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How To Drive Yourself Crazy, Part 352
Invent an elaborate calendrical system. Then, because too much isn't enough, invent another. Then, because you are clever like this, invest your calendrical systems with social significance in such a way that one of your narrators uses one and the other uses the other and ne'er the twain shall meet. Then--because, remember, you are sharp enough to cut yourself--write a novel in which the plot depends in certain places quite heavily on the intersection of the two calendars, meaning (a.) you drive yourself Straight. Up. The. Wall. trying to work out the timeline and (b.) once you've worked it out, you daren't so much as breathe on it, because if the timeline ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Then insert a couple years' worth of rewriting the previous two novels such that the fixed point from which you calculated the timeline of the third novel (i.e., the date of the end of the second novel) becomes radically unfixed and Heisenbergian.
Then you start work on the third novel again and realize that you no longer have any idea how much time has passed since the end of the second novel, because, although you know when the third novel starts, you no longer know when the second novel ends.
Confused yet? Good. So am I.
This is why I spent yesterday evening going through The Virtu and working out the dates when everything happens, in both calendars, discovering in the process that the two places in the text where I'd fudged dates in, I'd fudged wrongly. Not off by a lot--fifteen days in one place, five days in the other, although of course the two discrepancies are also discrepant (I know that's not a word, but dammit it's the thing I need) with each other--but, yes, I will be fixing it in the galleys, although I am the only person in the world who will ever know or care. This is what it is to be a perfectionist.
However, the tale ends happily: I now know that it's roughly twenty-one months from the day The Virtu ends to the day The Mirador begins.
And since I've just been thrashing around in the nets I made for myself, I figure I might go ahead and explain the calendrical systems of Mélusine.
There are two major calendrical systems in Mélusine: that of the wizards and that of the city. The wizards' system is the simplest: weeks, months, and years pretty much exactly like ours except for the names and the points of reckoning. They keep time the same way we do, counting from midnight to midnight. The days of the week are Anglicized French: Dimanche, Lundy, Mardy, Mercredy, Jeudy, Vendredy, Samedy. The months are Gallicized versions of the names of the ancient Greek months (meaning, inside the secondary world logic, that they get their calendar ultimately from the Troians), taken indiscriminately from the Delphic and Athenian calendars: Pell, Bucat, Bathus, Eré, Dai, Petrop, Amalie, Bous, Théoc, Endes, Heraclé, Illé. Pell is roughly equivalent to July.
They reckcon the year from the summer solstice (our June 21); every fourth year they take one day from the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen (about which more in a minute); they count years ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city--the trick being that the city in question isn't Mélusine, it's Cymellune of the Waters, a semi-mythical city that perished in a natural disaster probably a thousand years ago or more. So Mélusine begins on Lundy, Bous 9, 2279 A.U.C.
The wizards' calendar was brought into use by the Wizards' Coup of 2101, and is followed by the wizards, the court and nobility, and those (like Ginevra Thompson) with pretensions to gentility. The calendrical system it replaced was the old system of the kings of Marathat; it's still used in the Lower City and by the respectable working classes. This is how Mildmay reckons time.
Days are counted from sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise; noon is the seventh hour of the day, and midnight is the seventh hour of the night. The system of months and days is purloined from the Napoleonic calendar because (a.) I like the names of the months and (b.) it amused me greatly to make the historically unsuccessful revolutionary calendar the entrenched and ineradicable calendar of the ancien regime. So months (each thirty days long) are divided into three decads (ten days each), the days being named Première, Deuxième, Troisième, Quatrième, Cinquième, Sixième, Septième, Huitième, Neuvième, Dixième. The months are Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor; they reckokn the year from our September 22. The five days at the end of the year (between 30 Fructidor and 1 Vendémiaire) are the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen, the city's major religious festival. (And that's an ancient Egyptian trick.)
Years are called indictions (and this piece of the system I stole from the Byzantine Empire), and they're counted in septads, which is why Mildmay tends to count things in base 7: seven is a sacred number, and this calendar is as much religious as social. Each pontifex of Phi-Kethetin (the principal god of the city's pentatheon) reigns for a septad. Indictions are counted from the ascencion of Tal-Marathat (demi-god and first king of the city that would come to be called Mélusine), and counted in sevens. A Great Septad is forty-nine (i.e., seven sevens). So in Mildmay's calendar, Mélusine begins on Dixième, 10 Pluviôse 20.2.4, the fourth indiction of the reign of the Pontifex Berenger. (20.2.4 designates the fourth indiction of the second septad after the twentieth Great Septad since the Ascension of Tal-Marathat.)
There. More than any of y'all ever wanted to know.
Then insert a couple years' worth of rewriting the previous two novels such that the fixed point from which you calculated the timeline of the third novel (i.e., the date of the end of the second novel) becomes radically unfixed and Heisenbergian.
Then you start work on the third novel again and realize that you no longer have any idea how much time has passed since the end of the second novel, because, although you know when the third novel starts, you no longer know when the second novel ends.
Confused yet? Good. So am I.
This is why I spent yesterday evening going through The Virtu and working out the dates when everything happens, in both calendars, discovering in the process that the two places in the text where I'd fudged dates in, I'd fudged wrongly. Not off by a lot--fifteen days in one place, five days in the other, although of course the two discrepancies are also discrepant (I know that's not a word, but dammit it's the thing I need) with each other--but, yes, I will be fixing it in the galleys, although I am the only person in the world who will ever know or care. This is what it is to be a perfectionist.
However, the tale ends happily: I now know that it's roughly twenty-one months from the day The Virtu ends to the day The Mirador begins.
And since I've just been thrashing around in the nets I made for myself, I figure I might go ahead and explain the calendrical systems of Mélusine.
There are two major calendrical systems in Mélusine: that of the wizards and that of the city. The wizards' system is the simplest: weeks, months, and years pretty much exactly like ours except for the names and the points of reckoning. They keep time the same way we do, counting from midnight to midnight. The days of the week are Anglicized French: Dimanche, Lundy, Mardy, Mercredy, Jeudy, Vendredy, Samedy. The months are Gallicized versions of the names of the ancient Greek months (meaning, inside the secondary world logic, that they get their calendar ultimately from the Troians), taken indiscriminately from the Delphic and Athenian calendars: Pell, Bucat, Bathus, Eré, Dai, Petrop, Amalie, Bous, Théoc, Endes, Heraclé, Illé. Pell is roughly equivalent to July.
They reckcon the year from the summer solstice (our June 21); every fourth year they take one day from the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen (about which more in a minute); they count years ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city--the trick being that the city in question isn't Mélusine, it's Cymellune of the Waters, a semi-mythical city that perished in a natural disaster probably a thousand years ago or more. So Mélusine begins on Lundy, Bous 9, 2279 A.U.C.
The wizards' calendar was brought into use by the Wizards' Coup of 2101, and is followed by the wizards, the court and nobility, and those (like Ginevra Thompson) with pretensions to gentility. The calendrical system it replaced was the old system of the kings of Marathat; it's still used in the Lower City and by the respectable working classes. This is how Mildmay reckons time.
Days are counted from sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise; noon is the seventh hour of the day, and midnight is the seventh hour of the night. The system of months and days is purloined from the Napoleonic calendar because (a.) I like the names of the months and (b.) it amused me greatly to make the historically unsuccessful revolutionary calendar the entrenched and ineradicable calendar of the ancien regime. So months (each thirty days long) are divided into three decads (ten days each), the days being named Première, Deuxième, Troisième, Quatrième, Cinquième, Sixième, Septième, Huitième, Neuvième, Dixième. The months are Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor; they reckokn the year from our September 22. The five days at the end of the year (between 30 Fructidor and 1 Vendémiaire) are the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen, the city's major religious festival. (And that's an ancient Egyptian trick.)
Years are called indictions (and this piece of the system I stole from the Byzantine Empire), and they're counted in septads, which is why Mildmay tends to count things in base 7: seven is a sacred number, and this calendar is as much religious as social. Each pontifex of Phi-Kethetin (the principal god of the city's pentatheon) reigns for a septad. Indictions are counted from the ascencion of Tal-Marathat (demi-god and first king of the city that would come to be called Mélusine), and counted in sevens. A Great Septad is forty-nine (i.e., seven sevens). So in Mildmay's calendar, Mélusine begins on Dixième, 10 Pluviôse 20.2.4, the fourth indiction of the reign of the Pontifex Berenger. (20.2.4 designates the fourth indiction of the second septad after the twentieth Great Septad since the Ascension of Tal-Marathat.)
There. More than any of y'all ever wanted to know.