Tag: nifty stuff

Back from the Road

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I’m back in town after a long weekend in Montreal (lovely city, and in fact closer to us than Boston); in lieu of anything more substantive, have a couple of amusing links:

Life Beyond Words, a blog post by Judy Tarr about equine perception and communication.  Horses are one of the things aspiring fantasy and historical writers tend to get wrong.   Reading all the posts on the horses tag on this blog would go a long way to remedying the matter.

And then there’s Shady Characters, a blog about the history of punctuation marks.  It’s a book now, too, and most of the more recent posts are concerned with that, but you can dive into the archives for discussions of pilcrows and interrobangs and octothorpes.

More from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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As an addendum to my post the other day on outlines and cover letters, there’s this (from romance novelist Linda Conrad via Terri-Lynne DeFino): a handy-dandy basic two-sentence “elevator pitch” generator:

(TITLE) is a (GENRE) about (Heroine/Hero), a (backstory/identity) who, after (inner conflict) wants (goal). But when (turning point) happens, he/she has to (external goal), which seems impossible because (external conflict).

Looked at in skeletal form, it resembles nothing so much as MadLibs For Authors, but it works.

Today’s Nifty Link

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Over at the blog Ex Urbe, there’s a long, chewy post (with pictures) about the historical development of the city of Rome from its first days as a cluster of huts on a hilltop by the Tiber.

Writers dealing with invented worlds (whether past or future), take note:  This is how a real city grows up.  Your invented cities need to have similar layers to them if you want them to feel real.  (This is also, I suspect, why planned cities can have such a flattened feel to them.  They haven’t had enough time in place yet to accumulate additional strata, so when you scratch the surface all you get is more surface.)

Links of Interest

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Well, of interest to me, anyhow.

This one doesn’t have anything to do with writing, except in the way that everything, eventually, has to do with writing; it’s about the spread of prehistoric dairying culture as traced through ancient cheesemaking tools, and how that tracks with the development of lactose tolerance in northern and western Europe.

I can’t see hanging an entire story on those bits of knowledge, but it’s the sort of idea that tumbles around in the back of a writer’s head for an extended period of time, accreting other ideas to itself all the while, until it becomes something much bigger and shinier and definitely other.

This post by Greg van Eekhout, on the other hand (while a couple of years old at this point) is very much about writing — specifically, about the vexed question of skin color in cover art, and the work involved in getting it right.  As long as you’re over at Greg’s site, you might as well read this more recent post, as well, in which he takes on the question, “What is a writer of Dutch-Indonesian descent doing playing around with Norse myth?”  (Other than, “A damned fine job, that’s what,” which was my instant reaction, years ago, to reading his short story “Wolves Till the World Goes Down” at the Viable Paradise workshop.)

It All Counts for Research, Right?

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Today’s entry in the “everything is grist for the writer’s mill” department:  a decidedly NSFW illustrated article on a 1680 sex manual that even shocked Samuel Pepys.  (But he read it anyway, the horndog.)

For the prurient or dedicated researcher — not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive — the article includes a link to the full version of the text as digitized on Google Books.  Because you never can tell what you might need to know someday.

Getting There

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Fantastic and historical fiction is full of journeys, quests, hot pursuits, and other assorted road trips — sometimes with magical assistance, and sometimes not.

It’s with the “not” that things can get difficult, because a lot of modern-day writers don’t have anything like a working knowledge of any kind of travel that doesn’t involve an internal combustion engine and a four-lane divided highway.  Doing research can be tricky, too, because while modern-day horse people (and trail hikers and dogsled racers and people who raise and train yokes of oxen for fun) are almost always delighted to share their specialized knowledge, a lot of the time it can be like asking a NASCAR driver or a rally enthusiast, “How many days would it take me to drive from Podunk to Ashtabula?”

You’ll get an answer, all right, but it may well be so full of qualifying details that you can’t sort out the single thing you really need to know, or so far out there on the extreme performance end that an ordinary mortal wouldn’t have a chance of coming near it.  These people are all highly-qualified experts driving perfectly-maintained, high-end machines, and all you really want to know is roughly how long it would take an ordinary Joe or Jane driving a plain vanilla sedan with an automatic transmission and 50,000 miles on the odometer.

(I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that once horses stopped being a means of transportation and became a hobby, the equine equivalent of the midrange family car with automatic transmission and cruise control started fading out of the picture.)

Nevertheless, you have to try.  Criticism of fantasy, both from within and from without the genre, has already said a lot of true and cutting things about fantasy horses that are functionally indistinguishable from motorcycles; you don’t want to provide the critics with yet more ammunition.

For some help on that, you could do worse than to read this LiveJournal post, here — also the comments, which contain much additional useful information.

Another Neat Thing They’re Doing

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Scholars are using computers “to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean” — a task that previously had to be done by eye and hand.

A lot of the documents retrieved so far deal with the minutiae of daily life:  contracts and sales records and legal documents and even recipes.  For a historian, and even more for writers who are trying to recreate history for their readers, such details are golden, worth far more, sometimes, than the word about who defeated whom on the battlefield, and where.

(I’d be particularly interested to know the ingredients and techniques involved in what the article describes as a “particularly vile” recipe for honey-wine.  Purely as a matter of academic curiosity, you understand.)

 

Elsewhere: In Praise of Good Sentences

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From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a blog post on memorable sentences.

The post, and the comments, have some good ones, though so far they seem to have missed James Thurber completely.  At one point in my life I not only could quote Thurber extensively, I would — under sufficient provocation — actually do so.  (How could I not admire a writer who could come up with lines like “He was six-feet-four and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was”?)

Anyhow — go over there and read the post and the comments.