Well, I just finished reading all of the books I've set aside for A Magical Medieval Society Castles and writing will start soon. To be honest, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. A castle book is hard to do as a Magical Society product because what I need is synthesis of the subject, not just a simple elucidation and transference of information to the reader - which is also needed of course. Synthesis is a bitch. I'm kinda stuck now, staring at the blank white page and going... "huh?"
I've also been trucking along with my Magical Society India reading. It's been cool and I've learned some interesting things that I didn't know before. Once I'm done with two or three general books I'll need to focus on more specific books, but I won't know that those are until I get there. Reading is always so much easier than writing. :)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I hadn't heard about you working on MMS:Castles, Joe, and it sounds fun. What do you envision the contents to cover?---stuff like Gies' Life in a Medieval Castle (but with magic missiles and trolls?), and all about building/sieging castles, and castle ruins, or ???
Allan.
Yep, pretty much like that. :) The problem is going beyond explaining how things were into integrating it into the concepts of A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe. It not so hard to do the explanation part (just takes time and bit 'o effort), but it's very hard to do the synthesis.
It’s great to hear that you have two new Magical Society books in the works, I still remember rushing over to XRP after reading Monte Cook’s review of Medieval Society. Since it had been so long since Silk Road, and since these books obviously required a tremendous amount of work, I was afraid we wouldn’t see any more.
I’m particularly happy to see you tackling India, it’s a region not well covered in the fantasy genre despite having such vibrant cultures and a vast beastiary. Have you decided upon a specific era to draw on?
Glad to hear your excited. I'm shuffling along with these books at a slower pace than I wanted, but they're getting done.
With India I don't really have a specific era in mind, but I think that more than likely it will be sometime during the early Mughal period (sans guns) so I can discuss the the hindu, the muslim, and the western influences (Portugal) etc. It won't be a historical discussion, but more of a "cultural clash" type discussion.
Post a Comment