How To Drive Yourself Crazy, Part 352

[truepenny]

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.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

geek.

*loffs*

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Also, tell Mildmay that I'm very amused that his swiping the revolutionary calendar means that his year starts on my birthday.

[libskrat]

I hate to say this, but I vaguely recall one moment in Mélusine where Mildmay said something that was irretrievably decimal-system-oriented, and it stuck out as just wrong to me. If I find it again -- I'll keep my mouth shut so you don't kill me.

But then, programming computers is part of what I do for a living, so I worry about crud like zero-based versus one-based counting systems... I seriously doubt anybody else noticed or cared.

[autumnstar1.livejournal.com]

I am *SO* glad you explained this. The only thing that drove me nutty about Melusine was the calendar. I’m really big on needing to know random details like that though…I think it comes with the writer’s mentality. I have to ‘see’ maps and calendars or I go nutty. Anyway, thank you for explaining it because I was just NOT getting it.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

So what you have learned from this post is: If you have time to stick a note on the calendars in the back of The Virtu, you will make the math geeks among your readers very happy.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, and that's how it should be. You shouldn't NEED to be able to figure out the crazy-ass time-keeping system. It was an entirely necessary part of the worldbuilding, but it's not a necessary part of the story--except insofar as they would be different people in a different world if they were all using the same calendar.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Damn.

Well, it figures I'd miss one--as opposed to the dozens (or septads) of glitches I did catch.

I shall think of the novel as a Persian carpet and claim the error was put in deliberately.

[libskrat]

Yep. Definitely appendix material. Or your legions of fans will up and do it, and you know they'll get everything wrong (cf. much Tolkienian linguistics).

[caprine.livejournal.com]

Holy crap! How delightfully abstruse!

Now I have a hideous mental image of somebody writing crossover fiction between your world and skzbrust's Dragaera, and adding in the base-seventeen calendar of the Dragaerans...ack!

[heathwitch.livejournal.com]

That. Is. Just. Plain. Wonderful. *hugs!*

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Forgive me for being morbidly fascinated by what would happen if the steam engine was suddenly invented and they had to deal with railway timetables. (grins evilly)

[jenett]

Ooh! My birthday too. It is amusing. (Much better time than January or July...)

I'm with the "I like knowing how it works, and I went batty for about 20 minutes (before going "y'know, story, go back to the story") at it when I noticed the competing calendars. I like knowing the logic behind them.

I think this was my favorite part

[thefrozennorth.livejournal.com]

"Then--because, remember, you are sharp enough to cut yourself-"

The curse of being incredibly smart and a perfectionist.

[flangirl.livejournal.com]

See, I was planning on reading your book soon, but now I think I must do it immediately. Because that's just too cool.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I never managed to figure it out either, and it drove me batty too because I couldn't even figure out if people were talking about days, weeks, months, years, or lots of years. It would be good to have an author's note in one of your forthcoming books.

[cleverthylacine]

I just purchased Melusine yesterday, and this would have driven me NUTS, so thank you for posting! Appendices are lovely things :D :D :D

[cleverthylacine]

IT is utterly cool and I am so glad she posted it because otherwise I'd be spending hours trying to figure it out!

(I would love to be able to do this sort of thing but I am JK Rowling level at maths skills.)

it didn't bother me at all

[(Anonymous)]

i'm with the [$pudding] reader. but now that i know, i'm delighted.

so you win twice. or i do. or something.

[larryhammer]

So it is a pentatheon. That was the part that was bugging me, trying to figure out.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Roughly speaking.

It is not a tidy theology.

[barbarakitten-t.livejournal.com]

thank you so much for explaining this...i am about halfway through mesuline (great book, btw) i actually just suspended my Need to Know(tm) and figured i would try to figure it out later...now i don't have to.

[davidlevine]

every fourth year they take one day from the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen

This raises a couple of questions for me:

1. If this is on Earth, or a similar planet with a 365.25-day year, you would add a day to the Trials one year in four.
2. We're talking about the wizards' calendar here. Do they also celebrate the Trials? At the same time as the City calendar? How does this interact with the regular months of the wizard calendar? I note that you didn't mention how many days are in each wizard month, but if they're the same as ours the insertion of the five or six days of Trials would occur at a slightly different time every year.

I suspect that this sentence was simply misplaced -- the mention of the Trials should have been in the section that discussed the City calendar, and this sentence should have been replaced with a discussion of how the wizards' calendar handles leap years. Picky, picky, picky...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, sorry. What I meant was: every four years, the court observes one day of the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen--the equivalent of February 29th--meaning that theree's a day in that year that has no date for them. And, no, the court does not celebrate the Trials--too, too plebeian, darling. They simply use it as the hop-skip to keep the calendar in line.

And, yes, presumably, the length of the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen gets recalculated every so often (Heth-Eskaladen is a librarian god, so that would be the prerogative of his priests), although that's a detail that's never come up, since my poor protagonists never have the chance to actually attend the celebration.

[davidlevine]

Hmm... looks to me as though the wizards' un-numbered Leap Year Day falls in mid-Bathus every fourth year.

They must do some interesting mental/cultural gyrations to justify setting this important day (important because it interferes with schedules and therefore $MONEY$) based on the declasse' City calendar.

Or maybe they just ignore the co-incidence, as our culture generally ignores the fact that the date of Easter is based on the Jewish lunar calendar.

[larryhammer]

Untidy, with the occasional syncretic alias no doubt. I was trying to count seven, because of the septagemal calendar, and not getting them to add up.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, given that the city stops dead for five days ...

And most of the bourgeoisie still lives by the old calendar, even if they're careful to write the date in the new one.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Five is also a sacred number.

And I would expect, actually, that it was originally a septatheon, but a couple of gods have been eroded away.

Kethe used to be a god. That's why Mildmay never refers to him as Saint Kethe.

Like I said, not a tidy theology.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

you are a woman after my own heart

[libskrat]

Librarian god!

*dances*

[aranel.livejournal.com]

I tried to follow the above but all my brain wanted to do was think, "Dorothy L. Sayers and bellringing!" over and over again. I think it meant to offer you a compliment.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

My paternal grandfather knew the year of his birth in the Gregorian calendar -- and the month and day in the Jewish calendar.

Rather than inventing a calendar, I think I would swipe one of the half-dozen or so peculiar to India.

Note: The freeware program Calendar Magic can handle Gregorian dates between 1582 and 9999 AD, and convert between a large number of other calendars. (Windows only.)

[larryhammer]

Eroded or merged? Well, Kethe's been eroded obviously.

I wish I understood the mechanism for how the active worship of a god can be eroded away, since it's an essential, arc-impinging part of the deep history in my fantasy in progress.

---L.

[heresluck]

Is this perhaps good matter for the website, for those fans who don't stumble across it here?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, in classical Rome, the worship of Isis (and later Christianity) gained the ascendant because it was predicated on a different kind of relationship with the deity. The Roman state religion was very formal, very public, whereas the worship of Isis was personal and profound. This is also one of the reasons (I think) mystery cults flourished, because they offered the kind of intense experience the state religion lacked.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah, maybe, although I'd need to write it up more formally.

More than I wanted to know? Well...

[ambartil.livejournal.com]

Nearly *AS MUCH* as I wanted to know, anyway. The only sorta significant question I still have is: how long is an "indiction"? The word SEEMED to be used as a length of time. (And I spotted the French Revolutionary Calendar month-names, BTW. Clever sneaky irony!)

I heartily agree with everyone who recommended a "Calendars Explained" Appendix in one of the forthcoming books.

Re: More than I wanted to know? Well...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

An indiction is a year. (As I said, I stole the idea from the Byzantine Empire, so I'm only partly to blame.)

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Explain the calendar, and people will just write in to explain where you made mistakes. :)

But it may be worth putting in a forenote explaining that "two septads and one" is a fifteen-year-old. Etc. That much you need to know to understand any of Mildmay's narration about his history. I worked it out in time (brag, brag); obviously not everybody did.