Peeking into the rock

So The Drummer Boy is reaching draft status. I'm closing in on the last chapters. I took some time off to revise the earlier chapters and I've made notes for some further revisions, but I'm feeling ready to hear what other people have to say about it. It's long enough, and I'm close enough to the end, that I am pretty confident that by the time you're ready for the last chapters, they'll be written.

If you're interested, comment or message me, and I'll send you the link to the folder.

In other news, I've suspended taking simvastatin in a desperate measure to stop my legs hurting and this seems to have worked in a limited fashion, so an important task when I get back is to figure out how to get back on some other kind of statin regime (either reduced dose or a different type), because the statistics in favor of statin use are really quite conclusive. As to the limitation -- the really quite severe and puzzling muscle pains I was having since my arrival in Prague have just about disappeared -- but now I am having actual knee pain, as in obviously the arthritis. I can't catch a break. I have, however, at least according to Hana's bathroom scale, lost almost six kilos, which would please me more if it hadn't been in less than a month. I am not certain of this, naturally, as the scale weighs very heavy compared to the doctor's scale back home, in fact it just now says that I weigh a bit less than when I left. I do know I have lost some weight though as my clothes are hanging off me, which is disconcerting. anyway, the point is, or was back there before I got sidetracked about weight, that my leg pain is clearly multifactorial, and I've been identifying and dealing with one factor at a time. I identified fascitis and muscle spasm, and physical therapy dealt with that (I still do exercises and self-massage for that). I identified arthritis, and put that on hold as the muscle stuff seemed to keep the pain at bay and I lost any method of paying for surgery. Then the pain came back and I seem to have identified this other thing with the statin and also to have crossed some new threshold with the arthritis.

The one thing I know about the pain is that I need exercise and rest, more of one or the other depending on the day.

It is enormously hot here in Prague -- like record breaking some days. Combined with the arthritis acting up I am glad I did a lot of my sightseeing and research already because I can't do so much of it right now.

I don't need this right away but sometime in the next three months I would like to have a word with somebody who can help me make my fictional vaguely-Slavic personal and place names be not stupid. I am envisioning a place where there's a lot of small ethnic groups living close together, so I don't need everything to be extremely consistent. What I need is a feels-real chaos of linguistic miscegenation, and what I wanmt to avoid is stupid hodgepodge that fails to capture the feel of the way this stuff happens in the world. Since the way it happens in the world is capable of producing really dumb combinations and extremely awkward expressions, you can see how it would be easy to fall into a trap and make bad choices in this.

I'm definitely not trying to: replicate real-world languages, or invent a language for the book (for one thing I'd have to invent at least seven! And I'm not going to). What I am trying to do is to create a linguistic landscape that you could walk around in and feel that it is a richly observed world and not a felt-marker-drawn backdrop for a puppet play (not that such a thing couldn't be perfectly fine in its time and place, anyway).

Ideal, of course, would be someone who has a bit of familiarity with more than one from the real-world region. I don't mind too much whether it's Eastern, Western, or Southern SLavic, or Old Slavonic, and I would be tickled pink if the person also knew some other non-Slavic regional language or two or three, like Romanian or Hungarian or some weird dialect of German.

What I'd be asking the person to do is to read the draft when it's ready, or if that's too much, to read excerpts, and to mark where the names and so on seem rightish or wrongish and hopefully to meditate on why they seem that way and what might make them better.