The elephant is part of the of the world but each culture has hold of different parts of it.

And this is culturally appropriate. Ecumenical is the wrong word to use of early cultures but in the ancient world it isn't uncommon for pantheists to be entirely open to the idea of other gods. Just...less powerful gods than their own. And I have yet to research how the Mycenae look at magic, but I've been reading a collection of stories from Ancient Egypt and there is a strong theme that human understanding of the ways of the gods is incomplete.

So it will work to have a supernatural force/entity/whatever that each of my characters...and the various cultures encountered...describe in different ways that even they realize are incomplete. Even as they try to find a fit within their own mythologies.

The key is probably to avoid having the "thing" be recognizable to modern eyes. That is, it isn't a dinosaur or a crashed space ship that the locals are spinning their own take on. It is something that is best described in the terms used in the story.



Personified Chaos* is where I'm going right now. Possibly a natural force as well; something that directly causes the mass migration of peoples (aka drought, frost, plague, whatever)**. Whatever personification there is, is entirely there so it can be sought, chased, and fought. Because yes, in both Egyptian and Greek mythologies the gods can be challenged (even if they tend to win in the end.) Gods were driven from the field in the Trojan War. Nefrekeptah stole the Book of Thoth (but Thoth quickly had his revenge). The child mage Se-Osiris visited Duat with his father, and returned safely.

But remember this is the fading of an age. The gods are losing power; soon enough (give or take eight hundred years) Roman poets are going to be spinning tales of hen-pecked Jupiter and otherwise turning the gods into (still erratic and dangerous) figures of fun. Just as the Witch-King of Angemar could fall to a human woman with a sword, it remains thematic that the Big Bad of this story could be taken down by a self-doubting mercenary with a weapon of meteoric iron.

(Yeah -- I don't know yet if I can justify it or how well it works but I can't help thinking of the funerary dagger of Tutankhamen -- which is by the way a really gorgeous piece -- and the actual documentation of iron smelting as early as 800 BCE. And, yeah, Sokka's Space Sword. Not that the latter achieved anything magical, unless you count the armband of the same material he gave to Toph...)

(It is also interesting to look at the local take on meteoric iron. It isn't seen as a gift from the gods, or rather, no more so than springs or seed grains or the annual flooding of the Nile. The available writing is pretty much; yeah, some iron fell from the sky, and we used it to make jewelry.)

Thing is...when I look at the idea of personified chaos, coming out of the Carpathians, possessing people, causing plagues of rats, I keep getting resonances of Vampire lore. Which is as I said exactly what I don't want to do. Or, that is, it is a helpful subtext only in that it works within the local mythologies and doesn't allow the readers a superior distance of, "Oh, those foolish ancient people, it's really a vampire."

A similar problem is facing me for myth-making. I very much want the idea that hundreds of years later the poets will be telling stories based on what happened. The Trojan War is available as an example of a real incident of the not-so-distant past that is being mythologized as they watch. But it seems a similar class of mistake to tie anything the characters do too directly to a single myth known in our time.

Pity, because the idea of Pandora and her jar is exactly that sort of candle to light the darkness I want to end with.



*Actually, to be more specific, it is the current idea that the Bronze Age Collapse is best understood in terms of system theory. It is an emergent effect from existing forces. Even if my planned usage veers parlously close to the popular misconception of Chaos Theory, as exemplified in Jeff Goldblum's mutterings in the Jurrasic Park movies.

**I'm very tempted to do a riff on a genocidal god story told of several different figures; in the Amarna period it was told of Hathor. The key bit being blood mixed with beer spilled on the ground; in the myth, a trap for a god, but in this story, some sort of scarlet blight on the staple crops....

A Denyen, an Ekwesh, and a Peleset walk in to a bar...

...and the bartender says, "I have no idea who any of you are."

I've finished two books, several articles, and about four hours of podcast on the Bronze Age Collapse. Which is just barely enough to give me confidence the story can go forward. But not enough, alas, to move into actual plotting.

The goal is draft in a year. Three months for general research and planning, the next six to nine moving from setting to setting more-or-less as the cast does. One of the things I learned from the fanfic is I do like more of a travel literature style (more extensive descriptions and histories) but I need to back off. I need, in short, to decompress my text. More of the words should be the grit; walking and talking, eating and fighting. More "They sailed for another three days" and less "They boarded a dromon with sails of cinnabar-dyed linen."

Which boils the required research down to something like six to ten 5,000 word essays. Not impossible to complete in a year. This doesn't, of course, account for the investment of visiting Crete, acquiring sandals and a bronze Naue-II replica, eating historical foods, etc., etc.

I am less confident about back-filling, about the idea of skipping over chunks of text or putting in place-holders. Sure, I want to learn more about how Scrivener handles meta-data, but I tend to write in whole paragraphs. This is definitely going to be an experiment in not just outlining, but actual iterative writing. For instance, all the description of Memphis might be in a single chapter, but the Scribe character will be in almost every chapter.

(There's an amusing side thought in this. The Homeric epics are characterized by epitaphs for recurring characters and even natural phenomena; "The wine-dark sea" is a typical phrase. This made it easier to fill out a line to the right length and meter. It also made it easier to remember what was an oral, bardic tradition -- and is theorized also could serve as a sort of standard set of parts to construct new lays. There's something here not entirely unlike the idea of using a place-holder to be replaced after the research is done.)

I originally picked the Bronze Age Collapse for three reasons; because I'd been reading/exposed to a lot of bronze age stuff already, because the period is lesser-known, and because I thought I had a plot.

Well, the latter two fell down almost immediately. Lesser-known is not the same as saying we know nothing about the period. There is a lot of research to do. And more; although I could easily stick to, say, the Anatolian coast and have characters who haven't studied history, it seems a shame not to explore some of the really big players here. Particularly the Mycenae, and the Egyptian New Kingdom. The former is the time of Tutankhamen, possibly the most popular and popularized era of Egypt's long history. The latter is the Heroic Age, the time of Troy and Theseus and the rest of the Homeric and legendary heroes.

And more. There is actually archaeology here. Ancient peoples were as fascinated by the past as we are. And even the idea of ancient writings, particular hieroglyphs, as being magical writing is not something invented with the Theosophists of the 19th century. It was already an idea in ancient Egypt. There's at least one tale of a wandering scribe looking for a book of magic who has to break into a tomb and fight off the monsters within.....

Yup. My Egyptian Scribe character would probably feel at home in fedora and bullwhip.

So between him, and a "Greek" mercenary wrestling with questions of honor against the mythologies he was brought up on, I'm going to have a lot of character time dealing with history and literature and language and religion. As easy as it would be to have Conan-types striding bronze sword in hand through a land they barely understand, it works better for me to have more of a, well, Lord of the Rings flavor with everywhere history and crumbling monuments and ancient ballads and Elvish songs (well, not really the latter).

At the moment I'm at a plateau. I'm continuing to do general research on the period and peoples, but I don't have a good idea now for the plot. The only things I'm sure of is I want to move around, and I want to move mostly along the paths the Sea Peoples took (or may have took; it is entirely unclear if the Sea Peoples, quote unquote, had anything to do with the collapse of the Hittite Empire and the sacking of their cities). And I'd like to end in 1175 at the Battle of the Delta, when Ramses III defeats an assembled fleet of these mysterious invaders.

I am tempted to start with the sack of Hattusa with a Mycenaean mercenary band doing an Anabasis from there (well, march to the Aegean). Willusa/Illios/Troy is probably two hundred years back, meaning it is part of the legends and stories already. Another starting point might be Knossos, when the exiled Scribe and the Cretan seer he has discovered realize they need to get word to Ramses III -- and presumably fall to pirates within the first day of their journey.

And Eastern Europe is not off the table yet. The history and archaeology available in the West is heir to the bias towards the foundational Greco-Roman cultures, but this is changing. And there is some fascinating stuff happening in this period in the Intra-Carpathian region.

The other big unknown is the fantasy element. After thinking it over for a while I've realized I don't want an "out of context" problem. No crashed spaceships, no people (or visions, sigh) of the future. What happens should be presented in, discussed in, understood by the characters in terms they understand.

I want to treat magic and gods the way they are treated in the various literatures. There's a very matter-of-fact way auguries are described in Xenophon -- in one particular incident, it was divined that the freezing wind was a result of having angered Poseidon. One sacrifice later, and "The winds diminished noticeably, much to the Greek's relief." Of course Xenophon is writing in the late Classical age, but then Homer didn't pick up his pen until some two to four hundred years after the period when my story is getting set (and some of the most literary of the Egyptian tales didn't get recorded until the Ptolemy's.)

There's a pitfall, however. The Xenophon above exemplifies something I'd call "deniable magic." And that feels wrong to me as well. I don't want to play the game of having things happen that could be interpreted as the action of gods or merely the blind action of natural forces. It feels dishonest to the cultures being depicted.

It isn't as if it is hard to find excuses to send characters out on an adventure. The Bronze Age Collapse is pretty much the definition of a time of disorder, of rapidly shifting events that sweep up people in their path. I'd like my characters to have a purpose that isn't just a transparent McGuffin. And yet, it would be unfair to the real history to have a single cause for the collapse that they can discover and attempt to thwart. It doesn't even make sense to the real history for our misfit group of heroes to know the "secrets" of the Sea People. The historical evidence is that neither they nor really anyone in the period thought of this as a unified force with specific goals. It was, as I said, a time of chaos.

The best I can come up with is the heroes have some other goal, tangential to but not completely unrelated to the events unfolding around them. A Saving Private Ryan mission, perhaps. Or, something I've been toying with but need a lot more research on the various local mythologies to see if it can be made appropriate, a sort of personification of Chaos or War. Something that was one of the engines behind the current path of destruction and could make things worse if left unstopped. But throughout all of this I keep remembering that this is the end of an era. Even Egypt essentially collapses (well, is reduced severely in power and never fully recovers.) This is the last golden age of many empires, and the best the heroes can achieve is small victories, a candle of hope to light the dark ages to come.

(And here, if nowhere else, it is terribly tempting to have a seer gain a vision of the Classical Age. Which, when you think about it, wasn't exactly wine and roses but in this world of ours you take what you can get!)

The Sea Peoples

I've found my new novel. And the research is insane.

It came in a moment of inspiration. I can boil it down to one terse statement of purpose (always a good start!) But that statement would be phrased in keywords referencing some of what was going through my head at the time and thus would only make sense to me.

Things like Ozymandius (the Shelly poem, also a similar by Sandburg). The influence of W.W.I on J.R.R. Tolkien. H.P. Lovecraft. The Anabasis of Xenephon. The heroic quest and the concept of the five-man band. Minoan Crete. Bronze-age trade networks. Akhenaten's Egypt. The Belisarius series.

The part of my elevator pitch that I can share, however, is, "...during the Bronze Age Collapse."




Not that this is that explanatory either. It is a complicated and under-documented era in history. Which, honestly, attracted me; the sources are thin and contradictory enough that you can make a lot of shit up with a wave of, "it is defensible that..." or, "sources don't say..."

But that's for the actual collapse. See, here's the problem. Something collapsed and there's remnants of it and stories about it and a whole batch known about it. Oh, and worse? Dark ages don't last. New cultures flower, and some of their stories and myths are buried in that less-documented past.

See, the time of this story is also at the height of power of the Egyptian New Kingdom. Literally Ozymandius (Shelly was inspired by Ramses II, and he and Ramses III document fighting the Sea People.) Tutankhamen and the rest of his interesting family is only a few generations earlier.

And when we come out of the dark ages and the Greeks start writing stuff down again, one of them is a fellow named Homer. Yes, the Trojan War theoretically takes place during the Bronze Age Collapse. And if that wasn't enough...so does much of Exodus.

Yeah, sure, these are pretty heavily disputed and sources, as we say, disagree. But whether there was a Troy and where it is and when Jerrico fell and who was the Pharaoh of Exodus can be endlessly argued in academic circles, it still remains that if I'm writing a story during the collapse, and any of the peoples mentioned actually show up as characters, I'm going to have to know their cultural background. I need at least a smattering of the myths and beliefs and oral traditions and philosophies.



And it gets worse. The Homeric Age and Egypt's Golden Age are both very, very popular. On the one hand, then, you've got fans. On the other side, you are going to have critics. Harsh ones.

(And it doesn't stop there, of course. There's also the wee bit of Ancient Warfare, which has a lot of cranky opinionated people studying it, and it wouldn't hurt to know a little Biblical history, and even though it collapsed hundreds of years ago the Mycenae more or less took over the islands and trading empire but...deep breath...there's never anything wrong with studying the Minoans a little more.)



In a similar good news, bad news way, the popularity of some of these areas means there are unusual research opportunities. I'm all about the look and feel; it is one thing to be able to say "dromon," it is an entirely different (and much better, for the reading experience) be able to say something about what kind of wood or how the sails are used or otherwise put across what the characters see, hear, smell, etc.

There are re-enactors and mummy rooms and epic poetry and recreated historical music and foods and reconstructions of buildings. There's opportunity here to immerse in, if not the actual culture, then something similar enough so it can be extrapolated and approximated. And, yes, I've started pricing plane tickets to Athens.

So far my tentative research list is archaic arms and warfare, Homeric epics, ancient seafaring, Egypt's New Kingdom, Egyptian philosophy, early writing systems, early Greek philosophy, Mycenaean culture, the Hittite empire...

But the first step is getting a general grounding in the period and seeing if I can indeed write a heroic quest in which a rag-tag bunch of misfits (tentative list includes a Mycenaean mercenary, an Egyptian scribe/court magician, a Cretan born seer) fight their way across a war-torn world to solve the mystery of the Sea Peoples. "...during the Bronze Age Collapse."