Worldbuilding means deciding on a type of style. In the case of an antique society, one must be restricted to what is possible and what is not. In the case of my Shadow series, a British Isles reverted back to the Dark Ages and not in touch with other countries will not have access to silk or cotton. Equally obviously the artificial textiles will not be available, either. What is left? Leather of sheep, cow, goat and pig. Wool and flax. So yes, a person can have linen and fine wool garments. Yes, they can have leather garments and shoes, but these must be made without industrial power, as in the old days. Curing leather is exceptionally unpleasant and involves the use of ammonia, (stale urine).
Linen? It is very, very labor intensive and people would have had a care to look after their clothes. Things would be darned and patched. Here is how to make linen out of flax the old way.
I know this isn’t in the free sample offered on Amazon, so it will be something new to all who haven’t read the book.
Raven forced the food down and took a long drink of water. A bowl for washing rested at the foot of her pallet, and she poured the remainder of the water in that vessel. Margie might have told the villagers her scrying water came from a sacred spring, but Raven knew she got it from the stream behind their shack. The bowl wasn’t black inside, yet the dark brown wood might be dark enough for the sight to show future.
The ripples calmed. Shadows swirled in the depths. One by one, pinpricks of light winked into existence and then the pale orb of a full moon. A great beast flew across the night sky, an impossible beast with wings and four legs. Moonlight shimmered off the gleaming muscles as it climbed, higher and higher. A firedrake? It dove like an arrow to lights on the ground. Torch-lit shacks and people running hither and thither, terrified.
The size of the beast killing those terrified people stunned her. No firedrake grew to more than an arm span. The beast banked, hovering, and opened its mouth. Fire spewed forth. Streams of fire caught people, lighting them into living torches. Screams and shrieks from the dying. The bowl slipped out of her hands.
Now she knew the look of the beast from close by and was afraid—this was a wyvern, worshiped by the First Born tribes. Raven ran to the window, wrenching the beaded strings aside. Outside, embedded in the ground, sharp stakes pointed toward her. A creature who could fly might escape, not a walker of the earth. No one could climb across those stakes without getting impaled by the sharp tips.
***
For those interested, here is the trailer teaser for the next book in this series, Serpent of the Shangrove.
Trailer
Everything can look good, flow well and be a good follow-on at face value but I knew there was something missing. I couldn’t put my finger on it and have been procrastinating, but now I know. I needed a secondary driver to ramp up the angst and the humor moments.
Now I am a happy camper. Now the storyline is in place properly and will work as I intended. Now I have to sit down and stuff in around 30k words in various places. Kicks self. I should have thought of this before. Just looking at the driver now I can see how crucial it is. Still, better now than later.
I guess I will have plenty of time to work on it today as I don’t intend to go anywhere. Someone gave me a late xmas present of a cold that I am trying to fight off. Double Grrrss.
Another Christmas done and another year almost over. I loved seeing family and the little grandsons. The smallest was just a few hours more than three days. How special is that?
Looking forward, I was semi-planning my craft projects and an unnatural thought came to me. I am going to have to buy online from here in out. This is not a choice I want to make, because I would much rather support the ma and pa stores, but they are no more in my neck of the woods. There used to be four craft stores in the next town up the road until WalMart moved in. They are all gone now and with that demise, Walmart has stopped stocking the goods those stores sold. The same can be said for our capital city, Edmonton. There was a chain of craft stores of various types and we also had a Craft Canada. Then WalMart and Michaels moved in and hey, what is left? Yep, you guessed it. What is more, either those things I purchased previously are no longer offered, are of vastly inferior quality, or are outrageously priced. If I spend the gas money to get to the city I have no guarantee I will get what I want, added to that, I have the hassle of a wasted journey. Even Fabricland has gone so far downmarket that it is just hanging to the lid of the toilet before sliding down the hole.
What are the results of buying online? I expect I will buy a whole lot less as it is so easy to make a mistake if not there in person. This is going to cut out any impulse buying. My sites will turn inward, to my stash, which I intend to whittle right down this year. I will forgo the joy of shopping, touching the craft/fabric/whatever. Those times have gone and will never return.
That said, I feel so sorry for the upcoming generations. Does the future hold nothing but xboxes that may or may not work on xmas day if some mean toad decides to hack? Or Frozen dolls/paraphernalia based so loosely on a traditional fairytale Disney have mutilated that I actually haven’t a clue which one it is supposed to resemble? I think back to all the craft and board games formerly available that were a precursor to lifelong hobbies or choice of career. I guess there has been a shift from a creative society into an entitled society and that is sad. If the power ever went down for good there is no hope for humanity now.
This is going way back to a long lost age. I guess people did the best they could with what they had and they were kind to each other. My mother’s widowed older sister moved in with her much older sister in law when the latter got beyond living by herself. My aunt and that aunt’s sons were the lady’s only living relations, her being a spinster as they used to say.
The two lived in a very old house that had been the property of the single lady’s parents. At one time it didn’t possess an inside bathroom. There was an ‘arrangement’ plumbed in to a small cubbyhole accessed on the outside of the house and next to the coal cupboard. It stands out in memory, not for use, (shudders), but because it had more than one accepting orifice on the single plank seat. We won’t go there…
While there was hot running water for the bath, in the new bathroom, courtesy of some cylindrical monster, fired by gas and optimistically attached to an internal wall directly above the bathtub, the taps in sink and kitchen ran only cold water. I think it was the pervading aroma of burning gas that sticks in my mind the most. Coal gas fired the monster in the bathroom, the stove in the kitchen and in every other room there was a gas powered fireplace. Heat at the turn of a lever and the strike of a match. There was a definite aroma caused by the heating. It wasn’t unpleasant, just different. I guess it stood out as my parents had central heating in their place that was fired by solid fuel.
Aside from that, there was always the aroma of cooking, as both ladies liked to cook, particularly the older single lady and especially at xmas. She really loved sausage rolls and mince pies, but eld is unfathomally cruel and her digestive system was no longer happy with ingesting her choices. My kin aunt used to get very annoyed with the single lady for eating what obviously upset her when the inevitable re-visitation occurred. What I remember and admire was the instant response. “At least I had the pleasure of eating it.” Yep, she did and at 80+ she got in the pleasure she could. Go her.
I am not really thinking of Christmas as being the highlight as Christmas, or what it has become has been thrust in my face since the Halloween candy got taken off the shelves. This is not what I remember from my young days. A gift was more about someone spending time making something special for people. It was more about families and of course, the church. Now, it is referred to as the festive season for fear of being politically incorrect. It is swamped with commercialism and drowned in greed fest.
That is not why this time of year is special to me. I used to look forward to the winter solstice as it meant the days would start drawing out again and I could look forward to planting in spring. It also became a time to say goodbye. My husband’s grandfather, who I loved dearly, passed over on the 21st. My own mother passed on the 23rd. Not all gloom and doom, though, as my middle daughter decided to make an early appearance, (by a month), on the 22nd one year. It was the best Christmas present I have ever had.
Up till now, that is.That daughter’s second child will be arriving very soon and there is another reason right there to celebrate the time of year. Birthdays form place-markers through the year. The strange thing is that the placemarker used to be a what could be described as a bucket, with a whole lot of birthdays clumped in the winter months and the singleton in June. Despite the shift in people, this is still the case. One dear little grandson is a June baby, just like his great grandfather was.
