. . . and the noodle's noodling and oops! it's going to be another novel, I think

[ritaxis]

I'd been playing around with an idea about a drummer boy and now suddenly I have I think a full-fledged, entirely new novel in Fantasy Not-Poland Not-Early-Twentieth-Century, involving inheritance, sibling rivalry, a magical wild sow, a foresty marsh, and the aftermath of war. I wasn't even thinking about fantasy when I started. But while I was rationalizing making up a country instead of doing three years of research for what was going to be a novella for my own amusement I was taken with some remembered passages from Landscape and Memory, and the Lithuanian Cow became the Great Sow of the Marsh, and well, the rest is coming together.

The drummer boy is still central, of course. And the collision of semi-modern (trench) warfare and the style of warfare that pertains to black powder technology.

Once again, I am harmed by the absence of the nice fellow, whose thing was military history, and who always had to say something about the broader implications of military technology.

Stupid translating engine story of the day: Google can handle "stony" and it can handle "brook" but it can't handle "stony brook."

Comments

[frogs_of_war]

More and more interesting.

I did research a few months ago for a short piece of historical fiction. I thought I had everything I needed, but then I went and rechecked the dates (in this case the isolation of Japan and Cromwell's conquest of Ireland). Many things that we think of as one event are really many (the isolation policies were implemented over six years and the places I looked originally had only the ending date). To keep my Irishman at least in his mid twenties, I had to aged up my ninja from twenty-eight to thirty-three.

Not that five years is a lot of difference in a fit man, except in experience. But if I'd written guys from Not-Japan and Not-Ireland I could have left it the way it was.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Trench warfare was basically invented in the black powder age and "mining" - which was digging under fortifications to either set off an underground bomb (from which we get the modern term "land mine") or to burn a fire to undermine a fortification - is also quite old.

But in Renaissance and Enlightenment siege warfare, castles and cities had bigger, longer-range cannons than any army on the move, so invading armies had to do this elaborate trench warfare where they would dig trenches to approach fortifications. The fortified position would then send send out sorties against the trenches or dig tunnels to the trenches and send in guys with pistols and daggers.

More "modern" style of trench warfare was basically invented during the US Civil War, too. You can have black powder machineguns. ;) But trench warfare is as old as gunpowder, really.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Thabnk you. Both for correcting the term and knowing what I really wanted to say.