Is there any convenient way to do a mass-redirect on various URLs? Basically, I want to simplify the directory structure of my site, such that everything which used to be swantower.com/marie/X becomes swantower.com/X. But people may have bookmarked particular links, and I’d like them to be automatically redirected when they try the old URL. What I don’t know is whether there’s any simple method for achieving this. Help?
I’m reading the relevant chapter of Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners now, but I’d love to have a book that looks more specifically at the circumstances of the Irish in London during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Any suggestions?
Who in Greek mythology, besides Paris and Oedipus, was prophecied to cause trouble and therefore abandoned on a mountainside? (Or otherwise disposed of in a way that was intended to prevent the prophecy from coming true.)
I’m sure there’s at least one more, but my knowledge of mythology has sadly declined from its heyday.
ETA: hmmm, it deleted my first edit. I was going to say, Romulus and Remus appear to fit the bill, but I welcome other suggestions.
Does anybody know of a good book about the Great Exhibition of 1851, and/or the Crystal Palace? (That’s almost twenty years before this novel will take place, but I think I’d like to make use of it in the backstory.)
ceosanna, you won the icon sweepstakes. Many thanks to everyone who provided me with icons, especially all the ones that fit my description of what I thought I wanted; it’s just that my brain went sideways and decided this one had the most suitable vibe. Foggy and dark and a little bit mysterious. So what if bridges aren’t really a major plot point in the book; it works.
Expect to see a lot more of this image in the upcoming months.
Continuing my Victorian research trawl, the next thing on the agenda is Hindu folklore and mythology1.
I’m looking for information on the closest analogues to European faeries: rakshasas, apsaras, yakshas, gandharvas, other things in that vein. (Not positive yet which of these is most appropriate to focus on, and there might well be other possibilities I’m not aware of.) I have a certain amount of familiarity with major primary texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata; at this point what I’d really like to read is a good secondary source that discusses these things directly. Are there books out there which will talk about their origins, nature, appearance, habits, narrative or theological role, etc? Someone who’s done for Hindu material what Katharine Briggs did for British. Bonus points if your recommended source talks about the role of these ideas in daily life, outside the context of the epics.
Unfortunately, I’ll only be able to read sources in English, which I know will limit my field sharply. (Especially since English sources, especially of the older variety, are likely to be heavily tinged by the colonial lens.) But any pointers in a useful direction would be appreciated.
Edited to add: Heh. Sometimes, i r not so brite. I posted this, then got up to fetch from the shelf what books I already have on Hinduism . . . then remembered why I have them. Because I took a course on Hinduism from Diana Eck while I was at Harvard. She was even one of my House Masters! So I’ve e-mailed her, too, to see if she can help a former Lowellian out.
1 – For the record, while some people have gotten into the habit of using these words as a form of dismissal, that is never what I mean. I’m interested in the cultural material (lore) of a particular group of people (folk), and a “myth” is not a lie, but rather a specific kind of sacred narrative. (Yes, I do in fact use the phrase “Christian mythology.”) I bring this up because I spent a minute or so trying to find other words to use that would say what I mean without the baggage, before deciding I’m damned if I’ll surrender the technical terminology of my field without a fight.
In related news, “gender” is not just a polite term for “sex” and AUUUUUUUGGGGGH I hate it when useful specificity gets obliterated by careless daily speech. But we’ve already spent too long on this tangent, so back to the query we go.
The arches of my feet are popping again.
Used to be they did this every morning, when I got out of bed. Not always both; sometimes not even one; but popping arches were a fact of life. I’d usually push my foot over the tops of my toes to get it out of the way — a habit left over from ballet. I’d noticed they weren’t doing it as much anymore, but hadn’t really paused to consider the cause.
Turns out my arches1 have started collapsing.
Oddly, this is good news, in a way. Good because the major palpable symptom of this (since I can’t look at my own feet from behind) has been pain in my right ankle, which could also theoretically have been related to the osteochondritis dissecans I had when I was nine. The x-ray showed something indistinct, and if my pain doesn’t clear up we’ll go for an MRI to see what’s happening there, but for the time being the answer is “orthotics” rather than “surgery and six weeks on crutches.” Which I’m grateful for. Been there, done that, don’t want to go back.
So here’s the query part of the whole thing. When my doctor (a general practitioner) explained that my tibialis posterior2 (the muscle-and-tendon set running down the inside of your ankle to the arch of your foot) is weakening/strained, I immediately asked if there were exercises I could do to strengthen it. He said no. Which I frankly don’t buy. We’re talking muscles and tendons, here; even if I somehow can’t work directly on the correct bit, surely I can derive some benefit from strengthening things around them. I have resistance bands; would it help to work with one of those, maybe by pointing my foot inward? How about the thing where you scrunch up a towel with your toes? I’ve got custom insoles now to prop my feet back up to their accustomed shape, but I don’t want to rely on those; I want my arches to be strong enough on their own.
Advice appreciated. I may end up seeing a physical therapist for this, but for the time being I figured I’d ask the Great LJ Overmind.
Edited for clarity: I’m interpreting the popping thing as a sign that the insoles are doing their work; I’ve been wearing shoes around the house, instead of my usual barefoot habits, to hasten what improvement I might get. The lack of popping seems to have been a sign of collapse. Looking back at my post, this was not entirely clear in my original phrasing.
1 When the guy who custom-molds insoles to people’s feet for a living says “wow, you have really high arches . . . yeah.
2 I’m pretty sure that’s the one he named. Wikipedia seems to confirm my guess, but do correct me if I’m wrong.
This one perhaps goes out to my British readers more than others, but in theory anybody’s capable of answering it for me.
What authors — ideally spec fic, just because of my reading preferences, but not necessarily — have done a good job of representing cockney speech? I need authors, not media sources, because I’m curious about the methods people have used for showing it on the page. Like any dialect or accent, it’s really easy to fall into the territory of “really annoying and borderline unreadable,” and I’m keen to avoid that, while still conveying the distinct flavor of the pattern. Probably I’ll rely more on phrasing and quirks of word choice than phonetic representation, but I’d like to see how other people have tackled this issue.
So who’s writing good cockey-centric fiction? Bonus points if it’s Victorian, but since my concern is on the sound more than the vagaries of rhyming slang, modern-day stories are also acceptable.
Which translation of the Mahabharata should I read?
(Not Buck’s abridgement/retelling. Read that already, and appreciated it as a Cliff Notes introduction to what I understand is a very complicated story, but now I need to look at the actual text.)
I am debating a small point of spelling in my copy-edits, brought about by the change in English spelling standards over the centuries*. In this particular case, it is the variation between faerie and fairy (and also faery and fairie, but those are less common and I haven’t messed with them). The possibility on the table is that, as belief in the aforementioned creatures declines, I’ll use the “fairy” spelling when the speaker is talking about them as superstition, and “faerie” when talking about the real thing. But I can’t make up my mind whether I want to do that or not, and so you get a poll.
This will also have relevance for the Victorian book, by which point “fairy” had far surpassed “faerie” as the most commonly-used spelling for the word (and belief had also sharply declined, at least in urban areas).
*This has been an unexpected problem for me, in the Onyx Court books. For example, the general pattern is to spell the surname of the Queen of Scots as Stewart, but the surname of her grandson Charles as Stuart. Etc. And nobody, so far as I’m aware, formally changed the name of Candlewick Street to Cannon Street; it just kind of cruised along being one but occasionally the other until eventually it was the other all the time. Which are issues I didn’t consider when I wrote what I thought was going to be a standalone Elizabethan book.
Edit: So I’m leaning toward deferring the problem. The poll results so far have “pleased” winning by a noticeable margin, but a lot of “confused” votes as well, with a good discussion down in the comments of how this could be resolved by drawing attention to the difference up front. Unfortunately, there’s no graceful way to do that in my narrative as it stands — I’d have to a) horribly interrupt the first relevant scene or b) stick an out-of-narrative note at the front of the book. Neither of which sits well with me. But it doesn’t become a real issue until the Victorian period, when their rampant fairy obsession makes the use of a decidedly non-Victorian form distracting, and so I think for now I’ll stick with my usual spelling. Then, once I start drafting the next book, I’ll see if I can’t build in something that addresses the difference properly.
Edit 2: To give you an idea of why this issue sticks in my brain like a burr — the Onyx Court books are edited to American spelling, except in cases where I’m referencing something British. So ships are in the harbor but Henry Ware got murdered in Coldharbour, and the characters are looking at colors when talking about Newton’s essay “Of Colours.” Despite the fact that the entire thing is in Britain, with British characters. This annoys the snot out of me, but short of strong-arming my publisher into giving me a UK copy-edit (my preference), I can’t do much about it.
I’m still pondering the icon issue, so feel free to go on adding suggestions to that post. (The problem is not with the pictures I’ve been given already, but rather with my subconscious, which just doesn’t want to play ball. I don’t know what it’s looking for — that it hasn’t been given already — or whether it’s just being cranky. Quite possibly the latter.)
Back when I decided to spend 2008 writing In Ashes Lie rather than the Victorian Onyx Court book, the rightness of that decision was encapsulated by two things: I had both a title and an LJ icon for Ashes, and I had neither for the Victorian book.
Now it’s almost 2010, and I realio trulio am writing the Victorian book, and I still need those two things. I’m working on the title issue at the moment; I have possibilities, though all of the ones assembled so far have flaws.
But I don’t have an icon. And the problem there is, I’m not sure what I want for an icon. Midnight had Elizabeth, Ashes had the Fire, Star had the comet, but I don’t quite feel like there’s the same kind of central object in this book — except London itself, really, and it’s hard to pack the “monster city” with all its smog and townhouses and gentlemen and beggars into 100×100 pixels. The best I can think of is some pic of a Victorian-era train, especially an Underground train, but my attempts to find such on the Internet have not turned up anything that leaps out at me. This is the closest I’ve come, but it doesn’t crop to icon size very well.
So here’s the favor I’m asking. Make me some icons — no text needed, just an image that evokes gritty nineteenth-century industrial London. If I use your icon, you’ll get a prize. Most likely prospect for said prize, if you’re willing to wait, is an advance copy of A Star Shall Fall; if you’re more impatient, I’ll come up with something else. A magazine with a story of mine in, maybe. But some kind of prize for saving me from having no icon with which to post about this book.
It’s hard to ask for something like that when I’m not even sure what I want. But I figured I’d toss the net out there, and see what it pulls in.
It appears that some time between the last time I used Nero and now, it has turned into a bloated, computer-hijacking piece of crap. Ergo, I do not want to buy it.
I do, however, want a program with which I can design CD labels and case inserts. There are free ones out there, but all the ones I’ve seen are extremely limited. I need something that will allow me reasonably full functionality from a graphical and text standpoint — not full-scale image manipulation, since I can do that in other programs, but (at a minimum) the kind of control you’d get out of, say, MS Paint. I don’t mind paying for this; I just don’t want to pay for 270MB of crap I don’t want in order to get the 30MB I do want.
Any recommendations?
Okay, so, researching the Victorian book. I’ve decided my first priority is to come up with something to call it other than “the Victorian book.”
The simultaneous convenience and inconvenience of the Onyx Court books is that I know where to go looking for a title (period literature), but I have to go look. I can’t just make one up. We therefore come to the first Request for Help of this round: what mid-Victorian literature should I read in search of a title?
My preference is for poetry over prose, because it’s more likely to have a short, evocative phrase that I can spin out; fiction (especially in the Victorian era) is rather too fond of going on at length. The book will probably start circa 1870, so I’d like material no later than that. No specific limit on how early it could be, but I’m trying to avoid going as early as the Romantics. So who was writing good (and preferably non-pastoral) poetry around 1840-1870?
I’ll use my French horn icon because, well, it’s what I use for music. But given that I’m talking about Metallica, it might not be the most appropriate choice.
Or is it? You see, this post is about one of my odd collections: Weird Metallica Covers. I’m not just talking about S&M
(For the curious: the most frequently-covered song I’ve got is “One,” which clocks in at four and a half renditions, not counting the original. [“Half” because the Rodrigo y Gabriela version segues into “Take 5” partway through.] It’s narrowly trailed by “Enter Sandman” and “Master of Puppets,” with four apiece.)
Can anybody recommend more of this to me? Or, y’know, odd covers of things other than Metallica. I have a string quartet doing Evanescence, Richard Cheese doing lounge-singer covers of all kinds of random crap (including “Down with the Sickness,” which is freaking hilarious in lounge style), Rondellus doing early medieval covers of Black Sabbath in Latin. Techno remixes of opera, shamisen duet of Radiohead — if it’s a weird mashup of instruments or styles, I’m there*. What should I look for?
*(I haven’t actually soundtracked any of my Driftwood stories, but in the back of my head, this is what it calls for.)
Similar to my Gunpowder Plot query — if I were to read only one history of the Napoleonic Wars, which one should it be? I’m specifically looking for a history of Britain’s naval campaign. The kind of thing that would be useful background for reading O’Brian, Forester, et al.
If nineteenth-century America is something you know something about, this post is aimed at you.
For the second time in my life, I’m gearing up to run a game. The first one was Changeling (and resulted in the Onyx Court series); this one is Scion (and god help me if it tries to turn into a novel). For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Scion is a role-playing game where the characters are the half-mortal children of gods. Think Hercules, or Cú Chulainn, or the Pandavas, running around in the modern world. Except that my game will be set, not in the modern world, but in the nineteenth-century American frontier.
Larger-than-life personalities doing over-the-top deeds? Nah, there was nobody like that in the Old West. 🙂
I’ve already got a nascent list of people I can reinterpret as half-divine, but I’d like more. This is where you, O internets, come in: who really seems like they might have been the child of a god? Who excelled in their chosen field? Whose deeds acquired legendary status?
The game will likely take place in the mid-1870s, so while people who predate that point are okay (they might fit into the backstory — or not be so dead after all), anybody born later is out. Mostly I’m looking at the frontier, but will also entertain suggestions from back east; the game may wander there at some point. I am especially interested in people from the groups more often overlooked by history: blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, etc. One of the things I want to look at in this game is the way in which a wide variety of cultures collided in the space of the frontier. (Adding a mythological layer should make that extra interesting.)
Bonus points if you can suggest a possible divine parent along with the Scion. Whose kid is Doc Holliday? How about Marie Laveau? Pretty much any god is up for grabs; the books provide rules for handling nine different pantheons, and I’ve found decent-looking player-created material for three more, so I can field most things.
Suggest away. The more names, the merrier.
Well, I think it’s past midnight in the UK, so I missed the perfect window by a few hours. But:
If I were to read only one book on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which book should it be?
Back in August, I got an e-mail from an individual with the initials GH (not sure if he wants his name shared publicly) who offered assistance in translating some bits of dialogue from this book into German. I just tried to get back in touch with him, and the e-mail bounced, saying the recipient domain rejected it. If you are the one who passed my request along to GH, could you drop me an e-mail or LJ message and help me contact him?
Totally the wrong kind of dance in my icon there, but it’s the best I’ve got.
Does anyone out there know, or know someone who knows, how to dance a minuet? Or any other kind of mid-eighteenth-century dance, for that matter. The Wikipedia entry on the minuet step is incomprehensible to the layperson, since it was written in 1724, and while the videos it links to show me the basic step, they don’t give me any sense of the shape of the whole dance, and how one interacts with one’s partner.
In other words, it’s time to replace my bracketed placeholder descriptions in the scene where Galen’s dancing a minuet, and I need references to go by. Movie scenes that depict it correctly would also work; unfortunately, the closest I’ve been able to get is Regency dancing, and that isn’t the same.
Hellllllllllp!
