Writer's Daily Grind

Sickness, health, and writing

2010-09-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers:

I got out of the hospital after a long stay(way too long, IMO, but it was necessary. unfortunately), and am now, more or less comfortably back home. Basically, because I'd been, among other things, spending too much time at my beloved computer, writing, and doing other things, I ended up with a nasty sneaky lymphoma which fortunately only affected my right leg and right side, although there was fluid buildup in the lungs on the left side for a little while. Fortunately nothing went to the brain or heart! I consider myself lucky, and will keep it that way.

This has affected my writing schedule somewhat, in that I have to write in short bursts rather than long hauls, but that's to the good. It sort of forces me to get up and move around, which is what I should have been doing anyway to begin with, I also have pills and chemotherapy to deal with. The chemo is every 3 weeks, so I have time to recover and get stronger, and that's what I'm trying to do.

But the writing will keep coming, no matter what. It/s one of the most important things that keeps me going, and I'm going to finish and publish this masterpiece if it's the last thing I do(sometimes I feel like it is!)

In any case, the blogs may come slower; there doesn't seem to be much in Neandertals, I didn't see anything much in Medieval, either, nor on My Beloved Wolves. But I won't stop. Maybe I'll just blog the first chapter of my first book, for you folks to read, if you want, and you can see what you think.

I have a feeling these will be exciting and challenging days,
Anne G

NIce picture

2010-09-12T18:47:00.000-07:00

All:

This isn't exactly what I had in mind in the way of "Neandernews", but going through the John Hawks Blog, for what I did want, I came across this picture

It's a commemoration of the site in the Neander Valley where the first recorded or published Neandertal remains were found in 1856. There were earlier ones, in particular, a skull at Gibraltar which the finders couldn't figure out, but ths was the site. It's interesting to note that at least until other Neandertal specimens were found, the finders weren't quite able to figure the remains out, either. They kept coming up with the idea that it was some "degenerate" "modern" human, such as an Irish person(the Irish were held in disrepute at the time), or a "Mongolian cossack" who had crawled into the cave to die. A fellow named Schaffhausen began to grasp that these remains were really old, and, eventually, people began to figure out that these specimens weren't exactly "like us". From which a great many controversies have flowed, and are still flowing.

Oh well. Neandertals quickly became, in the minds of many, what I would now call a "despised group". At least modern "despised groups" are around to speak for themselves. Since Neandertals aren't, I hope I'm doing well by them.
Anne G

I'm back again, just to letcha all know

2010-09-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

Dear readers:

I'm finally back to blogging again. Trouble was, I've been in the hospital for almost a month but now I'm recovering at home. Finally. It kind of put q dent in my writing, too. Ugh. I mean, I just barely finished the chapter I was on, and had trouble figuring out how to finish it. But there's going to be lots to blog about now that I'm back. There's some lovely Neandernews, some decent medieval stuff and notices from some of my writer friends about books they're workng on, even some good news about wolves, both the ones on Ellesmere Island, and the Washington wolves, who seem to be surviving.

There's so much to blog about! I will be catching up over the next few days,
Anne G

Neandertals had comfy, organized homes.

2010-08-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

All:

I know, I know. I got this item off MSNBC, which may or may not be the most reliable of sources, but -- well, it's another piece of information, useful in part because it sows they liked to make themselves as comfortable and cozy as anybody else. In this, they seem to be more like "modern" humans than some people might suppose.
Anne G

Good news for the Rocky Mountain wolves!

2010-08-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

Apparently the the judge on this appeal to stop shooting wolves hasruled to ban it You can read it on this site
article for those not familiar with the case.
Anne G

Cloning Neanertals?

2010-07-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

All:

Thanks to the John Hawks Weblog I cam across a post on one of the Discover Magazine blogs, that argues yes, we should clone Neandertals

Now I'm not going to argue with this person's reasoning, but I remain queasy about this idea, nevertheless. For one thing, I'm not sure that there is any body that is qualified to do ethical oversight on such a project. And while I share the blogger's enthusiasm for such a project, in that I would like to see how a real Neandertal might behave in the "modern" world. OTOH, this selfsame blogger seems to assume that Neandertals were vastly different from ourselves(not), would be easily recognized(maybe or maybe not), and being vastly different in some fundamental manner, basically inferior(not). The problem is, that there really isn't much evidence for such differences, beyond the "anatomical'. Would we really recognize a Neandertal "on sight"? Again, maybe, maybe not.

There is also the little question of the cloned Neadertal's human status? Would they be accorded "human" status? Judging by the latest discoveries, both prehistoric-archaelogical and various genetic and paleoanthropological studies, they shuuld be., But would they be? This is where some sort of ethical oversight would have to come in. Furthermore, since we primates are social animals, it would be imperative to clone a number of them, so that they wouldn't be alone in the world.

I think that sooner or later, somebody, somewhere, is gong to try to clone a Neandertal in the not too distant future. If that is the case, whether I, personally, am emotionally queasy about this or not, we should start the process of forming this ethical oversight panel. Now.
Anne G

Oops, again

2010-07-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

Oops, I forgot again. It seems that the Lorsch Abbey, near Worms, is of an earlier date than the Anglo-Saxon leechdoms. This manuscript seems to come from the time of Charlemagne. And was probably influence by his drive to have a literate class of people with "knowledge" In any case, the Anglo Saxon leechdoms or leech books, may have been partially copied form that source, with other "stuff" inserted. But it was later

My bad,
Anne G

Maybe some medieval monks knew more about what works, fo treating certain ailments. . . . .

2010-07-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers:

I haven't written much about medieval-themed stuff lately. There hasn't been much I wanted to write about, especially since much of it was about subjects that didn't directly involve anything in my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals. OTOH, today, I think I have. There is a site that claims medieval monks knew what they wee talking about, at least regarding remedies for some ailments or conditions. Maybe they were at least partially right. The site gives some fairly specific examples, and the authors claim they work. All I know, is this kind of knowledge was gathered at least as early as Anglo-Saxon leechdoms, writings of people who treated various ailments. Whether there leechdoms weree anything accurate, I can't say. But these medieval cures are later.

Make of this what you will,
Anne G

Another lupiine "goodie" but from yesterday

2010-07-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

All:

Now that I'm in sort of wolfish mode for the moment(back to books, writing, Neandertals and medieval anon), I have to pass this on. It seems the late Brutus the Wolf left progeny, if this post from Wolves of the High Arctic is correct is accurate. Might solve the mystery of the "new female wolf" and her nursing, especially if Brutus bred with both wolves(sometimes this happens).I am awaiting further developments.
Anne G

A wolf pack with two mothers?

2010-07-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

All:

Now that the team is back up there, studying Ellesmere Island's wolves, the pack they're studying seems to have two nursing females. Which is rare in wolf packs, but has been known to happen, especially if the pack is large(and maybe about to split), but not unheard of. There is a "new" female who nurses at least some of the pups(they diddn't say how many there were). Then there's a "resident" female who apparently is the "alpha". Did she have some pups too, so they always have a milk bar when Mrs. Alphawolf is away? The team didn't say anything more, so all is mysterious at the moment. I look forward to hearing more. You can find it at this site. It also has some pretty neat pictures, one of which is of a wolf followng an ATV or the like. The wolf seems to be checkiing them out.

Current read

2010-07-09T16:06:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers:

Before I get back to my take on various kinds of thrillers(it will be titled "intelligent and Unintelligent Thrillers, Part II or something similar, I would like to say a few words about the book I'm currently reading. It's by Kamran Pasha, and it's called Shadow of the Sword

It's the story of the Third Crusqade, seen from various "religious" points of view. Kamran Pashi, the author, is a Muslim, which, at least in writing fiction about the Crusades, is, to me, almost unheard of.Since this book features Saladin -- a hero to many Muslims, and Richard I("Lionheart"), a hero to many in the West, it may feel controversial to some readers, at least as far as I can tell. Richard I doesn't seem to come off very well, and Saladin comes off a lot better. Whether or not Mt. Pasha has done his research, it's harder for me to tell. I know something about the Crusades ear, and the effect it has had on all of us through the ages. He even compares the actions of the Crusaders at various points, to 9/11 and the various al-Qaidas and Talibans floating around the Muslim world today, and the damage they have done. In short, he doesn't think these sorts of actions are very good Christianity or Islam, or much of anything else. He also thinks the thre "Abrahamic" religions(Judaism, Christiahity, and Islam), have more in common, re their basic values of making the world a better4, not a worse place, and those who use vioulence in the name of "religious" faith, are violating their own faith, whatever it may be.

I'd like to say more, and I will, eventually, when I finished the book. At the moment, I don't feel I can do that. But I can say this: to me, so far, it looks very promising.
Anne G

Intelligent and unintelligent thrillers, Part I

2010-06-30T22:57:00.000-07:00

All:

I've been a bit slow this month, for a variety of reasons. But today, I'm introducing a series in several parts, which will include reviews of what I call "intelligent", v. "unintelligent" thrillers. But first, I have to define what I mean by both types.

First of all, the "thriller" genre is almost always, though I believe there are a few exceptions, written by and for men. Which doesn't mean women don't read them, often with great pleasure, as happened to be the case with the last two thrillers I read. One was "intelligent", and the other was "unintelligent". I'll get more into this below.

Generally, these thrillers involve a lot of mayhem and chases, over vast portions of the globe, to uncover some apparently accidentally discovered secrets. They often string together several apparently unrelated pieces of information strung together so that at the end, it is more or less "satisfyingly" resolved in some way. The "thriller" genre covers a wide range: everything from the works of Dan Brown, to the works of John LeCarre, and everything in between. The LeCarre books are definitely "intelligent", but Dan Brown is considered, for a lot of reasons, equally definitely "unintelligent"

To get further into the definitions of "unintelligent" v."intelligent" thrillers, we need to look a little farther into it. "Unintelligent" thrillers, while often a lot of fun to read, try to stretch suspension of disbelief to incredibly thin lengths, though the writers of these things are often very good at what they do. Which tends to make them fun to read, but essentially, not very plausible. If you read some thrillers that have supposedly "historical" roots(usually centering around some ancient "prophetic" scroll or something like that, and often involving the Vatican(or some other religious body that believes the ancient texts will overturn everything they understand about their religious faith, and there's always someone from \whatever religious body it is, trying to prevent the hero(they are always men) from getting to the "secret". If you know anything about the real circumstances, then the premises often become , well, pretty implsudinlr, yo dsy yhr lrsdy. Duvh yhtillrtd trly hrsbily on loyd og yhr z'lsyrdyz'. often military type technology, to lend some plausibility to the way they go about their thrilling adventures. Then, too, these heroes often have a military background of some sort.

"Intelligent" thrillers, by contrast, don't rely so heavily on gadgetry, especially "military-type" gadgetry to make their stories seem plausible. They rely less on "gimmicks", too, so the disparate elements eventually to be much more plausible. Also, the heroes are often not military types; they tend to have families, or end up with one, which makes for much sweeter endings, and that overused word "closure". This closure, as in a ll genre fiction, has to be reasonably plausible, but it can't seem forced, which it may in "unintelligent" thrillers. They also tend to be somewhat better written than the "unintelligent" ones, and often, but again not always, the writers of the "unintelligent" ones are British.Some readers of thrillers, however, shy away from these action-oriented, but plausible thrillers, for the "whiz-bangy" "unintelligent" ones. The readers may know they are completely preposterous(and I've talked to some who apparently do), but what they're really after is the action, often just want that. But then, these "unintelligent" thrillers are pretty much archetypal 'guy books" anyway. Be this as it may, we now have a working definition of an "intelligent" v. an "unintelligent" thriller, and I will be expanding on this in the next parts.

There is more to come,
Anne G

I wonder why?

2010-06-30T18:20:00.000-07:00

The blog Wolves of the High Arctic, which is researching the wolves of Ellesmere Island, has announced that the local Inuit people have denied the researchers a chance to radio-collar the local wolves. Which kind of puts a crimp in their activities. The question is, I wonder why this is happening. I think I will try to find out, to the best of my ability. Meanwhile, I'd like to hear more about our local Washington wolves. . . .
Anne G

The "language" debate -- again

2010-06-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

Another bomb in the "language and authenticity war" has blown up in the blogosphere that caters to readers and writers of historical novels. Since I have one foot in that camp(and try to keep the "history" part at least reasonably accurate, and another foot in the "romantic science fiction" camp, I tend to follow such debates rather closely. And they do go on and on, seemingly forever But this one

One school of thought, and, contra the author of this particular blog, may be a minority, but it's certainly not slient. The followers of this school of though tend to be very vocal in insisting on usuing lots of "period" language, up to, and including, "old" place names, and deliberately "olde-tymey" langauage. Such usage isn't always appropriate; I recently tried to read a book set in Anglo-Saxon times which used this "olde-tymey" language, and it came out sounding like really bad imitation Shakespeare(and it wasn't meant to be funny, as the use of such language often is), but this author was dead serious.

In the case of the above author on the above blog, the person actually makes a case for this kind of writing. They admit, however, that one has to be careful about such language; there are words like "jet" and "go-cart", used for travel, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but 300-400 years later, they have quite a different meaning, and that is to be expected. Yet some readers reading the work where this kind of language is is used, claimed the usage was "too modern", even though the usage was authentic! Which is just one hazard in using "olde-tymey" words that are familiar to a modern reader.

But it's worse than that The author of this blog sets up a distinction betwee "writerly" and "readerly" books.. The former are somehow to be savoredfor their word usage and word play. The latter are "popular" -- the kind you would find in a drugstore or at an airport, which automatically implies, to the author, at least are forgettable things you usually just throw away. Many such books, whether historical novels, mysteries, thrillers, or something else, are basically "forgettable" in the way he describe. But not all. Because of this distinction, which is basically derived from earlier critics' dismissal of "genre" fiction, as opposed to a certan type of "literary fiction". The latter,is, in the minds of these sorts of critics, automatically "superior", the "only" kind of fiction anyone with a brain should read. In some circles, if you even admit that you like science fiction, or romances, or enjoy reading thrillers, no matter how silly the premise of any given thrilly, as opposed to, say, Jane Austen(no, I don't generally read literary fiction or Jane Austen; I just don't like either genre all that much, though some people are shocked, shocked when I tell them this) This author thinks "erudite" readers will "prefer" this kind of language-play and weird, or "olde-tymey" usages, place manes, etc. The blog entry also implies that readers and writers who "prefer" this kind of literature are somehow superior to those who want a good story. Whhich, IMO, is an incredibly snobbish way of looking at reading habits. My feeling is this: If you want "serious" stuff, get out a book on the history of any given period, read up as much as you can, while dipping into books written in your favorite time period or place. I also realize that what some historical fiction authors, in their heart of harts, really want to write a lightly fictionalized history text. And some readers like this, too, including, apparently, the author of the blog entry. There is nothing, per se, wrong with this, if you really do like this approach to historical fiction or any other genre. But it's not a matter of superior reading or writing habits v. inferior ones.It's a matter of individual taste. And it's not a matter of "good" or "bad", either/ there are, in general, no "good" or "bad" tastes in reading, or writing, just individual ones.

Which brings me to the blogger, and his "relationship" to Anya Seton's Katherine. For the blogger, Katherine basically falls into the "popular but forgettable" category. And the author goes after Katherine for what I think is one of the flimsiest of offenses, namely, what he considers to be "howlers", e.g., "mollycoddle", "chunky", and "scrawny", among other things. I don't know for sure about "chunky" and "scrawny" being used as words in the 15th century, but there are some who say they can make a claim for "mollycoddle". But, as the author of the bolg points out, most readers probably won't "notice" this. He does, because he says he cares; for him, the use of words like "mollycoddle" in the 14th century are just plain dealbraeakers. Fine, if that's what ye wants. But to argue against an author, and a book, which has been highly influential, often to readers and writers of historical fiction, in the nearly fifty years since it was first published, shows the blogger doesn't really really know, or care much about what many readers and writers like to read and write. Or if he does, he simply dismisses it. This is unfortunate. But perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Anya Seton was a woman, writing historical fiction at a time when most historical fiction writers were men, and those men may well have been jealous of her popularity upon writing Katherine.

I should also add that Katherine had a tremendous influence on me, personally. I first read it in my fifteenth summer, and I thought it was wonderful! I have reread it several times since then, and loved it, until the very last time, when it seemed a bit, um, "19050's-ish" to me. But in many ways, it was not only and enjoyable read, but in some ways, a highly influential one. Without having read Katherine the idea that I wanted to write a novel set in medieval England would probably never have occurred to me at all. Since I was also quit3e the science fiction reader at the time(and still am, to some extent), I never would have dreamed up the category "romantic science fiction" to characterize the "science" part of this historical fiction. Furthermore, I think I began learning a lot. I'd never heard of Katherine Swynford before, and ti made me want to learn a lot more about that, and the subsequent period that led to the Wars of the Roseses. I realize few readers would go this far, let alone end up doing some fairly serious historical research for the novel I"m writing now, but I"m hardly the only one so influenced. Katherine is hardly a "forgettable" book; it has sold steadily and appreciated by many since the day it was published. And I truly do not think one needs to be a snob about admitting this, whether reader or writer.

The bottom line here is, I really, really detest snobbish attitudes about anything at all. And when it comes to writers and writing, I practically hit the ceiling when I see evidence of this in writers or readers. Sorry, but I do. Such people may have cultivated "good taste", but they don't seem to realize that it is their tastes they are promoting. Which, in and of itself, is also not bad. If one, for instance likes books and movies with "weepy" endings, that's fine. I've seen at least one person who has explained why they do. And that is also fine. But they didn't attempt to impose their tastes on anybody else, nor did they consider themselves in any way "superior", though I still prefer "happy ever after", and that's the way I write mine.It is the assignation of certain kinds of literature that the truly "erudite" "should" enjoy, if they are truly "erudite", with its built-in attitudes, still sometimes filtered through departments of English in various colleges and universities, that does. I should add that though people who have gone through English majors, are exposed to a lot of "good stuff" , and this is sometimes visible in their writing efforts, most of these "English major survivors" are not snobs about their experiences, though their tastes in reading may be different from mine. In any case, it saddens me to see yet another opinion piece or blog space, still, in this day and age, expressing such opinions. But even then, I respect them, though I disagree.
Anne G

Dissing Neandertals still goes on, despite new discoveries

2010-06-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

Gentle Readers:

I came acorss this post Via a review in Salon, of Brian Fagan's book Cro-Magnon. I must say that Dr. Fagan is a well-respected archaeologist and a good writer who has written many books very good books on various aspects of archaeology. I should also mention that I meant to blog this post several days ago, but have not, for various reasons(partly to do with the now-seasonable weather after a very crappy month of May. In any case, the reviewer seems to think the book is already out of date. And I tend to agree with him.

First, the term "Cro-Magnon". It is popularly used as a standin for early "modern" humans living in Eurasia, who are scientifically named Homo(sapiens)sapiens. But scientists prefer "early moern human" or "Early modern European" to "Cro-Magnon", simply because the latter term is much more inclusive. Furthermore there are no apparent "modern" human fossils found coterminous with the later Neandertals(Homo(sapiens)neanderthalensis. Though the Chauvet Cave painings are generally considered to be the work of "modern" humans, there have been no fossils found, that would prove this, one way or another, at least not in most parts of the world where Neandertals and "moderns" apparently coexisted. There are still big arguments about this, with some workers even thinking Chauvet Cave was decorated by Neandertas, but this can't be proven either. Be that as it may, it appears that Dr. Fagan feels that Neandertals were, somehow, just not smart enough to compete(whatever that might mean in the context) with "modern" humans. Why? Because, in his view, "modern" humans had cave art and Neandertals didn't.Wow! He also thinks they were totally separate"species" that died out, perhaps because "modern" humans "preyed" on them. The only trouble with that idea(aside from the fact that Fagan has had this notion for a rather long time, though in other works, he did't dwell on it), is that at the Max Planck Institute, in Leipzig, Gerrmany, Svante Pääbo and his team have been extracting Neandertal genomes for years.

They started first with mitochondrial DNA, which in Neandertals, appeared to be quite different from "modern" humen mtDNA. This led Pääbp amd his team to conclued, in 1997, that, yeah, Neandertals were definitely quite different from outselves. But wait! The moment Pääbo and his team announced this, studies came out from other geneticists suggesting that it wasn't quite that simple. Among other things, modern chimpanzee subspecies, have greater differences in their mtDNA than did Neandertals.

Then there were the archaeological studies over the years between 1997 and 2010, that suggested very strongly that Neandertal behavior seems to have been very similar to ours in a number of areas, given that they mostly occupied different areas, and had different materials and potential food available to them. In a place calld Salzgitter-Lebenstedt, some 60,000 years ago, they were catching reindeer/caribou in a similar fashion(but without guns and snowmobiles or other transportation devices), in very much the same basic way that certain Alaska natives do in Central Alaska: they essentially herded them, or "met" them as they were crossing a stream(just as modern caribou do in Alaska) in order to get to forests to live through the winter(and breed). Fall is mating season among Rangifer tarandus, and it is also the time they migrate from open tundra to forests with deep, protected snow to keep wolves and other predators away. They are also at their best at that season, and provide a lot of food. Neandertals must surely have noticed their migratory habits and took advantage of this to plan their hunts, just like tradtional "modern" humans do.

Then there's a cave in Jordan called Tor Faraj, where Neandertals lived, patterned their living space in that humble cave, built fires near their sleeping areas to keep them warm at night, and so onIthey seem to have done that in various caves in Spain, too). Also, some 60,000 years ago or so, they were using birch pitch to make glue so they could better haft their tools(including "thrusting" spears which they mostly apparently used. Other workers discovered that, later on, Neandertals were associated with the so-called "Chatelperronian" style of tool making(and symbolic objects like necklaces or pendants. Some of these imply that Neandertals understood symbolism just as well as "modern" humans did. This strikes me as being very sophisticated indeed. And the archaeologist Francisco d'Errico claims that they came up with this "Chatelperronian" style independent of any "modern" humams. Others pooh-poohed him, claiming that the Neandertals "only imitated" what they saw on "moderns". This is one of the stupider conclusions I've seen, because aside from imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, it takes anunderstanding of symbols and like characteristics, to be able to imitate anything. But then, people used to think that the native people of Australia were stupid, too, yet they knew to used some materials from the invading Europeans, for their own use on weapons, which strikes me, at least, as extremely smart.

Finally, in 2010, João Zilhão, found a stash of shells of some deep sea mussel in a cave in Spain. It was a Neandertal cave, and the shells had been decorated with a mixture of red hematite, ochre, and some slightly sparkly substance. The shells, in other words, were painted a kind of peachy orange, and strung through natural holes, for some probable symbolic purpose. Remnants of some shells seem to have been used as mixing cups for this purpose. Some West African people used to do things like this. Maybe they still do.

But that wasn't all. By 2010, Svante Pääbo and his team started in on sequencing the nuclear Neandertal genome. It is not yet compliete, but the results were a complete surprise: People who ended up in regions other than sub-Saharan Africa have some 1-4% "Neandertal" genes! Sub-Saharan Africans don't, but that hasn't stopped them from contributing to the gene pools of the rest of the world, one way or another, including, of course, the fact that they seem to have given us the modern "morph", which is the glue that holds all the world's populations together, IMO. We can no longer deny our kinship with Neandertals, a misunderstood prehistoric group, if there every was one. In fact, they are what I like to call a "despised group"; nobody in their right mind, supposedly, would claim kinship with them. One paleoanthropologist(whose psssible identity I won't reveal here, in order to protect the guilty), thinks Neandertals were so ugly and stupid he actually said he was glad he was different from them! But even "despised groups" are now asking for their human rights, and if Neandertals were still around, I am sure they would be, too. Unfortunately, they are a prehistoric despised group, which is not around any more, at least not as a distinct type, so they can't. That is one of the reasons, aside from the fact that they are strong presences in my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, I write about them a lot. My aim is to make them respectable.

Having said all of this, it is quite apparent that Brian Fagan has no interest whatever and checking to see if his theories are correct. He doesn't appear to care if Neandertals are respectable or not. But many people do.The views presented in Cro-Magnon now seem wildly out of date, according to the reviewer, and I tend to agree with him. Whether or not Neandertals are Homo sapiens neanderthalensis or just Homo neanderthalensis, it is increasingly obvious that they seem to have thought like us, made the same kinds of decisions(given the respective contexts) as us, and generally behaved in ways quite similar to ourselves, mich as wolves and coyotes have similar habits(coyotes even form packs, where undisturbed) --and they have been known to mate! Three-qaurters of all "wolves" around the Great Lakes area have "coyote" gene sequences, and there are "coyotes" in New England and southeastern Canada, that have "wolf" genes. What does that make them? I don't know, but I have come to the conclusion that the genus Homo, starting at least with Homo erectus, were all capable of interbreeding, as this very same reviewer seems to be suggesting.

So Brian Fagan might want to consider two possible courses of action(or maybe both of them at the same time). First, he might want to try to open his mind a bit and get over his(and a lot of other people's) fixation on the (mostly anatomical IMO differences between Neandertals and ourselves, and he might also want to consider not involving himself in a subfield about which he very obviously knows almost nothing, except "recieved wisdom" that will, most likely, turn out to be quite mistaken.
Annne G

I have an idea!

2010-06-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

Over at another site I inhabit from time to time, there was a discussion going on about mysteries, likeable characters in books, and more specifically, a subgenre of mysteries known as "cozies". These are mysteries that are more like the ones Agatha Christie used to solve, and which were popular with people of my mother's generation, and some women of mine. My sister also likes these kinds of mysteries, but I'm the oddball. When I was growing up, "cozy" type mysteries were about the only kind you could get, unless you wanted really "noirish" stuff. I never read a lot of mysteries at that time, mainly because they never seemed to go much of anywhere, and I couldn't really engage with the characters. I guess I thought most of them were just to "nicey-nice", except for the ones who turned out to be whodunnit.They were the only ones with flaws or personal problems to solve.

But I'm not here to "denounce" cozies. They are obviously a popular subgenre, and there are a lot of them around. What interested me was, that one of the people who chimed in on this discussion, hated, absolutely hated, mysteries solved by "telepathic cats" or other companion animals. I understand this person's feelings. Besides wolves, cats are my other most favorite animal, so I've tried to read a few of these, and, quite frankly, they are very, very boring!

But this gave me a (sort of) idea. What if there was some way to write a mystery where wolves solved it in some way. Of course there would have to be humans involved too, and it would have to be in some place where there enough wolves to make this a possibility. Maybe Yellowstone? Isle Royale has been done by at least one person. Then how would you get the wolves to go about solving the ,mystery? I have a kind of half-baked idea right now(talk about writer's creativity) Maybe I could get my Dauarga(Neandertals) involved? It's an interesting idea, and to many people it would sound absolutely crazy. Or maybe, to make it slightly easier, I could substitute coyotes for wolves(they pretty much the same habits and reproductive cycle as wolves, and they are very, very common around here, even residing in city parks. I don't know. What do you, gentle readers, think of this? It wouldn't be a cozy, because I don't think I could write thoseII;ve read a few cozies that I've actually liked), so anyone who reads this and likes "cozies" please don't be offended; it's just that my tastes just differ somewhat from yours. In any case, I'm going to tu4rn this around in my brain for a while and see what comes of it. The project might be interesting!

Oh, and any suggestions or opinions, pro or con, will be cheerfully accepted.
Anne G

Neandertals arrived early in the Briitish Isles?

2010-06-01T22:48:00.000-07:00

Wel;l, at least judging by a snippet , accompanied by pictures, from the Beeb, they did. Some archaeologists found some flint tools and dated them to around 110 kyr ago. Which is a lot older than 60 kyr, by nearly half. According to this same article, since there was no English Channel, since the glaciers essentially sucked up so much moisture that what is now the English Channel and part of the North Sea, were essentially something like Beringia. In other words, if you had to hunmt reindeer/caribou, horses, mammoths, elk/red deer, etc. you could follow herds of them wherever they went. And that is what some Neandertals apparently did, at least according ot the article. I have a feeling this is going to be another possibly contentious issue, as even as the announcement was made, some people pronounced themselves skeptical. We'll see, but I have a feeling it will make some awfully interesting reading as the articles go back and forth.
Anne G

This is the first of June, so I'm back, finally!

2010-06-01T22:35:00.000-07:00

Well, I should say I've never been away. But I've not been feeling well lately, though thankfully slowly getting over whatever this curd is this time. It kind of snuck up on me, and I thought it was my annual round of pollen allergies. But I usually stop coughing or sneezing when I'm in an "allergy free zone". I couldn't this time around. A family member, not living with me, though, came down with a much nastier version, and I knew I had what she had.

But the other problem was, my computer went out of commissio, earlier in the month -- agian. It turned out that the hard drive the computer people put in last February, was a bummer. So I didn't have to pay for anything but the costs of the labor this time. Fortunately. So that
kept me out of commission for another little while. Ugh.

Besides, there wasn't too much going on that I wanted to blog about. Well, yes there was, but once I got this crud, I just didn't feel like blogging about it, at least not in May.Which is why I haven't blogged much in the past month. Never fear, though. I think there are going to be a fair number of things I'll be blogging about this month, and in coming months. I don't yet know what they'll be, other than they will be somehow connected with my writing. I'll keep y'all posted.

And you should all bear in mind, that computers are a bit like cats -- they do exactly what they want to do, regardless of the owners wishes. And unlike cats, computers are not warm and furry.
Anne G

Writing male, writing female

2010-05-21T19:50:00.000-07:00

Since I started this blog, I've had some quite interesting conversations with a number of writers, about various aspects of writing. And I've discovered a number of interesting things. One is, that some writers will write only male or only female main characters. Here, I'm not talking about writers who write romances(largely by females and for female readers) or what I call "guy books"(almost exclusively male writers and a male audience). These are pretty much extremes. They're popular, but I don't necessarily think representative of any gnere.

What I'm talking about here has more to do with the way some writers think about conceiving stories and characters. I've mostly talked to writers of historical fiction, but the kind of preferences I'm talking about here exist in other genres, as well. I should mention that I think there is something of a natural bias toward writing about people of ones own biological sex. When I first started writing, I generally conceived my principal characters as female. I thought I "understood" them better. Somnetimes this bias works, if it happens to fit the story. For example, I have a book that I'll be working on whenever it is that I finish with my Invaders trilogy. It's not medieval, but it does describe the life of a fifteen year old girl in her own words. Hint: in a continuing effort to make Neandertals respectable, and kind of connect it with what I'm now writng, she's a Neandertal too, but only a few peopel know this, and to most of the world, they're just basically middle-class folk. It's kind of an adventure story set in the near future in a former Wester Washingto timber town(fictional, of course). In any case, I go into detail describing this, because having a female lead here fits the kind of story I tell.

In The Invaders, the situation is a bit different. Illg is the lead female character(she's the one that looks sort of like the Neanderlady that sits near the title of my blog). But two of the main characters, both rivals for her affections in various ways, and the story is partly driven by Illg's inability for a long time, at least, to make a choice between the two. This inability has consequences that ensue. So I had to flesh out the male characters in some ways. I needed to have them think at least somewhat like men, and think about their world and women more or less in the context of their time. I don't know if I have succeeded or not, but in order to draw characters, I had to open my mind to the way men often think. This wasn't as easy as it may sound, but I did it, and found it an interesting perspective top say the least. I also have a prequel in the worls, which centers around one of the secondary characters -- Mat Fartraveled. Needless to say, he's a Neandertal character too. Again, I have gone into some detail about this, because I've learned something, at least about myself. As a writer, it's a good idea, in my opinion -- whatever one's natural instincts -- to keep one's mind open and flexible.

However, not all writers agree. I find this particularly troubling when (some) women writers seem to continually write male characters, and, at least ion historical novels, find them more "interesting". Now I understand how some historical novelists might feel this way, because until quite recently, there were a lot of things women supposedly weren't "allowed" to do. Except that they often did them. In the Middle Ages, a lot of women ran businesses, particularly after their husbands died, and nobody thought this odd at all. They were sometimes very good at this, are records all over the place, particularly in England, about some of these women. Of course, women had to work their way around a lot of restrictions, but that, to me, could be one way a writer of historical fiction could make their female characters as "interesting" as those men.

But I am equally disturbed, in a way, with women writers who will "only" write female characters, whether real, historical people or not. In this case, it feels to me equally restrictive to "only" write about one sex/gender, on the basis that they "understand" their own sex/gender "better". I am disturbed by this personally, because it suggests a sort of rigidity which, to me, at least, is unbecoming to a writer. Writers work with imaginative twists and ideas, and that in itself should suggest more openness about "what it might be like" to be a man(or a woman(if you're a male writer) Even if you end up "getting it wrong", you have, at least, tried. And yes, I've "met" both kinds of writers.

It's true some male writers(and again, I'm not talking about the writers of the average "guy book"), can't seem to "write" women at all. The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein comes to mind, but there are plenty of others. This, oddly enough, is less of a problem in science fiction today. Although a lot of sci-fi is still writtne by and for males, there are an increasing number of female science fiction writers, some of them quite good, and there are plenty of strong female characters om tjat genre.

Oddly enough, there is an overabundance of female characters in historical novels. This is partly driven by what publishers think their audience(apparently mainly female) will actually read. This is both good and bad. It's good, because the reader gets to know some pretty strong female characters, such as Elizabeth I. The bad news, that these writers all tend to write about the same female characters(like Elizabeth I). The other "bad news" is that some writers concentrate on male characters because they "prefer" them, thinking them more iinteresting in historical terms, but perhaps this is also a reaction to the overabundance of female historical characters.

This is my plea yere: I would like to see both interesting and strong male and female characters, in historical novels, and in any other genre as well. For historical novelists, perhaps part of the answer is to write less biographical fiction, and write about people, male and female(either one can be a lead character, depending on the situation), living in a historical time and being affected or somehow participating in the events of that time. This is what I see as lacking, and if some writers opened their minds a little more, perhaps they could become flexible enough to do this. I should also finally say that one of the reasons I like Ariana Franklin's and Jeri Westerson's books is, they have strong male and female leads, who also share in the events of their disparate times, and furthermore, the novels themselves seem to be reasonably accurate reflections of those times. I would like to see more of this kind of writing.
Anne G

Thank you!

2010-05-21T18:49:00.001-07:00

I just want pass a great big Thank You on to all the people who have decided to become my followers. I really appreciate this, especially since I'm drawing from a number of different fields which don't appear related(except they are, in my book, in a way). In any case, I'm glad you're all here.

Again, thank you,
Anne G

Yet another medieval-themed book review

2010-05-19T22:53:00.000-07:00

Franklin, Ariana
A Murderous Procession
G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 2010, 337 pp.
ISBN 978-0-399-15628-1

When Ariana Franklin's first book in this series, Mistress of the Art of Death, first came out, many people criticized her heroine for somehow "not being of the period", which was the latter half of the 12th century. This, BTW, was roughly just before the Third Crusade started, but that's another story.Ms. Franklin, whose real name is Diana Norman, and who has written books -- all historical, under her own name, seems to me to be quite well-versed in the century and the people she's writing about. And her feisty heroine, who solves cases through "the art of death", namely what we would now call forensic science, remains delightfully feisty.

Many, though fortunately not all, authors who write in and of various periods we call "medieval" tend to shy away from having central characters who are women, unless they are writing romances. Usually, though, romances set in historical periods tend not to be long on accuracy, and sometimes this is glaringly obvious. Ariana Franklin is a welcome exception to this(though there are a couple of others I can think of. She is also, in my opinion, a happy exception to the trend for writing medieval mysteries with monk or nun detectives. To me, monastic life in the Middle Ages is at best, only mildly interesting. Perhaps this is my background, which didn't include much in the way of r"religious" training, but I don't know. In any case, I'm glad Adelia has an interesting, but believable background(n the context of her time)., and, almost as delightful to me, are her struggles to somehow carry out a place for herself that allows her reasonable independence, yet give her some security in life. In her other books, it is obvious she has made sacrifices, including marriage to a man she really cares about, but who ends up headed for a bishopric.It's obvious he cares for her, too, though he doesn't make a huge number of appearances.

Like all good detective heroes and heroines, Adelia is kind of an outsider. An orphan raised by a couple , one of whom is Jewish and the other Christian, and given an education unusual even in the rather liberal Sicily of her time, she gets caught up in the politics of a completely -- to her -- foreign country, thanks to the wishes and needs of the formidable King Henry II, and she keeps ending up working on mysteries for him. A Murderous Procession is no exception, as this story deals with Adelia's travails when ordered to accompany Henry's ten year old daughter Joanna, to marry the ruler of Sicily. From practically the moment she joins the "procession", murder and mayhem ensue in various forms, and she becomes increasingly aware that a murderous figure from her recent past may be involved in some way. Of course, like all good mysteries, there are plenty of hints along the way, and everything is more or less revealed at the end. I also like the way Ms. Franklin has (sort of) used both Arthurian themes(her last mystery was set in and around Glastonbury Abbey, where the monks there claimed to have dug up the bones of Arthur and Guinevere, and, along with the stories then circulating and very popular with everyone, , got the legends really rolling. She also hints a bit at Robin Hood as well; this comes out more in A Murderous Procession, but she never lets the legendary overwhelm her story. It is a mystery, first and foremost, and an engaging one at that.

Some readers and writers may disagree with my assessment. I myself was afraid that this third book in the series might be a letdown. Endless series often are. They just get stale after a while. Fortunately, I can say, after having read the book, that this has not happened with A Murderous Procession. For this reason, I continue to recommend her Adelia books, and look forward to the next one, whenever it comes out.
Anne G

(Neander)life is imitating art!

2010-05-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers:

I've been meaning to blog about tthe latest findings re Neandertals. You see, according to Svante Pääbo and his team at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, they have sequenced 60% of "the Neandertal genome". This genome was extracted from three pieces of bone from Neandertals found at Vindija Cave, Slovenia. And it seems that many of us living today have a little bit of "Neandertal" in them. People from sub-Saharan Africa don't seem to, but since people from sub-Saharan Africa seem to have been the population that gave birth and rise to "modern" humans, I can kind of see why this would be so, although, despite the barrier of the Sahara Desert, there was probably at least some interchange, at least later on in human evolutionary times.

ThePääbo people estimated that people outside of Africa carry about 1-4 per cent "Neandertal" genes, probably arising from fairly early gene exchanges between wandering "moderns" and wandering Neandertals, though this study is probably far from complete, and some people who have heard about it, think the "Neandertal" contribution may well have been higher. The John Hawks Weblog gives the Gentle Reader an excellent overview of the study, though it is rather long and scientifically detialed. There are also plenty of news stories about this, as the story had been all over the media over the last few days.

This is an exciting discovery in many ways, and kind of confirms some of the suspicions I had, when I first began gathering information for the book I was then writing, which was quite different from what I'm writing now, although I ended up with a bunch of spinoffs, some of which take place in "modern" times, from just this one point of entry, so to speak.

But this story takes place in medieval England, and there are three Neandertals in it: Illg, the heroine -- who looks not unlike the Neanderlady in my picture, though her hair is less messy, but it is very obviously red, just as, a few years ago, it turned out that Neandertals apparently had a version of the skin pigment gene MC1R, which can confer light hair and skin, and sometimes red hair and freckles. It isn't quite the same version of MC1R as exists in "modern" humans today, in certain parts of the world, but from a hair and skin color point of view, an average viewer wouldn't be likely to be able to tell the difference.

Curiously, or not so curiously, perhaps, neither Illg, nor her companions Ren of the Three Trees(her older cousin who is supposed to be her guardina), and Mat Fartraveled, a friend of Ren's(and there seem to have been a lot of Viking-era people called Fartraveled, which doesn't raise too many eyebrows among those people who encounter Mat, either. seem particularly "noticeable" to the medieval people they encounter, except for their "big" noses(though Illg, being female, has a somewhat "daintier" one), and in my sotry, all Neandertals have a certain sexual charisma which, if they choose to exercise it, can prove irresistable to some people, especially those with the requisite "Neandertal genes".

It just so happens that the hero, Hardwin, and the antihero, Ivo(who springs from a medieval family "from hell"), both have the requisite genes, which makes them unusually sensitive to conditions in their surroundings in various ways, though both of them are what I call "fighting men" and what later became known as "knights". But they both become attracted to Illg, and Illg is attracted to both of them, though from the beginning, she's more attracted to Hardwin. From this, spins a ver complicated tale, with a "cast of thousands", many of whom are real people.

The point here is, much of what I deduced from my early reading about Neandertals -- their behavior, probable genome, abilities, brain power, even their ability to speak -- have turned out to not be too far off what I learned and put together. It would make sense, for example, that Neandertals were probably light haired, light skinned, and light eyed, because they lived in cool, cloudy, Paleolithic Eurasia, for the most part, though some lived in the Middle East and Israel. So, like modern Western Europeans, they would not have needed a lot of protection from the sun in order to survive.

They also seem to have had all of the prerequisites for ability to speak a language, incliding physical ones like a modern-looking hyoid bone(the bone that attaches the tongue to the muscles of the throat, certain "speech genes" which are identical to "ours" and so on. And in my books, they speak perfectly intelligibly.

It's also true that Neandertals differed (somewhat) anatomically speaking, but unless they had arthritis, and a fair number of them did, they could walk upright like we don, and used their environment in similar ways to "modern" humans, given what they had available to them. Their heads were somewhat differently shaped, having lower foreheads and a kind of "bun" or "bump" at the back of the head, which has led some people to believe that their brains must have developed differently, though there appears to be no evidence of this. But the people in medieval England don't "notice" this, either, as they are careful to blend in as much as they can.

Most importantly, since the people they meet, don't "know", other than to guess(sometimes), that they have some rather um, unusual abilities(which is part of what makes this science fiction rather than a kind of "alternative history"(they even know space travel, since they are on a kind of mission from a planet where their ancestors were taken before they apparently became completely extinct, in a solar system in a nearby part of the galaxy. they are accepted as perfectly human, thank you very much. This allows Illg and her hero, Hardwin, to fall in love, but for most of the story they are kept apart, partly by circumstance, and partly by Illg's dithering, because she's pretty young when she starts out, and also is somewhat impulsive when she sees wrongs that need, in her opinion, to be righted, and these get her into various kinds of difficulties.

Of course, there's a lot more to this story than what I've suggested here, but it is, in various ways, firmly based in the scientific findings I've outlined above. There are some pretty firm archaeological and human evolutionary references as well, for those who like the scientific, even in an obviously historical setting.

And for those who like the "historical", everything in this book is as factual as I can get it, where the facts exist(and in this particular period of time, there aren't all that many "facts" to go on). To fill in gaps of various kinds, I've had to make up certain things, but I've tried to be as careful as possible. And it's been very hared work, though I have enjoyed, and am still ejoying, every minute of it. Scientific research like I've been doing is exhilarating and often exhausting. So is the writing process.

Now that I've mentioned the names and relationships of the most important characters in my book, I'll probably be writing more about them(and others, as well), at least from time to time. I'll certainly be blogging a lot more about the latest Neandernews and what it all means,

Stay tuned,
Anne G

How not to write a historical(or any other kind of) novel

2010-05-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

From time to time, people who have written something they've had published, ask me to read it, and let me know what I think. I am generally willing to do this. The experience is often pleasurable, and the writer not infrequently has a story worth telling.

On the other hand, I sometimes come across something that the author really wants people to read, but when I read it, I find that the person who did the writing simply hasn't done enough work. And after reading the last one of this kind, I can see why Robert Sawyer is so "down" on self-published material. What I read isn't science fiction, and just so as not to offend anybody who has self- published, I've read some self-published material that is actually quite decently written and edited.

But too often, I think self publishing is just a way for an author to just get "something" into print. This is the case with a book I've been reading off and on. I won't name the author, or the historical period it's in, other than to say it takes place in medieval England, with historical characters being the principals.

This author chose an interesting subject, but apparently started out to, uh, write a romance. Except that, for the characters involved, the situation was probably anything but "romantic". Still, s/he got kind of carried away, especially with what the author Elizabeth Chadwick calls "twisy-twasery" writing(I call it "fake poetic")/ Others have called it "forsoothly" writing. The people use a lot of 'tis, 'twas, "fake Biblical" or "fake Shakespeare" language, some of which isn't really appropriate, and in any case, does absolutely nothing to make the feel of the time and place any more "authentic". Author should have stuck to plain modern English.

There is also a little matter of some of the historical characters acting in a way that they probably never would have done in real life --I can't give any details, since I'm not naming the author or the period --but no matter how one interprets the actions of a particular historical character, it is possible to see that some actions an author makes up, would simply have been "out of character" for that person, place, or circumstance. There are a few possible errors of fact, also.

These could probably be forgiven, since any given reader will probably not know very much about the period they're reading about. Even the "twisy-twasery" could be forgiven -- some readers of historical fiction actually like this. But what can't be forgiven is the apparent lack of thorough editing. There are numerous examples. Conversations are not indented, as they should be. The author didn't bother to indent conversations, either, which is, well, usual in most writing. There are also a good many apparent spelling or typographical errors, and inconsistent spellings of some place names. Which doesn't even even cover some fairly basic grammatical errors, like being able to understand where you should use "I" and where you should use "me".

The author had an interesting premise, and a possible very good story there. I really don't know whether s/he just thought it was finished, was in a hurry, and didn't realize s/he should have done another draft, just to smooth this kind of stuff out, or whether s/he just wanted to get it in front of the public so badly that they rushed it into print.

And I also hasten to say that I'm not totally against self-publishing, unlike RobertSawyer(but then, I've never seen ay self-published science fiction, good, bad, or indifferent). But I do think that if you're going to write a novel, of any kind, please, dear writer, give it your best shot. Write and rewrite the thing polish and polish some more, till you get all the grammatical errors, historical errors(if it's a historical novel), "typesetting" issues, etc., out of the way, before you send it anywhere. "Traditional" agents will immediately reject the book I have been reading, on just these grounds, and the poor author will get nowhere, despite whatever interesting idea they have. If you've done your absolute best, had other "eyes" look it over, sent it around to publishers and agents who have rejected it for whatever reason, and then you do decide to self-publish, that's one thing. Sometimes that may be all you, the author, can do. You owe your readers at least that much. If you do decide to go the self-published route, you owe your readers that much. If you don't do this, however, you will just make the reputation of self-published work even worse than it is at present(which is still not very good). Readers don't need this. It's hard enough to find good reading material of any kind, as it is.
Anne G

More changes to the blog

2010-04-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

All:

Just a quick note to let everybody know(if you can't see it already), that I've changed the blog background. The reason? Someone suggested it was difficult to read and caused eyestrain. I don't want that, and believe it or not, I am responsive to these things. If you have any likes or dislikes about this latest change, Gentle Readers, I will listen carefully

More nice Neanderpics

2010-04-28T23:30:00.000-07:00

Just to let anyone interested know, I have just stumbled on some rather nice pictures of Neandertal reconstructions. They all look, very, very human. One of them is eerily reminiscent of that famous early 16th century painting of Jesus. Another one looks like lots of athletic young men I have met(sans the beard, and in modern clothes). His nose sticks out, but he' really doesn't look remarkably different. The little girl looks like a little girl, etc. The only one I don't really "cotton to" is the picture of "Wilma". Were Neandertals really all that messy? The link, BTW, is on Mathilda's Anthropology Blog.
Anne G

It's true, Brutus is confirmed dead

2010-04-28T23:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's true. the International Wolf Center has confirmed that poor Brutus the Wolf i s dead. The cause was a musk ox, who was doubtless trying to defend itself. Musk oxen are very good at this, and the picture of the hole in his side is about the size of a musk ox horn. The International Wolf Center works with one of the weather stations on Ellesmere Island, and some weather station people went out after snow stopped falling, and dug up his remains. So farewell, Brutus the Wolf! You lived a good wolf life, doing what nature intended you to do, just as the musk ox was doing what nature intended it to do. I hope that there will be some way to continue reporting about the habits of these beautiful animals, living as they do in the High Arctic.
Anne G

Sad news

2010-04-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

I've had some sad news today. The sad news is about the apparent demise of Brutus the Wolf. I mentioned in an earlier post, that Brutus was not with his pack, way up there in Ellsemere Island, nor was his radio collar transmitting anything. It's still not transmitting anything, so he is presumed dead, but unless the people at the local weather station can find something out, they won't know for sure until around July 4. I guess it's very difficult to get there much before then, or at least the conditions necessary for getting around on an Arctic island are very difficult till then. This is all very sad.

On the other hand, Brutus was apparently about 10 years old. That's pretty old for a wolf in the wild, and it looks like he did live a nice wolf life in a tough environment. He sured a lot of pups, some of whom are still apparently with the pack, so his genes, if nothing else, are probably living on. And you could say, while alive, he did the job nature intended him to do, which is good enough. Still, it's sad, especially for the researchers, to lose one of the wolves whose movements they were tracking.

Rest in peace, Brutus the Wolf,
Anne G

Another egregious goof(don't know whether it was Bloglines or me, though

2010-04-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers:

Apparently the link to the letter the little boy wrote to the mayor, in my previous post about the Seattle Public Library System, did not go through. Don't ask why. Computers can be mysterious things.

Anyway, here it is:
http://friendsofspl.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/a-young-boys-letter-to-mayor-mcginn/

Read it if you wish. It's quite powerful, in its way.
Anne G

Library woes, again

2010-04-24T22:57:00.000-07:00

Gentle blog readers:

That time has come around again. Budget time for the City of Seattle. Unfortunately, there is a shortfall, and the budget looks as tight as ever. Which means somebody is going to try to cut library system's hours and services. This affects a lot of people

The kid who wrote this e-mail to Hizzoner Mayor McGinn had a point. There are still people, whose only access to computers is through the local library system. And it's not just little kids, either. I've mentioned before that many of the people who don't have access are immigrants trying to become citizens, people looking for a job, some homeless people who try to keep in contact.

There is also the "human" aspect: How about parents of small children who want to find some parenting advice that fits their child? They may have computers, and that helps, but they may need just some time away, especially if their child has special needs. The library system might, for them, be a place to relax for a short while, to catch their breath. Libraries are also community "hubs" of various kinds. Community meetings and other functions are often held in them, and the wonderful thing about libraries(certainly that's the case here in Seattle), is that they're free for all. We citizens pay a certain amount of taxes to keep them funded. I realize also that some people here in the US are pretty "antitax", but they, too, use the library, regardless of whether they think tax money that goes to fund libraries is a good idea or not.

I also realize that what is happening in Seattle, as far as budget difficulties go, is happening all over the country. In this sluggish economy, these problens are unlikely to be resolved soon, and in my opinion, this is all the more reason to get our City Council and Mayor McGinn to hold the line on funding for the library. We have been cut enough.

Also, while this may seem "political", and in a way it is, I want to assure all Gentle Readers that this is not, and never will be, a "political" blog. It is primarily a blog about writing, medieval history and society(especially in a certain period in medieval England), prehistoric humans(especially Neandertals), and I won't leave out My Beloved Wolves. Most of these subjects relate to the book I'm writing, so I feel justified.

But libraries are important to writers, too. Oh, there are lots of interesting resources, of varying quality, on the Internet, and that's the trouble. They are of varying quality. Some are quite good, others, well, dubious to say the least. So my fallback is libraries, for research. Yes, we writers often do research about whatever we're writing about! So this is why I occasionally blog about the state of the library system here in Seattle, and what I think should be done about it. Libraries are a reflection of the health of the local community, and thus are important for their own sake.

And lest anyone think I'm just sitting on my behind complaining about this, I"m not. Yesterday, I e-mailed the mayor, and everysingle member of the Seattle City Council, laying out reasons why they should hold the line with the Seattle Library System budget, and not cut any more. I hope they will take heed. I also plan to attend a community meeting about this, in about 2 weeks. I will not stay silent. I will do what I can to add my voice, and try to keep the library going as it is till better times. And when better times come, I plan to add my voice to a push for expansion and restoration of previously cut hours and services. I will not be silent about that, either.
Anne G

Sad and serious news from Ellesmere Island

2010-04-23T16:38:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers:

I have been hoping to recount the genesis of my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals long before this, but there have been many things, including life, that have interfered. I will be posting about this, soon.

But unfortunately, I have to pass this alarming news on, to those who love all living beings, including wolves. It seems that something bad has happened to the wolves on Ellesmere Island that scientists at the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota have been following.

In the first place, something seems to have happened to the radio collar on Brutus, the wolf through which the scientists have been following this pack, has stopped transmitting. Sometimes, a collar malfunctions or falls off. Unfortunately, it also stops functioning when the creature wearing it dies or disappears. This is what is alarming.

There is a weather station nearby, but apparently the weather station people can't snowmobile to the last place from which information was transmitted. Weather at this time of year is even more "uncertain" than April weather around where I live. And more dangerous to snowmobile in when it is.

So we don't really know what has happened to Brutus. Except that he hasn't been seen with the pack, and that's bad news, too. If something has happened to him, the scientists will doubtless r4adiocollar another pack member, and they can follow its movements into the summer. I do hope this doesn't portend more disaster for them, though.

Anne G

p.s. I will post more info about Washington wolves, whenever I can get my hands on it.

I've got more followers, and I'm happy

2010-04-21T21:34:00.001-07:00

In fact, I've got 20 of them now, I didn't expect to haveany when I began this blog!
Anne G

They're beginning to notice medieval things and recycle them!

2010-04-21T21:24:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers:

It looks as if the town of Bury St. Edmunds is going to recycle a 13th century guildhall for um, modern purposes. You can see the site here:

http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2010/04/medieval-guildhall-to-be-redeveloped.html

The exterior certainly looks "medieval" enough. And atmospheric, too!
Anne G

I missed the URL to link to Judy Arnopp's site

2010-04-18T15:31:00.000-07:00

I forgot to put the URL for Judy Arnopp's blog site. Here it is:

http://www.juditharnoppnovelist.blogspot.com/

It's a pretty interesting blog, and I will probably have more to say about the various topics in it,
Anne G

Introducing Judy Arnopp

2010-04-18T14:47:00.000-07:00

Gentle Readers:

I'm linking Judy Arnopp's Medieval Scribe to my bloglist. I think it's a worthy addition, especially since her(strictly historical) novel, Peaceweaver is set in a slightly earlier period than mine is(I'll be writing more about that, later), but featuring some of the same characters. I haven't read it yet, but it looks good!
Anne G

I've learned some interesting things about some types of fiction. . . .

2010-04-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

I'd like to follow up a bit about my introduction to the blog Clio's Children. I was invited to join via another blog, which I won't go into now. Well, actually several blogs, and my accumulated knowledge, while hardly "scientific" suggests a few things, at least about the genre or subgenre "historical fiction".

I've already noticed that most readers, and even more so writers, like "accuracy" in historical fiction. Which is fine. A historical novelist should maintain accuracy in whatever historical fiction they're writing about. But that inevitably leads to the question about what is "accurate" or "accuracy". Some writers, for example, feel that they must use "period" place names, or a lot of expressions like "ere", "nay" "tis" "twas", and so on. Or write the names of people in "period" style(or what they think is "period" style(how many of these writers actually know Old English or Old French, for example?) These kinds of things can be quite confusing for a modern reader. es[ecoa;;u of the modern reader is being asked to figure out how to pronounce some Old English name as it was originally written down(since monks were about the only people who could write, and there were no "rules" about how to transcribe place or personal names, these things could vary wildly, but recognizably, which only adds to a modern' reader's confusion. And that doesn't even take into consideration that English-speaking writers are basically communicating in modern English.

Another interesting thing is, the majority of historical fiction readers tend to be female, and both female readers and writers, tend to gravitate toward biographical fiction about Famous People. Which is one reason so much Tudor-themed material is being written for the growing historical fiction market. Which has resulted in an absolute glut of Tudor-themed books. . . . This may be partly publisher-driven' the people who publish books have apparently gotten it into their heads that "everybody" likes Tudor stuff. A fair number of historical fiction readers have gotten into that period, and love, love, love it, but I was never all that interested in Tudor anyway, and I'm beginning to feel that there's just an absolute glut on Tudor-themed historical novels. Aren't there any other periods that are interesting? The same thing could be said, especially in the US, about the abundance of American Civil War themed books. And the American Civil War is, for reasons I won't go into here, I avoid, avoid, avoid.

This, by the way, is not a rant, exactly. Just an observation. Men write historical novels, too, but men's historical novel-writing tends to be closer to the "thriller" subgenre, in that it tends toward blood, guts, war, battle, etc. and often doesn't have very well-rounded female characters. When there is a female character that's reasonably well defined, I've noticed a tendency among some male writers, to just have the female character sit at home and cry or there is a "bedroom reunion" or something like that. Men still don't tend to view women as having any real "agency", and it shows. This all too often doesn't accord with actual history; even constrained by the mores of their times, women could, and did, and not infrequently, act on their own for sme reason or another(but all within the framework of their times)

As I said, this post is not "scientific" at all. I don't pretend that it is. It's just my observations, and I'm sure there are many, many exceptions which the Gentle Blog Reader can surely point out, if they wish to do so. I will have more to say about a lot of this in a not-too-distant future post.
Anne G

Introducing Clio's Children

2010-04-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

I've gotten off to a late start blogging for the month of April. Part of the reason for this has been certain time constraints. But another reason has been that there hasn't been much going in in the subjects of this blog. At least not enough to excite me enough to write about them, though this is beginning to change. \

My purpose here, though, is to introduce the new blog Clio's Children,which is a group blog, devoted to historical fiction, which I was invited to join. I haven't posted anything -- yet. But I intend to as soon as the blog is better established. Those of you who are interested in historical fiction, may want to follow my musings there.
Anne G

Changes to the blog

2010-03-26T22:31:00.001-07:00

I’ve changed the blog. No, not the title or the content, just the background. I’m trying to make it more like I wanted it in the first place. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded, but I changed the background somewhat, and I then had to change the link colors so they would be more or less “reader friendly”. I will probably continue to do more tinkering, but not so much that it’s completely unrecognizable. I just want to have it both imaginative and “writerish”.

Let me know how you like it,

Anne G

Yet another book review, and medieval at that

2010-03-14T20:51:00.001-07:00

Hoffman, Mary

Troubadour

Bloomsbury Press, 2009

291 pp.

ISBN978-1-599990-367-5

I came across Troubadour quite unexpectedly. I was in the local library, as is my habit at certain times, to see what might be there that would make good, entertaining reading, I had never really paid much attention to Mary Hoffman, the author, though I have seen some of her work – Young Adult-type books set in a sort of “alternate” Renaissance Italy, based on some visits to Florence that she’d made earlier. Troubadour looked interesting, but I didn’t pay much attention to it in the bookstore, either.

However, when I came across the book in the library, I did pay attention. It’s not often you see a book aimed at “young adults” that the library staff feels adults might enjoy. And they were right; I enjoyed it very much. I knew next to nothing about the Cathars, or the “crusade” against them, mainly motivated, apparently, by the desire of the king of France to gain more control over southern France, and the desire of a number of his vassals(many of whom were semi-independent), to grab more land. The “crusade” itself was long and bloody, but the Cathars were finally crushed.

Judging by the way the book is put together, and considering the audience the book is aimed at, Ms. Hoffman does a very good job of pulling a complex time, place, and set of characters together, while not appearing to be preaching a “history lesson”. Her principal focus is on a young girl of marriageable age, named Elinor. Her parents, or at least her mother, are very worried about her seemingly wild ways, and her mother decides this can be cured by getting her married off to a much older man with children of his own. Part of this reason has to do with the dark clouds on the political horizon, which eventually led to the so'-called “Albigensian” crusade, which resulted in terrible bloodshed against the “heretics” known as Cathars(though they themselves apparently never used this term calling themselves “Good People”). As the story develops, it becomes apparent that she and her family are in danger, because her father is a secret Cathar, and it also turns out that this is one of the reasons her parents are so anxious to get her married off.

However, Elinor has no intention of marrying the man chosen for her, although women in Southern France at this time had considerable freedoms of their own. They could inherit property, and prospective husbands had to pay a bride price for them, rather than having property in the form of a dowry passed to them. Furthermore, there were apparently some quite strong and competent women in this region at the time. Be this as it may, Elinor manages to run away, disguised as a boy, and joins a troupe of what Hoffman calls joglars, basically entertainers of both sexes. She has a nice voice, and is allowed to sing some troubadour compositions(Troubabours composed the verses, and they were usually of higher rank than the entertaiiners; they didn’t have to sing). She is particularly interested in one troubadour called Bertran, who also turns out to be a secret Cathar, and because he has taken certain vows, can’t marry anyone, let alone the impressionable young Elinor.

Basically a “coming of age” story set in a very turbulent time and place, the story focuses on what Elinor learns about herself and others, and her realization of who she is really meant to be. This book is full of adventure, and there are some terrible and sad parts, but they are never overdone. Without entering a spoiler here, suffice it to say that the story does end happily for Elinor, though in the time period she is “on the road” and away from home, she matures into a very wise young woman. While this story may be a little “lightweight” for some adults who prefer more “serious” stuff, fans of historical fiction, of any age, should enjoy it. I certainly did, and I’d like to see more in this vein out of Ms. Hoffman.

Anne G

Opinions, please, gentle readers!

2010-03-06T22:05:00.001-08:00

On a writer’s site where I have a version of the first book in my trilogy uploaded(with great difficulty, I might add), I also do reviews and critiques of some people’s work. I do a fair amount of reviewing sci-fi/fantasy, and some historical novels, since The Invaders is a hybrid – of sorts – or both genres.

Which brings me to my dilemma, the one I want opinions about. I’ve noticed a tendency on the part of some writers of historical novels, to use “old” place names instead of their “modern” equivalents. I can understand the reasoning behind this: in Anglo-Saxon times, for example, the city of York was called something like Eorferwic or Jorvik(by Viking-era Scandinavians who traded there). The problem for me is, such usage may turn out to be very confusing for the average modern reader. And yet some readers of historical novels actually prefer this. Again, the reasoning behind this preference seems to be that it is more “authentic” to give the “old” place name, because that was what was used at the time, rather than the modern one, regardless of whatever confusion a reader may feel. I think, too, these writers(and a fair number of readers who may know more than “average” about whatever historical period the novel is set in), want what they feel is consistency here. They don’t want what they feel are “modern” attitudes seeping into their novels, and if this means using “old” place names, so be it.

And I can understand that, too. I used to read a lot of romance novels, and got rather disgusted with the historical ones, when the writers would use out-of-period, or obviously made-up names that no one in that period of time would ever have used, or had things like castles in the wrong places or times(I actually started critiquing a historical novel that was set in a time when there weren’t essentially, any castles. This woman appears to have had serious problems, because she got all upset when I mentioned this to her, and I never did find anything out about her novel. I suppose you can credit my anthropology background for some of this sensitivity; names tend to “belong with” periods and “ethnic” groups. Names make the people of such ethnic groups and/or time periods instantly recognizable as who or what they are.

I also understand that many writers think that their readers want easy-to-swallow history lessons, because they fear history is not taught in their schools or in their country, particularly well. In this, they are right, but I’m not sure that this kind of attention to detail is going to “teach” the reader anything he or she really wants to know. If they really want to learn about “what really happened”, there are libraries, and the interested reader will probably be interested enough to get such details about the period, on their own. I did much of my own research this way: I knew a little bit about Neandertals before I started writing(they existed in the past), and nothing at all about earlier medieval England, except a vague blur of events. I had enough sense to want to get it “right”. At the same time, though, I did not want to burden any potential readers with a lot of facts; rather, I wanted to give a flavor of the times, as accurately as possible, while at the same time telling an interesting, and hopefully compelling, story. I hope some potential readers will be interested enough to do their own research, and if they’re really dedicated, write their own novels. That, I think, is the best any writer, even of a “hybrid” genre like mine, can do.

Which brings me to my dilemma. Well, I guess it isn’t really a dilemma, at least not for me. I don’t use “old” place names; I think the extra possible authenticity(and I have come to the conclusion that authenticity is as much in the mind of the writer as it is “factual”) is negated by the possible confusion to the reader – even if that confusion is, to some extent mitigated by a glossary or end notes of some kind. So I use modern place names. I also avoid expressions like “ere”, “nay” “mayhap”, etc. like the plague. For me, these particular words may well have been used in “olden” times, but the problem is, the people living in “olden” times, sounded just as modern, to themselves, as we do now. I am fairly sure that at least some of those who could read, might have found “olden” language used in their time, stilted and unnatural.

By the same token, then, I use what I call “modern standard” English for dialogue(indicating when people are speaking some other language when necessary). No, I don’t use slang, though I do try to add “flavor” by using expressions that were probably used in that time period. I realize a number of writers, and readers, would disagree with me here. I also know that some very fine writers, who have immersed themselves in a particular period, are happy to use a “flavor” of “olde-timey” language, just the way some writers use, or think they can use, “dialect”(the number of people who try to imitate Scots is really unbelievable, and they never get anywhere close to the real thing). Yes, this may be less “authentic” in some ways, but I think it’s more important to suggest authenticity in other ways. A writer can, for example, flavor their character’s thoughts about things by, for example, contrasting the common way of thinking about, say, Native Americans, in the 18th century, with their own, if their own attitudes happen to be different for any reason(maybe they were brought up in Quaker households, for example). They can describe clothing and buildings in some detail. They can, without overpowering the reader, describe what kinds of medical treatments were available. And so on. The astute reader will ”get the picture” if they’re alert enough. And as I said earlier, if they’re really interested, they might read more about the period and the people of that period, especially if information is abundant.

In other words, my primary concern is, telling an interesting story, while keeping any historical side as accurate as possible. I’m not here to give a history lessen, especially in view of the fact that what I’m writing is kind of a hybrid(I call it “romantic science fiction set in medieval England” for lack of any other way of describing it). As there is also “prehistoric” detail involved(which is a whole other area of research), I’ve “flavored” the book with that as well. But again, my purpose isn’t, per se, to give a lecture no the course of human evolution. If people are sufficiently interested, they will also do research on this, for themselves. Therefore, I’ am not so “historically obsessed” as some, but I’m not going to lie about anything that “happened”; I’m going to get as much “right” as

possible, but that simply weaves in and out of the story I’m telling.

Which, when push comes to shove, I am inviting comment here. What do you think? How accurate do you need to be in a situation like mine. Remember, that although I’m writing what I call “romantic science fiction set in medieval England”, I am most definitely not writing a romance, although there are some perfectly delightful romance writers out there, who write in “historical time”. I’m must writing “my” story. And I try to pay attention to the historical side, without letting it overwhelm me. So I will part by once again asking, what do you guys out there think?

Anne G

Another Neandertal reconstruction

2010-03-03T20:41:00.001-08:00

Well, actually, it’s a whole series of human evolutionary reconstructions, all of them quite good. I have a lot of respect for John Gurche, the reconstructor. In this particular instance, he’s done a spectacularly good job of reconstruction. And I stumbled across this piece via Julien Riel-Salvatore's "A Very Remote Period Indeed" So thanks, Julien Riel-Salvatore, for sharing this with us.

For those interested in the Neandertal, you can see the picture here:

Is there some archaeological evidence, somewhere, that Neanderguys wore ponytails? Just wondering. I should have thought they didn’t have messy hair.

Anne G

My computer is back, and working properly now

2010-03-03T20:23:00.001-08:00

I’ve had a lot of problems, of one sort and another with this computer since December. First, I got a bunch of junk in it, and had to send it to the computer store. Then my hard drive died in February. Don’t even ask why it died. It wasn’t that old. Then, when that was fixed, I couldn’t access the Internet when I got home. Why? Well, I couldn’t exactly figure that out for a while, though I finally turned to a gadget that allowed me to access the Internet, and I was fine with that. Only trouble was, it was a problem with the router, which was old and cranky, and it apparently died, which was bad for the other members of my household who use laptops and wireless. Ugh, ugh, ugh, until the Family Computer Guru came along with a brand-new router which works fine, and we now all can get on the Internet when necessary. It’s too bad you have to both love and hate computers and their peripherals; everything is fine when they work, but when they don’t. . . .well, I’ll leave that to your imagination. It didn’t affect my writing, though, as I continued to do that. It didn’t require Internet access. But now I have a “funny” other thingie. . .

Anne G

Another fine novelist and blogger

2010-03-01T22:36:00.001-08:00

This is the first of March,and I would like to make an announcement. Which is to say, I’m adding another fine blog to my blog list. It’s Sharon Kay Penman's blog. She is a fine novelist who has written such works as The Devil’s Brood, her most recent work. The other reason I’m adding it is, she writes fiction about medieval England. Her works are mainly biographical fiction, which is not usually a genre or subgenre I read, but Ms. Penman is a definite exception, and I’ve enjoyed most of the things I’ve read from her. I have certain disagreements with her about her style and approaches to certain things, but that’s not because I don’t consider her a good writer. I do. And besides, I haven’t blogged about any medieval stuff for a long time. That needs to be rectified. So thanks, Ms. Penman, for your blog. I’ll be following it with great interest!

Anne G

Dawn over Ellesmere Island, with wolves

2010-02-25T23:21:00.001-08:00

According to this post, dawn is finally breaking over Ellesmere Island as the big wolf pack returns to its usual haunts. It’s a beautiful sight; the island has been without daylight for something like four months. Even Barrow, Alaska doesn’t go that long! Oh, and the wolves, one of whom is a wolf called Brutus, which they’ve been studying intensively, is prominent in the picture. Arctic wolves are beautiful creatures.BTW, Brutus is the one with the radio collar. He’s more in the background, but his radio collar is very obvious.

Anne G

Computer trouble

2010-02-25T23:08:00.001-08:00

After a week of essentially having no computer access, except through my local public library, I am now back online. I can blog once more. I don’t have very much to say at the moment, other than the fact that apparently hard drives in laptops don’t tend to last a long time, unless you really take care of them. It was kind of an “ugh” situation, but I hope everything is fixed now!

Anne G

Hungry wolves come home

2010-02-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

It seems like the huge wolf pack that's been roaming around Axel Heiberg Island and Ellesmere Island has decided to come back to their territory on Ellesmere. Apparently they couldn't find much in the way of wolf chow on Axel Heiberg, and not much in the way of wolf chow in their territory, so they searched some more, out of their Ellesmere territory. They managed to sustain themselves, apparently, by dining on leftover muskoxen that were killed by somebody or something else. That pack seems to be pretty strong. And you can read all about it here;

http://internationalwolfcenter.blogspot.com/2010/02/theyre-back.html

Anne g

I'm trying again

2010-02-19T13:19:00.000-08:00

Drat! The attempt at putting up the link didn't work. Don't ask why.

http://sfwriter.com/2010/02/neanderthal-parallax-began-10-years-ago.html

But now I've got it, so you can read all about the Neanderthal Parallax 10th anniversary if you like.
Anne G

Oh dear!

2010-02-19T13:17:00.000-08:00

Sorry. For some reason, there wasn't a link to the "10th anniversary" post. I'm fixing that now.

10th anniversary of the Neanderthal Parallax

2010-02-19T13:15:00.000-08:00

If you click on the link, you will find that Robert Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy began today, with Hominids, the first in the series. It's one of Saywer's most popular books. And, after reading it, I can see why.
Anne G

To clone or not to clone? Neandertals, that is

2010-02-14T22:34:00.001-08:00

This past week has seen a bunch of articles, in various venues, about the possibility of cloning Neandertals back into existence. You, gentle reader, can get an idea of what this is all about in Archaeology Magazine, and also here, and here, and here. If you read through all the links, you will find varying degrees of enthusiasm or caution about the idea.

I must, for the record, admit that I would naturally be very interested if Neandertals were to somehow show up again. But then, I would love to see a few woolly mammoths, too. Trouble is, woolly mammoths though just as extinct as the Neandertal population, are not and never were, human beings. When you get into the idea of cloning a human being -- and I definitely consider Neandertals to have been human beings, however they may or may not have been related to "us" -- gets into territory that definitely makes me a bit queasy. Even Svante Pääbo, the geneticist who sequenced the first Neandertal genome back in 1997, thinks it would be unethical to do this. From the Max Planck Institute, he has said on a number of occasions, that he thinks it would be unethical to do this. If you read the articles, apparently a number of people agree with this.

Though the idea of having Neandertals around, to compare and contrast, excites my fantasies to some degree, I tend to agree with those who think it would be an unethical idea. On the other hand, if you read the article, it's obvious that there are people who are "behind" the idea. And in any case, regardless of whether or not people think it's a good idea to clone Neandertals back into existence, it's probably reality to say that once enough knowledge about the cloning process becomes available(as applied to humans, at least), someone is bound to try to clone a Neandertal.

So the questions become manifold. First of all, why would anybody want to do this? To study what the differences between "them" and "us" really are, the enthusiasts reply. Some enthusiasts might also claim it would help us understand how certain diseases work in human populations. Others might be more interested in presumed differences in brain function, or language capabilities. The list of reasons for cloning Neandertals is potentially endless. Which raise a lot of questions right there.

First, would this Neandertal simply be considered an "experiment"? If so, that should raise a lot of red flags. It's all too easy, even with "modern" humans, to consider certain groups "other" or "not us". And this has happened in recent history -- if one googles the "Tuskegee study", they will find a good example of the sort of thing that makes me queasy, and should make any person with half a brain queasy too. This raises further questions of how a Neandertal under such circumstances would even be regarded. Because if he or she was regarded as "human", it seems to me he or she would have to be given the kind of basic human rights everyone is now thought to be entitled to. If people started thinking of Neandertals as basically "subhuman" -- and some people, even scientists, still sort of do -- then it would be only a short step to the kind of thinking that put Jews and other people some Germans didn't like, into Auschwitz and other such horrors. There is no guarantee that such thinking has been entirely wiped out, even in the 21st century.

So, in order to be protected, a Neandertal would have to be given full human rights, assuming it would be possible to clone one at all in some relatively near future. If he or she were given full human rights, then they would have to be allowed to consent to any experiments performed on them for scientific purposes, with full understanding(assuming, as I tend to, that a reasonably intelligent Neandertal would be able to fully appreciate the implications) of the possible consequences. Otherwise, it might end up being very much like people who claim aliens from outer space abducted them, and performed experiments on them. Most of us consider that people who make such claims are slightly crazy, but can anybody imagine how a Neandertal might feel, if these things weren't fully explained to them, or if, for whatever reason, they couldn't fully understand the reason? I'm not entirely sure some of the enthusiasts for cloning Neandertals back into existence, have fully consider this.

If, however, any such project decided to clone a small population of Neandertals, there might be less opposition, provided, of course, that all of them were given full human rights and responsibilities. After all, there doesn't seem to have been any indication that their brains were anything much different from "ours", though their skulls were slightly larger. But corrected for overall size, the amount of brain inside a Neandertal skull would have been roughly the same as a "modern" human's. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any archaeological indication that they were unable to do anything contemporary "modern" humans could do. They certainly seem to have had at least the potential for such capacities. My guess is, that if they didn't exhibit some of these capacities, this was probably due to (a) what was available in their environment and (b) restrictions partially imposed by population size. Neandertal populations, as I've said elsewhere, seem to have been quite small and scattered, which at times and in places, may have hindered the kind of communication that fosters the adoption of new ideas. Nevertheless, they seem to have been perfectly capable of "upgrading" their toolkit, and doing things like painting and decorating themselves, as finds from places like El Sidrón and Arcy-sur-Cure seem to show. And these things, in addition to the burials I've mentioned elsewhere, and the find, in Bruniquel Cave, of a rectangle or oval, deep in its interior, with a burned cave bear bone inside this oval or rectangle suggest that they were perfectly capable of symbolic thinking and language.

So what are we left with? Well, the anatomical differences are fairly obvious, but even here, most people probably wouldn't "recognize" Neandertals if they were walking around dressed in modern clothes(this, by the way, forms part of the premise of my Invaders trilogy; medieval people never heard of Neandertals, and though some of them recognize "something" about them, in some situations, they have no idea what it is). So unless these differences were pointed out to them, people mostly wouldn't "have a clue". And if they did "have a clue", how would they react? I don't know, but this is another reason, which again the cloning enthusiasts seem not to have considered, why they would need to be protected by legal, basic human rights, and treated as any other human being. I doubt eve everyone would be equally enthusiastic about Neandertals, once they started walking around the Earth again, and formed their own social groupings, which might or might not include "modern" humans in some circumstances.

So for now, I remain queasy about the idea of cloning "a" Neandertal. I would be a bit less queasy it if it was going to be a bunch of them, but I would still be somewhat queasy. Fortunately, it seems that at the present time, even cloning woolly mammoths(some scientists are actually working on this) seems not to be feasible. At the present time, cloning Neandertals seems even less so. So I remain queasy at the idea of cloning "a" Neandertal, or even some Neandertals, into existence. But I'm not going to actually try to "do" anything about it till the day comes that it might be possible.

Anne G

A little more on the whole "self publishing" bit

2010-02-11T15:51:00.001-08:00

I'm not offering very much at the moment. A bunch of things I was planning to post, I would have posted, had not some other interesting tidbits come through. And this is one of them. I am acquainted with the author, and she claims she's "done everything right". But she still can't get published. Which is all too common, I'm afraid. First, please don't get me wrong. At the moment, before the novice author tries anything else, they should at least attempt to sell the traditional way, IMO. Because -- and believe me I've seen it -- there's quite a bit of "self published" crap out there. No, I'm not talking about small, independent presses. They often find authors that are very good. I've seen some of those, too. What I'm talking about is authors that have an idea, think they can write, but don't bother to polish things too much or don't bother with the research necessary for their topic, or who knows what else. But they still want to "independently publish" because they think their idea or story will "sell itself". This particular author has done the best she knows how to do, has tried very hard to sell her book the "traditional way", but has failed to get a "bite". And I know she's not the only one. I know someone else -- personally -- who is having the same problem. So what is an author like this to do? I don't know, but she offers one answer, that might be at least worth thinking about.

Anne G

Robert Sawyer's "Neandertal problem"

2010-02-06T21:32:00.001-08:00

In addition to having a "publishing problem", Robert Sawyer has, IMO a "Neandertal problem" as well. Again, it's not because he exactly negatively portrays Neandertals in his books Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids. His Neandertal characters are very engaging, and he writes very well of them. Still, he has a problem.

Maybe I should call it a "religion problem", because it became very obvious, when I was reading Hominids, that he honestly believes "religion" is bad. So he wrote his Neandertals in such a way that they were very, very "rational" , and never developed spiritual beliefs. Which prompted person of the cloth to write him and ask if "Is it a copout that Neandertals never had religion?" Sawyer gave a very "rational" answer, which reflects his beliefs, far more than it reflects any beliefs about the unknown, Neandertals might or might not have had. And that shows very strongly in his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy as well.

For example, in the very first book, Hominids, Sawyer goes to great pains to deny that Neandertals ever buried their dead. To do this, he apparently has read the now-discredited theories of Robert Gargett, who claimed, in effect, that Neandertal burials weren't "really" burials. Gargett did a useful service in pointing out that, in some cases, what looked like Neandertal burial sites, may have been the result of something else. Gargett was especially hard on the Shanidar "flower burial", which he claimed, in essence, was "just accidental", as was the evidence of flower pollen. Some people still believe this about the flower pollen, however it is odd that five of the six pollens found at the Shanidar site are used as traditional herbal medicinals to this day, and also that these flowers bloom in the spring, whereas the excavation of Shanidar Cave took place in August.

Furthermore, if you know how to look evidence for deliberate Neandertal burial is reasonably easy to determine. Most, if not all, Neandertals that are known to have been buried, are buried in a "flexed" position. People who just "drop dead", or even fall in a faint, never, as far as I know, fall or drop dead in a "flexed" position. The Kebara burial, for instance, is shown buried flexed, minus the skull, but whoever buried Mr. Kebara, thoughtfully left his jaw and his hyoid bone(the bone that attaches your tongue to the rest of your throat so you can talk), for future humans to ponder.

Then there's the famous(or infamous) La Chapelle Aux Saintes fossil. The excavators(two brothers who also happened to be Catholic priests), took a photograph of the fossil. Click the link and look closely at the fossil and see how it lies. All of these practices suggest deliberate burial, which suggests some kind of rituals were involved. If rituals were involved, this practice also suggests, at least intuitively, some kind of spiritual beliefs. We have no idea what these spiritual beliefs, if any, might have been, but rituals of this kind do, at least, suggest some form of symbolism or symbolic thinking. And I don't care who they are, nobody is completely rational when they lose some important or well-loved member of their family or band, or tribe, or whatever.

So the real question here isn't whether it's a "copout" to create Neandertals who never "had religion". The real question here is, how much of our own beliefs or nonbeliefs about Neandertals(or anybody else, for that matter), are we simply "imposing" on poor Neandertals, who aren't here to defend themselves? Of course, one can argue that the same could be said of people who claim they had a "religion", and they would be right. We have no way of actually knowing, absent a time machine. But there is enough archaeological evidence, which, for his own purposes, Sawyer seems to have conveniently ignored, to suggest that they did have some sort of ritual or spiritual beliefs -- about something. We just don't know what.

Finally, we should keep in mind that all of us have "spiritual beliefs" of one kind or another. Heck, even many atheists have "spiritual beliefs". They just don't rest on believing that a deity exists. So, my final question to Mr. Sawyer and other "rationalists" of this type is, why can't we accept the idea that Neandertals had them, too?

Anne G

Robert Sawyer's "publishing problem"

2010-02-06T20:36:00.001-08:00

Robert Sawyer, a highly respected science fiction writer(I really like some of his work), has a publishing problem. No, I don't mean that he can't get published. He can. You can get his books in any halfway respectable bookstore that sells science fiction. He's against "self publishing" science fiction. Totally against it.

He claims, in effect, that you will never, ever find a science fiction writer who self publishes. This may or may not be true. Writers who write science fiction are often a quirky lot. And there was "vanity publishing" back in the days of classic writers like Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, etc. "Vanity publishing" back then had a very bad reputation, and for very good reason. Also, there was no such thing as e-publishing. For that matter, there was no such thing as the Internet. So I can see where he's coming from.

I should also add that I've seen at least some "independently published" fiction(some of it is actually a type of science fiction). The quality varies, and the audience for some of this stuff may be rather limited. In some instances, I think the writers know this, and that is why they go this route. Occasionally, the writer goes this route after trying to get a "bite" from some agent(very hard to do these days). These writers have done all the right things that they're supposed to do, but gave up in despair of ever having their books published.

However, a lot has changed in recent years, and many of the publishing houses(including the ones that publish science fiction) are subsidiaries of giant corporations, and "traditional" publishing is not in a happy state right now. It's always been hard for an unknown writer to get him or herself published, and perhaps even harder for a writer of science fiction who can't break into one of the magazines(and there aren't very many of those any more, either). Is Mr. Sawyer completely unaware of this? It almost seems as if he is. And, unfortunately for Mr. Sawyer, I think it is only a matter of time before a lot of material ends up e-published anyway. Again, this may not be true of science fiction, but I wonder. I don't know how much time will pass before this is the case, but I am pretty sure this will happen; the publishing business at the moment is in a fluctuating state. And because of this, if there isn't some science fiction writer who has "self published" somewhere, there soon will be, and people will read him or her. And, perhaps, Mr. Sawyer will end up having a very red face.

Anne G

Wandering white wolves

2010-02-03T22:14:00.001-08:00

Well, here goes. My first blog on the subjects I mentioned yesterday is going to be -- gasp! -- wolves. Partly because it's late at night(I got home kinda late tonight, and I'm tired and sore from exercises), and partly because some of the things I'm going to be blogging about over the next few days are going to require long blog posts.

This isn't about the wolves of Washington State this time, though you can all be sure I'll be blogging about them whenever there's news about whatever is going on with those particular wolves. This post is about a wolf pack that has been traveling around Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Islands, which are jammed up there, very close to the North Pole. It's still dark up there; the sun won't rise again for maybe another ten days or two weeks(and if you want to know where Ellesmere Island or Axel Heiberg Island are, Google Earth would be a good place to start). In any case, these wolves have traveled over the ice, presumably in search of muskoxen to dine on(their principal food, apparently), from Ellesmere Island to Axel Heiberg Island, and back, and now they appear to be traveling south toward a tiny settlement called Grise Fjord, whose inhabitants are all Inuit, and probably shot most of the wolves that lived around Grise Fjord until the Canadian government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to settle some Inuit people there, back, I think, in the 1930's. Anyway, if you go to Wolves of the High Arctic, you can track their movements. Someone asked exactly where the URL for Wolves of the High Arctic was, and I'm basically replying to that person.

An unusual thing about this particular wolf pack is, it's very large for a wolf pack. The usual size of a pack is about 7-10 wolves. This pack has some 20-odd. How that happened, I wouldn't know. Maybe a lot of the territory around them is essentially wolfless, or maybe there are just a lot of muskoxen to be had for their dinners. Or maybe something else is going on. In any case, the site itself is very impressive, I think, and is part of a study that includes David Mech, a famous wolf specialist. So anybody interested in wolves, or maybe just looking at some pictures of them(in those regions, they tend to be white or nearly white), it's a wonderful site, and I highly recommend it.

Anne G

A plethora of goodies on various subjects

2010-02-02T21:44:00.001-08:00

There is an absolute plethora of bloggable subjects cluttering up various parts of my computer today, and I didn't even realize it! I've been busy the past few days, mostly with more writing(have completed or revised two more chapters in the second book of my Great Medieval Science Fiction Trilogy With Neandertals), and haven't, lately, had much time to do any serious blogging.

But never fear, there's plenty to blog about. First, two stories from Julien Riel-Salvatore's fine blog, A Very Remote Period Indeed, both on the presence of Neandertals in Poland north of the Carpathians, some 80,000 years ago. Then there's an equally fascinating piece on preserving an 11th century bridge in England, with sugar, on Got Medieval. And let us not forget My Beloved Wolves! There are stories and updates on the Wolves of the High Arctic(in this case, Ellesmere Island -- if you don't exactly know where that is, you might want to search through Google Earth or an atlas). Their travels are interesting. All wolves' travels are interesting, for a variety of reasons.

Last but not least, I have my own thoughts about why only certain people are interested in medieval history and society, and why few readers of historical and other genres deal with "medieval" except as fantasy. I will also have something to say about how this impacts my own history, and my writing.

In any case, stay tuned. I'll be blogging about some of this stuff, a little each day or so. I'm not deserting anybody, though I haven't started 2010 with a huge number of blogs. But that's another story to tell -- later. Much later.

Anne G

A nice picture

2010-01-23T13:40:00.001-08:00

I found a rather nice sketch of the controversial Neandertal fossil La Chapelle aux Saintes. You know, the one who was all crippled up with arthritis, had almost no teeth, and the earliest photos of the fossil(taken at the time it was discovered) show an obviously buried person.

Here is the sketch:

As you can see, he doesn't look all that different from people you and I have known. Or the differences, such as they are, are decidedly subtle. But you can all judge for yourselves, I think. Reconstructions of early humans often follows the conceptions or preconceptions of the reconstructors.

would really like to Dr. John Hawks and his blog for this. Dr. Hawks is obviously rather multitalented.

Thanks again,

Anne G

What do you do when you're blue?

2010-01-15T19:20:00.001-08:00

Fellow writers(and anybody else who cares to comment:

I recently went through a very bad period, that had to do with some personal things I won't go into here. I am working my way through these things at present, but while I was "actively" going through them, I felt very, very bad indeed. I felt bad enough so that I got, I think, on average, about four hours of sleep, among other things. It also affected my writing in some ways, though I never actually stopped writing during this period. But I was unable to really do much for very long, and though I have committed to doing some critiques for some other writers I know, I haven't yet started on those(fellow writers, don't worry, though, I haven't forgotten your critiques; it's just been hard to squeeze the time to do them, but I will, I hope, get to them by tomorrow!). I also found myself unable to concentrate and kept making mistakes of various kinds that I ordinarily don't make. I should also mention that I went through a period of major depression a few years ago, and depression runs in certain members of my family. I will also mention that I don't like to think about that episode even now, and while my personal stuff that happened just recently wasn't as bad, it was bad enough. The only thing I can say for this is, thanks to having gone through my depressive episode, I did learn ways to handle other "bad stuff" that comes my way. One of them was, that doing my writing saved me from feeling even worse than I ended up feeling. Which is why I plunged myself into writing over the last week or ten days.

Which leads me to the question I'm throwing out at all of you out there: What do you do when bad stuff happens? How do you handle it? Does it affect your writing? I'm curious, because writers are all supposed to be tortured souls anyway. Not all of them are, of course, but still. . . . And besides, I could learn something useful for the next time something blows my way.

So thanks in advance for all your replies,

Anne G

Assassination and ambush, caveman style

2010-01-11T15:13:00.001-08:00

There's been a fair amount of news about Neandertals floating around lately. There is even one about "Neandertal artists", which I'll get to later in another blog. However anthropology.net has an interesting comment about a paper published -- I think -- last fall or so, about the famous Shanidar III fossil. This was the fossil that, among other things, gave Jean Auel her portrait of the shaman Creb in Clan of the Cave Bear. I won't go into all the inaccuracies Auel perpetrated in this work, but for those who may have read Clan of the Cave Bear, you may remember that Creb was suffering from arthritis, couldn't move one arm, and limped around, apparently just like Shanidar III.

One of the authors of the recent paper referred to in Anthropology.net, Steven Churchill, apparently became convinced that "modern" humans succeeded Neandertals because they had projectile weapons, e.g., javelins or long spears, that they could throw over long distances. He seems to think that an injury to Shanidar III's rib is consistent with a thrown "javelin", which, supposedly, Neandertals didn't have. They supposedly "only" had thrusting spears. This may be true. However, there are javelin-like implements, found at the German site of Schöningen, which are dated to approximately 400,000 years! These also appear to have been used on an ancient species of wild horse, as horse-type bones were found with the javelins or spears. So these ancient people, whoever they were, were not necessarily getting "up close and personal" with the prey they hunted. Whether Neandertals possessed such weapons or not is perhaps debatable. The point is, that these Schöningen spears were not dissimilar to -- and this sort of ties into my own work, in a way -- medieval weapons of a certain type. I will show an illustration here:

Note that at least some of the fighters are holding the spears above their heads and presumably throwing(or perhaps thrusting them; this would, even in 'moderns" on horses, not be all that different from Neandertals and their "thrusting" spears. Unfortunately, I can't lay hands on any pictures of the Schöningen spears, but they apparently were held and thrown similarly; the people who found them ran "throwing tests" on them.

I can't say whether Neandertals had such weapons for chasing down prey, but the archaeological record seems to indicate that they had a lot of things that were similar to the range of equipment contemporary "modern" humans had.

So Anthropology.net raises some interesting questions about possible interactions between Neandertals and "moderns". Steven Churchill, on the other hand, presumes that such interactions as Neandertals and "moderns" may have had, were always what I call "high conflict". He, and people like him, base this idea on the ecologically-based notion of "competitive exclusion", in which creatures which have similar habits tend to "exclude" each other out of their territories, or else kill each other. Problem with this is, humans, while following some of these ecological rules, some of the time, are more complicated organisms. Since Neandertals and "moderns" increasingly appear to have had the same range of behaviors and reactions, and probably each had some sort of language, now lost, it's quite likely that, while all between Neandertals and "moderns" wasn't exactly "lovey-dovey" all the time, it wasn't always, and inevitably "high conflict", either. Besides, as Anthropology.net points out, why would someone suffering from arthritis and maybe not able to use one of their arms, be considered a threat to anybody? It kind of boggles belief.

To conclude, I don't know how Neandertals and "moderns" living around Shanidar Cave or anywhere else, might have regarded one another. But I think Dr. Churchill, while he's done some excellent research about prehistoric humans, has just gone off on a sort of personal tangent here. And an increasing body of research seems to suggest that whatever "happened" to Neandertals, it probably wasn't due to anything as simplistic as his ideas of "competitive exclusion", or some other notions(here implied, rather than explicit) of some Neandertal "lack" or "inferiority".

More about this and similar subjects later,

Anne G

We might not be in such trouble today if we dealt with financial misdeeds the way Henry I of England did. . . .

2010-01-05T19:53:00.001-08:00

Elizabeth Chadwick's Medieval Mondays on her blog Living the History has an uh, interesting entry for this week. . . (sorry, folks, I know it's Tuesday and all that!). It's about moneyers(or minters, as they were sometimes called). Some background: Every town of any size, by law, had a mint where coins -- English silver pennies -- were minted and stamped with a design approved by the king. These coins circulated for several years(I think it was three), and then, again by order of the reigning king, were withdrawn, and new silver coins, with a new stamp, were issued. People with the old coins then had to pay a visit to the town mint(in some really large towns there were apparently two or three of them), turn the old coins in, whereupon they would be melted down and new coins made with the new official stamp. The moneyer/minter charged you a fee for this. This was how minters made their money, and some of them became quite rich and important.

Unfortunately, the system was subject to abuse, and it was not unknown for moneyers to cheat. The king, or at least what passed for his bureaucracy, knew, or eventually found out, and laws kept getting passed. This didn't necessarily stop anybody, so the kings had to periodically rein in the moneyers.

So here is what one of the current Medieval Monday posts has to say about this situation. After I read about this solution, I began to wonder whether someone, somewhere, could channel King Henry I to deal with the financial shenanigans of some modern bankers and Wall Street fat cat types. Nah, I decided. That would be too big a job even for Henry I!

AnneG

Early "moderns" and their teeth

2010-01-05T19:30:00.001-08:00

PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, has published a paper concerning the teeth of a fossil known as Lagar Velho I or the LV 1 in scientific parlance. It seems, from a superficial glance at the paper, which was written by several experts who did the study, and who have long had ties with the ongoing research on the Lagar Velho fossil, that there were things about the child's teeth that seem more like that of some Neandertals, than of "modern" humans.

To give anyone reading this a background, the Lagar Vellho fossil was discovered in, IIRC, 1995. It was thought at first that the child, who was apparently about four or five years old when it died, was an example of early "modern" burial culture, and that was about it. Then Erik Trinkaus, a Neandertal expert and one of the authors of the present paper, took a closer look. He said he found that the child's skeletal proportions suggested a mixture of early "modern" and Neandertal traits. João Zilhão, one of the original discoverers, and also an author of the paper, declared at the time, and has been declaring ever since, that Neandertals "took their last stand" so to speak, on the Iberian Peninsula, and the early "modern" population was a "mixed" one. Needless to say, these assertions have been disputed, just as almost everything concerning Neandertals has been.

Whether or not one believes these claims, it is certainly true that early "modern" humans, e.g. Homo(sapiens)sapiens were more "robust", and in some ways, more like Neandertals, than later ones. This, as Razib of Gene Expression points out, is probably due in part, at least, to the introduction of agriculture in the so-called Neolithic period. You just don't need as much muscle and bone bulk to grow crops, as you do to go out and hunt or gather your own meals, so it's no wonder people switched to agriculture! By that time, of course, there weren't any Neandertals, and, when people started switching to agriculture, there probably weren't that many "modern" foragers(e.g., what have previously been called "hunter-gatherers"). Agriculturalist populations were larger, and probably "swamped" the hunter-gatherers.

Which is food for thought. At the time they existed, Neandertal populations were even smaller than later "forager" populations, and little groups of them apparently hung on is relative semi-isolation on the Iberian Peninsula rather late. "Modern" populations eventually filtered their way into the peninsula, but there may not have been very many of them, either, at the time. Which may account for the "mixed" population, if there was a "mixed" population(people have disagreed about this, too). In any case, assuming "moderns" and Neandertals "mixed" in the Iberian Peninsula or anywhere else(and they might have, in some places, at various times), there weren't very many of the "mixed" populations, either. Which would make them easy to "swamp" genetically, even if more "gracile" people didn't originally have some genetic advantage. In any case, as the PNAS article seems to be suggesting, the "modern European origins" story is rather more complex than some people like to believe.

Anne G

State of the blog

2010-01-04T21:10:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year, dear blog readers!

This is the first post of the year 2010. It is also the first year I've decided to do a "State of the Blog" address, similar to "State of the Union"(though I can hardly compare myself to the President of the US). 2009 has been an interesting year. While writing my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, I've also been writing book reviews. These have mainly been mysteries, historical or otherwise, but they are all related, in some way, to what I'm doing(though I'm not writing a mystery. I wouldn't have any idea of how to go about it). These mysteries have been quite good, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them, and this is reflected in the reviews I've done. It's a bit odd, because while I'm writing a work of "romantic science fiction"(for lack of a better term), I haven's seen any fantasy or science fiction that I considered worth reviewing. I think this is too bad, but I am looking forward to the possibility that this will change as 2010 rolls along. I am not neglecting anything that looks good, and there were plenty of mysteries and historical fiction I didn't review, either. I just didn't consider these interesting enough(to me) to make the effort of reviewing them.

I hope, though,that the authors were satisfied with my efforts. I have also become a guest blogger and have acquired "followers", which pleases me. I'm always happy when someone thinks my blog posts are interesting enough to follow and/or comment on. During 2009, I also added the subject of wolves to the subjects I cover on this blog. The reason for that is, although wolves don't appear in my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece(s) With Neandertals, they appear in some other works that I have waiting to be finished, and they're an important part of the "scenery" in those places(hint: these take place partly in a very fictional former timber and milling town in Western Washington State, and there's a convenient forest nearby where the wolves have trotted themselves. There are Neandertals there, too, hiding in plain sight; it's in the near future). It also reflects the fact that a couple of packs of wolves have, in recent years, begun to recolonize parts of My Fair State, and I'm happy to have them back.

I've gotten a lot of feedback from many of my posts, which also satisfies me. One I recently got seemed to really like this blog, and pointed out that my efforts have much improved since I started it. I'm glad of that, too. And I'm not surprised. First efforts are just that -- first efforts, and they are often not as good as later ones. I think in part, this improvement had to do with the fact that the first few posts I did, were a little less focused than later ones. I have learned not to just "blather on", and I've learned to focus my efforts on just a few things, rather than "going all over the place". And I am now trying to avoid writing vague posts about "creativity" and the like, unless I have something really "focused" to say about it.

I've also gotten a few brickbats. In one case(and I think the person who posted the "brickbat" deserves a more thoughtful reply to the blog comment than I could give in a "comment" section. I was also coming down with something nasty that I think I've finally recovered from, so I may have seemed a little more "intemperate" than I intended to be at the time. But more on that later. I will just put up another post. On the other hand, what is a blog without some controversy? I'm not one of those innumerable "political" blogs that thrive on controversy, and I don't generally publish such things unless they have pretty enormous significance, e.g. the 2008 elections and their results. Still, some people may not understand or even dislike what I have to say. I sometimes take risks, as everyone must, from time to time. But all in all, I don't even mind this. It goes with the territory.

For the future, expect to see more book reviews, more commentary on writers and writing, if appropriate, comments on various Neandertal-related finds, anything interesting related to medieval England, and last, but not least, the state of wolves, especially Washington wolves. Anything reasonably related to the territory covered in my Great Science Fiction Masterpiece(s) With Neandertals is fair territory, so expect these things when they start coming. I encourage more people to "follow" me, if they wish to. Finally, if anyone leaves a comment, I will make every effort to reply, though some replies may take longer for me to "process" than others. In the meantime, keep reading my blog, throw brickbats if you really disagree with me, or don't(I'd much rather have the latter, but as I said, some brickbats are probably inevitable, even here). And whatever else you do, don't take yourselves, or the world too seriously. That can be depressing!

Enjoy your life and your reading life while you can,

Anne G

How to define a classic?

2009-12-31T22:55:00.001-08:00

but, I I like to get responses to my blogs, and I'm happy to toot my own horn in these last few hours of 2009 by saying that I've gotten a fair number of responses, some critical, some supportive, and some that made me think. One of these came from my Instant Classics post. This post generated a fair amount of response, because, I suspect, some people came across it, and thought I was somehow dismissing or demeaning Maud Hard Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series. I wasn't. I loved reading her when I first stumbled on, I think, it was Betsy, Tacy and Tib Go Over The Hill, when I was in the third grade. I thought it was a wonderful story, and, just as I often do now when I come across a writer I like, I looked for more books. I ended up reading the entire series, and am glad I did! What some Betsy-Tacy Society members took for "grumpiness" being excessively "critical" was more a degree of puzzlement about why the series turned up in the "literature" section of my local Barnes & Noble outlet. I just hadn't thought of it as a series "for adults", nor had I ever thought it would get reprinted, but there it was. And I must confess, I'd never heard of the Betsy-Tacy series until that very moment about two weeks ago.

One of the respondents to this post, asked me what I though constituted a "classic". This is a very fair question, and I must confess that, even after giving it thought for several days, I still haven't come up with an answer. Even if I had, my answers would no doubt irritate at least some people. Some of my posts obviously did, but that's another story. I suppose this is just part of what goes with the territory when you blog. In any case, this writer asked me if I thought Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books were classics, or Little Women. I suppose it's easy to answer "yes" for Little Women, since it has kept getting reprinted practically since the time it was first published. But then, so has the Little House series. I read many of the Little House series to my daughter at a certain age. I don't know what she "got" out of them. But then, I read the Narnia books to her, too. I loved the Narnia books as a younger person, and love them still, though there are parts of them that make me cringe now(e.g., just for one example, all wolves are bad and evil, but foxes are "all right"). There are many people who consider the Narnia books and the Little House books to be classic literature, though both are, in some other areas, "problematic" in certain ways, though I would never, ever say one "shouldn't" read them. So I think, yes, they can certainly be called "classic children's literature", and to qualify, these stories must also be satisfying to the adults who read them. Good "children's" literature, generally does satisfy any adult who reads it, and that is one way I judge these things. It's not the only way, but that's again another story.

I think, and I must emphasize here that this is what I think, and anyone reading this should feel free to disagree, the Betsy-Tacy series occupies a kind of gray area. The series was very good, and Maud Hart Lovelace was an excellent writer, whose work, showing Betsy and Tacy as they grew toward adulthood, was very insightful(in certain ways, and for her time), as well as entertaining. I have to reserve judgment about the "classic" nature of her work, but at the same time, I recognize that the roots of the kind of material she(and, to some extent Laura Ingalls Wilder, as well), actually stretch back to Jane Austen and her work, which was aimed at adults and were "novels of manners". They centered around description of relatively "small" incidents, and character development, rather than lots of action and changes of scene. Now, personally, I don't much care for Austen, but she has millions of fans. Perhaps many in the Betsy-Tacy Society also like Austen, but I certainly can't speak for them. I will say this, however. Austen, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, seem to have had a considerable influence on at least one person I know, who is a good friend of Again I emphasize that I have no problem with this, other than, I prefer much larger, more complex canvases, and that's the way I write. It's one reason why I ended up writing a "romantic science fiction" trilogy set in medieval England, around some very real events and people. Which can be frustratingly difficult at times.

I also mentioned in the Instant Classics? post, that there were a number of reissues of books(mostly historical novels, but also some science fiction), by authors such as Norah Lofts, and Anya Seton. I loved these books too, and it was from these authors, I think, that I conceived the desire to write something set in medieval England. Here, too, I'm glad that they're being reissued, but again, in my opinion, these books occupy the same "gray area" that the Betsy-Tacy series does; they are very, very good, but weren't considered anything but "entertaining literature" at the time I remember reading them(but then, historical novels weren't taken terribly seriously, and sometimes still aren't, unless they were, or are, written by men). Are they "classics"? Again, I don't know. And as I said, I'm glad these books are being reissued. There is definitely a readership thirsty for them, and I'm glad of that, too.

But, dear blog readers, I've probably said enough about this. I will leave to everyone's individual judgment, what they consider a "classic" to be, whether it's written for children or adults. In the meantime, I wish you all a prosperous and Happy New Year, and please, feel free to drop in any time during the coming year. There will be many exciting literary and other things going on(I'm sure there will be a bunch more interesting stories about wolves, tee hee!) I extend this invitation especially to members of the Betsy-Tacy Society, and anyone else who thinks I have been overly critical of certain aspects of writing and the writing process.

Looking forward to 2010,

Anne G

More wolf news from all over!

2009-12-29T15:00:00.001-08:00

I've just stumbled across a very interesting blog that tracks the movements of wolves on remote Ellesmere Island. These are wolves of the high Arctic, and they are usually a bit smaller and shaggier than their mainland conspecifics, and arctic wolves, in general, are usually white or almost all white. The Ellesmere Island wolves are no exception. They were tracking a wolf called Brutus(he was radio-collared) and it turned out he and the rest of the pack travel far and wide, even to neighboring Axel Heiberg Island, in search of muskoxen and Arctic hares, their staple diet. It's impossible to track them at this time of year, because the sun doesn't rise there from about the middle of October till the second week or so of February. Besides which the temperatures and other conditions would make this pretty impossible. How the wolves manage under such circumstances, I don't know, but they have to eat, like everything else.

The article is accompanied by some pictures. The first is of the paths followed by Brutus and his pack. These wolves apparently trotted themselves over the ice pack to Axel Heiberg Island, but they didn't stay by the shore. They went inland in search of their meals. The round trip took about a week and covered nearly 100 miles. And the map also shows all the other places they traveled. Wolves do a lot of this kind of "traveling", especially in the Arctic, where their territories need to be quite large, for obvious reasons, if you think about it. Anyway, there's a really nice picture of one pack member(or at least I think it is a pack member; it sure isn't Brutus, because it's a mother with a pup)

Enjoy, she's obviously an Arctic wolf in the Arctic,

Anne G

Have you heard the one about the historian who no longer reads historical novels?

2009-12-26T21:18:00.001-08:00

No, I didn't "hear" that one, I saw it, here! In some ways, I can't blame her. If you're a historian, I guess you're going to be able to pick out what you think are "anachronisms", "modern" thinking in historical times," etc., etc. But when it comes to things like words for "mother", "father", "mama", papa", etc., what's going on here? It's interesting that many languages have "pet" names for mothers and fathers and other close relatives, and a lot of them sound like "mama" and "papa",especially when coming out of young mouths. But Magistra et Mater isn't a linguist, so presumably she wouldn't be aware of this.

It seems to me that what she really wants, and what I've complained about elsewhere is "total" accuracy for whatever period she's reading about. Even in periods where there's an abundant amount of material that can be mined as research, this simply cannot be done. As for as "modern" attitudes go, well, I kind of wonder. If, for example, my heroes had completely "early medieval" attitudes, they would probably be totally unsympathetic. That doesn't mean I don't recognize that such attitudes existed, it just means that at least some of the people are exceptional in some ways(besides, it's "romantic science fiction set in medieval England", not a history treatise, nor a "pure" historical novel. And it has "anthropological" material in it, or I wouldn't otherwise be writing about Dauarga/Neandertals as some of my central characters.

The real problem here is, a kind of academic snobbery, not unlike some "literary critics" who moan about "popular" works like Twilight and the Harry Potter series. These people want "beautiful writing" about "character development", whereas many readers just want A Good Story. This doesn't mean you should write sloppily or have inconsistencies in your story. It just means that there are some things that are more important to a lot of people than they are to these literary snobs(there's no other word for them, in my opinion). Historical novelists, however, do offer an opportunity for the reader to learn "more" about whatever period they are writing about, and it is not uncommon for people who read historical novels to later get into history majors, and become professionals, in some way or another. Similar things have happened to some science fiction readers, who get into science that way.

I think Magistra et Mater has fallen into the common trap of thinking that, since they have become "experts", they must find fault with anything written by a nonexpert. Some fiction, like some historical films(such as Kingdom of Heaven and Braveheart in the movie realm, and things like The Da Vinci Code in the "literary" realm), richly deserves the opprobrium it is given. These pieces are laughably inaccurate, as in Braveheart, and/or they have, as in the case of The Da Vinci Code, very obviously "mined" certain dubious source "works", which are themselves full of historical "junk". However, the author apparently does not recognize that a historical novelist is not a historian, is not expected to be a historian, and shouldn't be held to the same standards as a historian, no matter how "representative" of a time or place any piece of historical fiction is supposed to be. I've seen whines about this in anthropology journals(mainly about the Jean Auel's Children of Earth series. There, the problem is, that the academics in question wish they were as famous, or had made as much money as Mrs. Auel, but they're academics, and aren't as famous as Jean Auel or her series. It is quite possible to make legitimate criticisms of her series -- she has obviously done extensive research, but Ayla, her heroine, is too much of a prehistoric "everywoman" to be completely credible. Yet, if she hadn't written Ayla this way, would anybody have eve read her books? I don't have an answer to this, but novelists must make authorial decisions all the time about things like this, whether it's "accurate" or not. On the other hand, I do think the novelist in question should research as thoroughly as they can, and work the "accurate" bits into the background. It won't be "history", exactly, but it might inspire someone, some day, to research a period on their own or even(gasp!) to become a historian themselves.

Anne G

Medieval peasants weren't the downtrodden souls they're sometimes made out to be

2009-12-22T13:52:00.001-08:00

Or, at least they weren't in England, according to this article! It seems like the peasants liked to dress as nicely as anyone else when they could, and apparently they were often able to put together the money to buy nice accessories, too. These accessories may not have been as "fancy" as the dress and accessories of lords and ladies, but they weren't the plain, dull stuff some people picture them in. Naturally, the "higher orders" thought the peasants should "stay in their place", and churchmen especially, decried "fancy" clothing for the peasant class. And, equally naturally, the peasants didn't agree, and went on buying "fancy" stuff anyway, whenever they could, and wore such things when the occasion demanded. Which might have also been more often than you might suppose, since there were lots of feast days, harvests, etc., where people tried to dress in their best.

Anne G

A little bit for the Neanderphiles

2009-12-22T13:33:00.001-08:00

For the Neanderphiles among my Gentle Blog Readers,this article makes some nice, though relatively "light" end-of-the-year reading. As the John Hawks blog say, there's nothing really new in it, unfortunately.

But why did the article have to be accompanied by such an ugly picture?

Anne G

A wonderfully "noirish" medieval noir

2009-12-18T21:29:00.000-08:00

Westerson, Jeri
Serpent in the Thorns
Minotaur Books, New York, 2009
276 pp.
ISBN 978-0-312-53498-1

Jeri Westerson has done it again! When I read kVeil of Lies, I was impressed. Ms. Westerson writes very well. But some people didn't think Veil of Lies was"noirish" enough, or at least, being set in the Middle Ages, couldn't possibly be a "noir" type novel.

This, of course, is a matter of opinion. To me, "noir" can be set in any time period as long as the person has been "cast outside" in some way. The hero, Crispin Guest, certainly has, though he also most certainly has people on his side, including his (sort of) servant, a boy named Jack, and John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. The only trouble is, the king isn't on his side, because Guest supposedly did a Very Bad Thing(you'll have to read the books to find out what the Very Bad Thing was; I'm not giving this away).

Unfortunately, Crispin Guest is also in a Very Bad Position, though he has friends on various sides, and needs them. And, if anything, he needs friends more than ever in Serpent in the Thorns; in this book, it at least looks like everyone is betraying him, even though he knows, or thinks he knows, who kille a French envoy(he turns out to be wrong on this, but that was due to the fact that the person who came to him in the first place. . . . well, never mind. Again, you'll just have to read the book to find out more.

Westerson does several things I wish I could do, but don't quite seem to be able to manage. First, she writes with "economy". Her novels aren't all that long, but they're very satisfying, and because she is writing a series, she can explore Crispin Guest and his times in more depth than I think a lot of "short" books do. The second thing, which I may get better at over time, she conjures up a "flavor" of fourteenth-century London in a way that is rare, even for people absolutely steeped in the history and culture of some past time.

This, I think, is truly a gift, and Ms. Westerson writes so well, it's a pleasure to read her offerings, and for this reason, I am looking forward to her next Crispin Guest novel with anticipation. She hints that it might be "a little different". I don't know. I'll just have to wait and see.

If there is any flaw in this book, I think it is a minor one -- at the beginnning, it was a little hard to get into, for some reason I can't really articulate. I have no idea why. Perhaps I just had too much on my mind at th e time. However, I got past this rather quickly, and after that, Jeri Westerson's wonderful story simply took over.

Anne G

Another book review, actually two of them at once

2009-12-16T13:23:00.000-08:00

Kyle, Barbara
The Queen's Lady
Kensington Publishers, New York, 2008, 530 pp.

The King's Daughter
Kensington Publishers, new York, 2009, 489 pp.

I don't usually read "Tudor-themed" historical novels, much preferring earlier periods, or reading nonfiction about this period, which I sometimes do for information. However, I more or less stumbled across The King's Daughter, by accident, at my local library. And I'm glad I did, because it was a good, satisfying complex read, and an interesting tale with a heroine who won't let anything get in her way: not her parents, not Queen Mary Tudor, nor anyone else.

The book was so good, that I decided to look at The Queen's Lady, which was the first book in this set. They are both related, as the mother is the heroine in the earlier book, and the daughter in the later one. In both cases, they face religious misunderstanding and persecution for their (eventually) rahter freewheeling beliefs.

As both stories take place at a time when religious passions(and religious persecution) were a huge feature of the European landsacape, there is, as one might expect, an underlying theme that what we now call "tolerance" should be strived for. I think, given the dates of the original publication, and the reissue of both books(they were first written about 15 years ago), that people need to think on this message of toleration once again, given that various religious sects and traditions, and people of no faith or religious tradition, are again all shouting at each other that "only they" are right, and one should "only" follow "them" to true enlightenement and salvation.

This is not an eeasy message for a lot of people to swallow, but I think the books both go a long way to making it easier, at least for those people who happen to read them.

Both heroines, and the men they encounter, at least the heroes they eventually end up with, are engaging, and the stories have lots of overlapping subplots, which tend to involve famous people of the time(e.g., Mary Tudor, about to marry Philip of Spaion, Henry VIII, in the earlier book, Katherine of Aragon, etc.). Kyle picks one or two famous characters to focus on, then exposes them to what she thinks are both their flaws and their virtues. In the case of The Queen's Lady , it's Sir/Saint Thomas More, who stubbornly clung to his version of Christian faith, but in Ms. Kyle's hands, seems to come on like an intolerant fanatic with, uh, problems. Queen Mary Tudor is also flawed; she insists on marrying Philip of Spain, even though she knows this marriage is unpopular with the English in general. It is against these backgrounds(which involve the pursuit of "heretics", among other things), that the heroines of both books must move, and both of them are determined to wade right in.

They wade right in, which gets them both into various kinds of trouble, from which they get dramatically rescued, and the machinations of the villains in both books are dramatically thwarted.

It is these last "twists" in both tales that seems most "artificial", because they almost seem like a kind of "deus ex machina" device in both books, but it more or less works. The heroine has done everything she can do, though perhaps from certain perspectives, the fact that the hero has to step in and save her at the end might seem a bit "forced"

However, oddly enough, I found that both books have a good deal of strength. For one thing, they are longer than most books by relatively unknoown authors, today. They each run about 500 pages, which is very unusual nowadays. My own feeling is, that character and plot, at the hands of a novelist who knows what they're doing(and I think Ms. Kyle does), are better handled at this length, than they are with shorter books. It's really too bad that considerations other than "writing" ones are dominating the market at the moment. You have to practically be someone like Stephen King or Dan Brown, to get away wirh writing a long(er)novel. Which is too bad, because I think there is a place for such work, even among "unknowns". And, quite frankly, a longer book somehow just feels more satisfying.

In any case, I really liked these books, and anyone who likes historical novels should at least take a look. I cannot say how "accurate" they are, although I'm sure Ms. Kyle did her best, by the look of things. But perhaps it doesn't matter. As I've said elsewhere, even in a historical novel, story needs to come first. But that's another "story".
Anne G

Instant classics?

2009-12-12T13:46:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I was hunting around for a book I was reading(from the library), that apparently had been republished. I will be reviewing it, and its sequel, a bit later, once I've finished the book. While hunting around for this particular book, my eye happened to fall on a book(or was it boos?) in the Betsy-Tacy series, by Maude Hart Lovelace. I remember reading many of the Betsy-Tacy series as a child and young teen, and they were itneresting, and memorable in a way. But I wondered as I wandered: why were these being reprinted as adult books? Or, to put it more precisely, books for adult readers? I suppose you could say they were "historical", since they all take place in the early 1900's, up to about World War I.

In this case, it turned out that there is a Betsy-Tacy society, dedicated to preserving Ms. Lovelace's books for posterity. These are people(I imagine mostly middle-class, white women of a certain age), who in some way see "themselves" in a much more "innocent" time and are fond, as many people nowadays claim to be, of "innocent" books. I don't have any quarrel with this per se, but on the other hand, I don't exactly consider the Betsy-Tacy series, nor Maude Hart Lovelace, to be "classic" books, nor is she a "classic" writer, again in my opinion.

But this is just my opinion. There seem to be a lot of reissues, particularly of certain historica/romance type books, for which there is, apparently, a genuine readership. For example, many of Anya Seton's books(including my, and a lot of other people's favorite --Katherine), which is fine, because many of these books wer eout of print for a long time. Same thing with another of my favorite historical writers -- I got the name of one of the characters in my Great Medieval Science fiction Masterpiece with Neandertals from her -- Madselin. The book of that title hasn't been reprinted as far as I know, but another one calledThe Lute Player has. It's an odd book in some ways, as many Norah Lofts books are; there's a streak of, well, weird sour realism in some of them, and I remember this in The Lute Player.

The weird thing about all of this is, none of these books were considered anything but "popular" literature when I was reading them. Maude Hart Lovelace was a children's writer, and I found her books in the children's section of the library. Now they're apparently "for adults". Norah Lofts and Anya Seton were "popular" writers in the 1950's and earlier 1960's, and were certainly not treated as "literary" in any sense of the word.

Not that I'm unhappy with any of this republishing, but what makes a "classic", anyway? I'm old enough to remember reading these books when my hair wasn't gray. And I didn't think much, one way or the other, about them, except that I liked much of Norah Lofts and Anya Seton's writing, and I loved most of their subject matter. I certainly never thought they'd every be considered "classics". but I suppose tastes and times change, and things go in and out of fashion. As I said, maybe it has something to do with some people longing for more "innocent" times, whatever that may mean. As I say, I'm not pointing fingers at anybody in particular.

But it's also interesting that these books were a lot longer than is generally "allowed" nowadays, and some writing conventions that were "allowed" then have fallen out of fashion. Personally, I find longer books a lot more enjoyable, and I'm writing each of my books in this Great Medieval Science fiction Wioth Neandertals triology somewhat longer than is generally "allowed". . . .even ten or fifteen years ago, when the book I am now reading, was first published, a relatively unknown writer could get away with a 400-500-page book.

I also notice that the vast majority of these republishings are historical novels and "romantic-historicals" written by women. there aren't any similar books written by men(I mean certain "guy books" with lots of adventures, etc, not romance or "historical/romantic"). The only other genre I'm familiar with where "classic" authros have been republished is certain s-f collecions of authors like Isaac Asimov(though he has never really gone out of style), or -- all I can think of at the moment is Theodore Sturgeon, and a few others. In this case, the men outnumber the women by a huge margin, because when I frist began reading science fiction, most of the writers were men(with the exception of Zenna Henderson, some of whose work has also been reprinted).

All I can say to this is, the world of book publishing seems increasingly bizarre to me. Agents say that, from unknown authors, they want "short"(e.g. around 300 pages max) books of any kind, yet people complain that they are not getting "enough" new talent. I know economics plays a role in this; it's easier to print a shorter book than a longer one, and more profitable, at least until the author becomes better known. But why can't these guys take a chance? It's not just the publishers; it's the agents as well. And it's so difficult to get published that I see a lot of authors twisting themselves into knots to get themselves published. Again, I don't blame them.

And yes, I see a place for these old "classics" being republished(if you can, truly, call them "classics"). But why the republishing of old authors and titles, when there are a lot of good people who do good writing(and yes, I've seen that, too: I've been critiquing a lot of stuff, lately, so I know. I'm just puzzled, that's all. And I guess it's a puzzle that won't immediately be solved. At least not by me.
Anne G

Elizabeth Chadwick's Medieval Mondays

2009-12-07T17:24:00.001-08:00

Today, Monday, December 7, 2009, the author Elizabeth Chadwick has started a weekly feature on her blog, called Medieval Monday Yes, it will be a weekly feature, if what she says is true. The first one was absolutely fascinating; about a period when men in England grew their hair long, and the Church didn't like it, and what was done about it. Or rather, what the men(at least some of them) did about it. She also has another feature that looks very interesting -- the first and last sentence of whatever material she's been working on. That might be an interesting read, too. I certainly enjoyed it. And I"m looking forward to even more fascinating weekly tidbits.

Anne G

I'm adding to my blogroll again

2009-12-04T20:06:00.001-08:00

Today, I have the privilege of adding another blog to my blogroll. This is a medieval blog, specifically earlier medieval England. It's name is Anglo-Saxon England. It is written by a person who also runs message board called Englistory, which is also very valuable, full of lively discussions, and there are interesting people on it, but it covers a much wider range of historical times and places than just early medieval England. There is a great deal of material on the Anglo-Saxon England blog that is relevant to my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece, either because it covers historical events mentioned in my book(s) or else it gives me background material I can incorporate into it. The blogger also lists the sources used for some of the blogs, and it covers some material that is reasonably accessible to a non-scholar one way, or another. So with a flourish, and a bow, and a ta-da, I will leave things at that, and all the Gentle Reader of my blog has to do is click on the link, if they are interested, and they will see what I mean.

Anne G

The lessons of NaNoWriMo

2009-12-01T13:54:00.001-08:00

As I noted in an earlier post, I am an "official" NaNoWriMo winner, having written over 50,000 words of about half a novel, which is a prequel to my Invaders trilogy. This novel, tentatively called The Tale of Mat Fartraveled, needs a lot of work, so I'm kind of setting it aside for the time being, as it will have to be rather extensively revised, and I will probably change a number of things within. But I haven't decided exactly how, at this point, although I know I"m going to make the beginning a lot shorter, so I can get a lot more into the action. There's way too much "backstory" where there shouldn't be, among other things.

But all of this is another story. As for the things I've learned, it's like this:

At first, I wasn't even sure that I could write 50,000 words in a month, but I did. And I found that I only had to work at this about 2 hours a day, to turn out a decent sized chapter, which I didn't know previously. This is going to change how I work on my other material. Seriously. I should also note that since most writers have other jobs they must perform in order to support themselves and their writing, or they have "family" obligations of one sort and another, it is important to know that you can put aside a relatively short part of your day to devote to your writing, and get a lot done!

Second, I learned writing discipline! I sat down and wrote something, even if it wasn't very sensible, each and every day. Again, this is something for any writer to keep in mind.

Third, I started out basically, with just a single character, who is prominent in the trilogy, but deserved "his own" story. To begin with, I had only the vaguest idea of what this was, though I know how it's going to end -- basically in a way that leads into the trilogy, but can stand on its own reasonably well.

Finally, although I discovered that many people who participate in NaNoWriMo may be competitive overachievers who write great chunks or whole first drafts, those of us who are not competitive overachievers can still accomplish great things. It's not "competition", but persistence that counts! And if you expect to get yourself published and read some day, you must be persistent in pursuing your goal, and you must believe in it as well.

NaNoWriMo is over for this year, but not forgotten, and never will be. I am going to participate again next year, though what I plan on doing probably will be "all" science fiction/adventure, not "historical". In the meanwhile, I hope to get my trilogy in much better shape, though the first draft is in a lot better shape than it was when I first wrote it. For now, I just feel happy that I've accomplished what I set out to do!

Anne G

I did it!!!!

2009-11-28T23:50:00.001-08:00

As of the final week of NaNoWriMo, I've passed the 50,000 word count. My official word count is now 50,603. And I have a nice little ol' Winner's Certificate to prove it, a, well, a picture. Which I'm pasting. Or posting.

More on my thoughts about NaNoWrimo, and what it taught me, as of December 1. For now, I can only say, it was very good discipline!

Anne G

NaNoWriMo, Week Three

2009-11-21T22:56:00.001-08:00

I have successfully managed to make it through Week Three of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month! I am now at 42,118 words. I only have 7,882 more words to go, to make 50,000. And I will probably make that goal a bit before the end of the month, for whatever that's worth. Some people have written much, much more than I have. And even with 50,000 plus words, this piece is nowhere near a "complete" novel, not counting the probably drastic revisions it will have to go through. On the other hand, I have learned a great deal, which, to me is the most important thing. Writers should always be learning things. One thing I've learned is, you can produce quite a bit in a relatively short time, if you put your mind to it. And the discipline of doing this has been very good for me. I produced pages, even when I had my little "computer problem" that kept me, temporarily, off the Internet(I"m still waiting for my ISP to deliver my nice new, improved modem, but that's another story). In any case, I will report back in fuller detail, somewhere around December 1. There are others who will have produced far more than I have, but I don't care. The experience of just sitting down and writing this stuff has been quite an eye opener for me. And I will be reporting on it in some detail on December 1, or thereabouts. Stay tuned.

Anne G

Grrrrr!!!!! More computer woes!

2009-11-18T14:49:00.000-08:00

Something died in my junkpile laptop last night. I'm not, at the moment, sure what it was, except that I can't connect to the Internet(it's a good thing library funding was restored around here, because I'd be in real trouble if I couldn't access a computer somewhere!) You see, it could be the connection card. Or it could<> be my ISP, which said it's upgrading everybody's modens. I upgraded the modem, which they will kindly send me, about Thanksgiving time(wonderful timing, that!) If not. . . .and it's the wireless card. . . .About all I can say is, I'm going to scream. And you're all going to hear it. Computers, unfortunately, are something you can't live with and you can't live without. I find my laptop very, very useful. Until something like this happens1 Ugh, ugh, ugh!
Anne g

The Seattle City Council gave a press conference today

2009-11-16T22:51:00.001-08:00

Yes, that's what they did. I didn't know about it, and I would have continued on in complete ignorance, had it not been for the fact that I had to return some books to the library. I returned them, and then went to the floor where most of the kinds of books I want to read, are kept(and I found some good stuff, too, later). But when I got there, it was immediately obvious that Something Was Going On. The "something" turned out to be a Seattle City Council press conference, which they'd decided to hold in the biggest room in the library. The part where the council members were speaking, was roped off, mainly, it turned out, to keep people from getting in the way of the innumerable news cameras, not to keep out the "hoi polloi". There was a very large pink ceramic piggy bank sitting beside the esteemed council members, and as each council member finished speaking, they dropped some symbolic change into the large pink piggy bank, which, they said, was to be added to the Rainy Day Fund. The reason for this, it turned out, was that our budgetary woes had been sufficient that they had to dip into it to fund some of the many things the City of Seattle must fund, to keep itself running. And one of those things is the Seattle Public Library system. One of the council members(I think it was Richard McIver,but I'm not sure), patted himself on the back for saving most of the hours for the library system as a whole, and keeping most of the library staff jobs. Some libraries are still going to have to cut hours, at least in the next year, but some of them will continue to be open as they are now, the computer system will be there for job seekers, and best of all, there won't be another week-long "furlough" , when the entire system shut down last August.

All of the Seattle City Council member patted themselves on the back for saving the budget in general, and for their particular areas in particular. I"m grateful that they found a way; I'm especially grateful, and thankful that I did my part to encourage this to happen, because unemployment is still high around here, and people are going to need those library computers in order to find jobs -- not everybody has one at home, and I know that many job seekers don't(or may not have access to the Internet, even if they do), much though they might want such things. I am grateful that the Seattle City Council was responsive, and ignored the mayor's original request(he ran for reelection, but was voted out of office in the primaries, because he'd become increasingly unpopular because of decisions like this). I am grateful that we have a library system that, at present, isn't hurting too much, unlike library systems in some other parts of the country. But there's still plenty of work to be done, and what I'm hoping is, that in the coming year, the Seattle City Council and other library-friendly groups, will seek ways to find some alternate system of funding, so that there can be a cushion against harder economic times, in the future. the King County Library system has such an "independent" source of funding, so it never faces these kinds of problems. I hope the Seattle system will work to find something similar.

Anne G

NaNoWriMo, Week 2

2009-11-14T22:01:00.001-08:00

This is the end of Week Two of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. I am modestly -- at least compared with several other writers on that list -- above goal, and will make 50,000 words at the end of the month if I keep on doing what I'm doing now. I'm confident of that. But there are days when I have more trouble writing, than others. Today was one of them. But I know such stuff happens, so it hasn't wrecked my confidence. Now, on to Week Three!

Anne G

Flash! Funding partially restored to the Seattle Public Library!

2009-11-12T22:30:00.001-08:00

In all this dull recessionary news lately, there is a bit of good news here, because the Seattle City Council has voted to restore some funding to the Seattle Public Library System. Which means some of the staff that was going to be cut, will stay on. And all of the hours at the Central branch, and some of the "important" neighborhood branches, will remain more or less the same. Unfortunately, the branch I mainly use is one of the ones that is going to have its hours cut so that it isn't open on Fridays or Sundays. At least not in 2010. I'm heaving a great big sigh here, and we'll just have to keep working on restoring all the funding to all the libraries. It will be an uphill struggle, by the looks of things(but I suppose that at the very least, job seekers will be better able to use the computer and employment search resources they have.

Anne G

Spam, spam, spam!

2009-11-12T22:20:00.001-08:00

I seem to have been having some trouble with spam, sent to this blog, lately. I don't know if any other bloggers I'm connected with have been having this trouble. You, Gentle Reader, won't see it. Because I've been rejecting it every time I see it. Some of it is just laughable. One idiot sent me some spam --in Russian, probably via some basement in Moscow. Or St. Petersburg. Or God-knows-where, Siberia. In any case, the stupid idiot apparently didn't count on the fact I can read Russian(though not so well as I once could), so I understood perfectly, this stupid character's "advertisement" for "sexy girls". Ugh. Nor are you going to see those wretched Viagra ads they used to send to your e-mail. I reject them all, dear, blog reader. And believe me, it's going to stay that way. But, to Blogger -- do something to filter out the crap before it gets here. It's getting tiresome.

Anne G

Anybody wanna buy a very old castle?

2009-11-11T23:20:00.001-08:00

According to Medievalists.net, you can buy a 11th century castle in the old region of Gascony. It looks nice on the outside, and has walls 3 feet thick, so it would probably be quite comfortable in the summer. Unfortunately, it needs a lot of work, and doesn't seem to be too close to any major towns, though the countryside looks attractive, and the local town seems to get a lot of visitors during the summer, thanks to a local festival. But still. . . .if you're interested in the Middle Ages at all, maybe buying this old castle would be worth your money -- if, in these economically stagnant times, you happen to have any.

Anne G

I don't usually do this, but. . . . .

2009-11-11T21:04:00.001-08:00

I'm adding a blog to my blog list. It's not the kind of thing I would normally add to this blog list, but the man does seem quite legitimate, and he e-mailed me nicely, so I feel obliged. Besides, there are some nice pictures of outer space and stars and things there, and I'm sure some Gentle Readers may well be interested.

You can find the blog here.

Mr. Chakravarthy, if you are reading this, I've added you!

Anne G

Wolves are good for the environment

2009-11-10T23:58:00.001-08:00

Farmers and ranchers may not like wolves much, and they're still trying to shoot them in Idaho and Montana(and some idiot or idiots did in a whole pack that used to roam Yellowstone National Park. But they sure are good for the environments they exist in, whether the farmers, ranchers, and wolf haters know it or not. A recent study on Isle Royale, whose wolves are world-famous, seems to show that when wolves chow down on the local moose, they leave bits and pieces behind(not to mention wolf droppings, and such. And these "leavings" are apparently good for the local forests; the trees and other things there are healthier when there are wolves around, chowing down on their moose dinners.

Furthermore, this isn't the only time I've read about things like this. There are wolves on or near the British Columbia coast, that eat a lot of salmon, in the seasons when salmon mate and the runs are abundant. They just wade in and catch themselves as many salmon as they can eat, which is a lot easier than chasing down the "blacktail" deer(they're a subspecies of mule deer), and eating them. Of course, they have to compete with grizzly and "black" bears for the salmon, too, but there, the salmon runs are more abundant than here in the Puget Sound area(and a lot less full of pollution, too). The result of all these leftover salmon carcasses? Again, the forests where wolves leave their bits of salmon(helped by the various bears and perhaps other wild things as well) are a lot healthier than forests where there aren't any wolves. Which suggests that, indeed, contrary to the yowls of farmers and ranchers, wolves are, indeed a Good Thing.

Just an addendum here: I believe the wolves of this part of British Columbia, are classed in the same subspecies as the two packs that wandered into Central and Eastern Washington, and settled in to raise families. There probably aren't many migrating salmon any more, in the nearby streams, but there are plenty of mule deer. So the wolves doubtless eat them. And are probably, even now, starting to make the forests healthier. Which is a good thing, because there are people in those areas whose incomes partly derive from those forests. Even if the local farmers and ranchers don't like this, the presence of the wolves, in the long run, may be healthier for all.

Anne G

NaNoWriMo, Week One

2009-11-07T20:41:00.001-08:00

I've gotten through a whole week of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month! I still don't know what I'm doing, but I've written "above quota" for the month. It's been an interesting experience so far. The good thing about it is, I've learned a lot from just doing this one week. First of all, I've kept at it. I've also learned that, even with just a single character to start with, I can take a whack at writing a novel. Better yet, it has forced me to concentrate on actually writing, in a disciplined way. I usually get out about seven pages per session, and what I have always seems to be more than is required(I keep track of the word count. I'm reasonably confident that I'll succeed in this endeavor, even if, on some days, they words just don't come very easily. They didn't today. And I'm confident that I'll succeed, even if the result isn't very much -- yet. It's basically a very rough draft, and I know I'm going to be changing a lot of stuff for whatever revisions I make. But beyond that, I don't know how the story is going to develop. I know how it's going to end -- very dramatically. But it's a "prequel", so it is also going to tie into what I'm writing now. So far, BTW, I've written 14,433 words, by actual count. That isn't as many as some, but it's above what you're "supposed" to do, so I'm patting myself on the back. We'll see how Week Two goes. I'll report back, naturally.

Anne G

Another ray of hope for the Seattle Public Library System

2009-11-02T14:47:00.001-08:00

Yes, it's true. There is still another ray of hope for our poor, beleaguered Seattle Public Library System. It appears that The Gates Foundation has chipped in $50,000 to help the library's job resource center. It may not do anything to keep libraries open, or prevent a systemwide "furlough" next year, but it may help job-seekers around here. And those folks desperately need some help in these tough economic times(even though they're supposed to be getting better). I certainly hope so. And I hope the Seattle City Council sits up and listens. We need all the help we can get.

Anne G

NaNoWriMo!

2009-11-01T22:26:00.001-08:00

Today is the first of November. And it's also the first day of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. I'd heard about it, maybe two years ago, but wasn't ready to try anything. So I didn't submit any part of my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, the Invaders trilogy(that's my working title). However, as I worked on the Invaders trilogy, certain characters grew and grew and grew. These characters were not originally going to be much of a part of my original work, but Mat Kruvennachild, known on Earth as Mat Fartraveled, ended up being a much bigger character. He needed a book to himself. So now I'm starting to write a prequel, whose central character is Mat. He most definitely has his own story, and it's an interesting one, too, traveling from the Refuge Planet where he was born(though his parents died in a freak blizzard, collecting woolly mammoth underfur), to medieval Earth, whose "modern" humans are always seeming to need help of one kind or another. I plan many adventures for him, and an ending that leads into the Invaders trilogy, though I don't exactly know how that's going to happen. But happen it will. All I have to do, during the month of November, is write a total of 50,000 words. I've written 1836 so far, this first day! I hope I'll end up with more than that, though. And on the first of December, I'll set it aside for a while, go back to working, hopefully finishing the second draft of the first book, then getting into the second draft of the second book, and finishing the first draft of the third. After that, I'll probably just pick it up again. I'm excited. But it will mean that most likely, I won't have too much time for blogging this month, though I will check in to let everybody know how I'm doing, from time to time. And if anything important about Neandertals, or wolves, or libraries, or anything else that tickles my writing fancy comes up, you will be informed.

Anne G

For the Seattle Public Library, perhaps a small ray of hope

2009-10-29T22:59:00.001-07:00

On Monday evening, I attended a Seattle City Council meeting regarding the proposed city budget for the coming year. Due to the economic situation, not just here, but all over the country, in the past year, Seattle city revenue is down, down, down. I pleaded the Seattle Public Library System's case here at that time. I also left a copy of my little speech to them. I couldn't say it all, despite the fact that I pared it down to a bare minimum, as you can only speak in front to he Seattle City Council for two minutes.

Perhaps in response, or perhaps because I sent an e-mail urging them not to cut anything more from the Library System's budget, I got an e-mail from one member of the Seattle City Council, Nick Licata. In conjunction with the Seattle Public Library Board, and the City Librarian, he has proposed several alternatives to these drastic cuts. This would involve spending some money, but it would also have the benefit of keeping the library branches more or less open as they are now, though some staff would still have to be cut. If adopted, it would probably also relieve the library system of being shut down for a week -- again.

Finally, the most important of these proposals is, to create a dedicated fund, similar to what another regional library system has done, which would help to soften the blows rough economic times deliver, and perhaps help people locally in their efforts to find jobs and further their educations. I hope the Seattle City Council is sensible, and passes one of these proposals, and finds a way to create a dedicated fund for the library.

For those interested, here is the proposal Mr. Licata has put forward:

Thanks for writing.

I urge you to write other City Councilmembers and ask them to support my proposals to restore library hours at neighborhood branches in 2010.

As Chair of the Council committee overseeing the library’s City budget, I am sponsoring four proposals to restore library hours and related staff positions. The Library Board and the City’s Librarian submitted these options and support each one for consideration by the Council.

Option 1 calls for $1.2 million to restore all 330 branch hours and 27 related staff positions proposed to be cut by the library in response to the Mayor’s 2010 budget proposal.

Option 2 seeks approximately $1 million to restore 191 hours and some of the 27 staff positions.

Option 3 would cost $860,000 to restore 140 hours and some of the 27 staff positions.

Option 4 requests $433,000 to restore 65 hours as well as some of the 27 staff positions.

Additionally, the Council is asking the Library to explore the creation of a dedicated funding source that could provide more stable and predictable financing in the future.

You may know that the City is required to balance its budget. That means every time the Council proposes to add funding to the Mayor’s budget we must find a corresponding cut. As you might imagine, this poses a significant challenge for me and my colleagues, particularly this year.

As our economy continues to slip, City resources are stretched thinner than ever. The Mayor has again asked all departments to reduce their budgets for 2010, including The Library’s, because 2010 revenues are expected to drop even lower than previously predicted. Our financial forecasts indicate a $72 million revenue shortfall in the city's 2009-2010 biennial budget.

The Mayor asked the Library to identify approximately 5 percent in cuts adding up to roughly $2.8 million. $1.2 million would be saved by cutting library hours - 23% fewer hours than this year. The remaining $1.6 million in savings would come from a one-week closure of the Central Library, management and administrative reductions, putting off replacing staff computers, and absorbing citywide inflation, health care and rate adjustments that don't affect services or staff.

I believe reducing access to books, computers and library services when times are tough is not in the public’s best interest. During economic downturns, demand for library materials and services actually increases because people find themselves more in need of the free high-quality services and materials provided by libraries.

You may wish to consider listening live by phone to any Council budget meetings in progress by dialing 206.684.8566. You can also watch via streaming video by visiting http://www.seattle.gov/council/ and clicking on ‘LIVE! Council Meetings’. To watch previous budget-related meetings, visit http://www.seattlechannel.org/ and enter “budget” in the search field toward the top of the page. Then, in the results, click on “Budget Committee and Events”.

To learn more about the City’s 2010 budget and its schedule, please visit: http://www.seattle.gov/council/.

And finally, you are welcome to contact my staff member Frank Video with any Library-related budget questions you may have. Frank can be reached Tuesdays through Thursdays at 206.684.8849 or frank.video@seattle.gov.

Thanks again for writing.

Sincerely,

Nick Licata

Chair, Seattle City Council Culture, Civil Rights, Health and Personnel Committee

P.S. If you'd like to keep up with Council goings-on, subscribe to my Urban Politics, Seattle’s longest running City Council e-newsletter.

I wrote to the rest of the Seattle City Council in support of these proposals.

Anne G

Did we love Neandertals? Did they love us?

2009-10-29T20:40:00.001-07:00

Sometime late last week, a story started circulating around various science news feeds, that went something like this: "Neandertals had sex with humans". The source of these headlines(and news stories with lots of speculation) was Svante Pääbo, a paleogenetics specialist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany He has done a lot of work on woolly mammoth genomes(he was one of the first to extract and sequence the woolly mammoth genome), and, more germane to this discussion, Neandertals. It seems that Pääbo is kind of hinting around that he's going to publish some bombshell about Neandertal(and "modern" human) mating habits in the paleolithic era.

In the meanwhile, however, several news outlets have glommed onto this story, with various, shall we say, viewpoints. One of the (slightly) more "sober" of these -- at least it does quote Pääbo and some others at some length -- come from the Times Online, and is, I think, fairly sensible, in view of the fact that the actual scientific paper hasn't come out yet. No doubt Svante Pääbo will speak to the press at length, when he is finished sequencing the Neandertal genome. To be fair, his team has sequenced Neandertal mitochondrial DNA, and has come up with a bunch of differences in sequence, though the vast majority of "our" and "their" genome is identical! And, to Pääbo's credit, what he says, in the above mentioned video, and in print, is, perhaps deliberately, inconclusive.

However, this hasn't stopped some people from "getting wild". Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who has long studied Neandertals, seems to think that "if" they "had sex", they must have been like horses and donkeys, that classic example from Biology 101 showing that species are defined as separate(more or less), when they cannot mate and produce fertile offspring. Or at least that's what the above-mentioned Times Online article seems to imply. It should be noted here that I have a lot of respect for Dr. Stringer. He has worked on Neandertals for a long time, and has garnered a good deal of respect in many quarters for this work, which is careful, but which, in my opinion, may be influenced by whatever biases he has acquired over a lifetime of work. And when it comes to Neandertals, there are plenty of biases at work, and always have been, practically from the minute of the first "official" discovery back in 1856. Just to remind everybody, this was three years before Charles Darwin announced his theory of evolution. People then had no idea what human evolution might have been like, and Neandertals were fortunate or unfortunate, to be the first "nonmodern" human type ever discovered. About all I can say to Dr. Stringer is, I would love to show him around various bodies of water in the Seattle area, give him a bird identification field guide, and then ask him what kind of gull he sees walking around the shores of Green Lake or Lake Washington, or the Ballard Locks, or. . . . What he might not realize is, the gull population around here is a "hybrid" one: they are a mixture of "Western" gulls(Larus occidentalis) and "Glaucous winged" gulls(Larus glaucescens). The Puget Sound area is the southern end of the "glaucous winged" gull range, and "Western" gulls have been flying, and settling, north for some time. They meet here. And mate. And produce apparently fertile offspring. The gulls obviously don't care about such minor details as what species they are supposed to belong to. Their only criterion for being a suitable mate is (a) is the potential mate of the opposite sex and (b) do they have pink feet? Both "glaucous winged" and "Western" gulls have pink feet. To complicate things even further, in western Alaska, "glaucous winged" gulls mate with "herring" gulls(Larus argentatus), and yes, they, too, produce fertile offspring. And they both have pink feet. I can imagine the gull gene pool . It kind of boggles the mind. The reason this is possible is, that these gull populations were separated in various places during the last glacial advance, and because of the separations, these gull populations all diverged, genetically speaking -- somewhat. But not enough, apparently, to create anything like a reproductive barrier. Among "generalistic" species, and gulls are pretty darn generalistic, if you've ever seen one in action(they'll eat just about anything), this is not as uncommon an occurrence as one might think. And so, the gulls around here are called "Puget Sound hybrids", because they may look like "glaucous winged" or "Western" gulls, but they have cheerfully been exchanging genes for an apparently not inconsiderable time. After all, there are no glaciers to impede their attempts to mate, at least not at the moment. Besides, evolution is a decidedly messy and complicated business. That includes the human variety.

But if Dr. Stringer still wasn't convinced that such things are possible, I would love to see the expression on his face when, on my theoretical journey, we stopped off at Isle Royale, Michigan. As many people are aware, Isle Royale National Park is world-famous, and its wolves have been studied intensively and extensively for some 50 years now. Except there's one thing about them: These wolves aren't entirely wolf. They have mitochondrial DNA sequences characteristic of coyote populations. And there certainly are coyote populations nearby, though not on Isle Royale itself. But then, the "wolves" of Isle Royale trotted themselves across Lake Superior and onto Isle Royale during an especially cold winter, when that part of Lake Superior froze over,it is thought, in about 1948. And they've been there ever since. They came from nearby Ontario, Canada, where there are also numerous coyotes. . . .and at the time, people thought nothing of trying to shoot every wolf they could shoot. The wolves were probably safer on Isle Royale at the time; there certainly weren't very many of them, and coyotes seem to be somewhat more adept at not getting themselves shot. But that's another story. I should add that, to someone just looking at them, the wolves of Isle Royale look like wolves; they're big, furry, mostly gray, and they regularly hunt moose, when the hunting is good. They don't exactly look like coyotes, other than the general resemblance all members of the genus Canis(dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, "red wolves") have to one another. But they still have these "coyote genes".

And if Dr. Strnger still wasn't convinced, I'd take him somewhere in New England, to pay a visit to the "coyotes" there. The New England coyotes now appear to have some "wolf" genes -- they are somewhat larger, darker, and furrier than their western counterparts. This is partly due to the fact that it generally gets colder in the winter in, say Massachusetts, than it does in the Puget Sound region; coyotes around here don't need to grow a lot of fur in the wintertime, though they do grow some.

The thing here is, at least from what I've gleaned in my readings(and I* keep on reading this stuff as it comes out), the members of the genus Homo, which include both Neandertals and "moderns", had, long before there were any Neandertals, evolved to be "generalistic". That is, they were, and are, capable of, and not too fussy about, eating just about anything, and adjusting t6o whatever environment they found, and find themselves in. True, the origin of both "ancient" and "modern" humans is somewhere in Africa, but people wander, and adapt. And, 300, 200, 04 50,000 years ago, there were small populations scattered all over the Old World. Their numbers generally weren't very big, and in many cases, their populations tended to be local and somewhat scattered. But they were there, and they would follow game, in cold climates and in warm ones. They would sometimes meet each other(as Neandertals and "moderns" may have in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East, but this has always been true for that region). And, I suspect, some of these little groups may have exchanged genes.

It's another question entirely, whether these small populations of whatever kind, were able to pass their "paleolithic" genes to later populations that began to take up farming, and because they had more "reliable" sources of food, were probably more numerous. As it was, Neandertal populations appear to have been quite small and scattered; more so than "modern" ones, who kept coming from Africa anyway. And later Paleolithic "modern" humans(whether or not they had any "Neandertal" genes), were smaller than later "Neolithic"(farming) ones; their genes may well have simply gotten swamped out of existence, just as (in my opinion)Neandertal genes likely were.

Which brings me back to Svante Pääbo and his possible "bombshell". He is probably right that Neandertals and "modern" humans "mixed it up" on occasion when their populations met, in any number of ways and for any number of reasons. And I'm guessing, since both Neandertals and "moderns" had evolved to be "generalistic", that, like the gulls, and coyotes x wolves, were perfectly capable of producing fertile offspring. Whether they had much opportunity to do this is no doubt another story. And, absent a time machine, there is no way of telling if this was the case. But I think the capability was there, if for no other reason than both groups seem to have had broadly similar strategies for accomplishing tasks like hunting or making tools or setting up dwelling places.

This is difficult, nowadays, for a lot of people to believe, because most of them have been told, over and over and over again(if they pay any attention to these things) that Neandertals were fundamentally "different" in some basic way. Well, as far as I, and a number of other people can tell, they just weren't -- at least not in a behavioral sense. Just like wolves and coyotes, or the "hybrid gulls" of Puget Sound. And that belief, based on what evidence I've read in learned papers, gentle reader, is partly why I ended up writing a Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals.

Anne G

My eyes just fell out of my head when I saw this!

2009-10-29T18:50:00.001-07:00

Things are getting really interesting around here! I don't know exactly how this happened, or who picked it up, but the Redheaded Neanderlady is now on this YouTube video about Neandertals. Given that my Great Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals takes place in medieval England, the music is appropriate, too, I guess. Anne G

My plea to the Seattle City Council, to keep libraries open

2009-10-25T23:36:00.001-07:00

This is a copy of my plea to the Seattle City Council, to keep the Central Library, and 21 branch libraries, open for the same number of hours they are now open, and to prevent, if possible, another weeklong "furlough" where the library system shuts down completely, some time in 2010. Too many people are getting hurt here. But this is just my personal plea.

TO: Members of the Seattle City Council
FROM: Anne Gilbert
RE: The Seattle City Semiannual Budget and the Seattle Public Library System
DATE: October 26, 2009

I am here, once again, on behalf of the Seattle Public Library System.
It has come to my attention that once again, even more drastic cuts in the budget of our library system are being contemplated for the coming year. These cuts will result in an approximate 25% reduction in hours for all libraries. It will:

Also result in another weeklong “furlough” for the entire library system
Closure of 21 of the 25 neighborhood branch libraries for two days, Fridays
and Sundays,
And a resultant loss of access and services for the many people who need them

This is utterly unsupportable. As I’ve noted earlier, I’m a writer who frequently uses the library system for research and other purposes. I have a friend, also a writer, who, like many people at the moment, is looking for a job, and has not yet found one. She is one of the fortunate ¬¬– she has a computer at home. But I met one job-seeker downtown, who was not so fortunate. He was looking for a job, and the only other place he could go was WorkFirst. I know from experience, as he did, that there are far fewer computers in the WorkFirst branches, than there are in any branch library, or the central library, but there was nothing any of us could do about this. The WorkFirst offices often have less adequate or comprehensive job-search facilities than the Seattle Library system. In this economy, with so many out of work, and therefore unable to contribute to the budget through their taxes, it is a terrible thing to shorten hours and services, even on restricted budgets. For the sake of those job seekers, for the long-term sake of our budget, and the cultural future of this city, please do not cut the library’s budget any more than it already has been.

Thank you.
Anne G

I met a writer in person today, and it was an awe-inspiring experience!

2009-10-16T22:50:00.001-07:00

I met Nan Hawthorne in person for the first time today, and I was absolutely amazed at the experience. It took me a while to get to the place where she had some artwork exhibited, and one of them was a lovely creation she'd crocheted out of various purple and "blue-family" yarns. She is really a talented woman, and has lots of interesting ideas. I wish I could get her with my other writing friends. I think they would all hit it off very well. Besides, she, and one of the other writing friends, likes cats. Nan has four of them. It's funny how writers, anthropologists(and a lot of people who "do" prehistoric humans), seem to mostly like cats. Don't ask me why. I like cats, too. Of course, I also like My Beloved Wolves, but I wouldn't keep a wolf in a house. The wolf would be unhappy. But that is another story entirely. Anyway, I have a feeling my other writing friends would like Nan. I sure do. We're on the same page about a lot of things. We will, of course, have to find a way to meet more often. Don't ask me how, don't ask me when, but it's going to happen! Oh, and the meeting also gave me a frame for my upcoming Seattle City Council speech on behalf of funding for the Seattle Public Library. You see, Nan Hawthorne has "low vision", and this exhibit and meeting was in the Seattle Public LIbrary's Talking Books outlet, a nice place once you find it. But that, too, is another story. I'll probably end up blogging about that, too! Stay tuned.!

Anne G

Independent publishing has promise, but also pitfalls

2009-10-15T22:20:00.001-07:00

I recently read a book by a first time author, that was independently published, or "self-published" if you prefer. I won't go into its plot or characters, except that it was a book I generally liked. I then let someone else borrow it. I don't know whether this was a mistake or not, because the person who borrowed it, and then returned, who is a writer, gave their professional opinion. It was not as good as mine. Now I understand that different people have different tastes in fiction, and the reader didn't have any "trouble" with the substance of the story. However, this reader was much more critical of things that I noticed, mostly about the struggles of this character in an alien environment, than I was. The reader of the book felt that the author had just, as they put it, "taken a novel writing course and written a bunch of character notes, to fill in the character, but didn't really fill them in, in depth. What I noticed was that the lead character seemed to have an awfully easy time adjusting to the alien environment in which they found themselves, which did seem somewhat "off" too me, and probably should have been shown more. But the book was reasonably well-written, and enjoyable in its way, so I can say I rather liked it, even if my borrowing friend didn't, and I wish that author well in the future.

There were, however, things about the book that were kind of annoying. They weren't very obvious, if you weren't looking for them, but they were there, and I think this can be a real problem in "independently published" books. In this case, there were paragraphs in the book that looked as if the line heights were somewhat different. Only a little, but they kind of stood out, as if whoever was responsible for printing the book had violated some computer code, or the code got oddly "translated" from one word processing program to another. This sometimes happens to me, when, on occasion, I am sending copies of the second draft of the first book of my Invaders trilogy, to people I trust to tell me how well the story flows. I should note that I need to know this so I know where to tighten, loosen, consolidate,etc, in the next draft, which, I hope, will be good enough to peddle to agents. Naturally, I want the writing as smooth and polished as possible, so the agents will want to read it, and sell it. It's hard enough as it is for a first time, unknown author, to do this.

At this point, I should say that I think that "independent" publishing is probably going to end up being a pretty big chunk of the book business in the not-too-distant future. It may not be for everyone, but because of the nature of the publishing business today, there are authors who may be able to make some money from the "niche" markets they write for, or their work just doesn't fit neatly into some category. My fiction, for example, is set in historical time, but it's not strictly "historical novel". And it's not set in ever-popular Tudor times(I think this time period is way overdone, myself, but that's probably just me). I have a strong, and I hope, interesting female lead character, but Illg is not, shall we say, strictly "human"(at least not "modern" human, though she acts in recognizable and understandable ways). So my book(s) might not "fly" with a lot of agents and publishers. And I've heard similar things from other authors, and not just here in the US, either. So, for many people, "independent" publishing might well be an option. Whether it may be for me, I don't know. We'll see. But in any case, I want whatever I finally get published, to look professional, as if a "real" publishing house did it.

Which brings me to another problem. I read another "self published" book not long ago. The writing and characterization was much more to the taste of the aforementioned, nameless critic, I think, but for various reasons I won't go into here, the author felt that their work was too "niche-y" to be "traditionally" published. So the author published the book on their own. Which was fine -- but. . . .

While the dialogue and paragraphs were recognizable as dialogue and paragraphs, they weren't formatted properly. There were no indents at the beginning of each line, either in the dialogue or in paragraphs describing actions or scenes. It basically looked as though it had been originally published to some web page.

Again, I'll recount my own experiences here. When I first started writing, I "fully justified" my pages, more or less like a legal document. I didn't know, at the time, that when writing fiction or most nonfiction, you are supposed to left-justify your writing, but in the first critique group I joined, someone who had once been a copy editor or the like, rather quickly pointed this out to me. So I changed to left justification. The other thing I did, which this copy editor didn't notice, was that I put "widow and orphan" spaces in the pages. Nobody pointed this out to me, but it began "arranging" paragraphs in a really weird-looking way. It was so weird-looking that I soon abandoned this, and my pages looked much, much more like a "professional" job, even though my writing at the time was hardly "professional". Heck, I'm still learning. But at that time, I was pretty much at the "apprentice" stage. Or worse. And if I'd been stupid enough to try to self-publish that material at the time, and then try to use that as a way to interest an agent, they probably would have thrown me out the door. Professional agents notice these kinds of goofs. And they don't like them. Which is one reason why, still, many people who have self-published, don't get anywhere.

Maybe this is "too picky" on the part of agents, but I know for a fact that agents have to wade through a lot of literary "slop" before they find something they think they can sell. Not only that, but they tend to complain about such things, though usually not from authors who are at that point, trying to self publish.

But there is also something else going on here. And it's my guess that a lot of would-be writers may just not know the "rules" here. I also critique, and have my own work critiqued, on some web sites. The critiquers are good at what they do, most of them not being "professionals" or published, but it kind of seems like they don't understand certain formatting conventions. And in some cases, they may not even care. For example, I've read manuscripts where , when the author starts a new scene, they don't indent the first paragraph. Why? These people aren't writing "arty" stuff that deliberately defies literary convention; they're writing what are supposed to be readable, "popular" stories. Some of these same writers do things like indicate scene changes by a space and asterisks -- in the middle of the page! Again, I've been in other critique groups where the writer tries to justify this by saying they "like" it, but in the case where the author tried to justify this,they were writing something that was supposed to be literary fiction, with an overlay of "mystery". The author deliberately wanted this "artiness". But normally, when you shift a scene, you just leave several blank spaces, if it's in the middle of a page. Only at the end of a page, or the beginning of the next, do you put asterisks if there is a "scene break". That's because, when you turn the page, that's the only way you know there is a scene break! Otherwise, this may confuse the reader. They might start asking themselves, whether this is another scene! And if you send this kind of thing to an agent? It could possibly be a deal-breaker.

I'm not against new ways of doing things, as long as they "do something" for the writing, and the person doing the writing knows what he or she is doing. But these writers don't appear to have a clue about these simple conventions of formatting. For a novel, you don't make your work look like a web page. You don't have lines that are different heights or sentences in formats different from one another(e.g. one paragraph in Times New Roman 12 and another paragraph in Arial italics, unless you're doing something like having the person write a letter or the writer visualizes, say, a poster or a sign at a demonstration or the like. If writing is self-published this way, it's very unlikely that any agent will fulfill their dream of picking it up and being impressed, and successfully peddling it to a publishing house. However, if they pay attention to the normal conventions, and make sure that whatever they published doesn't look like an "amateurish" job, they may well have a chance, especially as markets change, open up, and readers become more aggressive about making their buying choices.

Anne G

Another BIG woo-hoo!

2009-10-13T23:43:00.001-07:00

I just found out today that The Writer's Daily Grind has been pegged at Spot 91 by something called Wikio! They have a category, Literature, and that's where I'm 91! As far as I can tell, the site is legitimate, and there seem to be a fair number of interesting blogs on all kinds of subjects. I'm at 91, because I just got put there, and there is some kind of gadget I can put on my blog that recognizes this. The only trouble is, so far, I've only been "indexed" but not "ranked", at least not officially, so I can't download the gadget or widget or whatever it is. But still. . . . along with the 11 followers I've accumulated(thank you very much, followers, please feel free to spread the word), I feel that at last, after a little over two years of hard work, I'm finally getting recognized. Woo-hoo!

Anne G

(Gendered) POV preference? Why?

2009-10-11T23:39:00.001-07:00

I subscribe to a lot of e-mail lists, all related, in various ways, to my writing. For example, I'm on a very lively anthropology e-list, full of anthropologists, naturally, who end up discussing everything under the sun, including science fiction on occasion, and prehistoric humans, including Neandertals, on more than one occasion. Then there is a more "generalized" list, that started out as a "defend the theory of evolution" list, and "fight creationists". That also is a lively discussion group. Sometimes I get information, or links to information, from these sites, that I can use on The Writer's Daily Grind. I never know, from day to day, what will pop up! But I also subscribe to several writing-related e-mail lists, and here, the discussions, mostly writing-related, can get really interesting. For example, on one such list there has been a recent, ongoing discussion of POV characters in fiction. This isn't, as is often the case, a discussion about the advantages of a first-person v. a third-person POV(just to let everyone know, "first person" is a narrative from the POV of the main character; the kind that has him/her describing what happened or happens to him/her; third person is the more common narrative style). In this case, the discussion revolved around preferences for a male or female as the main character, particularly in historical novels(but this might apply more broadly, as well).

It's an interesting discussion, for several reasons. First, in relation to historical novels, it seems that of those written nowadays, the majority are written about female characters. Supposedly the reason for this is, and there's probably some truth to it, that the majority of those who read historical fiction are women, and presumably women relate better to the lives of other women. Second, and this is where it got interesting, there is a perceived bias against male main characters! But here is where it gets really interesting -- some readers will read only fiction with a female protagonist, some others will only read or write fiction with a male protagonist.

Personally, I'm really puzzled by this. Which is odd, since I grew up in an era when the majority of "serious" writers, even of historical fiction, were men. there were writers like Samuel Shellabarger, Lawrence Schoonover, Irving Stone, Thomas Costain, all to varying degrees, popular authors when I was young, and when I was a little older, I read many of their works and liked them. But they didn't write about women to any extent. There were some women historical novelists. Norah Lofts comes to mind -- and then there was Anya Seton, of Katherine fame(though she wrote a number of other works as well). And they wrote almost exclusively about women in historical contexts. They came later, and by the time they came along, I believe the genre had begun to change. However, at the time, these women were not considered truly "serious" writers, though their work, especially that of Anya Seton, seems to have influenced some romance writers, in a roundabout way. But by and large, this writing world was very "gendered": it was before anybody had heard of feminism, for better or worse.

That was a good many more decades in the past, than I care to think very much about at this point, and since then, things have changed. For one thing, the publishing world is pretty "bottom line" oriented, and anybody that writes today, if they're writing historical novels, has to cater to that market. In other genres(except for romance, generally speaking), the writing world is far less "gendered" in this way; readers of mysteries, science fiction, thrillers, etc., seem not to care about the biological sex of the protagonist as much as how good the story is, although male writers still tend to write male characters for the most part, and women tend, though not so sharply, to write about women protagonists, though this is a lot more evenly split, as far as I can tell.

So what's up with people -- particularly some women, who can "only" write or read male characters, or who can "only" write or read female ones? This is what puzzles me. As I said, I grew up in a really gendered era in "popular" fiction, but I read both male and female POV's and enjoyed both, if the writer was good enough. This attitude informs my own writing; my works up to now have involved female protagonists, but for the next month, I'm going to start writing about a character from my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, who just grew and grew and grew on me, and I had to write (gulp!) his story. One of my earliest stories, which, with much revision, I'll probably get back to eventually, have two equally "protagonistic" characters, one male, the other female. I just can't write any other way.

So again, what's with people who can "only" read or write one sex? I have some ideas here. First, those people who feel they can "only" write about males(especially if they are women), may, unconsciously or half-consciously, think that "only" men did "interesting" things in the past(I'm addressing readers or writers of historical fiction here). Some of these people seem to be entirely unable to imagine a woman doing anything -- other than standing around and waiting for her "man" to come home. I read a novel like this, some years ago, that was like this, except, oddly enough, it was written by a man. Which brings me to another point that seems to be the case for some (male) writers: a fair number of them seem quite unable to conceive of, or write about, a well-rounded female character. The late Robert Heinlein was notorious in this regard, but then, in his heyday, sci-fi was largely a "boys club". But at the present, Bernard Cornwell has much the same problem; he has women characters, but they're mostly, well "flat", and relatively interchangeable. I hasten to add that not all male writers have this problem; some of them are much more sensitive to nuance, both in their own sex and among women. These male writers are concerned about what makes a person interesting, not what sex they happen to be, so they probably don't think that just because somebody happens to be female, that "nothing" interesting happened to them. These writers also know that there are plenty of boring men around.

But when female writers or readers can "only" conceive of male protagonists, I begin to wonder. I know that, when I was growing up, it was quite normal for girls to wish they were boys, at least as children. Oddly enough, though I grew up in "sexist" times, I never wished I was a boy. I think what is or was going on here, though, was a desire by a lot of girls, to be able to do the things boys did or do. There's less problem with this nowadays, at least in many of the more "developed" parts of the world, but this is a pretty recent development, and there's still plenty of pressure on women to "succeed" in only one way. There are two ways women who feel so pressured(unconsciously, perhaps), can react. One way is to "identify" with the "male"; if they're readers or writers, whatever a man, fictional or real, does, is perceived as "interesting", women, well, a lot less so. On the other hand, I discovered on this same list, that there are women who will "only" read or write a female protagonist. I think these women are actually(again, whether consciously or unconsciously) reacting to a perceived "male bias" here, and possibly feel they can "identify" more readily with a female character, whether they're writing or reading one. Either way, I think such readers and writers may be limiting themselves. If they're writers, limiting oneself in this way or any other way, is, in my opinion, absolutely deadly.

I think, in my own case, I have been blessed with a very good imagination. As I was maturing, but long before I started writing, I started half-consciously training my mind to be "open" to the possibility that other people, in circumstances different from my own, may see the world in ways different from the way I do. This is, I might add, partly a function of my "anthropological" background; different cultures have different ways of conceptualizing the worlds they live in, sometimes quite startlingly different, but often, surprisingly the same. And so, in my travels through the world I knew, I gave myself "thought exercises".

Let me give you an example of one of them. Some years ago, when my daughter was small, I planted a small garden every summer. In late April or early May, I would go to a particular gardening store to buy tomato plants. This gardening store was located in a part of Seattle which had, by then, become populated by various "minorities", and to get there, I had to take a bus. Now what was very interesting was, when I got on the bus, just about everybody on it was "white". But when I got off the bus, in the neighborhood of the gardening store, I was just about the only "white" person! Nobody was rude or unkind; not a deplorable word was ever spoken. People just wanted to get wherever they were going. But this experience got me to thinking. What would it be like for one of those "nonwhite" people to do the reverse, e.g., be the only "nonwhite" person in a "white" area. And I tried to let my imagination flow here, tried to imagine my life in someone else's skin -- literally. It was an interesting, and sometimes uncomfortable experience. But I persisted. I also began trying to imagine what I'd be like if I'd been a man rather than a woman. Would I have turned out more like my brother, a gentle, quiet person, or more like my father, who liked to be the center of things, or something else entirely? That, too was an interesting, and sometimes uncomfortable experience.

But as a writer, the cumulative effects of these thought exercises have served me well, I think. For one thing, it is impossible for me to conceive that a woman(or a man) would necessarily be "uninteresting" simply because of their biological sex. It's true I've started out with female characters, who are, at least to me, very interesting, but I hope I've made my male characters interesting, too. They are all individuals, and while, in my Invaders trilogy, the men and the women usually have different "trajectories", and they tend to be people of their time and place, with the general expectations of their time and place, that doesn't mean they don't do interesting things getting to where they want, or ought, to be. That is how I think writing should be done, and while I don't claim to be a "superior" writer, whatever that may mean, I strive to follow this. Again, in my opinion, if a writer doesn't try to do this, to stretch their imaginations in some way, then their limitations may be their shortcoming as a writer.

Anne G

In praise of Living the History

2009-10-11T22:33:00.001-07:00

Elizabeth Chadwick's Living the History blog is one of the best, and most accessible blogs, for anyone interested in fiction, and/or medieval history, that I know of. She also has a website(which you can access once you get to the blog), which is full of research material she's gathered, for anyone to use. Today, I just want to post a short note on her latest blog entry, a biography of John Marshal. John Marshal was the father of the more famous William Marshal. For those interested in medieval history, and the famous figures of the period, I can't think of a better place to begin your research. Thank you very much for your blog and your website, Elizabeth Chadwick!

Anne G

NaNoWriMo!

2009-10-08T22:20:00.001-07:00

I have done something I've never done before. I've signed up for National Novel Writing Month, which begins in November. That's what NaNoWriMo You're supposed to write 50,000 words of a novel -- just write it, no editing at all -- during the month, till you get to 50,000 words. So, dear readers and followers, I probably won't be doing quite as much blogging as I have in the past, but that's all right. I will keep everyone updated on my progress, and I will let people know some of the things I'm doing or planning to do.

At the moment, I know what I want to do: begin to write the "prequel" to my Invaders trilogy, which will be about some of the characters when they were younger; certain others who are "secondary" in this trilogy or just mentioned, are going to be much more "central" and there may or may not be quite the mix of "historical" and "made up" characters I have now. Heck, I can't even think of a title for this prequel, but never mind. I'll start doing a little planning in a bout a week or so, and let people know how that is going. I do have a possible couple of "key scenes" around which I'm going to start building the story, and I'll probably let y'all know my struggles with those! But right now, it's all a "blank".

Still, if I manage to finish all 50,000 words, and I think I will, I will be quite satisfied, having gotten just that far! So, wish me luck, followers and readers! I think I'm going to need it!

Anne G

The "mindset" issue, from a slightly different point of view

2009-10-06T23:38:00.001-07:00

I was going to post about that Anglo-Saxon hoard that was found a couple of weeks ago, and wasn't able to get around to it. I was also going to say a little something -- since I follow paleoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology, though mainly with reference to Neandertals -- about the complete description of the ancestral Ardepithecus ramidus, now know affectionately as "Ardi". That kind of escaped me too, and besides, I don't have much to say about it, other than the description of this find, though the fossil's existence has been known for years -- was pretty awesome, in my opinion.

However, something happened last week which sent me off on a different angle, although it does relate, tangentially to the Anglo-Saxon hoard. There is a woman I know, who has very strong opinions about just about everything. She reads a lot, sometimes rather odd things, at least for her. We were conversing, and she happened to mention the discovery of Nero's revolving palace which he never used, apparently, because he got killed before he ever used it. And no other Roman emperors used it, either, apparently. I had seen media reports of it, but didn't react much, one way or another. Greco-Roman stuff just doesn't appeal to me all that much. However, I mentioned that I'd also read and heard about this Anglo-Saxon hoard of gold things and enameled-looking things. I also mentioned that I thought they were quite beautiful and well-crafted.

"Yeah, it's pretty militaristic, isn't it?" she replied. Here I must mention two things: First, this lady knows nothing about medieval times, particularly not the Anglo-Saxon period of England. And the hoard did contain a lot of sword hilts. But my first thought was "militaristic?" Huh? I wouldn't have described it this way. To be fair, this woman not only is very vocal in her opinions about things, she has a rather narrow concept of what she considers acceptable -- in modern terms. And this brings me to the whole problem of mindsets, once again. For this woman is projecting her own ideas about acceptable norms, in modern times, onto (a) a society she knows absolutely nothing about and (b) onto people who probably had absolutely no concept at all of "militarism". And it is in modern projections like these, that the "mindset" problem arises. When you're writing or dealing artistically with some past society, even if what you're writing isn't strict "historical novel" material, you have to accept that people in this past, whatever it is, often accepted things that people today tend to find unacceptable. This is true, even when we speak of the recent past.

I can give two examples here: I grew up at a time when it was widely accepted by a great many people, that certain "minorities" didn't, for example, have the right to live in, or even visit, certain areas. When I was a child, you rarely, if ever, saw people of African descent visiting the local zoo. In that community, it just wasn't done. And this was in "liberal" Seattle. But a lot of people accepted this as natural or normal. Many people, both male and female, accepted the idea that women "shouldn't work"; they should just stay home, be housewives, and have a bunch of kids. There are still people who believe this, but they are, nowadays, a distinct, though sometimes vocal, minority. And times have changed, at least to some degree, for the better; women work in all kinds of jobs that would have been inconceivable for them in the 1950's and early 1960's. Most of us, in the Western world, are glad these things have changed for the people who were the objects of such thinking. But the point is, these two examples suggest a fairly common mindset at the time(though there were others, as well).

Similarly, in Anglo-Saxon times, I am pretty sure that an "anti-militarist" mindset, even among churchmen and women, would have been quite inconceivable. It was not so much that their militaries wanted to fight; just as today, it was better to avoid wars if you could. Besides, a local king or lord had to have fighting men, partly to protect him, and partly to keep whatever enemies he might have, away from the population. This was necessary for two reasons: in most parts of the medieval world, at least until fairly late, government pretty much consisted of whatever the king or local lord could manage to enforce. If he was weak, people would tend to go their own way. And strength often demanded armies or fighting men willing to stand behind the king or local lord -- and willing to fight.

Certainly what any local population got out of this might be said to be debatable. If some war did break out, clashing forces might burn everything in their path, but the path might well be local and narrow. Some populations might even have felt protected, knowing the king or local lord had a competent fighting force at his command.

Which just goes to show: yes, various mindsets do differ from era to era, but they change. And in any given period, there is not just one "mindset", there are a lot of them. Still, this doesn't give me, the writer, a license to project modern views about war and fighting onto people living in Anglo-Saxon(or any other) times. Fortunately, the woman I began my essay with, doesn't write anything but reports about her specialty, and it's not medieval history or paleoanthropology. And perhaps equally fortunately, I know something about these times, and know that people thought somewhat differently about things, than we do today. But then, I'm writing a Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece, and she's not. Fortunately.

Anne G

Woo-hoo! Some good library news for a change!

2009-09-29T23:59:00.001-07:00

Some good news has come out of the library rubble of woes lately. Yesterday, when browsing one of my local branches, I found a copy of Elizabeth Chadwick's The Greatest Knight, her recent biographical fiction about William Marshal. It's not that new, I guess, but it was recently reissued -- in the US -- in paperback, and our local system obtained a copy. This, after I won the same paperback version, by writing a reply to a blog about it. Haven't gotten around to reading it though. So many books, so little time. Anyway, it's not all gloom and doom there.

Anne G

Worse library woes

2009-09-29T23:46:00.001-07:00

Last week, II heard some more really bad library news. The Seattle Public Library system budget is going to be whacked, again!. What this means, and you can read all about it here, that out of the 26 branches of the Seattle Public Library system, 21 of them, all in neighborhoods, will have their hours cut so that they are open only five days a week. They will be closed on Fridays and Sundays. The mayor, who released the proposed budget last week, has also proposed that another week-long furlough be put in place in 2010. This means all libraries will be shut down, and the employees will be without pay, for that week. This, in possible addition to other furloughs city employees are supposed to take. Including, no doubt, library workers of all kinds.

At the same time, as I understand it, the police department will get an addition of several people hired, to form an anti-gang unit. Now don't misunderstand. I certainly don't want gangs running around shooting people. And these creepy characters don't just belong to one group. There are, unfortunately, gangs "all over the place", of every race, color, creed, or whatever. And they need to be dealt with. But why, if the budget shortfall for the City of Seattle is so desperate, can't the police and fire department budgets be kept at the level they are now, without additionally hiring people? Neighborhood policing, as has been done in the past, can go a long way to keep these problems at bay. Furthermore, by closing neighborhood libraries(and negatively impacting other social services as well), these budget cuts may actually be exacerbating the problem of gangs and other criminal activity. It seems to me, that if libraries are kept open, there would be places for kids who perhaps don't think they have other options at home, to actually go and be safe! And what about the kids who want to do their homework, stay in school, and do decently in life? What about their possibly unemployed parents looking for a job to support their families? The Seattle Public Library system has one of the best job resource centers in the region. And I know from listening to people on the first day of the last furlough, in August, that there are people out there who need that resource. They need the computers, too, to look for the jobs. Not all of us are lucky enough to have home computers connected to the Internet.

It seems to me that in times like these, when "everyone" is hurting, that governments, both local and national, tend to get awfully "shortsighted". It's very easy to cut those things considered "nonessential", and there are, unfortunately, plenty of people who consider libraries "nonessential". But they aren't. Because libraries are no longer just repositories for books, although they serve that function, too. They are learning and community centers, open to all. And all kinds of people use them, every day, all year round. In this sense, libraries are absolutely vital to any thriving community, and they are vital to the overall health of any community. I can't emphasize this enough. This doesn't just come from me, it comes from people I talk to. Being a writer, I feel it's important to talk to lots of people, and I'm happy to do that. Almost all the people I've talked to are very sympathetic, and understand full well what libraries mean to a community, and I"m not just talking about people who sign the petitions I'm trying to get delivered to the Seattle City Council before October 25, when there will be a meeting, which I will attend, and make yet another speech. They are vital to everyone, whether they know it or not. All I can say at the moment is, shame on the mayor, and I now understand why he's unpopular and has been voted out.

And yes folks, just to letcha know, I'm also going to e-mail every Seattle City Council member, and the mayor, too, and let them all know exactly how I feel!

Anne G

Neandertals were a naughty bunch?

2009-09-24T23:05:00.001-07:00

Well, again, John Hawks doesn't think so. He has some rather sharp comments about a silly headline on the BBC, and some sober research about digit ratios in men, that are supposed to imply something about mating habits. The BBC seems to think (a) either Neandertals just kind of randomly mated, or else the "guys"(the brutes!) kept harems of women. Hawks didn't say anything about this, but in a "generalized forager" type society such as was probably likely among Neandertals, I don't think either mating strategy would have been very practical. It isn't generally the case among known, historical foraging people. Also, as Hawks points out, certain finger ratios in men are supposedly associated with being gay. As he also points out, the headline could have been something like "Neandertals were gay!!!!" Yikes. Though to be fair, and I'm following Hawks here, this silliness isn't the original researcher's fault. Now I'm wondering: what gets into some "science reporters", when it comes to Neandertals?

Anne G

Wolf x coyote hybrids find a niche in the Northeast?

2009-09-24T22:53:00.001-07:00

The John Hawks weblog, which I think is one of the best science blogs around, and which I check daily, often has interesting stuff in it. Dr. Hawks is a biological anthropologist working at the University of Wisconsin, and he has a range of biological anthropology-related interests, including, of course, the very important subject of human evolution. He is also very interested in the subject of gene "introgression", and he spends a good deal of time writing about it. Genetic introgression , for those who have never heard of this term, is basically the crossing-over of genetic material from one closely-related species to another. Some species of organisms are well-known for interbreeding and producing perfectly fertile offspring. These species are very closely related; perhaps some of them are not "species" at all, but "subspecies", that is geographical variants of a very widespread, and adaptable larger species. Where I live, there are two species or subspecies of gulls(though field guides always list them as two species!): "Western" gulls(Larus occidentalis) and "glaucous winged" gulls(Larus glaucescens). They interbreed, and for all practical purposes, the gulls in the Puget Sound area are considered a hybrid group, no matter what they "look like". The thing both species(or subspecies, or whatever they are), have in common is -- pink feet! Another complication, though it doesn't happen around here, is that "glaucous winged" gulls will also perfectly happily mate with "herring" gulls(Larus argentatus) in Western Alaska, at least. "Herring" gulls also have pink feet. And all these gulls are, shall we say, opportunistic generalists in their habits, and are very widespread across any number of habitats. Which means that the "species" are known to exchange genes far and wide. There are "glaucous winged" gulls in the Queen Charlotte Islands that have "western" gull genes, though the northern limit of "western" gull range is-- you guessed it -- Puget Sound. And the southern limit of "glaucous winged" gull territory is Puget Sound and coastal Washington State.

I go into such detail about these apparent species "mixtures" because while this idea is fairly new and controversial, at least in some circles, it appears that these sorts of "mixings'" are more common in nature, at least under certain circumstances, than a lot of people like to suppose. And it's well-known among canid specialists(that is, people who study wolves, coyotes, jackals, etc), that all members of the genus Canis(wolves, coyotes, jackals, "red" wolves, etc). are "interfertile", that is, they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. And it's also well-known that some 75% of all "wolves" around the Great Lakes area, have mitochondrial DNA sequences associated with coyotes. It appears that all the famous Isle Royale wolves, whose ups and downs have been closely monitored for some fifty years now, have "coyote genes", apparently inherited from some female coyote who mated with a male wolf in Ontario. Some of the descendants of this pairing are the wolves who now inhabit Isle Royale. It is also thought that these pairings are or were "one way", that is, female coyotes x male wolves. In a lot of cases, this may well be the case. But now the John Hawks weblog has comments about a paper, and links to another paper about wolf/coyote hybridization that appear to show that many of the "coyotes" in the northeastern quadrant of the US have "wolf" genes. I'm not surprised at this, not at all. Like the aforementioned gulls,both wolves and coyotes are opportunistic generalists. Both live in a variety of environments, and there are a number of places where their environments overlap. Coyotes are smaller in size and lighter in weight, and tend, as a rule to go after smaller prey than wolves, but otherwise, their habits are much the same: they howl, form packs, hunt together as a pack on occasion(though they do more "lone" hunting, for obvious reasons, than wolves), have the same gestation periods at the same times of year, depending on climate and latitude, dig dens and tend their young in pretty much the same way, etc., etc. Coyotes, to the surprise of many who don't know much about the general habits of the genus Canis, not only form packs, but, at least until wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, hunted larger prey like elk and deer there(not quite as efficiently, though; that was one reason why wolves were reintroduced). The "coywolves" of the northeastern US and southeastern Canada hunt deer, and are apparently good at it. At the present time, though, these canids are generally classified as coyotes. They intermediate in size between coyotes and wolves, have somewhat darker and furrier coats than coyotes in the western US. This is probably a partly climatic adaptation; winters in the northeastern US and southeastern Canada can get pretty cold. And yes, they chow down on the local deer. Nor are they "solitary", as the Hawks blog post implies other coyotes are. But then, as I said, wherever they are not disturbed, coyotes actually form packs, just like wolves, and defend their territories, just like wolves. They certainly do within the Seattle City limits; people have actually observed "several" coyotes acting together, and what they are observing is most likely a pack, just like wolves.

In any case, John Hawks is very interested in this, because he is very interested in genetic introgression. One might ask exactly what a biological anthropologist is doing,getting all excited about wolves, coyotes, and other wild canids, but there's method behind his apparent madness: things like this may well have happened in the course of human evolution. While I am not as excited about "introgression" of genes, per se, either in other organisms or in prehistoric humans of any kind, it may well be one mechanism which has made "us" what we are as a species, today. And I have a feeling that there were human "hybrid zones" from time to time during the course of prehistory, and yeah, Neandertals were part of this. Like wolves that nearly got wiped out by people shooting them, Neandertals had small, scattered populations that were vulnerable in various ways, and it's quite possible that some of them, from time to time, just got absorbed in early "modern" populations. No enough to obviously "show", but enough to have possibly made an impact on early "modern" populations. There isn't much evidence of this at the present, except possibly indirectly, but I suspect that with more sophisticated genetic techniques, such traces might later be found. Because, like wolves and coyotes, Neandertals and "moderns" had very, very similar coping strategies as I suggested in the previous post So, I really think it stands to reason that "we" have acted, in the past, not too differently from the way wolves and coyotes are acting in the northeastern Us and southern Canada, at least as far as genetic exchanges are concerned So thanks, Dr. Hawks, for providing me an excuse for another long, complex blog post!

Anne G

Oh, them Neandertal fish fries(or clambakes, or whatever)!

2009-09-24T21:27:00.001-07:00

A lot of very interesting stuff has been emanating from Paleoanthropologyland in recent weeks. In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, there is a whole series of "origins" articles, relating both to "modern" humans and Neandertals. The nice part about this is, for those interested, the papers therein are free(they end up free, but on most of them, you have to wait a while), and you can download any pdf you like. But the most interesting(at least to me) news, comes from anthropology.net, and deals with the kind of things Neandertals were apparently dining on -- 70,000 years ago! And, -- gasp! the Neandertals living in a cave in a place called El Salt, apparently ate fish, along with other things more commonly associated with them. El Salt, as you might guess from what I've just revealed, is on or near the Spanish coast.

It's true that, some 25,000 years ago, the very last Neandertals at Gibraltar, also dined on seafood, but at least up till now, it was thought they did this because they were "desperate", or something of the sort. However, this find, and the fact that, apparently at a place in France called Grotte XVI, they also ate fish from time to time, and not only that, but they appear to have smoked it, suggests that they made use of whatever resources they had at hand, as any good "generalized" forager/hunter/gatherer society would do. True, the Neandertals at Grotte XVI lived later than the ones at El Salt, and somewhat inland, so they probably dined on trout or some other freshwater fish. Still, the point is, none of them turned up their large pointy noses at such fare. Unfortunately, as usual, a lot of people have trouble believing these things, so there appears, even now, to be a certain amount of resistance and skepticism about this matter. It also doesn't help that the original paper is in Spanish, unless you read Spanish well. Equally unfortunately, I don't. But it's quite possible that once more is published regarding this find, it will generate a fair amount of controversy. Everything about Neandertals seems to do this, despite the fact, which should be more and more apparent to more and more people if they don't resist it, that Neandertals had basically the same kind of brains and the same range of responses to their surroundings, as "modern" humans do. As I said, a lot of people still have trouble accepting this. But Yours Truly will keep every interested party informed about any developments here. It's going to get very, very interesting, I think.

Anne G