On the plus side, when I looked at the place where I might actually start my novel in the next draft, I discovered that it’s only 20 pages in. True, these are twenty pages that I have already slashed and burned and then lovingly rewritten at least three or four times (probably more, since they were part of the chunk I initially wrote and rewrote several times to go to the novel-writing workshop last summer), but still, it could have been worse.

So now I’ll do more slashing and burning and will use my jedi-ninja mind tricks to insert the necessary information from those pages elsewhere in the story as exposition and possibly a flashback or two.

Also on the plus side, almost every scene I’ve written in the second act is a keeper–I just didn’t bother to write the connective transition bits that would keep the narrative flowing and keep the reader from stopping and saying, “Huh?” So that is the task of this draft.

And finally, it’s day two of Daylight Savings Time, and I am up writing at my customary time, which is sort of miraculous. Hearing the little birds chirping outside my window helped with that tremendously; I figured if they could get up and get moving even without the benefit of hot running water and electric coffee machines, then I really had no excuse.

P.S. – Although I didn’t touch the manuscript, I did spend time thinking about it, and doing some related research about desert survival and medicinal plants, which was fun. My next research task is to go back to Hank Reinhardt’s Book of Swords and take the notes I should have taken the first time through. I have lots of people carrying around metal implements (copper and bronze) and want to make sure I don’t have them driving their dagger points emphatically into solid wood tabletops or anything like that. (Hint: bronze is softer than iron; copper is MUCH softer!)

P.P.S. – Currently listening to: The Weepies, “Painting by Chagall” (“Sometimes rain that’s needed falls…”) from their Say I Am You album. Also Iron & Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog. Highly recommended.

This falls under the category of “not quite news,” since various scientists and historians have reported on our species’ long history with alcohol, BUT it’s relevant to me at the moment because of my current project, a novel set in a culture similar to some of those that sprang up in ancient Mesopotamia (the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Akkadians). Date beer in particular shows up fairly often, with the occasional appearance of mead and wine.

The article linked below highlights several reasons why a desire for alcohol could have helped fuel agriculture and taken us down our current path of civilization, including the pharmacological effects, but the author leaves out three I think may have been pretty significant:

1. Unsafe water. Alcohol kills germs, and alcoholic beverages would have been safer to drink in many cases than water.

2. More protein. The process of brewing increases the amount of protein in beer, which would have been important when other protein sources were relatively scarce and hard to get.

3. Thriftiness. Some alcoholic brews are made from things people can’t eat anyway (or don’t want to), like grape stems (grappa) and crushed or overripe fruit (cider). Also, without refrigeration or canning equipment, our forebears used fermentation to preserve extra food (along with drying and pickling) – not just for beer and wine, but for yogurt and cheese (which is a different type of fermentation, of course!).

Did a thirst for beer spark civilization? – Features, Archaeology – The Independent.

This one goes out to everyone who longs to write (or read) a good sword-and-sorcery tale, because without the sword, it’s just not the same — and if you don’t know swords, you’re liable to make a gaffe or two along the way.

The Book of Swords by Hank Reinhardt came out earlier this year; it was edited and published posthumously by Reinhardt’s wife, Toni Weisskopf Reinhardt. The book is fantastic, and makes me sorry I’ll never have a chance to meet its author.

Reinhardt steers the reader through the history of the sword, throwing in some metallurgy, archaeology, poetry, and applied research as needed along the way. The focus is on how these weapons were used in combat and how they were adapted over time to changing technology (i.e., the discoveries of iron and then steel), battle conditions, and societal conditions. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading, most from Reinhardt himself.

Whenever possible, Reinhardt tried out reproduction blades himself and described the results (sacrificing innumerable pork shoulder roasts in the process) — what kinds of wounds different swords made; how well they penetrated chain mail; which were good for cutting, thrusting, or both. He also takes time to discuss armor and other weapons used against swordsmen to give readers a clearer context for how swords were used. Finally, he discusses the differences between the sport of fencing and sword combat, and dispels a few myths and excessive liberties taken with the facts, perpetrated by the movies and other popular sources.

It’s an interesting topic, and Reinhardt made it a delightful read, full of quirky asides and the kinds of details writers find eminently useful. If the story you are writing has a sword in it, you should read this book.

Find this book at a nearby library or purchase it.

If you read a lot of books and you’ve never used WorldCat, do yourself a favor and go bookmark it right now.

There are citation and bibliography-building tools for students and other researchers, tagging and list-making features and plug-ins of various kinds, but the reason I love WorldCat is that you can look up any book or magazine title and find the closest libraries that have it. You can also search for music and movies, too. Even if I’m not planning on taking a road trip to K-State or Kansas City to get it, it gives me some idea of how quickly an interlibrary loan (ILL) request might get filled if I request it at my own library. (One book I requested through ILL at my library had to come from Australia, so I figured in some additional wait time for it!)

That’s about 1% of the features available, but it’s what I use most. When you find a nearby copy of an item,  one click takes you to that library’s record of the item, where you can request it, jot down the call number, et cetera. All in all, it’s a simple, free tool that makes life easier for readers and writers.

There’s also a mobile phone version at www.worldcat.org/m/, if you’re fancy like that.

Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce. If you write about shape-shifters or were-anythings (wolves, rats, bunnies?) in your fiction, I highly recommend this book to you. Even if you don’t, this is an interesting read; it’s a compendium of recent research into the moral behavior of animals, specifically mammals, and particularly social mammals like various primate species, wolves, and but including even rats and mice.

Pierce’s background is in philosophy, Bekoff’s in biology, a good combination for the discussion at hand. They’ve targeted the book to a general audience and the writing’s good, with a refreshingly direct and relatively jargon-free style.

The authors define morality as “a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups.” They describe and explore three clusters of these behaviors: cooperation, empathy, and justice.

Pierce and Bekoff do much to dispel the leftover notion of nature “red in tooth and claw” and point out that in the primate world, for example, the vast majority of interactions between individuals are “affiliative” or “prosocial” — cooperative, helpful, caring. In prosimians the figure is 93.2%; for New World monkeys the figure is 86.1%; for Old World monkeys, 84.8%, and for gorillas, 95.7% affiliative.

They also cite the strict rules of play among social carnivores: “Highly aggressive coyote pups, to give just one example, will bend over backwards to maintain the play mood with their fellows, and when they don’t do this they’re ignored and ostracized.”

Reading this reminded me of A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (another book I recommend, a fantasy novel); their wolves talk (telepathically, but still), so there is a certain amount of anthropomorphizing going on, but the book evokes a vivid emotional and social life of animals that still maintains its wildness, its otherness. A Companion to Wolves predates Wild Justice, but I’m certain they did plenty of research into the social lives of wolves while writing that book, and it shows. Luckily Bekoff and Pierce have now done a lot of the legwork for the rest of us.

Find Wild Justice at a nearby library or purchase it.

and

Find A Companion to Wolves at a nearby library or purchase it.

I’ll kick things off with the wonderfully fun Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart, featuring illustrations by Briony Morrow-Cribbs and Jonathan Rosen (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009).

Stewart’s style is entertaining and breezy, with lots of historical anecdotes thrown in (in addition to Lincoln’s mother, we learn about President James Garfield’s assassin, details of how Socrates met his end, and more) as well as some nice tidbits of science (how poison ivy, oak and sumac cause skin irritation, types of toxins found in various plants, etc., etc.).

Stewart explores plants with a wide variety of traits: some kill-on-contact deadly, some mild irritants, some useful-but-dangerous, some used recreationally by humans (several of which are also deadly, notably tobacco). It’s a beautifully designed book, and the illustrations, particularly Rosen’s cartoons, add a certain whimsy to its macabre charm.

Wicked Plants is particularly of note to writers because of its focus on plants that are poisonous and/or noxious in some way, which makes it a nice supplement to herbal guides that focus on edible and medicinal plants, or more general field guides. Murder mystery writers in particular will find much to love here.

I found the book useful for world-building in speculative fiction; my work-in-progress has some scenes outdoors in the desert and in grassland, and using a few of these plants as models made things much more interesting for my characters, who had to avoid some and use others VERY carefully.

My one criticism is that the book lacks an index; the table of contents is fairly detailed, and that helps, but it would be extremely handy to look up plants by the active toxins they contain, for instance, or the region in which they grow. Stewart does include a bibliography for further reading and a list of “poison gardens” (botanical conservatories and the like) that contain specimens of some of these deadly beauties, both useful to researchers.

The links go to Stewart’s page for the book, which I think is also notable as an example of a marketing tool for writers – many of the things she does there would work for nonfiction and fiction writers alike: http://www.amystewart.com/wickedplants.html

These things come in various sized blocks; pictured is part of an 1800 calorie block, which is enough to feed one person for one day. They also come in 2400 and 3600 blocks, the idea being a handy block of shelf-stable food you can easily throw in an emergency pack or your glove compartment (or in with your camping gear).  Main ingredients: flour, vegetable shortening, and sugar. Tastes like slightly lemony shortbread as made by a very large institutional bakery (think: schools and prisons). The 3600 calorie block also doubles as a handy defensive weapon.

I originally thought, given the ingredients (it’s a cookie!), that I might be tempted to blow through two or three of the blocks at a time. Turns out this is not the case; eat one and you are ready to stop eating for several hours at least (and go out foraging in the meantime for wood sorrel, dandelions, clover, tall fescue, or anything resembling a vegetable).

And if it’s lightweight, calorie dense food guaranteed not to go bad for years that you need, you could just buy a 12-pack of Twinkies (though they aren’t nearly as compact).

So basically, made for true emergencies and for people who don’t actually like eating.

In other news, I’m going camping tonight, which I may use as a reason to try out some of those just-add-boiling-water pouches of freeze-dried camping food, another fave of many emergency preparedness advocates. I’ll report back.

Of course, they are still REALLY far away from editing memories in humans, but they seem to have been able to erase (in a broad/blunt way, at least) memories in lab rats with the injection of a chemical that interferes with the process. Not prevent them from being formed, but erase memories that were already there. Still, veddy interesting…

Back in the Bronze Age (when the books now known as the Old Testament were written), society was decidedly patriarchal. Sons were prized; daughters, not so much. I’m sure there were many reasons for this, but I want to point out one set of reasons in particular: the lack of medical knowledge and care and (as a result) the very real dangers of childbirth, which were not shared equally. If you had a son, you didn’t have to worry about him growing up to die in childbirth. Women who survived their childbearing years lived longer than men (just as they do now), but running that gauntlet meant there were a lot fewer of them at the other side.

So passing property patrilinearly at that time was not necessarily a bad idea; men were more likely to live longer to care for the children. In this light, tracing one’s lineage through the fathers’ lines isn’t so crazy, either (although still not as accurate as matrilineal).

Fast forward about four thousand years. Medical advances have not eliminated the risks of childbirth, but they have reduced them to a level that would have astonished our forebears. Women live longer than men, on average, and many of the patriarchal holdovers in our culture look quaint if not downright stupid. (Some of them weren’t the best choices 4,000 years ago.)

And there are still folks like the Quiverfulls around, trying to drag Bronze Age family values into the twenty-first century, because they a) want to and think it’s advantageous to them, and b) really feel like biblical literalism is the way to go.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, I’m working on a story right now that takes place in a culture not all that dissimilar from the one that produced the books of the Old Testament, and in studying some of those Mesopotamian cultures, I’m struck by what a practical people they were (for the most part). Even many of the behaviors that seem ridiculous to us had some utility. This is not the case, however, if you take those behaviors and just transplant them willy-nilly to another time and place — say, to the United States in 2009.

But even those throwbacks have some reason for wanting to roll back the cultural clock, even though the behaviors they advocate are no longer advantageous to the broader culture (and they are therefore likely doomed to fail in their efforts). Perhaps they want to regain power they think they’ve lost in the cultural changes of the last (cough) four thousand years.

Anyway, when world-building, the cultures will and should be messy and the practices they present to address practical problems (like death in childbed) may not be elegant, but they should be at least somewhat functional. And splinter/fringe cultures are interesting in that they directly oppose some practices of the mainstream culture and can serve to highlight some fracture or fault line in that dominant culture, some contested or shifting ground.

Please allow me to wax geeky for just a moment about a tool I think writers may find extremely useful.

Juice, a new plug-in for Firefox from Linkool Labs, puts a sidebar on your browser. Highlight any bit of text, drag-and-drop it on the sidebar, and a tabbed Google search (for web, images, news, videos, and blogs) opens there. It’s fast, free, and speeds all sorts of online research tasks.