(no subject)
May. 26th, 2011 02:19 pmI have turned today into tomorrow. All my messages and most of my housework will be done on Friday. This is because I was just so impatient to get back to my research that I couldn't put it off, not even to go up the street. I have food basics and I did the most urgent messages on Monday - everything else can wait a day.
My payback was that the first book I checked I could have done late last night or in six months time, for all the good it was. The book I'm working through now, however, is gold. There's so much material I can weave straight into my narrative and a nice list of things I don't have to hunt when I get to France. Cultural histories are lovely, when done well, and make sense of the small universes in which humans live. My big discovery of the last few minutes is that we actually have records of the sorts of nicknames semi-foreigners were called in equivalent towns in my region. This means that my guess for the second half of my character's nickname (which, being a guess, wasn't going into the novel - I found evidence for the first half early on) has been replaced by a viable nickname. And, knowing the system of nicknames for a whole group of people, I want to write my town rather like Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood, which is so not going to work, but is still very alluring.
If I can finish this book and read six articles before dinner, then tonight I can get stuck into my notes. This means, when I have done all my messages and housework tomorrow, I get to make sense of things and write.
This is my happiest time, when I get to bring it all to life, so I hope that this week nothing intervenes. I ought to be working on one of the last articles I promised (since I told myself I'd finish them by the end of the month) but I'm only just emerging from the keeping-my-head-above-water (I can work and do normal activities through the pain these days, but it's still not easy) and so I want to reward myself. Anyhow, I've had a bit of a break from nicknames, so now I get to make myself a pot of coffee and return to the Middle Ages, most frabjously.
My payback was that the first book I checked I could have done late last night or in six months time, for all the good it was. The book I'm working through now, however, is gold. There's so much material I can weave straight into my narrative and a nice list of things I don't have to hunt when I get to France. Cultural histories are lovely, when done well, and make sense of the small universes in which humans live. My big discovery of the last few minutes is that we actually have records of the sorts of nicknames semi-foreigners were called in equivalent towns in my region. This means that my guess for the second half of my character's nickname (which, being a guess, wasn't going into the novel - I found evidence for the first half early on) has been replaced by a viable nickname. And, knowing the system of nicknames for a whole group of people, I want to write my town rather like Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood, which is so not going to work, but is still very alluring.
If I can finish this book and read six articles before dinner, then tonight I can get stuck into my notes. This means, when I have done all my messages and housework tomorrow, I get to make sense of things and write.
This is my happiest time, when I get to bring it all to life, so I hope that this week nothing intervenes. I ought to be working on one of the last articles I promised (since I told myself I'd finish them by the end of the month) but I'm only just emerging from the keeping-my-head-above-water (I can work and do normal activities through the pain these days, but it's still not easy) and so I want to reward myself. Anyhow, I've had a bit of a break from nicknames, so now I get to make myself a pot of coffee and return to the Middle Ages, most frabjously.