Arsenic (Bronze) and Old Lace

Novel is giving me a hard time.

I came close to making a sketch for a prologue scene. Idea one was a pair of scribes working on the famous letter from the King of Ugarit in which he pleads for aid against the ship-borne raiders who are burning his country.

Idea two was the death of my Mycenaean's mentor in battle when someone breaks position in the formation. Except. Did they fight in formation at the time? The phalanx hadn't been officially invented, but formation is more the rule than not, and those shields look appropriate and oh boy I've still got a lot of research to do before I can actually write even a damned sketch.

(And the former idea, although easy enough to pull off from the research materials I already have available, highlights its own problem. Which is that between the Scribe, the Seer, the role of magical texts, and the importance to the plot of the Medinet Habu inscriptions, writing -- ancient languages -- are going to be a really big part of this. And I just don't have those chops.)



I like the characters. I've been living with them in my head long enough for them to really flesh themselves out. But I still haven't picked the settings, or nailed down the plot.

A recent thought is that they never actually make it back to Pi-Ramses. This would save me from having to do massive research on cities and palaces and armies of the New Kingdom. I could have the seer character "read" the Medinet Habu inscriptions instead, as a coda. And that moves the climax to Scythia, without having to confront a god then go racing back across the Ancient World to get to Egypt before 1170.

And that means I can take the characters out of their setting. Over the last lonely stages of their trek far from the centers of the Ancient World, they can change in ways that make them no longer the playthings of gods -- allowing that climactic confrontation to at least make some kind of sense. I know I said I didn't want them to move from their own setting, and certainly not to suddenly have all this future technology and tactics and (worse yet) modern attitudes, but I sort of like having them learn through the seer material from the Classical age, as well as other world cultures, and within their own tight private circle of the four of them develop along philosophical and moral lines that are entirely unique.

Anyhow, it's a thought.

(And, yeah, I really want to do Tale of Setne and have a journey into Duat. So that makes the plotting of the pivotal chapters...confusing.)



My main research task at this point has got to be charting every single date (or rather, range of dates) I can find on the key events I feel I want to reference or be influenced by; the fall of Ugarit and Mycenae, for instance. And also draw up my own map that highlights the possible places of interest and puts in as much as I can discover about what the possible political state, cultural make-up, travel routes, etc. are in each of these places.

And maybe when I look at those charts some kind of plot will start to make sense.

And maybe when I've plotted out the high points, I'll have a manageable list of research topics.

It's all driving me to put the thing aside for a couple weeks while I catch my breath. Maybe finish off the Tomb Raider/SG1 crossover fanfic while I'm at it. Figuring out what is under Mount Shasta is starting to sound simple....