A circular history of money
I don't know what money is, but I'll give you this nice shiny piece of metal for that loaf of bread.
Stage 1
Au tour de ma tête, more or less.
OK, so, my friend Janet got me on this blog tour thing. Thing is, I'd like to say I'm not writing these days. Much. I've got a new and demanding job, and I'm dog tired all the time. I've also got a lot of things I ought to be doing — not least, this year is Scotland's chance of independence, a chance I've been waiting for and claiming to be working for for forty years. But I'm not out on the streets campaigning, because I'm too tired.
Or so I say.
And yet, I came back to my lodgings on Monday night, sat down, and wrote three thousand words. I got up this morning at sparrow fart, and wrote another five hundred before wolfing down some breakfast and running out to work.
At fifty thousand words
A week ago tonight I tweeted:
"New novel now up to 42k words in only two months — 670 words/day average — despite new job. Very surprised. Don't know where it comes from!"
Buy the ASA a helmet. They need one!
Oh, I am so tired of the cycle helmets issue. I wish it would just go away. Cycle helmets are designed to stop you getting concussion if you fall off your bike at low speeds. They aren't designed to help if you get hit by a car, and they won't. They're not even nearly strong enough, nor could they be made so.
Of course, most people don't know that. Most people think that wearing an inch of polystyrene will stop a ton of metal. They wouldn't believe it if they thought about it, butthey don't think about it.
Modelling the ships
Yes, really I have been working on the novel today, but the actual text is not much further forward. I'm now up to 20,500 words, which is progress but not fast. However, I've been doing a lot of background research on speeds of camel caravans, speeds of iron age sailing ships, and other details; and I've been working on my calendar, to make sure all the right characters can plausibly be where I need them to be at the right dates, given the transport they have available to them.
Interestingly, this exercise has brought back to mind (and validated) my previous essay, 'The spread of knowledge in a large game world'. Because of the speed of the ships (more below) my protagonist sails from the northern city where he's spent the early summer thirty five days after his home city has been conquered — but he does not know of it, because there's no plausible way for news to reach him. On his way he visits The City at Her Gates, and there he may plausibly pick up news of the conquest of his home — but it's equally possible that he won't, since although the news could have reached there if a convenient ship has happened to make the passage, it's possible that it hasn't.