Any Hints?

 So research for the new (new) WIP is ongoing. There's a lot of it to do, paradoxically because the Heian period of Japan isn't well understood. We only have a sketchy idea of those times, and almost none of life away from the Temples and nobles. That means I can give myself free rein on a lot of things - make it up, really. But it also means I really have to get the basic points right, because those are the hooks that the rest hang on. If the reader is going to understand where the story is set, he needs those hooks.

 So, I'm very busy not writing. (Doesn't help that we've been a House of Plague for a week. When the girls get sick, they really go to town, and soon everyone else is sick too.) But anyway, I've been working out a social structure, including ranks and offices, sifting through various versions of Buddhism to pick the schism that divides the two main sects, and learning about Japanese mythology. Boy, that last is complex. Their gods are sometimes referred to as the Ten Thousand, and they all apologise for being gods, apparently. I haven't figured out why yet, so any hints.... But that gives you an idea of how time-consuming this is. Research is always tedious. This time it's extreme, but still, it hasn't changed its nature.

 So that makes me wonder, again, how some people manage to write, edit and publish a novel every six weeks.

 I could not do it. Not with the nature of what I do. If I took a cocktail of drugs to keep me awake and functioning 24 hours a day, if I abandoned my family, gave up my job, shut myself in a shack to work and did nothing else, I would still struggle. It's only possible if I abandon research and do no background work at all. But that changes my work beyond what I will accept. Imagine if Tolkien had written LOTR but not bothered to devise an Elvish language and culture, or a pantheon of gods, or any of the history of Middle-Earth. Would the story be as strong? Of course it wouldn't. It would be more like something by David Gemmell, where history is covered in two sentences and then someone gets killed again.

 In a way I admire those prolific writers. But there has to be a trade-off, speed in favour of quality and depth. I think they've chosen to make money rather than to make something of quality. Or to try; god knows I'm no Tolkien or Guy Kay, but I do my best to make something meaningful. I want to write books that people will come back to five years later and read again, and maybe find something new inside.

 I don't write for money. I write for the thrill of it, for the ideas and discoveries, some of which are found in the black pits of research. I'll stick with it.

Pip pip.

Carried off by a Dragon

 Age is a funny thing y'know.

 When I hit 20 I didn't care much. I wasn't a teenager anymore, and so what? Same when I hit 30, and then 40. I didn't really understand the idea of a mid-life crisis. They're just numbers. If we counted in base 60 like the Sumerians then nobody would worry about these multiples of ten.

I reached 50 last month, and I've slowly realised I feel different this time. I mean, 50. Half a century. I don't even think I want another 50 years, slowly declining into senescence and confined to comfy chairs in a home somewhere. But that might lie ahead. There's a voice in my mind that's lost and alone, and a little afraid. Only a small voice, but it's there.

 I am already on the downward slope, over the crest of the hill and closer to the finish than the start.

 Wow. Just... blimey. I mean, I have two infant daughters, and after all this time I've got reasons to want to live. And yet at the same time I've come to understand that I'm probably at a point where my energy and stamina begin to fade. Doesn't seem fair, does it?

 Now, my twisty won't-stop-twittering brain has taken all this and wondered what it would have been like five hundred years ago, when 50 would have been a pretty grand age. The average might have been 30 or so. Does that mean people had mid-life crises in their twenties? Did men of twenty-four have a sudden urge to get a tattoo and buy a really fast racing mule? A man like that might have been married at 17, seen his wife die in childbirth and married again at 22, have three kids that lived and two that didn't. If anyone had the right to dream of freedom and a more exciting life, he did.

 It's interesting, but hard to see how it could be incorporated into a Fantasy story. Modern readers won't sympathise with a twenty-something with an identity crisis, they'll just think he's a self-indulgent cockwomble. You can't really write a true account of how life was for people back then, or in a similar world. Too much of it would be dealing with plague or smallpox scars, and working a twelve-hour day of backbreaking labour only for the crops to be eaten by greenfly. Or the cows carried off by a dragon, but that doesn't change much. An author needs to create the right mood, but not too right. An overdose of realism kills the mood.

 The genre is called Fantasy, after all.