From My Fantasy Writing Desk:
I’ve been plotting. The third book in the Tesha series, that is. The second book, Sorcery in Alpara, will be published October 14. Between now and then, I have a pile of marketing duties for it, but the book itself is all done and beautiful. So I’m on to the next one.
Story Boards
I made not one but two fresh, three-sided boards for my plotting because I’m pretty sure the action that I thought long ago would be one book should actually be two books. I think there are some key conflicts and troubles that I want to give full, on-stage attention to that I was going to let happen in between book two and book three. After the events of Sorcery in Alpara, there are parts of the characters’ lives that readers will want to live through, not get the Cliff Notes version. That means the overall arc I had envisioned needs some major reworking.
It’s all at the stage when I only have brainstorming notes and post-its. The post-its are sketchy and stuck somewhat randomly on a board. Now I have two fresh boards ready for more precise scene placement. I haven’t started drafting scenes yet. I tend to move back and forth between imagining scenes so they can be placed on the board and drafting them into words. Drafting creates changes I couldn’t have anticipated until they came from my fingers onto the keyboard. There is magic in the process, if only the magic of the human imagination.
Many Hued Tools to Wrangle My Plots
My plots tend to have many layers and crises to them—trouble never comes from only a single source. As well as fostering the magic of the particular I mentioned above, I have to maintain a “big view” of my labyrinthine designs, so I use some tools that look more like I’m having fun in a kindergarten class: three-sided boards and multiple colors of post-its and little flags of many colors. I can color code my point of view characters, my villain threads, my competing empires, the different types of magic, and anything else I need to keep track of or go crazy. The supply of colorful post-its at the office supply store this morning seemed greatly expanded since the last time I looked. I had to restrain my purchasing, but I’m all set with my tools. Onward with rainbow-hued mayhem.
Archaeology I Enjoyed:
A Season of Finds on Cyprus
The season report from the dig of Ancient Paphos, Cyprus includes a fascinating variety of finds from the Classical period, 5th and 4th centuries BCE. A sherd written in the Greek syllabary of Cyprus preserves a fragmentary list of quantities of products stored in the palace. The only other royal citadel archive records found on Cyprus are from Idalion, and they used the Phoenician alphabet. That makes this tiny, ceramic find a probable gamechanger in the understanding of the economic management of the Cypriot city-states.
This season, archaeologists emptied a room full of 430 kilos of murex shells. Apparently, palace workers collected them for secondary processing after they extracted purple dye from them. We know very little about the actual murex dye production methods that stretch from the Bronze Age through the Roman era across the Mediterranean. I gather researchers hope to learn more from this giant depot find. In response, key researchers have organized a special international meeting on the subject of purple dye production.
Other exciting finds this season included an olive oil production room with sunken pithos, mill stone and basin, pebbled floors and exceptionally well-preserved smooth plaster floors, tiled roofs, and evidence of rooms above the ground floor units. Over a ten-year stretch, the Palaepaphos Urban Landscape Project has excavated about 30% of an extensive production and storage complex that functioned as the administrative-economic center of the royal dynasty of Ancient Paphos during the Classical period. If you’ve visited Cyprus, you might have seen the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Kouklia where there’s a beautiful site and museum. This dig is on the same plateau of Hadjiabdoulla, one kilometre east of the sanctuary.
If you like to mix in some history in your travels, visit Cyprus, from Neolithic to WWII with Bronze Age cities, Classical sites, Medieval castles, and Byzantine churches tossed in between. This two-month season report is a rich cross section of what excavation reveals over time and how we reconstruct the past from this work. Click here for Archaeology News Network “Greek inscription in Cypriot syllabary discovery on citadel of ancient Paphos”
‘Female World’ of Pompeii Revealed in Trove
I already mentioned this trove of jewels and charms found at Pompeii that give insight into ‘female world’ of ancient Rome, but this article has better photos and a bit more detail. I enjoyed this comment about the find by the director of Pompeii’s archaeological park, “Interesting is the iconography of objects and amulets, which invoke fortune, fertility and protection against bad luck. And the numerous pendants in the shape of small phallus, or the ear, the closed fist, the skull, the figure of Harpocrates, the scarabs.” Click here for Archaeology News Network “Trove of jewels and charms found at Pompeii give insight into ‘female world’ of ancient Rome”
More Troy?
There’s now a Troy 0—sort of. The excavation site has long had layers identified as Troy I-Troy IX, the city having gone through many destructions via war, earthquake and fires. This year Rüstem Aslan from the Archeology Department of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University (ÇOMU) says the current Turkish-supervised dig came across a new layer predating Troy I, which he dates to around 3,500 BCE.
I took a quick look at the timeline in Manfred Korfmann’s little 2005 guidebook to the Troia/Wilusa site and I notice he has a band at 3,500 BCE labeled “Older than Troia I” so apparently signs of this earlier layer have been noticed before. Much of Troy I is on bedrock, or so Korfmann indicates, so perhaps this new layer only exists in certain areas.
I think this article is making more of this than it ought to, and they have flipped the upper level, IX, into XI in their write-up. How much of this hype is the newspaper’s fault and how much Aslan’s, I can’t say. But it’s good the excavation continues. The Turkish government took it back from the long-time directorship under German and US universities (under Korfmann until his death). In any case, Troy goes way back. Most people view Troy VIIa as the most likely one for the “Homeric” Troy, so this “new” layer isn’t the one that I write about in my fiction. Click here for Daily Sabah “Ancient City of Troy May Have been founded 600 years earlier than thought new archaeological findings show”