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One essay has turned into a book review for this blog, another will be somewhat Medieval and the third is almost done. The big delay was a glorious thunderstorm that's taking a break from most strenuous effort but will be back soon. Sunday was going to be a Medieval day anyhow, so I shall simply make it a more Medieval day. With added fiction.

Something about the work in progress is going to nag me until it gets written and if I write it then I can get back to non-fiction. Besides, I only have four more teaching-free weeks and I want to see how much work I can cram in and how strange my hours will become.

Although tonight's hours are really the fault of the thunderstorm. It's a rather lovely thunderstorm.

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All my planning went astray. I've finished one article (and sent it) and am still nearly finished the other, and the third, I realised, I don't need for a fortnight.

You don't want to know that giant slugs are trying to colonise my lounge room, do you? I pick htem up wiht a big piece of scrap paper and put paper and slug in the rubbish and pretend they don't exist. I now want the weather to dry right out so the slugs stay away. (They only appear once every 15 years and they aren't nearly as horrible as the spiders-as-big-as-my-hand I get in dry years.)

Time for coffee and a bit of cooking.

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I'm angsting over how much destruction a writer can do to peoples' understanding of how historians work in order to set up a novel so that it will unroll the way it needs to. I'm also angsting at some of the really idiot statements that can be made about the Middle Ages when one makes these ill-informed assumptions about how historians work and what historians can realistically be expected to know (the reality is usually more than the writer assumes, but in different areas).

More SF writers need to actually talk to historians. Really talk. Not just for five minutes. Not just sit in on an undergraduate class. Not read pop histories or good general works. They should get this serious talk in before they work on the set-up of their time-travel novel, for preference, rather than after and during or as a quick accuracy check towards the end.

Given I'm an SF writer working on the set-up of a time travel novel, I shall take my own advice. I've booked an intense discussion with myself for this evening. I'm happy to find a chatroom and share this discussion with anyone else, especially if they're more practising historians than myself and are bored on Sundays and have strong feelings on this subject.


PS This aspect of things will probably appear in my Leeds paper, though I'll be talking about the writing techniques rather than how distressing I find it to be assumed an idiot.

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Did I forget to tell you what I made for a friend's birthday dinner tonight? I chose to cook the main course (though her husband made the salad, since they have a lovely vegie patch) and the weather is a bit cooler, so I had a lot of fun. I made:

Chicken roasted with peach and guava sauce
Sweet potatoes in butter and brown sugar
Rice steamed in turkey bouillon with shredded turkey and tabasco and lemon seasoning
Potato and garlic and chickpeas in thick tomato sauce
Plain rice (which everyone ignored)

This is why I'm working now, of course. I had time out for champagne and friendship. It was a lovely evening.