Illuminated

Still sick, Dracula is looming, and got an emergency call from a lighting designer friend to help a friend of his "do a Broadway lighting effect on a community theater budget." So I've been deep in calculations on LED strips and not at all amused by the way most vendors won't tell you the wattage you are working with.

(LEDs are always prey to this. Vendors for individual LEDs love telling you mcd's -- milli-candela. Which are an area dependent measure thus can only be compared across LEDs with the same view angle. Strips, meanwhile, love to tell you how many LEDs total, to the extent that some don't even bother to tell you how long that particular strip is! And even when you get the data, the numbers don't always add up with what the vendor is claiming.)

And, yeah, was tempted by idea of rolling up my own 6-channel Power MOSFET DMX-512-speaking PWM board. But not this time; the show installs on the 1st and although I could design a board and get the PCBs fabbed on quick turn-around committing that kind of money without a chance to prototype and test is not a good idea.



On the novel, finished the first book on the Hittite Empire, half way through a book of tales from Ancient Egypt and getting deep into a collection of more academic papers on the late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.

The characters are coming along. The more I read on Egyptian magic the more I like the Scribe character. He's pretty firmly in my mind a "crouching moron, hidden badass" type (to use the TVTropes term). Academic, geeky enthusiasm for old texts, can read anything (and speaks a few dozen languages as well). An unprepossessing body reminiscent of Amarna-period depictions, and gives no impression of martial prowess. But he's scary smart, Batman-level of prepared, and when he (reluctantly) whips out a magic spell...

The Mycenaean mercenary is coming along, too. He's sort of the audience POV, even though the culture he hails from has its own oddities. He's terribly steeped in honor codes and other aspects of what eventually gets recorded by Homer; he's a sort of a textbook of Heroic Age foibles, Achilles sulking in his tent and all.

The "Minoan" seer is giving me more trouble. Except for her gift. I've dreamed up an idea I haven't seen used elsewhere, an idea that could be a lot of fun even if it doesn't have any connection to any culture I've yet to study. And it fits in wonderfully with the way Egyptian magician-scholars of the tales come across quite a bit Indiana Jones, fighting their way into tombs to steal books of lost magic.

We forget that the past, too, has a past, and they were as fascinated as we are by long-passed cultures. After all, as the quote goes, the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us.

Ah, the Minoans. You got to envy the Hittites. See, all the common terms we have in Modern English for Egypt come down to us through the Greeks and Romans. The Minoans got hit later, with Sir Arthur Evans naming them after Greek myths. But the Hittites vanished from history. They weren't talked about by the Greeks, or by Roman Scholars, or by French or German or English speakers from the antiquarian age. They didn't (mostly!) get hit with labels given by scholars who were trying to see the world of the Christian Bible in everything.

They got discovered second-hand through the Amarna Letters. Through contemporary Egyptian writings, and then through their own writings. We didn't basically discover them until we'd gained the ability to read about them in their own words. So most of the names given to things Hittite are pretty much accurate transliterations of what they actually called them.

That's...unusual and lucky for most peoples, really. Especially when you are talking those on the losing side of history, the names we still use too often today are the names given by their wary neighbors, if not their conquerors. Names that translate far too readily into, "Slave," or "Our Ancient Enemy."

In any case, as much as I want to play with a Minoan point of view, to have some nice arguments and contrasts of perception, I haven't figured out how to defend a cultural relic of the height of their civilization finding a place amongst my cast two-hundred odd years later.




And, no, I still don't have a plot. I'm still pretty down on it being a quest novel. Of a motley collection of characters who could only have been thrust together by the most extreme of circumstances, becoming fire-forged friends and eventually accomplishing miracles.

There's two models I am currently considering. One is the "Heart of Darkness" model. The other I don't have as handy a label...perhaps call it a "Count of Monte Christo" model.

The former is a quest from a place of safety into the heart of a storm. More-or-less, the characters would launch from the court of Ramses III and journey along the path of destruction of the Sea Peoples to discover the greater evil that they in turn had fled from.

The latter is a quest to. Whereas the former begins in a place of strength, this hits nadir in a very early chapter. They've discovered a dangerous secret, and they have to fight their way across a world at war, against near-impossible odds, to deliver it to the right hands. It's the "After we get out of the inescapable prison..." plot.

Both models have their attractions. I am tempted either way to have a Ten Thousand back story for the Mycenaean. With or without his own Myrmidons. That is; they are the remnants of a mercenary army that barely escaped the fall of Ugarit, Hattusa... or even Illios. It did get sacked more than once, after all. Plus earthquakes and fire. (And to top it off, a German antiquarian with his dynamite...)

I am wary of the temptation of putting in too many historical in-jokes (or mythological in-jokes). There's a point at which this needs to be about the late Bronze Age, not about the familiar works and events and people of later ages. They should face their conflicts and solve their problems organically, not somehow through the power of being the protagonists in a novel written in the late 20th century come up with the exact same solution Scipio Africanus used against Hannibal.

Still, it is hard not to drop a mention of, say, a people largely unknown outside a peninsula of the Greek mainland who are already taking both warrior culture and a certain terse way of speaking to extremes... You know the sort of thing I mean!



So, yes. A lot of the book could be within larger social circles than our small band of adventurers. Within the fractious fighting for leadership and position within the remnant mercenary force, and the complex relationship between our main Mycenaean hero and his mentor, say. And it seems far too likely that even when they make it at last back to Pi-Ramses court intrigue ensnares them and they are forced to even more heroics to get that all-important warning to the Pharaoh, activities that drive them deep into the politics of the court and the Scribe's position there.

I don't want to go the route of larger strategic operations. I want chariots to figure at some point but our view of the battles will remain largely that of the individual foot soldier, not that of the generals. Still, modes other than the solitary heroes making only the most shallow contact with the events they move through have their attractions. Tolkien hired one of his hobbits off to Denethor, after all. He knew.

The thing I'm most sure of is the climax takes place in the Nile Delta in 1175 BCE. (Even if the real climax of the hero's arc may have taken place months earlier on an icy, lonely hill in the heart of Scythia.)