A Writer’s Best Friend: 3-sided Cardboard
I’ve cleared my desk of the first book of my upcoming Tesha series, Priestess of Ishana. It’s off to reviewers and the cover is under development.
So now I’m back into the second book. I’d done a rough draft, but it needed a major rework. I had notes and reminders all over the place, generated randomly over time. Time to conquer the chaos or this fantasy novel will never come together.
I use those 3-sided boards that I remember from my kids’ days of school projects. I combine that with some tidy heading titles and multi-colored post-its for a fine plotting tool. I’ve got three point of view characters in this one, so a different color post-it for each.
My board looks messy with long tails of notes attached to post-its instead of the tidy scene descriptors that’ll replace them as I go. But all those notes represent order amid chaos as I plow through making the needed edits and changes. Delete a scene here, add a scene there. My editing also reflects the overall clarity that comes to me over time with each book. I’ve come to a much clearer sense of the arc of the changes in my two main characters and the theme related to those changes.
I do not work well in chaos, so a clear plan of action, written down so I don’t have to carry it in my head (where it would likely fall out) is essential. There will be major diversions from this plan as I go, but at least I have a road to tromp along. If I lay new pavers, so be it.
Archaeology & History Posts I enjoyed this week:
“Oldest” intact Greek Shipwreck Mirrors “Siren Vase” in British Museum
“World’s oldest intact shipwreck discovered in Black Sea”reported in the Guardian. It’s a classical Greek ship, 2,400 years old. Theemphasis must be on the “intact” part since there are far older shipwrecksexcavated, such as the Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck that revealed so much about that much earlier period.
I believe it’s the preservation of the ship itself rather than the cargo that has researchers excited here. “. . . its mast, rudders and rowing benches allpresent and correct just over a mile below the surface. A lack of oxygen atthat depth preserved it, the researchers said.”
There’s a lovely depiction of this kind of classical ship on a vase in the British Museum called “the siren vase” because it shows Odysseus tied to his mast as his men row past the sirens. I’ve put that vase at the top of this post. (Never mind the classical period ship with the Bronze Age mythic hero.That definitely never crossed the artist’s mind.) It doesn’t sound like anyone is planning to excavate beyond the dating and photographing they have done. Click here for The Guardian “World’s oldest intact shipwreck discovered in Black Sea”
High Tech Imaging of Linear B Pylos Tablets
The many Linear B tablets excavated at Pylos—vital sources for everyday life in Mycenaean Greece—will be far more readable soon. The Pylos Tablets Digital Project uses 3D scanning and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI)—a kind of computational photography—to produce high-quality images of the tablets.
Scholars can access the images and thus do close study that does not damage the fragile tablets. One of the two scholars directing the project, Dimitri Nakassis, has already applied the understanding gained from increased readability these elaborate scans achieve.
He’s written a book that refutes the old view of Mycenaean life as despotic and unresponsive to the needs of the society. He’s studied the many mentions of officers of the state and how they interact with each other and the wider community.
The tablets are essentially accounting records for the palace, not literary endeavors, so the insights they can provide are very pragmatic. Nakassis won a MacArthur “genius” award for this work. I’m glad to hear the Pylos tablets are getting such fine attention and will become widely accessible. Click here for Archaeology News Network “Bronze Age bookkeeping tablets reveal complex society”
Fascinating
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