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February 13, 2010 Progress Notes:
The Enchanted Generation
Words today: 900.
Words total: 1600.
Reason for stopping: I've been in front of this computer writing for almost seven hours straight, and I am nearly exploding with bookloff, and I think I get to go to bed now.
Darling du Jour: There was a soldier at the door to our dining room. He was tall and thin and crisply uniformed in brass-buttoned brown jacket and trousers with a rucksack over his shoulder, and his trench-pale face, his lined and tired and too-young face was shadowed in the early evening light. It had Mother's fine brows and Father's straight nose, and my dark hair, side-parted.
It had not changed a day.
Mean Things: No pheasant for you! Bringing fairytale tropes into the mix, which is never good. Minor surface wounds which are nonetheless traumatizing to others.
Research Roundup: The process of sheep slaughter, which the internet apparently doesn't want to talk about; WWI hairstyles; basic faerie folklore; British countryside birds; the village of Sutton Courtenay; agricultural products of Oxfordshire; UK game seasons; the colonization of the Canadian prairie; Yeats's "The Stolen Child"; a timeline of electricity availability in Britain; WWI uniforms, photo reference; the text of King Lear; critical reaction to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in the early 1900s; Lillian Russell.
Books in progress: Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief.
The glamour: Dishes, baking, and a trip to Kensington Market with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ksumnersmith specifically to get some cheap honey, which we did. I also scored blood oranges and molasses and organic whole wheat flour and tea and some Green & Black's which I am virtuously not eating.
The best thing I found tonight: An agricultural survey of Oxfordshire done in 1916, which is like giving me what I want in a primary source with a maraschino whipped-cream pony on top. It still didn't tell me whether they farmed pheasant, but apparently they'd be out of season anyways at that time of year. Sorry, kids. No pheasant for dinner.
Along those lines, I'm starting to see the dangers of writing alternate history. One little move of a war from overseas to the domestic arena and you alter the agricultural capabilities of a country and that forces them to go buy wheat from their colonies, and that changes the economics and demographics of the Canadian prairies by pouring all kinds of foreign money into the agricultural centres there, and then whoops, there goes geopolitics. I hope none of you were using that.
I'm also starting to see the other dangers of writing alternate history:
cristalia: This is hard.
cristalia: It's...keeping the actual historical world in my head, and then balancing off all the changes I'm making and the ramifications of them, and then trying to, in that framework, write real characters and good tension in good prose...
cristalia: *juggles lions set on fire*
ringwoodcomics: Yes. Let me throw in a few chainsaws too.
cristalia: And some Ebola.
This book is a freaking madness. I must be nuts to think I can carry this off. This feels like someone put ten pounds of pop rocks and Coke in my five-pound head and shook.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee it's working it's working--
The Enchanted Generation
Words today: 900.
Words total: 1600.
Reason for stopping: I've been in front of this computer writing for almost seven hours straight, and I am nearly exploding with bookloff, and I think I get to go to bed now.
Darling du Jour: There was a soldier at the door to our dining room. He was tall and thin and crisply uniformed in brass-buttoned brown jacket and trousers with a rucksack over his shoulder, and his trench-pale face, his lined and tired and too-young face was shadowed in the early evening light. It had Mother's fine brows and Father's straight nose, and my dark hair, side-parted.
It had not changed a day.
Mean Things: No pheasant for you! Bringing fairytale tropes into the mix, which is never good. Minor surface wounds which are nonetheless traumatizing to others.
Research Roundup: The process of sheep slaughter, which the internet apparently doesn't want to talk about; WWI hairstyles; basic faerie folklore; British countryside birds; the village of Sutton Courtenay; agricultural products of Oxfordshire; UK game seasons; the colonization of the Canadian prairie; Yeats's "The Stolen Child"; a timeline of electricity availability in Britain; WWI uniforms, photo reference; the text of King Lear; critical reaction to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in the early 1900s; Lillian Russell.
Books in progress: Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief.
The glamour: Dishes, baking, and a trip to Kensington Market with
ksumnersmith specifically to get some cheap honey, which we did. I also scored blood oranges and molasses and organic whole wheat flour and tea and some Green & Black's which I am virtuously not eating.The best thing I found tonight: An agricultural survey of Oxfordshire done in 1916, which is like giving me what I want in a primary source with a maraschino whipped-cream pony on top. It still didn't tell me whether they farmed pheasant, but apparently they'd be out of season anyways at that time of year. Sorry, kids. No pheasant for dinner.
Along those lines, I'm starting to see the dangers of writing alternate history. One little move of a war from overseas to the domestic arena and you alter the agricultural capabilities of a country and that forces them to go buy wheat from their colonies, and that changes the economics and demographics of the Canadian prairies by pouring all kinds of foreign money into the agricultural centres there, and then whoops, there goes geopolitics. I hope none of you were using that.
I'm also starting to see the other dangers of writing alternate history:
cristalia: This is hard.cristalia: It's...keeping the actual historical world in my head, and then balancing off all the changes I'm making and the ramifications of them, and then trying to, in that framework, write real characters and good tension in good prose...cristalia: *juggles lions set on fire*ringwoodcomics: Yes. Let me throw in a few chainsaws too.cristalia: And some Ebola.This book is a freaking madness. I must be nuts to think I can carry this off. This feels like someone put ten pounds of pop rocks and Coke in my five-pound head and shook.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee it's working it's working--
