Then, at the department, one of the professors has a tree (or possibly a whole orchard, judging from the quantities) of big green cooking apples that she brings in for people to take away, and today there was a basket of them on the table by the pigeon-holes. One of them had a weird little excrescence over the hole where the stem goes, looking strangely like a nose. Of course I drew a face on it. I hope somebody found it.

Good seminar on authors and authorship in the medieval world – looking at Chaucer’s famous retraction, Peter Abelard’s memoirs, Wyclif’s justification for translating the Bible into English (best reason: “The French already have vernacular Bibles! Do you want them to WIN?”)  and some other interesting bits. On the theoretical side, Roland Barthes, who I can take or leave, and Foucault, who is always worth reading.

Went shopping for boots. Finally bought some boots. My feet will be dry for the remainder of the winter! Maybe. I have waterproof-sprayed them and given them new purple laces, anyway.

The highlight of the afternoon, whilst wandering listlessly between shoe shops, was undoubtedly catching Blackbeard’s Tea Party busking on the pavement outside All Saints. Apparently they’re usually a six-piece, but today their tuba player was missing, so they were represented by acoustic guitar, fiddle, two drummers and a trilby-wearing bloke on the melodeon. They are seriously good; if you like folk/folk-rock, well worth a listen. I may have to look out for them and buy them cheesecake.

My NaNovel is keeping just barely ahead of wordcount, I do not know how. I went into it meaning to write something at least vaguely thoughtful on human responses to apocalypse, and lo, it ended up being (so far) thirty thousand words of waffling and Templars. Such is life, I guess.

Yeah, okay, so 90% of that is complete and utter shite (I’ve discovered, or had confirmed, that I am a pre-writer. I have to write a whole shit-ton of words before I actually get a handle on my characters and my story), but the last couple of k isn’t going straight in the trash at the end of November, so, yay!

And I found a title today. Double yay!

Does anyone else feel the urge to listen to music from the Second Day of Majora’s Mask?  I think I should go find that file.  Seems like a good time to listen to it.

Well, last night, with literally two minutes before midnight, I finished my first chapter of my novel and turned in for the day–er, night.  I’m at about two-thousand words, which isn’t a very long first chapter, but I sort of wanted a cliff-hanger before I went on into a lot of action and then flashbacks and exposition and blah blah blah.  I’m working on my second chapter right now, but I have to do a stupid powerpoint on Lech Walesa and Harry Truman before I start really writing.

I’m really excited about my novel.  I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen after these first four chapters that I have planned out, but we’ll see where it all takes me.  The uncertainty of NaNoWriMo is part of the fun, after all.

I hope that all of my Wrimo friends are going strong, too. (:

Later, peeps.

I hope everyone’s doing well and I hope that my fellow Wrimos are getting off to a great start (:

So far, I only have one character solidly written down, only my first chapter and my middle chapter planned out, and an extremely silly working title.

Sounds like a plan to me.

DFTBA,

Kristeen (:

This year I’m doing good old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery, but hoping to avoid some of the more common pitfalls of the genre. Tired quest plots, for one; I know it’s a very old and eminently respectable genre but everyone’s doing it. Also, importing all the prejudices of the modern world into a fantastical realm – it continues to piss me off how many authors apparently have no problem envisioning dragons, elves, whole kingdoms with every leaf lovingly detailed, but somehow cannot create believable women. Honestly, we’re people really. IT IS NOT SO HARD.

The one that really, unreasonably, bugs me, however, is Medieval Stasis. The one where, as in Tolkien’s Arda or George R. R. Martin’s Westeros, society has stayed at the same generically medieval stage for thousands of years, with no plausible explanation as to what’s holding them back. Even counted generously, the European Middle Ages only lasted one millennium – and the world changed drastically between 500 and 1500 AD. The throne of England passed from Saxons to Vikings to Normans; we fought a century-long war with France and several smaller ones; we had a full-on civil war between Lancaster and York; the heyday of the longbow came and went; the plague happened, several times; the Peasants’ Revolt; the language went from Beowulf to Malory, as did warrior culture; gunpowder and printing were invented; the Reformation happened; and MILLIONS of other things that generally conspired to make the world an almost unrecognisably different place in the 16th century than it was in the 6th.

And all this was without any kind of magical or supernatural power; imagine how much more upheaval, how many more wars, how much more chaos and innovation and general awesome shit could be accomplished if there was bona fide magic involved. Of course people would meddle in it; meddling is pretty much what humans do. Quite apart from the fact that history moves on just left to itself, I have to imagine that the easy accessibility of violent supernatural power would lead to the exact opposite of many years of unchanging peace. Monsters arise in every generation; now imagine a Hitler or a Caligula with teleportation and fireballs. Yeah. No. On the other hand, geniuses turn up every so often as well: Magical!Leonardo da Vinci, anyone? The man could rule the world. (Oh man, now that’s a whole nother idea.)

So that’s objective #1: avoid (too much) Not How History Works fail. Objective#2: pile on the medievalist geekery. I’m envisioning a lot of Gratuitous Anglo-Saxon and the occasional Latin pun. (Did I mention I’ve already written a Latin poem for my characters to quote? Well, I have. You may judge me now.) Objective #3: play around with eschatology a little bit, because the more I think about it the more fun it seems to be.

Eschatology, despite its sound, is not a portmanteau of escapology and scatology;* rather, it comes from the Greek eschatos ‘last’ and means, therefore, the study of the last days, the end times, the Apocalypse, or however else you wish to refer to the end of the world.

Its traditional usage does not imply the absolute end of everything – rather, eschatology is concerned with the end of the present, material world, and different eschatologies allow for (even require) the presence of some kind of better, immaterial world After The End. For apocalyptic Christian traditions, that would be the Kingdom of Heaven; for the weirder strains of transhumanism it would be whatever comes after the singularity. And so on. Plenty of faiths and some not-quite-faiths** have eschatological beliefs of one kind or another, for further details of which I refer you to the rest of the Interwebs.

The Apocalypse and its possible impending-ness are still popular topics of speculation today. However, my field being what it is, I’m more interested in medieval versions of the End; in particular, the crop of them brought on by millenialism – the idea, quite popular amongst the Anglo-Saxons, that the world would end one thousand years after Christ’s birth and thus in or around the year 1000. You get a lot of day-of-Judgement rhetoric coming out around that time.

Then as now, people invoked the spectre of the apocalypse left, right and centre – it was a handy way to keep the flock in line. What I’ve always wondered, though, about both past and present eschatologists, is how many people out of those who nominally believe in the impending end of the world actually do genuinely believe in the impending end of the world? My gut feeling is that most of them didn’t/don’t, because vast swathes of people shy away from contemplating even entirely certain bad things, like dying, and it’s that much more difficult to care about something that may or may not ever happen in your lifetime.

I also suspect that a lot of the loudest preachers of apocalypse, past and present, don’t believe it in the slightest but have spotted a nice big source of profit and power. There’s also those who still think that the ideas associated with the apocalypse are worth working towards (e.g. transhuman consciousness, Christian virtue) but don’t actually believe in the apocalypse itself.

What I’m hoping to explore in this novel is how people in those categories – people who have embraced the idea of apocalypse as a convenient fiction for whatever reason, but don’t seriously think it’ll happen (or happen to them) – react when something of a distinctly apocalyptic flavour actually does happen. The one I’ve got planned for the story is a meteorite*** – big enough to cause utter chaos, but small enough to be survivable; the world will be in a stage roughly analogous to the thirteenth or fourteenth century AD when it hits. Lots of bickering medieval states that feud at the drop of a hat. Lots of religious controversy and accusations of heresy. And magic.

Can you tell I’m really looking forward to this?

*

*”Yes it is: it’s the study of figuring out how to escape the shit that’s about to happen.” – Rhiannon

**Singularitarianism makes no claim to be a religion, and plenty if not most of those who profess it are atheist; but a sincere belief that we are the generation who will live forever thanks to Science!™ seems about as weird to me as the belief that we are the generation in whose lifetime the Rapture will fall – exceptionalistic, unlikely, and too often used to justify a failure to clean up present shit based on the idea that soon it won’t matter any more.

***Why do fantasy worlds never seem to have full cosmoses? At most they’ll have some moons (which never screw up the tides as royally as you’d expect from multiple moons) – the general impression is of lone planets floating disconnected in the void. The Warmachine/Iron Kingdoms world gets points for having a whole solar system, but even that is, as universes go, kind of small.

I’m going to post a new video about NaNoWriMo every day leading up to it : D

Sorry?

It’s not like anyone’s reading this, anyway.

But, yeah, the point of this post is that: yes, I am doing NaNoWriMo again this year. For those of you that were wondering: no, I did not finish my novel last year. I got somewhere between 20K and 30K words and stopped cold turkey. I still haven’t opened up that file. I don’t really know why I stopped writing the book other than I just sort of… closed it and forgot. I had a lot going on; family issues and whatnot. School wasn’t too difficult, but by that time I think we were gearing up for finals.

This year, though, I want to go all the way.

I’m not going to return to my old novel’s plot this year. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to it. I have a few solid ideas (well, at least I hope they’re pretty solid). I still have to go through them a bit and write some stuff out.

By November first, I hope to have a pretty good outline going, with my characters fleshed out pretty well; but I don’t want anything that’s going to confine my writing. A lot of what I write is just off the top of my head and whatever seems to be a good idea at the time. And sometimes, it is a good idea. I don’t want to jeopardize that.

Right now, I have a composition book for my NaNo this year. I think I want to do something like this every year. For the memories, you know?

(My notebook currently is covered in lyrics to Mrs Nerimon, This Isn’t Hogwarts, The NaNoWriMoSong and It’s Snowing. Soon, it just be covered in duct tape and sticky notes.)

I really like sticky notes.

Needless to say, I’m really psyched up about NaNo this year. I’m having a write-in with some good friends and some of their friends the first week of November right after my SAT. It’s not going to be a big thing, but I hope that a whole Saturday will help me get my word count really far ahead so I’ll be able to miss a few days.

I can’t wait for the start of November.

What about you? Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? Are you excited? Nervous? Hysterical (already)?

Add me.