Witchy Newton

Thalanes dug into Calvin’s pack and pulled out his powderhorn.  He shook a pinch of the gunpowder into the palm of one hand.  “I want you to use this gunpowder as a material component of the gramarye.  “Just like you used three drops of blood back in Nashville, in your love-charm in Father Angleton’s tent.”

Sarah blushed, thinking of poor Calvin, still smitten.  “I think I can do that,” she agreed.

“The gunpowder serves the same function as the words,” Thalanes explained.  “They both just build a bridge, to get power from you into the fire.”

“Of course,” Sarah said, feeling slightly offended.  “Just like the blood in my love-charm.”

“Forgive me a little lecture,” Thalanes said, “but I am, after all, a priest.  Sir Isaac Newton, you probably know, was a great wizard.”

“Everyone knows that.”

“He was a great practicing magician and an even greater theoretical one.”

“He wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Magica just the year before he joined John Churchill’s Glorious Revolution against the Necromancer’s Eternal Commonwealth.  Everyone knows that, too.”

Thalanes smiled.  “Perhaps not everyone.”

“Okay, but I know it.”

“Have you read the book?”

Sarah shook her head.  “The Elector’s got a library, but it isn’t that good.”

“Read it when you can.  Newton formulated two laws to explain the efficacy of a material component in any work of gramarye.”

“This I don’t know.”

“I’m glad to hear I am finally able to teach you something you don’t already know.”  Thalanes laughed.  “Newton’s Law of Sympathy states that things that appear to be connected, are in fact connected.  And his Law of Contagion states that things that have once been together, are always together.”

Sarah screwed on her thinking cap and tried to apply Newton’s laws to the lighting of the fire and the little pile of gunpowder in Thalanes’s palm.  “So the gunpowder is an efficacious material component,” she said slowly, “because gunpowder and fire appear to be connected, so they really are.”

“Very good.”

She considered further.  “I suppose if I hold the gunpowder in my hand and then throw it into the fire when I cast, then I also catch up the Law of Contagion.  Me, the gunpowder and the fire will always be together.”

“Excellent,” Thalanes said.  “You would have run circles even around old Palindres.”  He poured the gunpowder into her hand, carefully dusting all of the grains off his fingers into the neat little pile.

Iron Andy's Reputation

Bob clucked like a chicken.  “Po’ little Angus, gettin’ scairt by a girl!”

“To hell with the girl!” Angus barked.  “I’d chop her to pieces right here and now and eat her heart raw and not miss a wink of sleep over it.  But iffen she really is Iron Andy’s daughter?  Damn right, I’m a little nervous!  Ain’t you?”

Bob spat in the leaves.  “You only die once.  Don’t be such a damn coward.”

“I ain’t afraid of dyin’.  I’m afraid of gettin’ my tongue cut out, and havin’ my fingernails torn off, and bein’ hung from a tree by my own guts while I’m still alive as a warning sign.  They say he crucified people in the Ohio Forks War.  They sat he took scalps.  They say he’s the one as killed George Washington, stabbed him in the heart in his sleep with Washington’s own sword.”

“All that shit you heard about the Elector jest ain’t true,” Bob said.  “The Calhouns spread those notions around to make people scairt of ’em.  Besides, didn’t nobody kill George Washington, John Penn bought him off with a bunch of land somewhere and he jest up and quit.  Pontiac’s the one they killed, and it was hangin’, not no midnight assassination.  And iffen any of it is true, it happened a long time ago.  He’s jest an old feller now with a lot of rough Cracker grandsons who live out in the woods, stealin’ cattle, drinkin’ home-made corn likker and sportin’ with their own sisters.”

“You ain’t from around here,” Angus muttered.  “You don’t know.”

Milieu

I'm working on a rewrite the main objective of which is to get more milieu detail into my novel Witchy Eye.  This is fun, and it has me thinking about ways to communicate milieu to a reader, in any book in which the setting is not already familiar.  Here are some ideas.  This list is not exhaustive.

• If you have an omniscient voice, can simply tell it.  I tend not to write this way, but to stick closer to a character.
• You can physically describe distinctive objects.  (Don't waste a lot of time physically describing objects that aren't distinctive.)
• You can insert in-world documents, poetry or songs.
• Your POV character can remember details to help him interpret things that are happening to him.
• Your characters can make allusions to the setting, tell jokes, insult other characters, etc., using references to the setting, especially where those references already have some meaning to the reader, or where multiple references can build up and create meaning.  Be careful.  A bunch of such references that aren't explained or tied together just add up to the indistinct realization that This Place Isn't Earth.
• You can show culture in the behavior of characters.  Are they fatalistic?  Individualist?  Xenophobic?  You can show cultural interaction by showing the interaction of characters from those cultures.
• Bringing characters to a milieu who are not native to it gives you scope to describe the milieu through their impressions and reactions.  The more foreign the newcomer is, the more you can describe.

Essential Classics: The Child Ballads

If you read many liner notes or recollections of sixties folkies, you will inevitably come across references to the Child Ballads, expressed either exactly like that or else as follows: "this song is a variant of Child #86."

"Child Ballads" does not mean songs for children.  It refers to the printed texts of songs called The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, collected by Francis James Child.  Words only, no music.  These are ballads, a structure we have discussed before: they are narrative songs, often recounting real historical events, characterized structurally by a series of identically-organized verses.

The Child Ballads were a wellspring for the folk revival, and continue to inspire musicians and writers today.  Unless you're a folkie, you're not going to recognize most of these songs on first sight -- and that makes them worth reading.  And some of them, you just might know... "Matty Groves" or "Barbara Allen"or some of the songs about Robin Hood, for instance.  Enjoy.

3000

Hey, passed 3000 pageviews.  I'm sure the 1,000,000 mark is just around the corner.  If I cluttered up my blog with ads I could make, like, a nickel.

What Is Steampunk? (City of the Saints: Edgar Allan Poe)

Another illustration from Jeff:

Stephen Foster (II): I Dream of Jeannie and Beautiful Dreamer

As part of my ongoing crusade for cultural literacy, here are two more Stephen Foster songs.

And that last one really needs an encore.

Seriously, Stephen Foster was the bomb.