05 April 2026, Writing - part xxxx374 The Novel, Antiquity and Technology
Announcement: I
still need a new publisher. However, I’ve taken the step to republish my
previously published novels. I’m starting with Centurion, and
we’ll see from there. Since previously published novels have little
chance of publication in the market (unless they are huge best sellers), I
might as well get those older novels back out. I’m going through Amazon
Publishing, and I’ll pass the information on to you.
Introduction: I wrote the
novel Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon. This was my 21st novel
and through this blog, I gave you the entire novel in installments that
included commentary on the writing. In the commentary, in addition to other
general information on writing, I explained, how the novel was constructed, the
metaphors and symbols in it, the writing techniques and tricks I used, and the
way I built the scenes. You can look back through this blog and read the entire
novel beginning with http://www.pilotlion.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-novel-part-3-girl-and-demon.html.
I’m using this novel as
an example of how I produce, market, and eventually (we hope) get a novel
published. I’ll keep you informed along the way.
Today’s Blog: To see the steps in
the publication process, visit my writing websites http://www.sisteroflight.com/.
The four plus two basic
rules I employ when writing:
1. Don’t confuse your readers.
2. Entertain your readers.
3. Ground your readers in the writing.
4. Don’t show (or tell) everything.
4a. Show what can be
seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted on the stage of the novel.
5. Immerse yourself in the world of your writing.
6. The initial scene is the most important scene.
These are the steps I use to write a novel
including the five discrete parts of a novel:
1. Design the initial scene
2. Develop a theme statement
(initial setting, protagonist, protagonist’s helper or antagonist, action
statement)
a. Research as required
b. Develop the initial
setting
c. Develop the characters
d. Identify the telic flaw
(internal and external)
3. Write the initial scene
(identify the output: implied setting, implied characters, implied action
movement)
4. Write the next scene(s)
to the climax (rising action)
5. Write the climax scene
6. Write the falling action
scene(s)
7. Write the dénouement
scene
I finished writing my 31st novel,
working title, Cassandra, potential title Cassandra:
Enchantment and the Warriors. The theme statement is: Deirdre and
Sorcha are redirected to French finishing school where they discover difficult
mysteries, people, and events.
I finished writing my 34th novel
(actually my 32nd completed novel), Seoirse,
potential title Seoirse: Enchantment and the Assignment. The
theme statement is: Seoirse is assigned to be Rose’s protector and helper at
Monmouth while Rose deals with five goddesses and schoolwork; unfortunately,
Seoirse has fallen in love with Rose.
Here is the cover
proposal for the third edition of Centurion:
|
Cover Proposal |
The most important scene
in any novel is the initial scene, but eventually, you have to move to the
rising action. I am continuing to write on my 30th novel,
working title Red Sonja. I finished my 29th novel,
working title Detective. I finished writing number 31,
working title Cassandra: Enchantment and the Warrior. I just
finished my 32nd novel and 33rd novel: Rose:
Enchantment and the Flower, and Seoirse: Enchantment and the
Assignment.
How to begin a novel. Number one thought,
we need an entertaining idea. I usually encapsulate such an idea with a
theme statement. Since I’m writing a new novel, we need a new theme
statement. Here is an initial cut.
For novel 30: Red Sonja, a Soviet spy,
infiltrates the X-plane programs at Edwards AFB as a test pilot’s
administrative clerk, learns about freedom, and is redeemed.
For Novel 32: Shiggy Tash finds a lost girl
in the isolated Scottish safe house her organization gives her for her latest
assignment: Rose Craigie has nothing, is alone, and needs someone or something
to rescue and acknowledge her as a human being.
For novel 33, Book girl:
Siobhàn Shaw is Morven McLean’s savior—they are both attending Kilgraston
School in Scotland when Morven loses everything, her wealth, position, and
friends, and Siobhàn Shaw is the only one left to befriend and help her
discover the one thing that might save Morven’s family and existence.
For novel 34: Seoirse is assigned to
be Rose’s protector and helper at Monmouth while Rose deals with five goddesses
and schoolwork; unfortunately, Seoirse has fallen in love with Rose.
For novel 35: Eoghan, a Scottish National
Park Authority Ranger, while handing a supernatural problem in Loch Lomond and
The Trossachs National Park discovers the crypt of Aine and accidentally
releases her into the world; Eoghan wants more from the world and Aine desires
a new life and perhaps love.
Here
is the scene development outline:
1.
Scene input (comes from the previous scene output or is an initial scene)
2.
Write the scene setting (place, time, stuff, and characters)
3.
Imagine the output, creative elements, plot, telic flaw resolution (climax) and
develop the tension and release.
4.
Write the scene using the output and creative elements to build the tension.
5.
Write the release
6.
Write the kicker
Today: Let me tell you a little about writing. Writing
isn’t so much a hobby, a career, or a pastime. Writing is a habit and an
obsession. We who love to write love to write.
I want to start with these definitions as
a premise for writing.
1. Write to entertain
2. Write using the
common outline for a novel
3. Develop a telic flaw,
a protagonist, an antagonist, and plan to resolve the telic flaw.
4. Start with an initial
scene.
5. Develop and define a
modern protagonist: you get a telic flaw, a potential protagonist’s helper, and
a potential initial scene from the development.
6. Write to reveal the
protagonist.
And here is the scene:
1. Scene input (comes from the previous
scene output or is an initial scene)
2. Write the scene setting (place, time,
stuff, and characters)
3. Imagine the output, creative elements,
plot, telic flaw resolution (climax) and develop the tension and release.
4. Write the scene using the output and
creative elements to build the tension.
5. Write the release
6. Write the kicker
I’m going to move into a more technical
subject this time. I’ve addressed this
subject before, but I haven’t in a while, and most of the time, I’ve looked at
it in the context of other writing ideas.
This is the subject of technology.
Why is technology important? The most critical point, in my mind, is
accuracy from the standpoint of the time and place of the novels we write. I’d say, technology is perhaps the most
important compared to history. Why is
that?
The obvious answer for the modern era is
the change of technology. If you write a
novel set in the 1990, and every character has an iPhone, you have done a great
harm to your technology and the historical and technical accuracy of your
novel. The iPhone was first introduced
in 2007. There are a lot of these traps
especially for the young and inexperienced who didn’t live through these
times. In other words, to a person who
spent their entire life with an iPhone (or other, so called, smart phone), the
idea of not having one is almost impossible to imagine. Likewise, the aircraft was invented in
1903. If you have an heavier than air
aircraft in your novel before about 1910, you are breaking an historical
fact. Now, you could be like some of the
creepy and silly movies and novels written in the modern era that have all
kinds of impossible historical technological anomalies. For example, one of the latest Sherlock Holmes
movies in the last ten years has an aircraft in the late 1890s or so. Now, it could be late Sherlock in about 1920,
but it’s hard to tell with the way movies are produced, and who can tell what
time they are really in. In any case,
these types of craziness defy reality and technology, but it gets worse. These are easy examples from the centuries of
knowledge and documentation. What about
the very early times in history and prehistory?
This is something I’d like to explain and
explore. My real expertise is in early
languages, cultures, and societies especially those that are early
Mediterranean and early British. These
are some of the times I’ve written about and that I use in my writing. Plus, I translate Anglo-Saxon and Athenian
Greek. These are both dead languages so
they aren’t going anywhere.
Here's my plan. I’m going to start with early technological
history like the seven basic machines and other major technologies and apply
them to writing about history. We’ll investigate
foods, cooking, warfare, agriculture, horses, husbandry (farming and animals),
crops, furniture, architecture, and so on.
The point is to begin to understand the past and past technology so we
can write historically correct and enlightening novels. In addition, we will eventually move to the
modern eras and then to science fiction.
Science fiction is all about predicting and extrapolating
technology. We’ll make a sweeping study
of technology such that we can write realistic and historically correct
fiction.
I’ll move on to what we know about
antiquity and should ensure as a basis in our writing, next.
Perhaps the biggest problem with works of
antiquity is the lack of basic knowledge by the general public and by our
writing community. Perhaps I should
write that we just get along by going along with the ignorance of the age, but
no—I think that would be obscene from a historical and educational
standpoint. Just because movies, TV, and
many writers are ignorant of the past, we shouldn’t be, and our novels
definitely shouldn’t be. Just imagine
writing a work for the ages when the ages in the future judge that novel by
some real data—it would be a laughing stock.
So, just for that reason, I’ll assist you, but there is more. I teach classes and write my own novels and
books about these periods. The worst I
could do is pass along ignorance, when as an educator, I should be helping my
readers and classes know the truth about the past. So, let’s start with food and cooking.
Food and cooking begins with what and ends
in how. The what is what can we
eat. In antiquity before agriculture were
hunter gatherers. Let’s move to the
point where they had fire and sharp tools.
Fire and sharp tools bring us into limited civilization. This is a good. With sharp tools, one of the earliest
machines, the wedge, we can eat meat.
Here is a terrible truth for humanity.
Humans are incapable of eating meat without knives to cut the meat into
edible chunks. Even with edible (mouth
fitting chunks) humans can’t process the meat without cooking the meat. Cooking usually requires a fire, but there
are other methods of cooking meat and getting it to human edible chunks.
Human edible means the meat has been cut
to a size that it fits in the mouth and/or it has congealed enough that human
teeth can shear and masticate it.
Studies have shown us that knives are necessary to cut through the skin
and fur of terrestrial and aquatic animals.
It is possible to cook and eat some aquatic animals without cutting, and
a few without cooking, but we can write, in general, that to consume animal
protein, humans must have fire, for cooking, and knives (the wedge) for gutting
and cutting. We can get into more
technical details for processing meat, but the important point is the tools
required to consume meat. Let’s move to
the actual tools themselves.
In the first place, we need some means to capture
the meat. I’m not going to get into
these details much, but suffice to say, with a knife of some type, we can make
deadfalls and snares. In addition, herding
and animal husbandry makes meat acquisition simpler. Notice, we haven’t moved to agriculture,
yet. There are unique problems for early
agriculture. Hunting is also possible,
but hunting is not as easy or reliable a means as the nonhunter might
think. Just watch any animal special
about animals hunting other animals to get an idea just how difficult it
is.
At this point, I’m more interested in cooking
in antiquity and not as much in procurement, but this is a very important point
about food in antiquity. Until about the
late 1700s due to the United States, every earlier culture was a starvation
culture. This means the number of
calories eaten by the average person was at the edge of sustenance. The average person was starving and never if
rarely ever had enough food to eat for good or even basic nutrition. The average person most likely ate when and
what they could and rarely had more than a single meal a day. With this as a basis, lets go back to cooking
meat.
How do you cook meat without metal or some
other means of holding it above the fire.
The typical campfire methods are applicable. Mostly, putting the meat on a wooden spit. This is a common means of cooking in third world
nations. It’s cheap, easy, and as long
as you don’t use poisonous wood, makes palatable cooked meat. You can also leave the spitted meat at the
side of the fire to cook.
With a way to cook meat, we have made a great
progress in human development. Meat
builds muscle mass, brain mass, the fat increases overall intelligence, and there
are other positives from eating meat.
Humans who eat meat are stronger, larger, smarter, and more capable of
survival. The opposite is true for
humans who don’t get much animal protein or with protein restrictive
diets. I’ll move on to vegetables and
more importantly grains in antiquity.
That’s next.
The main points about protein is that if
you want it, you must be able to acquire it, get to it, and make it
edible. The make it edible is more about
the ability to masticate and cut it into pieces and not necessarily just
cooking. I’ll get to other methods
eventually. What about grains and
vegies.
The problem with vegies is they will fill
your belly, but they don’t give you much bang for your buck. Some tubers like potatoes and peanuts are
great for both calories and for protein, but they are late date starches. The gathering lifestyle takes a lot of time
and gives back very little for the work—therefore farming. The problem with farming is well
farming. What we really want from
farming is grains and starches. The
problem with grains and starches is they deplete the nutrients in the soil, so
we need to go to warfare to see what happened in the world.
In the first place, river bed flooding or annually
flooded riverbeds like the Nile, the Ganges, the Rhine, the Euphrates, and so
on made near stationary agriculture possible.
Someone invented the ability to make flat breads and then rising breads
likely near the Nile and agriculture took off.
The problem with baking is at this time
metal was very rare and the ability to heat food almost nonexistent. The earliest breads both flat and rising were
from the kind of dough you wrap around a piece of stick and cook over or next
to a campfire. The next stage was likely
flat rocks heated near or over a fire.
With rocks, the real problem was explosions of the rocks when they were heated. Remember, no metal, so a flat of a convex
stone made a great griddle for cooking something like a tortilla. Then in Egypt or somewhere close, someone got
the great idea to make an oven. An oven
is a clay or stone structure with a fire inside that is allowed to become coals
the coals cook the food inside with eaven heating. The invention of the oven meant the beginning
of real human civilization and culinary culture.
In an oven, you can cook many many
different foods with minimal and relatively low temperature containers. The big deal are clay fired and unfired loaf
containers that can be used to cook loaves of bread and can be combined with meats
and vegies. This gave rise to the
classics of antiquity and of much of Europe.
Meat pies and breads filled with meats for example. Think shepherd pie, bierocks, and other
savory meat dishes. These can be cooked
(baked) in pots and clay vessels that can withstand the heat of an oven, but
could not be placed over a fire. These
dishes are popular today.
The big deal is the oven could be used to
cook meat as well as bread, and the bread became the basis for beer, while the
meat provided edible protein and fats. I’m
convinced that the availability of protein is the real power in the advent of
civilization. People still lived in a
starvation culture, but those who had protein and plenty of it could develop
mentally and physically.
I mentioned that agriculture was driven by
warfare. With bread and meat and a way
to cook them, warfare became possible and probable. In addition, warfare is what led to the great
agricultural revolution in humanity. It’s
all about technology. I’ll get to that,
next.
Humanity exclusively began agriculture on alluvial
plains from rivers. The why is the
natural replenishment of nutrients in the soil because of yearly flooding in
the alluvial plains, but this couldn’t continue for too long because of the
growth of human population and the growth of agriculture. The problem was in a starvation culture,
agriculture just made things worse, just mor predictably worse. Plus the lack of protein was not good for
young or old minds. What happened?
The great technological revolutions in warfare
happened. I haven’t mentioned it yet,
but already the haves (those who could command resources) were outstripping the
have nots (those who had to scrounge for resources) due to food availability. The health and intelligence of those who are
well fed especially with proteins and fats is significantly greater than those
who are doomed to little protein and lots of starches. Lots of starches fill the belly but not the brain
and muscle. Religion and the sacrificial
system did improve this problem, but not by much.
In any case, those who got protein and fat
ended up much more healthy, larger, and smarter than those who didn’t the great
human divide due to starvation cultures and nutrients began. Literally for the next six or so thousand years, the average human
was much smaller, weaker, and stupider than his aristocratic leader, and that’s
the point. Those who were better fed
became the aristocracy and leaders in the communities. It was all due to food and especially protein. So, yes, those peasants through time were
stupid, weak, and small. So was life for
a long time (until about the late 1700s in the USA).
What did this dichotomy in humanity cause—well
a lot of things. At first, the leaders were
like fathers and mothers to the vast array of humanity. They took over the hunt and the human
hunt. The hunt being for protein and
fats. The human hunt being for warfare. Societies tended to accumulate into two camps
or types of groups at the time. One was
the agrarian with fixed cities and communities and the second was nomads who
moved because of their herds and limited agriculture as well as the fact they
were pillage cultures. Many of the nonagrarian
cultures were pillage cultures. The made
a living by stealing from the agrarian cultures, and they did get more protein than
the average agrarian farmer. This means
they were larger, stronger, and smarter.
The aristocracy of the agrarians were the only group that could fight
them. How to fight fast nomads who lived
to pillage? To understand this, we need
to move to horses.
What about horses. There were to many to count. They tasted good, but at the time, they were
too small for a normal human to ride.
What’s that? Didn’t everyone from
the beginning ride horses—that’s what all the movies and most of the books say. All those books are pure fiction and the
movies are worse. The reality is that
humans couldn’t ride horses until around the 300 BC era and an armed and
armored man could not ride a horse until about 750 to 1000 AD. That’s with humans that were much smaller
than they are today. About 2000 BC, the
spoke wheeled chariot was invented and revolutionized warfare. It was especially useful in the alluvial
plains of the agrarian city states, but not good for use in rough or forested
terrain. The great transition from
chariots in warfare began around 500 BC.
The battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC led to the end of the chariot for
warfare.
This is what happened. Those who owned and used chariots in warfare
were the nobility and military leaders.
They had light chariots with two horses.
You could not control a single horse because horses are herd
animals. Until the invention of the
blinder, you always had to have two in a trace and side by side to be able to
control them. The chariots had two
fighters or actually one driver and a noble warrior who used a bow. These were perfect against the pillage cultures. Remember, no males can ride the horses yet
and carry something. The pillage
cultures used horse for goods transport when possible, but at the time, the horse
industry was controlled by the militaries and the leaders of the agrarian city
states—until the Battle of Kadesh.
Chariot warriors used their speed and range to keep away from the foot
soldiers and peasant troops or the nonchariot troops of the enemy. In the Battle of Kadesh, the enemy used their
overwhelming numbers to box in and trap the chariots. This led to the death of many nobles and the
capture of many chariots. Almost immediately,
these tactics became the basis for warfare.
That was the end of the chariot.
Horses still couldn’t carry armored or fully armed men, but the use of
chariots for fighting led to the death of many leaders and aristocrats—the
chariot became a thing of the past almost immediately. The Greeks and Romans specifically trained
their hoplites and their legions in tactics to defeat chariots. I can get into details later, but the most
important point is that chariots were done for and these agrarian city states had
thousands of animals they needed to get off the books. That’s next.
There’s more.
I want to write another book based on Rose
and Seoirse, and the topic will be the raising of Ceridwen—at least that’s my
plan. Before I get to that, I want to write another novel about
dependency as a theme. We shall see.
More
tomorrow.
For
more information, you can visit my author site http://www.ldalford.com/, and my individual novel
websites:
http://www.ancientlight.com/
http://www.aegyptnovel.com/
http://www.centurionnovel.com
http://www.thesecondmission.com/
http://www.theendofhonor.com/
http://www.thefoxshonor.com
http://www.aseasonofhonor.com
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