la_marquise | Entries tagged with drowning kings

Words written today: 762 -- still gearing back up to that 1000 minimum.
First line of the day: 'She wagged her tail at him anyway, bouncing around his feet in anticipation of whatever treat his presence promised.'

Owain is asking questions, the bond-villagers are being sullen and Gif is looking for a new playmate.
I now have a post-it over my desk reading 'Don't forget the body.' Because, you know, it mustn't get forgotten. It's not going to bury itself and Hyfaidd (the king) is looking forward to yelling at some-one about it.

Good things about this book: comedy dog; Owain; vikings to come; lots of fights.
Bad things: I am convinced that all the characters are cold and damp all the time. Early mediaeval Wales wasn't comfortable. Also, it had no plumbing. I have to keep reminding myself that the characters will be used to these things and won't worry about them. Indeed, they are probably quite comfortable at least some of the time and feel perfectly clean enough ditto. (though Owain isn't keen on pig-manure covered dog, for which I do not blame him.

Stray mediaeval thing: spell-checkers will tell you 'viking' needs to be capitalised. Many people do capitalise it -- it's almost standard practice. However, technically, it's not a proper noun -- it's a descriptive one, like plumber or carpenter. So it doesn't really need that capital. Of course, this may also be a reflection on my academic training and in particular on the nature of my PhD supervisor (

chilperic can doubtless imagine why). If I sell The Drowning Kings, I expect to have a minor battle with the copy-editor which I will loose.

Stray question: why do I have such trouble with lose/loose and chose/choose?

Skirt of the day: black flouncey.

And now I get to go and clean the bathroom. I like cleaning bathrooms, so it's almost my treat for getting on with the Bl**dy Celtic Book.

Current Mood: accomplished

How many vikings are too many? Or, more accurately, how many viking attacks can you stand within one book? I need at least two, for plot reasons, but I don't want to be boring.

Current Mood: curious

Something must be wrong with me.
I just went out of my way to use 'brisk masculine prose' rather than an appropriate Latinate word. My head has been invaded.*

I'm back to The Drowning Kings. Any tips for stopping myself thinking of it as 'the bl**dy Celtic book' gratefully received. It really isn't constructive. It's not an academic treatise. it's mean to be fun.

* 'make it worse' instead of 'exacerbate'. Owain doesn't strike me as an 'exacerbate' kind of guy.

Current Mood: confused
Current Location: desk alcove
Current Music: The Archers.

New words today: 1031
First line written: Hyfaidd rose, wiping the horse’s blood from his arms and hands with a handful of leaves.

Owain has got out of a tight spot, though the king is still suspicious. And finally a new scene. Questions will be asked!

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Snow today: the cats are dubious, although both Ish and Horus have made some forays outside. Mooncat has been hugging radiators, leaving the lap for Horus, who has been wanting regular paw-warming. I don't think it's that cold, but the cats are doubtless more expert. Much household excitement yesterday watching the ski-cross (they are all insane) and the men's combined. And yay for Bode Miller finally winning a gold medal. He's not my favourite skier, but he's worked long and hard for that and he skied a blinder.
A question: is there something in Swiss law that requires them always to have someone called Zurbriggen on their ski team?

Skirt of the day: denim

Current Mood: calm

First line today: A new gouge on the shaft, not deep enough to be harmful: he could smooth that out later.
Owain is anxious, the king is annoyed and Gif is into everything.

Took two days off from the book for fun and to let my shoulders rest (they'd managed to get very stiff and sore again). Today it flowed surprising well after the first couple of sentences, which was very nice. I hope ti continues. I'm beginning to have a much better feel for it.

Skirt of the day: blue tiered.

Current Mood: calm

New words: 788 -- I'm ramping up.
First line written -- The sense of wrongness still worked its sticky way down his spine.

Ambush! Owain's horse does not want!

I can see where the story needs to go in the next couple of chapters, and I suspect that some of the original first chapter may now go into the second. Though in an ideal world, the historical chronology would go the other way round. Sigh. And I may need to burrow through my work notes cupboard (which is huge) for 'The Seven Bishop Houses of Dyfed.'

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My brain may have been invaded by aliens. Not only am I sanguine about history-into-fiction (which for many years has brought me out in hives), but something very strange indeed happened at lunchtime.
I cooked. For me. Just me, on my own, deliberately, despite the easy availability of real food (houmous). Braised mushrooms. I had a craving for them for some reason last night, so I bought some and I cooked them.
They were lovely. Not that I intend to make a habit of this (that way madness lies).
Maybe there is some kind of global cooking balance, and this is just compensation by the universe for the reduction in cooking in parts north of here, due to the indisposition of

desperance?

Skirt of the day: still jeans. Recent weather leads to that.

Current Mood: Unnatural

New words: 504
First line written: 'From somewhere: a spear.'
Owain is in the thick of it, Gif is excited and the king is in danger.

I'm back into The Drowning Kings, with some recasting and rewriting, as I think I'd begun it in the wrong place. I'm a little happier with the project now, though it may still need to be storyboarded in some way. I'm not used to this sort of plot and it feels very strange, but I know I need to keep it more controlled than has been my wont.
And it's going to fail the Bechdel test. The society it's set in is intensely male, very stratified, and very sexist. And, because it's historical and because it's slap bang in the middle of my academic expertise, I can't bring myself to alter that, I can't collude in the Great Liberated Celtic Woman Myth. The shape of the culture defines in advance some of the things that can and can't happen. For instance, my protagonist. The protagonist has to be male. A woman simply would not have the freedom of movement, the respect, the possibility to become the necessary traveller and investigator. This is not a time or place where a woman had any real lasting power (or much safety). He has to be from the aristocracy for more or less the same set of reasons: any rank below that again would lack the opportunities and freedoms necessary. This is a society where most people are poor, most are unfree, many are slaves, and no-one had many rights outside their homeland (by which I mean the [sub]kingdom they come from, not Wales overall). It's not romantic, it's not egalitarian, it's not comfortable. And it is Christian. Another of the great myths is lingering paganism. But Wales was Christian by c.400. There are no traces of any pagan survivals in the early mediaeval period. The mental landscape is one of saints and demons, holy wells and clergy. (Perhaps some the wells and saints may have had earlier incarnations, but that was not known, not considered and would not have been believed.)
And then there's the names. The purist, the academic in me wants to keep this as close to proper as possible, to avoid Anglicisations and modernisations. The writer in me recognises that some Welsh words are hard to recognise and pronounce if you aren't used to them. I can keep the names of original characters as easy as possible -- Owain, Cadog, Idwal. But one of the major historical characters is called Hyfaidd, and that I can't change. ANd there are worse ones than that.
As to place names. I want, I really want, to use the Welsh ones. Mynyw, not St Davids; Ynys Mon for Anglesey. Ceredigion, not Cardigan. I am determined to use the Welsh kingdom names. But this is going to mean a map. Which I don't really want, I have an unnatural aversion to maps in fiction, they distract me.
It's an interesting endeavour. And I can't know what works till I get on and write it.

Current Mood: uncertain

I've been doing more rewatching: the Yuen Biao dvd upgrades are down to a single drawer, amazingly, though in addition to the six or seven films therein there are three and a half tv shows (the half is Jiang Shan Mei Ren, which I love but have got half to two-thirds of the way through 3 times and then stopped, mainly because I absent-mindedly started translating it and, with my Chinese at the level it is, that is a very slow process). Before the marquis returned on Saturday (I has Marquis! I has Marquis!) I watched Millenium Dragon, which was a bad as I remembered -- it's directed by Philip Kao Fei, who is one of the worst directors in the world -- and has an incoherent plot about art smuggling and a magic pearl. With helicopters and horse barbarians. Don't ask. I also finally watched the full length version of The Setting Sun (Rakuyo). That was rather frustrating, as there were no English subs and it's in a mixture of Japanese and (Mandarin) Chinese. This is the Japanese dvd, which is the full tv miniseries version, as opposed to the cut-down cinema version that I'd seen before (the HK release). I suspect it's better (and more comprehensible) in the full version, but most of it I had to guess at. This is an oddity, with Diane Lane as the Manchurian horse-warrior/cabaret singer heroine and YB as the villain (his first villain since his stunt-man days in the 70s). Plus points: he's very good in it, there's a weird cameo from Donald Sutherland, and a lot of it is sync sound. I do love to listen to YB speaking Mandarin: he has a lovely accent (Taiwanese-influenced). And I finally got round to Hero Youngster (Shao Nian Chen Zhen) which wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but led me to the interesting observation that a film can pass the Bechdel test in spades, but still be pretty poor (HY is about the early years of the Red Army and the resistance to the Japanese occupation, so there are many conversations between the women about politics and none about men, apart from the occasional maternal worry over her son). Sadly, Millenium Dragon also passes. It's still direr than dire.
So I treated myself to Dreadnaught (Young Zhe Wu Ju), YB's second lead role, directed by Yuen Woo-Ping of later Matrix fame. Around the house, this is often known as 'the laundry film'. The hero --- known as Mousy, because he's so very timid -- is a laundry boy. He has excellent laundry fu. Excellent, acrobatic, laundry fu, which turns out to be more useful than he expects. Other good things include the drunken lion dance sequence, the presence of the late Kwan Tak-Hing in his signature role of Wong Fei Hung (he created the part long before Jet Li Lian-jie) and some inventive choreography with far fewer wires and far less undercranking than usual for Yuen Woo-Ping. (This is not a Yuen Woo-Ping household. His wire-work is often unsubtle, his preferred style of humour rather heavy-handed and his plots can be flabby. This is a Yuen Kwai household.)
Meanwhile, Grass King has gone off to Nice Editor, and I am doing background reading for The Drowning Kings (because it feels safer that way. Yes, I know, writing avoidance. But the project makes me want to write footnotes, so I'm trying to settle academic brain before I let writer brain take over).

Current Mood: busy

New words: 525. Not enough. But book is gloopy and slow today.
First new line: But saints did not care about secular boundaries.
The king is about to be annoyed, but the dog is clean.
Reason for stopping: sore shoulders.
Skirt of the day: denim. Dull but warm.

Current Mood: discontent

Words written: 1074
First line of the day: He squatted at the side of the stream, dipping his hands into the water.
Today's theme: musings on dreams, and the introduction of a key character (Cadog).
Diversions: 10 minutes spent scouring my academic shelves for WATU (Welsh Administrative and Territorial Units), one of those reference books you need maybe once a decade, but then *really* need. But which no-one every reads (it's a list. With some maps).

Skirt of the day: black flouncey

Question of the day: Why do I like Raja Hindustani so much (other than the music. The music is splendid and obviously likable)? But the film: I mean, I really shouldn't. The level of violence towards women is worrying and the hero's uncontrolled temper is scary. And yet I love it dearly.

And yay, our boiler is fixed and no longer leaking and the house is less freezing that it has been. (The two may well, I feel, be connected.)

Current Mood: mellow

New words added today: 754
First line written: These days, they’d likely be even less tolerant.
The history of Wales c. 870 is three easy paragraphs! (Hmmm....) Owain is pondering, and Gif has found a Very Important Smell.
Shoulder: sore.

Skirt of the day: teal corduroy.
The oddness of Hours, part N: I spent about 20 minutes brushing Mooncat, as usual. She was purring quite loudly. So Horus, who was nesting in a beanbag several feet away, started purring too. It must be good: the other cat is happy!

Current Mood: creative

The Drowning Kings is set against an historical background (late ninth century Wales) and I really want to keep the names appropriate. But many of them are challenging for non-Welsh speakers. I've deliberately chosen a fairly common name for the hero (Owain) which is easy to recognise and pronounce, and I'm trying to give supporting characters fairly clear names, too (so far I have an Idwal, a Meurig and a dog called Gif. There will be a Cadog, too, and an Edith, and an Asser.) But I'm also dealing with a lot of real names of contemporary people. Owain's king is Hyfaidd, for instance, and other historical figures who are important to the plot are called Gwgan ap Meurig, Lunberth and Dufnarth/Donyart. St David's plays a part, also, but the Welsh name (then and now) is Mynyw. And there are more. The historian in me really, really wants to use the proper forms. The writer in me is worried about reader barriers. The Mostly-Welsh person in me is determined not to use too many Anglicisations.
What do you lot think?

Current Mood: thoughtful

New words added to The Drowning Kings: 574 (is that all. Kari? Yes, I know. I take a while to warm up.)
First line written today: The eyes were open because the lids were gone, torn away to leave a rag of skin along the socket. (Note to self: crime, not horror.)
The dog is happy, the hero less so. The monks are probably worried and the king is up to something.
Reason for stopping: a combination of shoulder pain and Horus deciding he really needs my attention. I hope the shoulders are going to settle soon, as I am now bored of this headache (a week is too long.) (No, it doesn't need a doctor. I know what the cause is and I just need to wait for it to calm down.)

In other news: not in Newcastle, in fact. Today's skirt is long denim. It's not glamorous, but it is warm.

Current Mood: sore

I dreamt about the dread book last night. This morning it finally began unspooling in my mind.
My shoulders are set solid.
The Dragon headphone batteries are flat.
Bah, humbug, operation of the law of s*d...

Current Mood: sore

I have, amazingly enough, written a whole scene of the dreaded new book. Now I just need to work out what happens next. Sigh.

Here's a question. I was watching Ish eat his supper earlier this evening. He was carefully fishing morsels from the bowl with his left paw and eating them. And it occurred to me: are cats handed when it comes to this kind of thing? Or are they ambidextrous?

Current Mood: curious

With some regret, but less than I anticipated, I've decided to withdraw from NaNo for this year. I lost several days at the start due to being away and jet-lag, but the real killer seems to be that that this new book simply can't be written that way. I have the daily writing habit, but this book needs careful structuring and the fast-and-dirty approach isn't helping it. So I'm going back to my steady plod, giving myself time around the edges to work on the revision of Grass King and on the long-delayed Sekrit Projekt.
Apologies to those I'm letting down. I'm in awe of your diligence.

Current Mood: uncomfortable

I seem to have signed up to NaNoWriMo, because finishing Grass King isn't enough. Oh, no. I'm down as la_marquise, if anyone would care to friend me.
(The project is a supernatural mystery, working title The Drowning Kings, and, umm, it's set in 9th century Wales. Yes, I know I swore I'd never ever do that. But I had this idea, and it's based on a sequence of historical events, and then there was this inscribed stone and, well...)