From My Fantasy Writing Desk:
I’ve been neglectful of my blog. I have two excuses, both pleasant. I have been traveling to visit family. I’ve also been doing a deep dive into the developmental editing of Sorcery in Alpara, the next Tesha novel. I had to finish that stage of edits in time for the scheduled copyeditor. The suggestions I received on the developmental side of the editing process were excellent. Laying those in has definitely improved the book. Developmental editing is the stage when big things change–added plot elements or character depth, for example. Copyediting is the final clean up stage, such as sentence tightening, consistency issues, grammar, etc.
I had a fun visit with family in Chicago. I hadn’t done any sightseeing there in years, and this time we had a great excuse to spend a day downtown as tourists, which turned out to be great fun. We enjoyed a trip in a boat up and down the river as a volunteer from the Architectural Society talked about the buildings. We also strolled through a couple parks and ate—of course. Here’s a few photos of our day, buildings seen from the river, Buckingham Fountain and the cool sculptures in Millennial Park.
Archaeology I Enjoyed:
Rare Mittani Palace Revealed by Receding Water
The receding reservoir behind the Mosul Dam revealed a palace from one of the least researched Near Eastern empires, the Mittani Empire. The Mittani Empire covered an area reaching from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the east of present-day northern Iraq from the 15th century to the middle of the 14th century BCE.
Bronze Age Egypt, Babylonia and the Hittites treated the kings of Mittani as equals, but very few Mittani sites have been excavated and their capital has not been identified.
This new site, called Kemune, flooded by the construction of a dam in the 1980’s, has now come to light as the drought conditions lower the water. Ten cuneiform tablets from the dig are currently being translated and one indicates that this is probably the ancient city of Zakhiku. They have also found remains of blue and red wall paintings, walls seven meters high and massive interior mudbrick walls two meters thick. All of these indicate elements of a carefully designed palace. This exciting excavation operates under joint Kurdish and German supervision. Click here for Archaeology News Network “Archaeologists uncover palace of the Mittani Empire in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region”
British Library Exhibit Follows Writing from Cuneiform to Cellphone
The British Library has an exhibit about the history of writing with examples from cuneiform to smart phone. It poses the question whether writing, the physical act, will disappear, and what we really mean when we say “writing.” So, is dictating to a scribe (or a blind John Milton dictating “Paradise Lost” to his daughters) an act of writing? Hard to say no, but then isn’t an AI speech-recognition system also writing? Or is writing only pen to paper, stylus to clay, etc. What matters in all this? Does cursive increase thoughtfulness or is that a romantic notion best left behind? The director of the exhibit notes how similar emoji are to the Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs. In all three cases they are “writing systems you cannot use to express everything.” Ah—the eternal search for expressing meaning. What role does writing have in that? Click here for the New York Times “From Clay Tablets to Smartphones: 5,000 Years of Writing”