Research, Etc.

[handful_ofdust]

I've got so many deadlines and I'm barely working towards any of them. Instead, what I'm doing in immersing myself in research and jump-starting the novel I'm currently least prepared to write, In Red Company, which requires me to figure out as much pseudo-historical detail as I can use to make writing something set in a time-period over a thousand years ago seem, at the very least, historically...likely. We're talking Anglo-Saxon Twilight here, almost a hundred years before the Norman Invasion of Britain, in the ass-end of what will eventually become Northumbria. The good part is that I can write it a lot like Lloyd Alexander/Prydain fanfic and probably get away with it. The bad part--well, more interesting than bad--is that it's actually SO historically distant that some of the cultural touchstones I reach for most easily simply don't exist yet. The "normal" idea of a witch, for example, isn't consolidated until the Inquisition/Malleus Maleficarum era; wicce hasn't really even become a term to damn someone with (let alone burn them), simply a term for someone who can mix drugs, create poisons, has land-knowledge and possibly might still worship the old gods. The idea of ghosts isn't fully formed; they're more physical, more like draugr. So I need to write out a very specific bunch of untranslated words to use, as well as translated terminology, and I definitely need to give people actual names instead of titles like "the anchoress" or "the ex-tribal queen" or "the sexy asshole bishop."

Otherwise, it's raining all the time and everything aches. Still very amused by Gregory of Tours, who I'm rifling for a style the sexy asshole bishop's clerk might use when writing in his diary, even if said diary is mainly kept inside his own head. I'm also going back and forth through my Tumblr queue for images to use, and I've found some pretty great stuff. I need to write this fast and not worry about it being beautiful; I can make it beautiful later on. I'm entirely capable of that.