bookkeeping

[truepenny]

That short story: revised w. 200 new words and the eminently sane conclusion that it needs to sit for a week or two so that my passionate fondness for the good bits can quit obscuring my rational contemplation of the other bits
Proj2.2: 527 words
Total: approx. 727 words
Other work completed: searching through four different reference sources to make up a dog-Greek coinage that had the right feel. Succeeded.
Verdict: Enh.
And you're stopping because ... ? Need to decompress before dinner with Mirrorthaw and Chesulker. Also, tricky scene coming up which needs better concentration than I can offer. Another over-bright day, another headache.

No progress with Proj4, because I'm having a little trouble combining a goddess-worshipping religion with the Church of England, esp. as it appears in and informs Golden Age British mysteries. The things you back yourself into when you're not looking.

Comments

[up-beat.livejournal.com]

hello!
my friend stumbled across your lj and told me you wrote an entry about yde girl the bog body.. but i'm not abole to find it. i am currently doing a project on her for school but finding information on her is so difficult. i just had a question and i was wondering if i could have an answer or opinion from you.. what's your theory on yde girl's death? sacrifice, murder or crime punishment??
thanks ever so much.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I have no idea. I know nothing about her culture, and that makes it impossible even to guess. It's one of the umpteen Things to Research on my ever-growing list, but I have to deal with my actual professional research first. *sigh*

Good luck with your project!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The C of E as it appears in Golden Age mysteries, as a goddess religion?

What's difficult about that? :-)

What kind of goddess? Some would be easier than others -- Astarte, though now I come to think of it, gently bewildered curates organising the temple prostitutes has a certain something, though that certain something is close to outright farce.

The essential thing about the C of E, then and now, is that it is piety without deity, it is the killed vaccine form of religion. It provides the necessary rituals for human life, without being embarrassing, it is accompanied by a quiet feeling that real religious fervour would be embarrassing, and it therefore helps to have a living religion to contrast it to for people to wince faintly at. Doing that in a world with real gods wouldn't be easy. Indeed, I'm not sure it would be possible to have a religion that held that social line with active deity. Changing the supposed gods behind the facade, however, is easy.

In your copious spare time, you could re-read Nine Tailors<./cite> and look at the mentions of actual religion/deity as opposed to church ritual.

A useful book absolutely pervaded with the C of E attitude, and then confronted with a real miracle and being faintly embarrassed, is A. N. Wilson's The Healing Art.

Lord Dunsany's totally bizarre (and being reprinted!) The Blessings of Pan might also be useful. (Dunsany assumes that polytheism and technology are inherently incompatible, but other than that...)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This is slightly easier because I'm not at all sure that the gods in this world are real. Religious experiences are definitely possible--one of my protagonists is slated for an extremely unpleasant epiphany here in vol. 2--but the reality of the gods is deeply questionable.

I don't know what kind of goddess; I know she's there because I need her to stand in opposition to another goddess (Persephone/Kali/Hel). I think this is at least a slightly polytheistic religion--and, come to think of it, I can also look at the Romans for models, since their religion was as much about the social performance, and as little about personal feelings, as the C of E in the genre I'm interested in.

I like your idea of Astartian curates, although you're right that one couldn't do it with a straight face (at least, I couldn't). But I can keep the mental image to amuse myself with when things in vol 4 have gone sticky.

And thanks for the book recs! Sayers is definitely where a lot of this started (inevitable, really, considering how many times I've read those nine novels in the past five years), The Nine Tailors on the one hand and the very peculiar ending of Unnatural Death on the other.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'm having terribly wistful images of what Wilde could have done with Astartian curates and temple prostitutes. The concept would have allowed a synthesis of the directions he appeared to be going in Importance of Being Earnest and in Salome.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

And doesn't that go well with the incest reading of TIoBE!

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

The incest reading of TIoBE? Coo, what did I miss?