This week marks the moment my work on my new novel gets real. So far it’s been just playing, warming up, tossing ideas about. Now it gets serious. I have no ETA, I have a poor excuse of an outline and a fair idea of the two main characters. And the general concept, of course, but that’s been there waiting for years. I don’t even have a date for the actual start of the writing. But now I know it’s about to begin.
I know it because today the postman delivered a book I needed for my research. It’s been a sort of hunt – I spotted the book while browsing Amazon and went “hmm, might be interesting to slip this bit, too, into the story…”
I first went on a Sherlock Holmes bender when I was in middle grade – I was twelve or thereabouts. The national TV had ran a cycle of old Basil Rathbone movies, and I checked out the Holmes stories in the school library. I was by then a solid science fiction reader, but as a reformed mystery fan, I enjoyed Conan Doyle’s stories a lot. I came back to them later, in high school, and I have been a sui generis Sherlockian ever since.
This morning, the postman delivered a paperback copy of The Best of Sherlock Holmes, a selection that includes the 12 stories that Conan Doyle himself had singled out as his favorites, plus other eight chosen by editor, critic and mystery writer David Stuart Davies. Published by Wordsworth Classics and sold for two bucks and a half, this 460-pages book is the perfect thing for anyone in need to refresh the basics, and whose complete Sherlock Holmes is buried somewhere in a box in the attic. At the tail of the long Sherlockian winter I have been through, in the next few weeks I’ll have work to do on Holmes, and this selection is just what the doctor (Watson, of course) ordered.
And in the meantime it’s been pointed out to me that Conan Doyle’s prose might be off-putting for a teenager. It’s over a century old, and not so easy. Which, given my experiences, left me somewhat baffled.
In the end I always go back to the first gaming system I really worked to exhaustion – the engine of The Call of Cthulhu, of Stormbringer, of Runequest. My goodness, of the ElfQuest RPG. Thieves’ World! The game engine they call Basic RolePlaying (aka BRP). I spent so many hours in my life playing with these rules, I could reasonably sit at a table without the handbook right now, and still be able to run a game with a minimum of fuss. More about this later.
And yes, this is a post mostly aimed at roleplayers, so maybe you might find it boring, or obscure, maybe even cryptic. I am sorry. Feel free to skip this.
Today marks the four-hundredth and sixteenth anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth the First, one of the historical characters that always fascinated me the most. It probably comes from watching at a tender age the old TV drama featuring Glenda Jackson, Elizabeth R. And yes, I have already mentioned, when I was a kid, my parents allowed me to watch all sort of adult stuff on the telly.
As a result of this fascination, I have a shelfload of books about Elizabeth and Elizabethan England. Biographies, guidebooks, tomes on specific subjects such as magic, espionage, the criminal underworld.
The second of the three “not so bad” sword & sorcery movies of the early ’80s features a tiger dyed black, an eagle that normally refused to fly, two weasels and one of Charlie’s Angels, the latter in a role that had been written for Demi Moore. And Rip Torn was in it, too, in a role that had been written for Klaus Kinski.
We are talking of course of Don Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster. And it’s not really bad. It’s just not very good.
Now I must say a lot of terms my grandmother used were extremely strange, exotic and never fully explained. To me as a kid was like she was some kind of character that came from another world, full of strange words whose meaning I extracted from context. But that word in particular…
Odds and Ends #11 just posted to the Patrons. This week Folco Quilici for cheap, a gallery of Writers No One Reads, language courses, a course about rationality from Oxford University, the secrets of brewing alcoholics, a science fiction short movie and a free Old School Roleplaying game. Because it’s good to be my patrons.
Karavansara 