From My Fantasy Writing Desk
Capturing Transformation and Fantastical Beasts
My writing challenge this week was one I’d been both looking forward to and dreading. If I’ve gotten a series of scenes right, the ending one of the sequence will be a beautiful and transformative moment for a character who really needs some light. But if I’ve flubbed it, no one’s going to believe the change and redemption ahead for this character.
Writing joy and inspiration is tricky, although I relied heavily on one of my comfort-zone strengths–descriptive language. (Most writers love dialogue and hate description. Not me. Dialogue is my personal writing purgatory.)
In the course of a novel’s composition there are scenes that are utilitarian and fairly straightforward to write. And then there are those other ones–upon which so much rests. I haven’t reread yet. I’m letting my work this week rest, my brain refresh before I assess. So I can’t tell if I’ve succeeded.
A particularly delightful aspect of writing these scenes: I did get to know some mythological creatures, griffins. Griffins are featured in Hittite art and that of the surrounding cultures upon which I base my world-building. (The drawings at the top show some lovely examples. They include griffin imagery on a cygnet ring at Mycenae and on painted stucco artwork from Knossos, Crete. From the papers of Arthur Evans. From Digital Bodleian.)
So in my blend of history and fantasy, I’ve brought the living creatures onto the stage. I knew what they looked like before I wrote them–all that iconic art, but I had no idea they had the personalities I discovered. In this first draft they turn out to be bloodthirsty with a warm sense of humor–talk about complicated. Lots of fun ahead.
Archaeology I Enjoyed:
Laundry Debate
Photo by Fae Wikimedia
How to get your laundry done in ancient Mesopotamia, instructions from the British Museum collection. A cuneiform tablet from Ur dating to 1600 BCE, probably written as a scribal exercise, tells a humorous dialogue between a clothes cleaner and his customer. The customer is way too picky about how his laundry should be done and the washer tells him to go do it himself.
We do in the process learn all sorts of details about Mesopotamian laundry processes, including a preference for some drying winds over others, the felting process with wood and stones to restore the shape of the garment and the use of beer, clay and urine as a cleaning agents.
Learning the tablet’s obscure terms and grammatical challenges was probably the main purpose of the tablet, not the “how to’s” of doing laundry, but meanwhile—anyone for a cloak restored to its pristine original form with some pounding, peeing and blowing in the wind? Click here for Atlas Obscura “How to get your laundry done in ancient Mesopotamia”
What Killed Alexander the Great?
Among the many legends surrounding Alexander the Great, one of the less believable may be that his body did not decay for seven days after his death. Great stuff if you want to elevate a person to divine status.
But, now some researchers think he may have only appeared to be dead for several days before he actually died. They think his symptoms of gradual paralysis after a sudden high fever may indicate he suffered from Guillain-Barré syndrome.
There are still proponents of the Antipater did it poison theory, possibly involving white hellebore, and this will always be an unresolved issue.
The story goes that the embalmers were unwilling to work on his body because it was in such a “fresh” state. Good call, embalmers. This is a bit like the bells that they used to put at graves so those buried alive could ring it and call for help getting out of their premature graves. Click here for Live Science “Why Alexander the Great May Have Been Declared Dead Prematurely (It’s Pretty Gruesome)”
Who Made It Out Alive?
We don’t think of the majority of Pompeii’s residents as surviving the explosion of Vesuvius, but a new study indicates that a lot of them escaped and went on to live their lives in the surrounding cities.
The researchers studied the cities of Cumae and other surrounding towns to see if names known to be Pompeiian crop up there after 79 CE. They also looked for signs of worship of some of the highly localized gods of Pompeii and the slopes of Vesuvius, also after the big bang. They tracked down as many sources of names and other leads and in the process laid out evidence of a large number of survivors.
I found fascinating the kinds of tracking these researchers did—for example they used a stash of records found in a strongbox abandoned by the road out of Pompeii and buried in ash. It contained several decades worth of the Sulpicius family’s financial records of loans, debts and real estate holdings. Another source were expenditures on infrastructure elsewhere to house refugees. I’m guessing someone has done similar studies of New Orleans post Katrina to examine where people moved to, who stayed or returned, etc. To do it from this distance for Pompeii was quite an undertaking. Click here for Live Science “Mount Vesuvius Didn’t Kill Everyone in Pompeii. Where Did the Survivors Go?”