Tuesday...

Still no progress with the issue of the squirrel in the attic, disturbing noises of heavy equipment from the alley outside where some part of the neighbor's sewer outfall appears to be being redone, and amazon still isn't offering The Druid's Son for sale. Oh, and an e-list fracas last night which is still on my mind. Difficult to settle down to anything productive under these circumstances. Some days are like this...

Something new for the garden which I got a couple of weeks ago. Still haven't decided where to put it.



 -GRG

Wednesday...

More writing, more gardening, more fine autumn weather - nothing much different. Roses are still putting on a fine show:



Word count on the new book is now 24,247 words. I'm still arguing with myself about the title, but in the meantime here's a cover mock-up I'm using on LibraryThing:



The stone circle is Drom Beg in Ireland.

-GRG

Wednesday...

First, here's the link (and a second link)for Saturday's event. It's a fundraiser for Gateway Battered Women's Shelter, run by our local ADF group. We're Dwygelli, and we open (4:00-4:45 pm). Here's our card:



Next, a picture of Monday's tomatoes:



Weather's still hot, with temperatures well above seasonal normal (as in mid-90's again today, close to a record high), but it should be a little better starting Friday. Maybe then I can get more writing done...

-GRG

Writing Across the Year

Another silent weekend on the blog, another active weekend with Flight of the Hawk. Summer is starting to warm up here in Denver; on the other hand, my protagonists are now well into their autumn. It seems that whenever I start a writing project -- even if it's originally in sync with the season -- I presently find myself having to imagine summer's heat at midwinter, or vice versa. Somehow writing never proceeds at the same pace as the exterior world's seasons. And even if it does for a while, by the time you come back to polish and revise, it's out of sync again.

Storyteller, of course, covered a year, from one year's Beltane to the next. A good period of time, and appropriate to a Celtic mythology-based tale: so often the Mabinogi speaks of "blwyden y heno" -- "a year tonight," the period it takes for the magic to work. Hawk, on the other hand, covers six months -- Beltane to Samhain, the bright half of the year. How to keep synchronized? I don't think there is a way. Like the Fairy Realm, where a few days may pass while as many years go by on Middle Earth, the time of the imagination forever proceeds at a different pace. The writer can only try and follow.

The next book, I think, will start in the spring -- but that is another story.

after the weekend...

Well, things were moderately productive at Tre Gwernin this weekend, even if not on the blog itself. I got a narrative problem resolved which had been hindering progress on The Flight of the Hawk for about a month. Great relief ... the problem was that I had the right story but was dithering about location. If I can't make it work on the map, I can't make it work in my mind. Right location, problem solved ... onward!

On non-literary matters, I planted out 16 (new-world) tomato plants, but didn't get the lawn mowed. And it's supposed to rain today...

Only so much time

Having built up a backlog of posts on this site for perusal by those interested, I'm going to slow the rate of substantial posts down to a couple a week. This doesn't mean I won't be putting other things on from time to time as well. It's just that I've found out, like many other writers before me, that time spent blogging is not time spent working on the next book.

I'm also feeling more than usually aware of the fragility and finiteness of life. In the last month two people I knew fairly well - one a next door neighbor, another a friend - have died suddenly. Things unsaid, things not yet done, press about me. I need to do them now.

Imagining the Past

Writing good historical fiction, it seems to me, requires equal parts of research and imagination. The research is needed for an author to learn as much as possible about the solid, verifiable facts that make a story real: everything from what the hero probably wore (wool? silk? linen? leather? what color, and how dyed? what weight, and how woven? underwear? raincoats? and by the way, where and how did he get it?) and had for dinner (bread? wheat, barley, or rye? meat? pig, cow, or sheep, and roasted or stewed? drink? beer, ale, wine, mead?) to the rulers and boundaries of kingdoms (or other political units) and the probable number, organization, arms, armor, and fighting style of their retainers. Some of my recent reading has included books on food in Roman Britain, horse care and accessaries in the late Roman Empire, the most recent excavations at Sutton Hoo, and the life and activities of St. Columba, to mention only a few.

And the imagination? That's for filling in the gaps, especially when writing about Britain in the Dark Ages (now called the "Early Historic Period"). We don't, in fact, know much about what the hero wore, although reasonable extrapolations can be made from neighboring cultures, where people ended up in peat bogs rather more often. We don't know what color those vanished clothes were, though literature and available dye-plants and processes give some suggestions. We are on slightly firmer ground with the food question, since archeological sites often provide a lot of animal bones and fragments of charred grain, but the lack of pottery of that age from some parts of Britain is puzzling, to say the least. And nobody really knows what sort of language the Picts spoke, although (mutually contradictory) scholarly opinions abound.

The most important thing that a historical novelist needs, or so it seems to me, is a sense of balance and proportion. On the one hand, you should do the research first, so as not to invent things unnecessarily or make obvious mistakes (e.g., tomatoes in your Pictish soup) which will put off better educated readers. On the other hand, you have to remember (or at least I sometimes do!) that this is fiction, not a research project, and that the desired outcome is a novel, not a scholarly article. Although educating the readers along the way (in as unobtrustive a manner as you can manage) is good, at the end of the day the historical novelist's job, like that of any storyteller, is to entertain - and to make the reader want to come back for more.

Did I mention I'm working on a sequel to Storyteller?