State of the Book #4: April 13, 2012

Hello, and happy Mother's Day! I hope most of you were able to see and/or talk to your mothers today (or at least kept them in your thoughts). I'm lucky enough to live with mine right now, so I get to see her every day! It's a lovely change from the last four years, when I lived overseas and saw her only on vacations.  She's a tough, smart, fantastic lady, and I love her to pieces. XOXO, Mum!

The book is continuing apace. I'm on the last edit of Chapter 3 now-- that's the read-aloud stage I find so vital for a coherent final project. This chapter started at about 10,000 words, but I had to cut a lot of them when I realized they weren't adding enough to the story. Now the chapter clocks in at about 8,000 words, which puts the entire manuscript around 29,000-- about half the expected total.

Meanwhile, I've been reading some fabulous books. Just today I finished The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, which was an impulse buy I'm quite happy I found. It's exactly what it sounds like-- a fairly comprehensive look at the day-to-day workings of life in medieval England. It's been quite helpful already-- I was using it as a reference for a story I was writing, before I decided I didn't know quite enough about the period to do it convincingly and changed it to a modern piece. With all the "medieval-type" fantasy stories I've read, I was surprised by how many little details about the period I didn't know. For example, did you know that carrots, in their modern form, weren't known in Europe until the 17th century? It's a small thing, but if your characters are eating in a tavern and you put carrots in the soup, you've just committed the sin of anachronism.

Of course, a lot of people think that the "medieval Europe" setting has been way overused in fantasy, and to a certain extent I agree with them. I'm really interested in finding historical fantasy settings inspired by other parts of the world. Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon and N. K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon are two I've got on my to-read list, and I'd love to hear about others if you can recommend them! However, I'm also sure that the faux-medieval-European setting isn't going anywhere for a long time, if every, and there are some fantastic stories written in those kinds of worlds. If that's where your heart lies-- or if you just happen to be interested in the period-- then The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England might be a really good resource for you.

*Edit: I just learned that there's another one! Will definitely have to get my hands on a copy of The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England, as well.

I was going to post about another book I'm reading right now, Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I've had a really hard time with it so far-- not because it's hard, but because it's intensely, mercilessly honest. I think it's going to be one of the ones that really stays with me. I think I'm going to have to wait till I finish to post about it, though, so that I can make sense of what I read before I try to talk about it. Until then, have a lovely week!