Paksworld

I’ve often enjoyed a blog tittled “Scientist Sees Sq1irrels” by Stephen Heard, a Canadian scientist who has just retired from his university faculty position.  Always interesting essays, sometimes about science, sometimes about other things.  So I’m half-stealing his title for this post, because I, too, “see squirrels” in the sense that I’m easily distracted by new topics, new data, something I never heard of or thought about before.   My mother the engineer, who could multi-track like nobody’s business, did not like my doing that.   Obviously, giving the length of books & book groups I’ve written, I can stick to a project for years at a time.   But in the fine detail of those months and years, I will also spend time nosing out  things new to me, *some* of which may show up in the current project.

The saber continues to fascinate and challenge me.  Yes, I’m getting slowly (annoyingly slowly) stronger and better.  This week I started working with it twice a day, not just once a day.  Exercises that would be boring if I had some other exercise object in my hand, but with a saber…the mindset is different.   I want to have a name for it, but did people ever name their saber?  Oh.  Wait.  It just named itself.  Joyeux.   That fits perfectly.

A week of working with the saber and I’m definitely getting more of a feel, including the feeling of sore shoulders, forearms, and hands.   But right-handed, I can hold the saber out straight in front, arm straight, with much less quivering, and raise the tip and lower the tip to level again, over and over and over….twice as many up/downs as when I started.    Then rotating the wrist, thus the blade, so that sharp edge is to the outside/down, outside/down ten times, then inside/down, inside/down, inside/down ten times.   Elementary first steps to controlling the blade.  Switch to left hand, which is weaker.  More quivering in the straight front hold (even today)  then on the right.  Can’t do as many up/down or rotational turns as with the right…but more than I could do on the first day.

Whole-arm swings, to loosen up, in a figure-8 pattern, right handed first for a gradually increasing number of swings,  then left handed , passing hand to hand in the middle.  Then added another exercise on Thursday:  elbow “motionless” as much as possible at my side, wrist only moving blade in figure 8 swing without letting my right shoulder lean sideways or forward.  A work in progress, not there yet.   Several other exercises, also not yet mastered, but working on them.

I’m working on both sides, because I have a big strength difference between left and right that I want to reduce, not because it’s in any of the written or demonstrated exercises.   The one-sidedness goes back to the encephalitis I had as a child, which left my left side much weaker for quite a while and was exacerbated by playing tennis in HS–right-handed–which selectively strengthened the already strong side and left the weaker side to itself.   I’m thoroughly enjoying the saber and hope I end up “straighter” on top after another half year or so.

Meanwhile this week Horngard II is sitting at 32.8K words in spite of everything else that’s gone on.

Clearly I need a stronger core, stronger arm, a lot more practice, and above all something other than what I’m wearing, but the sun came out after all the clouds and rain, and I have a new blade.  And as the middle picture shows by the way the light hits it, one impressive edge.

Writing about sword-wearing, sword-using characters, and then handling some antiques owned by others, pushed me to indulge my own long-term interest in blades.   Some of mine are blades I used in fencing lessons (with SCA instructors) and those have been more or less permanently blunted.    I bought a bated (blunted from birth, so to speak) longsword when I needed to see what it felt like to carry, how hard it was to handle in indoor spaces and in the woods, etc.   It was very helpful to get that physical feel of it, especially walking around and through ordinary obstacles.  I have a few sharps, on which I practiced slicing things and poking things to see what it felt like (and also because it’s fun to slice the bottom lumps off  2 liter plastic bottle hanging from a tree limb when it’s full of water and the water squirts out and…yeah.  Juvenile fun with swords.)  But all of it (including the spear, the bill, and some other more period bits I have) have contributed a lot to scenes in which someone is doing something with a sword, spear, bill, etc. When I borrowed a scythe and scythed some tall grass, that was another experience that enhanced my writing about Gird.  Same with the crossbow.  No amount of just reading or watching movies or videos can provide the body-feel of handling things yourself, whether it’s kneading a loaf of bread, digging a ditch, riding a horse, knitting a sock, or…using a weapon.

I was gifted a gorgeous USMC Mameluke officer’s sword by friends who knew I hadn’t been able to get one at the time, but I don’t “play” with it…it needs sharpening (barely sharp now) by someone more expert than I am.  It has a curve, and it’s definitely a weapon, not just a display item.

But as the Paksworld books have progressed, and I’ve studied more about swords, I’ve wanted to add a lighter-armed cavalry type to the mix in some areas.  And I’ve long wanted a curved blade that I didn’t feel as protective of, as I do my dress sword.    I have a character now, in Horngard I and II, Nasimir Clart, owner/commander of Clart Cavalry, who is a quintessential cavalry man, familiar since Xenophon wrote about horse training and cavalry operations in ancient Greece, and described vividly (for the 19th century) in the excellent series of books by Allan Mallinson, about a young officer’s career through the Napoleonic wars  and beyond.   And I could not envisage Clart without seeing someone with lance and saber.

So when Matt Easton of Schola Gladiatoria, one of my online sources of info on antique weapons and fighting styles, had a review of a reproduction of the 1796 pattern British Light Cavalry saber that he thought got all the details right, right down to the distal taper of the blade…I was hooked.  It is a substantially “beefier” blade than the Mameluke,  much wider and heavier, with a deeper curve, trading grace, speed, and ease of maneuver for power.  So here it is, side by side with its scabbard.

I’m reasonably sure Nasimir Clart chose a different hilt…something he would find more stylish that also gave more hand protection than the simple knuckle-bow here.   But for me, this will do just fine.  It was getting dark by the time I got back from feeding the horses this evening…discovered it on the porch on the way out…so I didn’t have time after unboxing it to change into something more appropriate to take a picture of the first swings with it, but yes…I took it outside (it’s WAY too big to swing around inside) and found the balance strange in one way but quite nice once I started swinging it from the position to cover the back to various cuts in front.  This is a saber for serious cavalry combat in the lightly-or-no-armored style.   I will be doing things with it, for the same reason I used the others…it’s research.  That it’s also fun and good exercise is beside the point.  I absolutely did not buy a saber for the fun of it.   (Stop laughing, you there in the back.)

Bringing Nasimir Clart into POV status as a character has led to the conclusion that I need yet another sword.   A cavalry saber suited to such a man as Nasimir Clart, for instance.  And paging through images of sabers (and sabres) for ones that were combat weapons, not just dueling weapons, has led me to….the 1796 pattern Light Cavalry Saber of the British Army.   Which is  not only a handsome, graceful blade but had the reputation as a killer, for its ability to lop off body parts, including heads.   Is it “in period” if the Paksworld stories were written as 13th-14th century?  No.  But Paksworld isn’t this world, it has dwarves as master smiths, with advanced (compared to ours) skill in mixing metals for steel…so they *could* make the right steel for sabers of that size and type in Paks’s day, allowing light cavalry a weapon superior to anything in the “real” (our-world) late medieval period.

Clart’s company is not exactly 18rh-early 19th c. light cavalry, either.  But it has some of the same uses: scouting, communication, covering troop movements, harassment of enemy troops, hit-and-run attacks.  It’s highly mobile, flexible, in ways a heavy-armored cavalry isn’t.  The company deploys both lancers and swords, mostly this type of saber.   And…I’ve never held this kind, just the modern ‘fencing” saber.  Not the same animal at all, a house-cat to a tiger.   In the area of “replica” swords, most sabers have been duds–the opinion of experts far more knowledgeable than me.  However, there are late 18th, early 19th c. sabers that “looked right” for Nasimir Clart (who sat in my head, saying “Maybe, too thin, maybe, too curved, NEVER, and YES!”)  Yes to the very popular 1796 pattern British Light Cavalry Saber.  Which has now, according to several experts, been reproduced accurately in all respects after using an actual antique, not pictures, for the model.

Before the final version of the combats I’ve written Clart into, in the new books,  I expect to have my own replica saber in hand, to feel how it moves in the hand, what it ‘does’ to wrist, elbow, shoulder, and back in use, and thus (if needed) improve the way I wrote the scenes.  There will be vegetable parts on the ground.   For those interested in what this saber–as an antique and as a replica–looks like I suggest looking up Schola Gladiatoria on You Tube, one of my favorite channels (along with Tod’s Workshop).   Or you can search for British Saber 1796 and see a lot of images of various versions of it.

And though Museum Replicas is out of stock with it right now, in the future some fine day I expect to find a package from them with my very own saber in it.

Meanwhile, Clart Company’s first cohort, with its commander and junior captain of the first, have made it out of the foothills and onto the plain, while the second cohort and its junior captain, are spending another few days back in camp at Horngard, while their lightly wounded recover more, and the second in command (senior captain of the second) who was seriously wounded either stabilizes or dies in Fox Company’s medical tent nearby.  Golden Company is awaiting the arrival of an expected Andressat contingent with the Count in attendance and some gifts for the king, and in between, a trade caravan will show up unexpectedly.  Everyone’s avoiding the Pliuni road becaause Pliuni is in bad odor thanks to its behavior in Horngard I.

Arrived this week as two BIG, HEAVY  boxes was a used copy of a 45 year old  Oxford English Dictionary.   Our Compact OED, which I used heavily while writing the Deed of Paksenarrion, Surrender None, and Liar’s Oath, is beyond my eyesight now, even with reading glasses and a magnifying glass..  But it was invaluable.  At that time I still had my HS graduation thesaurus as well, but the Compact OED gave me enough of the history and alternate meanings of words to provide a precision the thesaurus was never meant to achieve.  But as I said, with succeeding years it became harder to use it once my eyes started giving me more and more difficulty.  That row of cream-colored volumes in the picture is  of the 13 volumes of the 1978 printing of the Oxford English Dictionary.  12 volumes + supplement volume.   The words sit over there, chattering quietly to one another, bumping elbows sometimes, from volume to volume.  And I’m renewing my acquaintance with this very senior member of the family of Engilsh dictionaries, first met in Fondren Library of Rice University.  It’s not the latest…but it contains things from before the first.  One of the words I looked at yesterday, when it arrived, is referenced to a Psalter in 885 CE with another reference to it in 1000 in Beowulf.  

The advantage of such a research tool for writers?   Great is too narrow a word.    It’s historical, which means the etymology of the words goes back to the first recorded print source in England, and usage is recorded as “Obs” or “Archaic” but not ignored to give just the modern.   That’s how I learned today that “deploy” was originally cognate with “display” in the sense of “spread out to be more visible.”  Troops deployed meant a close formation opened out…not at all what it means in US usage today.  Any recorded use of the word from the first time it’s known to have shown up is included.  It’s that long because there’s information in there, most of it information useful to writers.   If you want every word to fit (“the right word in the right order”)  like a puzzle piece with the other words, it helps to know more, to grasp its entire history, the forces that shaped it.

The latest printing runs to 20 volumes, so of course has even more words, and takes up half again as much space, but this one is close to the one I used at Rice from time to time (actually, I mostly got into it for fun and relaxation and satisfying curiosity.)  I also played around in dictionaries of various sciences.  But I knew enough of the OED to know I wanted one.  We pounced on the Compact OED as soon as we heard about it; we used it for decades, including playing OED Scrabble with friends (any word that was in the OED was fine, but only in the main entry, not all the variant spellings….except in some sessions.)   Made for slow Scrabble, but two of the other players would run a game of chess concurrently, one would read a book, and I would play with the dictionary between needing to look things up.

Anyway, I’m already enjoying this moderate monster.  I’ve done only two directed searches so far; most of it’s been opening a volume randomly, looking on the two visible pages to see what looks interesting and writing down any unfamiliar words.  That got me “fife-rail, eadi, luddock, lue, maritage, marish, pun (not *that* pun), punatoo, starkle, stote, sumph, hopdog, hore, hoppet, and huik”, none of which I knew, and several pages of history and past usages of “stark,” some additional usages of “stot” …both words I thought I knew.   Today I looked up a word from Lee & Miller’s book Trade Secret….“replevin” as in “a writ of replevin” and got its complete etymology and expanded meaning.   Plus other words last night and today I didn’t actually write down (silly me; I don’t have an instant very sticky memory for words the way I did as a younger person, when absorbing vocabulary was easy.)  But I’m getting the kind of “deep awareness” of many of the words that made me confident in Paksworld when I started it and will restore some of that “feel” in Horngard.  For instance, there’s a scene in which Our Hero is talking to some displaced persons in hill country, who speak a variant dialect.   The OED has plenty of those–genuine  archaic terms and spellings linked to their usage in different counties in the UK, so…I can sprinkle them in where they go.

I am not a professional in etymology or linguistics or languages overall…BUT we did manage to afford the  Compact OED* way, way, WAY back when it was new(ish) and used to use it for (among many other things including research) playing Scrabble with friends.  OED Scrabble was a lot of fun, if slow enough to allow two people to play chess on the side.   And back in those days I could read the OED without a magnifying glass or glasses by putting my nose maybe half a centimeter above the paper, at which point the tiny print was in focus.  ANYway.   I now need reading glasses and the magnifying glass that came with the set.

*OED Oxford English Dictionary.  I always yearned to own the full version but it was and undoubtedly is still, incredibly expensive in its full expanse.**

** I had to look it up.  20 volumes, 4 feet of shelf space, $1,215 from Amazon.  That’s new.  What have I got I could discard to gain four feet of shelf space?   There’s not another place in the house to put another bookshelf.  Certainly not the 2013 Britannica.  Or the 1950 Britannica.  Not any of the nonfiction; that’s my personal research library.   (Looking with narrowed eyes at the fiction shelves.  How much of that am I going to re-read?  Yes, it’s also reference, but…I have just be attacked by a massive lump of book hunger.  And older, not up to date ones aren’t as expensive…there’s a lovely earlier 13 volume version, about what I remember from college.  Used, yes, but very nice, with proper volume covers…YUM.)  Writers need words.  They need to *understand* words, in the depth of time those words have been used.  They need words sitting around them, emitting all the nuances…filling their heads with words…beautiful, sensual, luscious, practically chewable, words.

Yesterday, in conversation with my agent, who had had someone else look at the Horngard ms., it turns out the first question to be answered, from the third person was “What is a paladin?” because all that cane immediately to his mind was Dungeons and Dragons paladins and even a cursory reading on Horngard revealed that nobody in *that* book thought of paladins the way whatisname did (sorry, but the head injuries are playing serious games with name memory today.  I can clearly remember the stuff in the rule books that so infuriated me about the abuse of the paladin concept, but not the name of the man who wrote them…wait…Gary.  Gary something…starts with G also.  Not Geronimo, shorter than that.  Gorgon, Griffin, Grimaldi….Gary-Gary-Gary…yes, this is a problem.)  By chewing on the old problem of “Why on earth did you write rules that made “lawful good” essentially include “stupid” and why did you let people start at level zero as paladins (and stupid-good) when the actual paladins (there were some) were all experienced and expert fighters??   I was then motivated to go haul out the second (heavy!!) volume of the compact OED and look up the history of the word and see if I’d remembered any of that.

I’d remembered it wrong, OK? But here’s the straight scoop from the Compact OED.  It goes back to Charlemagne’s court.  Now remember–this is post-Western Roman Empire time and Europe was mostly a seething (thinly seething) mass of little realms–Charlemagne (just means Charles the Great) of the Carolingean dynasty (became king of the Franks in 768,, King of the Lombards from 774, and was crowned as the Emperor of the Romans by the Pope Leo III  in 800, and died in 814.)  I regard those dates as…iffy, because of later calendar changes and I don’t know how much slippage was accounted for, but I could be wrong.  8th to 9th century Common Era, anyway.  Who were the Franks and the Lombards?  Funny you should ask.  They *had* been among the invaders who toppled the Western Empire, handily tucked into one or more of the Goths & Vandals tribes.  I happen to have a translation of the Lombard Laws from a pre-Charlemagne period, (like the Burgundian Code I also have a translation of, both of these researched and done by my medieval history prof,  Katharine Fischer Drew, then chair of the History Department of Rice University, may her name be remembered for good scholarship AND being a really good history teacher and administrator.   Both of those legal codes were intentionally modeled on their view of Roman Law (the first codified law either bunch of barbarians had ever seen)  but the difference between the stately and determinedly “universal” approach of the Romans and the decidedly particular and individual approach of these Germanic tribes is both notable and  useful to fiction writers wanting to add a little verisimilitude to their sometimes unconvincing narratives.

Back to Charlemagne.  Because Pope Leo III, wanted to recreate a more stable and uniform Europe (e.g. the Roman Empire),  with Roman Catholics in charge and no more Byzantine invasions and persecutions, he gave Charlemagne the title of Emperor of the Romans, although the actual crowning ceremony occurred in what is now France, not in Rome (Leo III had fled Rome.  It’s a really *lively* period of history which makes clear that interesting times may be interesting but get a lot of people killed, displaced, and wishing for nice boring peace for long enough to raise a family.  Some people are never satisfied–or rather, in any situation some want it to last and some want to change it.  Charlemagne’s father was Pippin (not Tolkein’s Pippin); that’s how Charlemagne inherited the crown of the Franks; his brother had the Lombards but when his brother died, Charlemagne just snagged that crown, ignoring his brother’s heirs.  Nice fellow.  As you can imagine, becoming and staying king, and gaining more meant wars and so Charlemagne as a feudal sovereign had fighting men–good ones, or else–under him.  Specifically twelve peers,  who were “of the palace” (hence, through a couple of spelling wiggles, paladins,  “palace warriors” the paladin title meant, who were directly sworn to him.

From Charlemagne’s court, the term spread with bards, writers, etc. and was helped along by Chretien de Troyes and his tale of Arthur and his Round Table and others.   Suddenly the Matter of Britain got involved.  Then the courtly romances of somewhat later medieval times.  Various other attributes got tacked on to the requirements for paladins (being polite to women, being clean, being pious.  The “parfit gentil knight” thing.  Galahad, not Lancelot.  Oh, and of course the Chanson de Roland was part of it, and even the Welsh poet Taliessin.   In German mythology, as expressed in Wagner’s operas and their preceding legends, the perfect knight might be tangled in pre-Christian mythologies as well.  The term was sometimes used for the exceptionally brave alone but more often for a cluster that included “presentable at a palace” (so the bravest soldier in the army, a terrific fighter, if too rough and cruel…couldn’t be a paladin.  Looking at Charlemagne’s time, this must have been a later addition.)  Courage, fighting ability, courtesy.  Often righting wrongs on his own, a knight errant off doing great things.  Since the Holy Roman Empire included most of Europe at one point, it also included staying within the bounds of Holy Roman Catholicism, and included Spain-to-Germania.  Not, however, Scandinavia. Vikings were immune to the romantic nature of paladins, until later.

My first experience with the word was in stories *about* the middle ages, the knights in shining armor approach.  But a degree in history, most of it ancient & medieval, gave it a lot more dimension…[[Gygax.  That was the guy’s name.  FINALLY.  Gary Gygax.  OK, sorry I couldn’t remember it faster.  The memory isn’t totally gone, it just has an extremely slow name-finding function.]]   Besides Dungeons & Dragons (before that arrived, in fact) but after writers like Scott & Tennyson & the spate of Arthurean fiction that popped up at intervals, there was a TV series called “Have Gun, Will Travel” with a main character names Paladin.  He wore black, carried a gun, shot people, and usually in the course of an episode, righted some wrong or other.  Modern paladin that sort of, but didn’t entirely, sit right with me when I watched it.  Like an unromantic Zorro (yes, I watched that one too.)

Paksworld paladins are based on the older form, as most of you know. However, the intrusion of functional magic in various forms in Paksworld allows paladins to do things that Charlemagne’s palace warriors could not.  Keeping their powers limited and sufficiently different from the magicks of others felt necessary to me, though the ability to light a fire or even a candle from a finger almost tempted me to give paladins “ordinary” magelight.   Nope.  Paks & others get the bright white “reveals the truth” kind of light.  What else?  They can’t be fooled when it comes to good/evil or truth/lies.  They have an innate ability to heal–it’s from their patron saint or a god, and it goes beyond what a Marshal can do.   They can protect others from magical fear (an evil projection from some evil source).  They are charismatic–natural leaders, and leaders for good.   But also they have the skills of expert warriors, including tactical skills developed from years of training & experience.  They are courteous, “presentable at court.”  They are typically active as paladins alone, going out on quests to accomplish an assignment (right a wrong, find a missing king, stop something bad) though they may associate with a crowd trying to do the same thing.  They’re no all alike, and they don’t feel allegiance to exactly the same good powers.  Paks and Dorrin, for instance, came from very different backgrounds (as did Gird and Falk).   Aris and Seri, the two young paladin figures in Liar’s Oath, one of them born Old Human and one of them born magelord, leading the most vulnerable people of Luap’s kingdom down-canyon and away, hoping to get them back to Fintha…were fully paladins and connected to the old high gods of Old Aare, Sunlord and Sealord and Windlord.  They had known Gird personally…they were “his children” nonbiologically but not “his” paladins.

It’s all perfectly clear now, right?  My rough-and-ready telling here didn’t buck you off into the mud, did it?

Horngard II is moving along, and today it handed me something unexpected.   Two Marshals have arrived at their home grange (a senior Marshal and one in the first year of being a Marshal, when they work under supervision just in case…) with four dead bodies and an extra four horses.  They didn’t kill them.  They saw an attempted armed robbery by a group of horse thieves; the horse owner (they think) killed all four thieves; the Marshals came to investigate and the horse owner (not of the 4 horses but others) was glad to have the Marshals take away the bodies and the thieves’ horses, because that horse owner was taking some horses to a sale.  (Whew…got through that with no spoilers for Horngard I.)  The Marshals disappear from Horngard I at that point, but in Horngard II they have other tasks.

Firstly, there are the four bodies.  Their grange is in a smallish town (but large enough to have a town government, an inn or two, and the grange) so they hand off the bodies (since they aren’t local citizens or Girdish) to the town for burial…in the “scraw land.”  That word popped into my head as I was visualizing the conversation between Marshals and the town judicar.    I knew it was “where we bury criminals, people with no family or prestige.”  Very clear, very definite: scraw land.  I knew I’d seen scraw somewhere, sometime, but nothing definite helped me, so I did an internet search for its meaning.  Scraw has several closely related meanings:  a piece of turf (like the stuff peeled up for laying a lawn down somewhere, only just pieces) , that might be dried for fuel, or placed on a roof under thatching for additional waterproofness, or more specifically “a sod from the surface of a peat bog…”  

What my backbrain had dragged up from past reading, internet stuff, TV stuff was “bog burials.”   Not all bog burials were criminals, but it’s thought some definitely were.  The connection to “scraw land” I still don’t remember, but wow, the backbrain was certainly doing a good job of giving me an old word, a traditional-sounding word (as it actually is a traditional word) for “the land where you get scraw (for whatever use you want to make of the sod off the top of boggy ground)  and thus the place you’d also bury criminals.  I am astounded (and grateful…backbrain, you’re the best.)  Notice that this was not focused research…I didn’t go looking for a word for “where you bury criminals”, the backbrain just went digging in its vocabulary stacks and handed me a goodie.

At the same time, I’m having a heckuva time remembering a word I’ve known, and used, for years (caltrop) and have had to back-search for it repeatedly.  It’s not that uncommon (though not *really* common, like “snake” or “bacon”) and should not give me any trouble at all, but it can slide right out of my mind within two minutes of looking it up, and it’s really hard to retrieve, much of the time.  I’ve finally tied it to Caltrans so I have the whole first syllable with the crucial “tr” after it.   Yet there, rising to the top of my mental swamp, so to speak, was “scraw.”  I don’t think I’ve ever *used* “scraw” before in any of my writing.

If anyone wants some bog mummies in Paksworld, there they are, not a mile from a grange, in the scraw land.  A low, damp, place of coarse grass and moss and rushes, reasonably close to the South Trade Road that once ran along the foot of the Dwarfmounts  (north side) from sortakinda near the Eastern Ocean to Corner (Fintha, south of Fin Panir, where the South Trade Road turns north.  Why there?  Because it doesn’t have to cross as much scraw land that bogs trade wagons down.  The South Trade Road now runs from Halveric House in southern Lyonya west to Brewersbridge in SE Tsaia then on to Fiveway, where it crosses the N/S road from Aarenis to Verella to (eventually) Arcolin’s holding in northern Tsaia.

http://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-long/no-wool-no-vikings

This article, found today on Twitter via a friend’s tweet, is a terrific resource for anyone interested in how wool was used–and the kind of sheep that could be raised in a subarctic environment.  The method of collecting the wool from these sheep is the same used worldwide for collecting an animal fiber from animals that shed annually (it’s used for quiviut, the underfur of musk oxen, and a century or so ago for the undercoat of sheep on the western most Hebrides island, St. Kilda.

I know the Vikings were supposed to have used wool sails, but it kept sounding improbable until I read this article, which describes how the sails were sealed, and how someone has, in this century, replicated the process and produced useful sails.  But wow, the Vikings would not have had any time to watch TV or surf the internet.

I imagined the Seafolk in Paksworld as similar to the Vikings (what I knew of them then)  so the Pargunese would also have had a lot of sheep.

Tuesday morning I head off for the first convention of the season, Keycon in Winnipeg.  My convention seasons have shortened, due to age and LifeStuff, so I’m especially happy this year to be able to make an international trip after having to cancel plans for LonCon.

I won’t be back until the following Wednesday.  I am going computer-free this time, due to other LifeStuff involving electronics and lack of time to deal with complications.  An old-fashioned notebook will go with me–it often sparks my writing anyway–and so will yarn and knitting needles.   Read the rest of this entry »