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Posts Tagged ‘research’

status of fiery things

Amazon UK has an item listed called Midnight Never Come: And Ashes Lie: Bk. 2, which apparently is 384 pages long and coming out next June.

I would like to know where they buy their crack.

***

Apropos of that, though — today my editor gave the go-ahead for this book to be longer than the last one, because I feel like I’m short-changing my own story, trying to cram it in too small of a sack. The pros reading this will have already leapt ahead to the immediate corollary concern, which is what that means for my deadline. Answer? Heck if I know. I intend to still make it.

I’d better, if the book is supposed to be out by June 4th . . . but they’ll have to shrink the typeface to get it on 384 pages.

***

Also, I just spent ten minutes wandering around my house trying to find the reference book I needed. That’s the Royal Exchange, that’s Pride’s Purge, that’s Whitehall, that’s the wrong book on Westminster . . . . I think one of the next packing stages will be clearing off the bottom shelf of my research bookcase and letting these books just annex it already, because the piles around the house are getting stupid.

Mush!

more adventures with the OED

Dammit. “Idealist” is an anachronistic word for the period, and in its earliest usage, it referred to a specific philosophy. “Optimist” is also out-of-period. “Utopian” is not, but it doesn’t mean quite the same thing as “idealist,” and that’s the word I really want.

The answer to this, of course, is to say “to hell with the OED” and use the word anyway. I doubt anyone not reading this journal would ever notice the word in the novel and think, that’s anachronistic. But having established this principle in my prose, I’m remarkably unwilling to surrender it.

Maybe this will be the corollary to the use of “medieval” in Midnight Never Come. There just wasn’t a word in use back then that efficiently conveyed the period I was trying to reference, so I finally gave up and used it.

Yes, I do obsess this much. But most of you are not surprised. Those who are, are probably new to this journal.

with my notes or on them

I took some notes for Midnight Never Come . . . but not so many as you might think. I knew a fair bit about the period already, which makes it easier to hold onto new details, and those things were mostly in the background anyway. I did not need to know what Robert Beale was doing on February 12th, 1590, in order to make that book work.

Writing didn’t happen last night because, while I had done some of the necessary reading for this next bit, I hadn’t yet taken notes on it. And therefore I couldn’t be sure when to set the scene, and what should have happened/be happening/be about to happen in it.

So after a virtuous afternoon of note-taking, I sit down with my rapidly-filling notebook and prepare to put down the 1200 words I need to stay on schedule. It feels a bit like I’m laying track ten feet in front of the locomotive, but last night is the first time the train has had to slow or stop due to lack of track, so I guess that’s moderately okay.

It would be nice to get ahead in this game, though.

neglected history

Death-marching through The King’s War (five hundred pages down; one hundred to go), I find myself considering a question that’s been in my mind for some time.

Why is seventeenth-century England so neglected in fiction?

Seventeenth and eighteenth both, really, but I haven’t gotten into researching the eighteenth yet. There’s some stuff there, but they get trampled by the Elizabethan period from one end and the Victorian from the other. (Starting early with the Regency.) Tonight I’m probably going to take time off from the death-march to watch one of the only pre-Restoration movies I’ve been able to find (To Kill a King). I know of almost no fantasy novels set during the Stuart era.

Yet the seventeenth century is chock-full of conflict and change. You’d expect to find lots of fiction exploiting that . . . but you don’t. Why?

Possible reasons . . . .

Day Eight: In which I do battle with handwriting (and lose)

Thanks to the Great LJ Overmind, I’ve managed to up my count of signed copies of Midnight Never Come from two to fourteen. (Not including the piles at Orbit.) On my way to fjm‘s lst night, I stopped off in Oxford Street and hit the Waterstones there; I did not, however, hit the Borders, on account of it being inside the police cordon closing off a chunk of the street after the fatal stabbing there the day before. Er. Yeah. Yikes.

So if you live in the London area and want a signed copy, here’s the tally of where to find them:

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Day Seven: In which I have a social life!

The Thames Path pleases me. I have no idea how far it stretches — all the way to the headwaters? — but if I were to keep walking east from Richmond, I’m pretty sure I could go without interruption on from here to Southwark. (If I had the endurance.) The companion trail on the north bank is the part of the same route I travel on my first day of these trips, along the bank from Blackfriars to the Tower. In the City it’s pretty in a paved and urbanized way; out here it’s rutted gravel and untrimmed verdage. It’s easy to imagine myself back in the past, editing out the few modern notes that creep into my view.

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Day Four: Courtesy of the Goodemeades

One unexpected side effect of not having my camera cable: it’s surprisingly hard to keep myself entertained in the evenings. I didn’t realize how much time I spent last year, sucking the day’s pictures down to my laptop, deleting the bad ones, and labeling the rest before I could forget what they were. I find myself at loose ends in the evenings, more than expected, and curse the combination of virtue and light packing that made the only book in my luggage Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. I cannot brain enough to read about seventeenth-century socio-politico-religious movements right now.

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last excerpt

With forty days to go until Midnight Never Come hits the shelves, I’ve posted the last portion of the excerpt. It’s a long one, so keep clicking through. (Alternatively, you can start back at the beginning.)

(Confidential to sora_blue: You can finally get the answer to your question from a month ago!)

That will actually be the last of the MNC promotional stuff for a while. I leave next week for London, where I will have many adventures researching the next book, and then I will be in the Mediterranean, trying to do no work at all. There will, however, be one last nifty thing, just before the book comes out. And in the interim, you will be getting the return of the trip-blogging, which I know many people enjoyed last year. So enjoy!

random query

I don’t suppose any of the Brits reading this journal are in Oxfordshire? Or are at least familiar with that area?

I’m trying to sort out something for research purposes.

Edited to add: Okay, it looks like what I really need is a bus schedule to get myself from Swindon to either Woolstone or Compton Beauchamp and back. (And, y’know, advice on whether I should be worried about hiking a few miles alone in the Oxfordshire countryside.)

AAL Book Report: King James and the History of Homosexuality, Michael B. Young

Dear Typesetter Of This Book,

I know the truth. You snickered to yourself when you saw what had happened in the last paragraph of Chapter Seven, where the line spacing required the word “arsenal” to be hyphenated onto the next line.

Kisses,
— The Part Of My Mind That’s Twelve Years Old

***

Dear Michael B. Young,

Thank you for letting your snark off the leash every so often. Like when, after telling me over and over again how much Thomas Scott wanted war and was so happy when he got it, because now England was a “nursery for soldiers,” and then tossing off in two lines that he was soon thereafter murdered by a soldier and life does have its little ironies, don’t it? Or when, addressing the question of whether the people around James understood what was going on with him and his male favorites, you go through a paragraph about how the Archbishop of Canterbury deliberately prettied up Villiers and chucked him into James’ path, and what in the world did he think he was doing?

— The Part Of My Mind That Appreciates Entertaining Nonfiction

***

I picked this book up on the recommendation of cheshyre, to get a sense of the atmosphere of James’ court (spilling over into Charles’), and how the critics of that lifestyle bemoaned it as homosexual. It’s a pretty good read, quite short — 155 pages, not counting notes — and quick to process. Though it probably could have been shorter if the conclusion hadn’t taken twenty pages to beat you over the head with the excellent points it raised in the preceding chapters.

I have yet to actually read Bray’s book Homosexuality in Renaissance England, but this appears to be a good counter-argument to Bray’s thesis that male homosexuality at the time was only conceived of in terms of sodomy (and therefore witchcraft, the devil, popery, and the general dissolution of the world). Young acknowledges that Bray’s probably right in certain cases, that some people wandered around with “sodomy” in one compartment of their brains and “what the King does” in another compartment and determinedly didn’t connect the two, but he also quotes a number of contemporary writers who appear to have been floundering around for a word they didn’t have yet — namely, homosexuality as we now conceive of it.

Hmmm. I might have more sympathy for James’ situation if he hadn’t been such a raging misogynist at the same time. Oh well.

Good book. Now on to the next one. Mush!

tradition

I remember when I moved into my freshman dorm at Harvard, and there was a list on my pillow of everyone who had lived in my room since 1804. (Nobody famous, but Ralph Waldo Emerson had lived down the hall.)

I’m reminded of this as I look at the list of the Lord Mayors of London. It’s kind of boggling to imagine being elected to an office that stretches back in an unbroken line to 1189. (Well, the elections go back to 1215. The two guys before that were appointed.) I won’t count them myself, but Wikipedia says almost 700 individuals have served.

Stop and think about that for a moment. Monarchical dynasties come and go; they overthrow each other, die out, pass to collateral lines. Sometimes they even get abolished and re-instituted. And those who occupy thrones are put there by birth, not by merit. I’m less impressed by that than I am by this, a tradition of annual elections stretching back nearly 800 years.

This is the kind of thing that makes me realize how American I am. We’ve had forty-three presidents over 219 years. Whoop-de-doo. 219 years is an eyeblink, by the standards of European history.

Brits think 100 miles is a long distance, and Americans think 100 years is a long time.

Back I go to making a list of the aldermen of London in 1640 — another institution that’s been around for eight centuries or so.

Edited to add: I also get brief flashes of what it’s like to be a historian, reading meaning between the lines of incredibly boring information. List of aldermen? Boring as hell. But then you notice things like the sudden turnover in 1649, the year they cut the king’s head off. Normally there were maybe one or two vacancies in a year; maybe four or five, maybe none. The list for 1649? Stretches nearly four pages. John Smith of the Drapers’ Company was selected for Walbrook on June 12th, sworn in the 19th; on June 20th they selected William Nutt of the Grocers’ Company. He got sworn in on July 10th, four days before the selection and swearing-in of Hugh Smithson from the Haberdashers. Smithson in turn lasted five days, to be succeeded by William Bond, also of the Haberdashers, who made it all the way to 1650 before vanishing. And that’s not the worst of it; Cornhill Ward alone went through nine aldermen in 1649.

I know seven aldermen were forcibly booted for Royalist sympathies, but I don’t know why the rest of them had the political lifespan of mayflies. What aspect of the unrest had them coming and going in a matter of days?

The list doesn’t say. But it raises the question, and I think that’s how historical inquiry gets started.

Edit #2: Also, my apologies to Richard Martin of the Goldsmiths, who is apparently the real-life individual I booted off the historical stage when I made Deven’s father the alderman for Farringdon Within. (There was a limit to my historical accuracy, but you have to dig pretty far to find it.)

Since Martin got to be Lord Mayor in 1589, I’ll just pretend he was busy with that instead.

I really am this bad

You know what happens when I post two research book reports in one day?

I get into the sort of mood where I’m genuinely excited to discover that all the minutes of the House of Commons from the seventeenth century are available online. And that the IU Library has a book that lists seven hundred years’ worth of the aldermen of the City of London.

The sad thing is, I do have a life. And this is it.

AAL Book Report: London Wall Through Eighteen Centuries

I know, I’m posteriffic today. But I’m finally making visible progress on research, so you get book reports.

This particular item, published in 1937, is apparently the most recent — nay, the only — useful resource out there for information about the Roman and medieval city wall. Which seems bizarre, but hey. It’s jointly written by Walter G. Bell, F. Cottrill, and Charles Spon, who took it in turns to write about the wall in various periods, from its first construction by the Romans to its demoltion through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The archaeologist in me alternately cringes and giggles at the gimpiness of 1930s research methods and the unapologetically patriotic tone of the writing, but it does provide me with a great deal of handy information, both for this and later books.

So for the 0.00001% of you who might need to know about the London Wall in excruciating detail, this is your book. (Unless the folks at the Museum of London are wrong, and there’s a better one out there I could have been reading.)

AAL Book Report: A Monarch Transformed: Britain 1603-1714, Mark Kishlansky

This is the book I needed to read before Stone’s. If you’re looking for a clear, readable, narrative overview of seventeenth-century history, I’d definitely recommend this one. It starts with a pair of chapters on the social and political world throughout the period, then begins moving chronologically, separating the century into reasonably distinct segments for James I and VI, the Duke of Buckingham, Charles I, the start of the Civil War, the conclusion of the Civil War, the Commonwealth/Protectorate, and the Restoration. (It goes on from there, but I stopped in 1667; I might well come back and read the later chapters after this novel is done.) A few of Kishlansky’s break-points seem oddly chosen — why 1644 as a dividing line in the Civil War? — but divisions like that are always going to be a little arbitrary.

The political perspective seems, if anything, excessively moderate. I’m not sure if the contrast with Stone comes from the different times at which the authors were writing, their political inclinations, their theory backgrounds, or what, but Kishlansky appears reluctant to paint anybody in a noticeably negative light. Charles I doesn’t seem unreasonable, Cromwell seems like a patriot — hell, even Strafford comes across as not all that awful, when Stone made it sound like he was practically eating Irish babies with tartar sauce. Granted, Stone’s purpose was to trace the causes of the conflict, so he’s more likely to highlight the negatives, but still — Kishlansky might be a bit too forgiving.

But that’s okay. I came to this book hoping to understand what happened, and now I do. The result is that I finally have a tentative outline for which time periods And Ashes Lie will be covering. I call that a win.

AAL Book Report: Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642, Lawrence Stone

Partway through reading this book, it occurred to me that reading a heavy-duty academic historical analysis of the causes of the English Revolution might not be the brightest idea for someone who hasn’t yet gotten a firm grasp on, oh, the chronology of the English Revolution.

I made it through, though, in large part because of the organization and focus of this book. Stone divides his causes up into three (admittedly fuzzy) categories of preconditions, precipitants, and triggers, each operating on a successively shorter time scale. The preconditions occupied the bulk of that essay (there are four essays in here, but the titular one is huge), and the preconditions, in his view, ran from about 1529 to 1629. In other words, from the Reformation in England and Henry VIII’s seizure of Church property to the dissolution of Parliament and beginning of Personal Rule/the Eleven Years’ Tyranny. That latter term is a new one by me — see the above statement about not really knowing the seventeenth century yet — but the Tudor parts of the preconditions, I can deal with just fine. So when Stone talked about how the redistribution of Church property changed the balance of economic and political power among the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the gentry, or how early Elizabethan neglect of the episcopacy led to a loss of status for Anglican bishops, I can follow him well enough. And I can definitely see how the policies that kept Elizabeth afloat left James in a nigh-untenable position.

The precipitants and the triggers, respectively, he links to the periods 1629-1639 and 1640-1642. That is to say, he’s looking at long-range, middle-range, and short-range causes. And writing from a perspective shortly after sociology apparently rammed into history at high speed, so he’s attempting the admittedly difficult hat trick of bringing in causes from Parliament and the monarchy and the merchants in London and the Puritans everywhere and the Church and the wars England was fighting and social mobility and anything else you can think of. The result? Is a hella dense book. (And regrettably saturated with the passive voice.) But a good one nonetheless, that goes a long way toward making sure I don’t leap straight from 1590 to 1640 or whenever AAL will start, without thinking through the intervening decades.

***

If the structural difficulty with MNC was deciding what year to place it in (since the changeover of interesting historical personnel was so high in the decade to either side), the structural difficulty here is how not to smear this book across forty years or more, to the point where it gets way too distant and boring. There are two ways I can see to do that. One is to turn it into the sort of 300,000-word historical brick that comes with free complimentary LOLcat caption saying “I R SERIOUS BOOK” . . . but that, alas, is not what we’re after here.

The other, of course, is to give up on covering everything happening in that forty years, and to find the perfect turning moments to show more closely. (And probably to pull in the edges. But I honestly don’t think I can reduce this to less than twenty-six years — from the reconvening of Parliament in 1640 to the Great Fire in 1666.) Picking the turning moments, naturally, is far easier said than done.

But the next step in that is probably, y’know, learning what went on in the seventeenth century. It isn’t a good sign when I’m reading this book going, “what happened in 1640? What are you talking about? Huh? The government collapsed? What the hell?”

Time to go find myself a more basic chronological history. Any suggestions?