The Writing Pit of Passivity, a Naked Mummy & 83 Graves

From My Fantasy Writing Desk

I had planned to be reporting to you from one of my favorite conferences designed for readers to connect with their favorite (and newly met) authors, Left Coast Crime. But large group events are not the thing right now, and instead I’ve spent some fruitful, intensive time writing.

I’m at an interesting turning point in this current project, right in the final scenes of what I think of as Act I. That is, I’m at the end of the beginning.

The ends of each act require a major climactic scene, and I worked on a good one today. I started the morning with the first couple hundred words written already from the day before and I had roughed out what I thought would happen. All was going well until my main character fell into the dread pit of passivity.

I tried writing it as though she wasn’t complaining in my ear about how much crap she had to put up with and couldn’t do a darn thing. But then I gave up. I went grocery shopping (and then washed my hands). I sat down again. The dread pit seemed deeper.

I went for a walk on the mountain. Walking alone in the fresh air is one safe way to get out of the house, so I’ve taken to doing it more often. I chatted with myself. This is an advantage of walking alone where no one can see you. Pretty soon I realized what was really going to happen in this scene.

It’s very dramatic and decidedly not passive. Tesha is very pleased I stopped being an idiot and wrote her out of the pit of passivity. Tomorrow I will turn my roughed-out solution into actual fiction. Hurray for walks.

Archaeology I Enjoyed

A Knife, a Naked Mummy and a Group of Doctors

Uncovering this crime took a long time. We still don’t know who did it or why, but Takabuti was stabbed in the back several times for a quick but violent death. Takabuti, a wealthy Theban woman of the 25^th dynasty period, was then mummified with unusual care and significance.

Her mummy had the misfortune to be discovered in the 19^th century. At that time, it was fashionable for Europeans to buy mummies and have unwrapping parties. So the poor woman was strip searched, so to speak, in Belfast in 1835.

Recently a group of doctors did more scientific study of her form and DNA. They identified her cause of death. Her DNA put her closer to modern Europeans than to modern Arabs. Researchers found that her stab wounds were packed with some material that had been mistaken previously for her damaged and shifted heart. The good news for Takabuti is that her heart turns out to be perfectly preserved and where it was supposed to be for a mummy. She could present it for weighing in the afterlife. Let’s hope she passed her afterlife admissions test. Click here for Archaeology News Network “Shocking Truth behind Takabuti’s Death”

83 Cramped Egyptian Graves

The cemetery isn’t what you expect from Egyptian burials. The excavation of a Nile Delta cemetery with 83 graves from the 4^th millennium BCE reveals burial styles very like those in other parts of the Near East at this period. Small, rock cut graves with bodies in a compressed squat and also some within large ceramic jars (pithos).

This sounds odd if you aren’t familiar with ancient archaeology, but it was common in a number of regions like the Anatolian civilizations I study (although cremation also entered Hittite burial practice by the time of the empire, at least among royalty/nobility).

This humble method of placing the dead in the ground carried on elsewhere but is quite different from what we think of much later for Pharaohs and wealthy Egyptians. Click here for Archaeology News Network “83 Ancient Graves Discovered In Egypt’s Nile Delta”