bunn

I have been rather swiftly skipping through  On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby.   Can't quite remember how this ended up on my to-read shelf, but I picked it out because there is an Egyptian chapter and I thought it might have some handy local colour that I could steal, as I am trying to get my act together and get my Egyptian eagle-rbb story finished off.  (if it had rained, I would have done it today.  But there's still loads of time...   It is a pain researching Roman Egypt : everything you Google takes you back into Ancient Egypt, and it's very hard to tell if the Roman period was the same.  Sigh.  

Sadly, the book was little use for this as the Egyptian chapter was mostly about how the author bribed a policeman to visit the Great Pyramid early in the morning before it was officially open (because a proper travel writer does not mix with the common coach-travelling hoi polloi, obviously) ,
( cut for exceedingly beautiful women and a turd. )

Length: 1408 words
Contains: Book!Esca with alarming Celtic facial hair.  Three quick and scribbly charcoal drawings. Writing (probably dodgy) from the point of view of a small child.  Hero-worship. 

Summary: Small Flavius finds that writing a letter to his great uncle Aquila is hard work, even when he has the BEST day out ever to write about.  Esca helps him tell the story.  Inspired by a photo of the White Horse of Uffington in the ninth-eagle fanmedia challenge. 

I think this is probably a children's story. For children from the 1950's. So why did I write it in 2012? Absolutely. No. Idea. 

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I was thinking about Placidus meeting Esca on the wolf hunt in Eagle of the Ninth, and then I started thinking about Cub again, in the context of my thoughts about wolves.  And I started thinking about animals living illicitly in country that is heavily populated by people, like these beavers and for that matter, the wild boar that are out there that I never see. And somewhere, I forget where now, I read an article about how wolves now are at the far end of a scale of wildness, because we have driven them away from people.  They were for so long symbols of ferocity whose presence could not be tolerated, that we have now created wolves which are very far from being dogs, and dogs which are very far from being wolves.

That brought me back to the idea that British wolves, eighteen hundred years ago, living half-hidden among towns and villages and farms, might not be quite the same as wild wolves as they appear to us today, in the remote places where there still are wolves.  And then I remembered that in Eagle of the Ninth, Esca said that three hunters went into the den where the cubs were hidden.  A normal wolf den is a low burrow of a thing, it would be hard to get three men into it, particularly when one of them was the elegant Placidus.

And before I knew it I had written this very short, rather sad story.

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Some months ago, I concluded that I really, really must do some work, and that therefore I should not participate in the planned Eagle Big Bang festivities.   Then that demon_rum persuaded me that I could do some charcoal drawings, and that would be quite quick really.  HAHAHAHA.

I had no idea which author was writing what from the list of story synopses, so I picked more or less at random the now complete story  'Where the Hills Run Red' from a brief synopsis even more delphic than most of the rest.  

I was curious.  What would I have to illustrate?  Would it be lurid, graphic and disturbing?   Would it involve entangled naked gentlemen?  Most alarmingly, might it be hideously badly written?   Whatever it was, I was sure it would be an interesting technical challenge...

Then I got the early draft through, and WOW!  I had picked quite by accident, a meticulously researched, very well written story that was very solidly grounded in a very specific landscape - across two times, modern and ancient.  The feel was a little Alan Garner, I thought.    Specifically, it is set around Mam Tor and Winnats Pass in the Peak district, and is very clearly somewhere that the author knows very well and describes vividly.  The draft arrived with a brilliant set of reference photos of the setting, a scan of the guidebook and loads of location information... I climbed into google maps and began perambulating along lanes, gasping at the views.

Charcoal was definitely not going to be good enough (I can't do landscapes in charcoal).  Acrylics seemed the only medium where I stood a chance of doing the landscape porn justice.   At one point I realised that none of the reference photos were from quite the right angle, so I sent my author scurrying up a hill fort to take photos from the top...

( Paintings this way!  )

A duck egg in a fried egg and black pudding bap is an egg too far.  I had to take a shower afterwards to get the yolk off.

Tommy Shortlegs still has a limp.  To vet tomorrow.  Still no enquiries for him!  We have asked Corgi Rescue if they might know of a suitable home, since he is more or less corgiform.  Apparently they have 140 people waiting for corgis, and no corgis! 

Terry Pratchett's 'Nation' is sadder than I expected.  Not sure why I didn't expect this, given that the 'entire people being wiped out' aspect is trailered on the back of the book. 

Channing Tatum has ridiculously small eyes and a quite absurd amount of forehead.

Despite this I am having fun illustrating the Eagle Big Bang story I volunteered for, as it is well written and has huge amounts of landscape in it.  Plus, the next picture doesn't feature CT and his tiny eyes at all, but Cottia!  With a knife!   Need to find someone to draw as Cottia. 

Mollydog is *almost* 100% again, and has become loud and importunate.  I shall start her on her painkillers again tomorrow as I think the arthritis is getting to her. 

Rosemary Sutcliff's Simon is very much a local book (for local people?)    Very definitely grounded in Torrington, right down to the individual fields and the river.  Less sad than I had expected, given the whole Civil War setting, though the internal angst of best friends on opposite sides is quite well handled, the ending is perhaps a bit too happy to feel real. 

I'm reading 'Britannia : The Failed State" by Stuart Laycock.  No, it's not modern politics ;-)

The premise is that the tribal groups within Roman Britain were much more differentiated than most histories assume, and that they were never effectively submerged into a coherent Roman province.  Even in the second and third centuries, he thinks there was a lot more intertribal raiding even in Southern England than is documented.  In particular he thinks the Iceni came West to raid the Catuvellauni (around London and the Southeast) and the Brigantes (biggest tribe in Britain, remember)  regularly came charging South to loot Corieltauvi land around Leicestershire from about 140AD onwards.
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I've just realised I forgot to put these onto my own LJ when I wrote them. They are three events from Esca and Marcus's journey North from Dorchester (where Marcus got a quick course in being an eye-doctor) to the Wall. It took them about a month, so I reckoned some things must have happened along the way apart from Marcus growing a beard.  Two short cheery anecdotes and the last one is an angsty one that fits in with The Fall of Cunoval. 

The Country for Farming  
( 329 words and an indelicate chalk figure )
Heifers and Elephants
( 707 words: Marcus reminisces about a memorable sight he saw in Rome. Esca thinks Marcus is having him on. With thanks to what may be the world's loudest herd of small protesting heifers which shouted very noisily at me. )The Old Crow
( 1728 words considering the social awkwardness of not having gone West of the Sunset in the proper manner. )
NOTES
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I do want to give a special mention to  Boudicca.  Boudicca is horrifying, but I think she's also almost sympathetic.  I feel you can kind of see where she is coming from - and for a book about a mass-murdering torturer, that's quite some writing.   I'm always awed by Song for a Dark Queen, even though it's such a sad book.   It has a male narrator, of course.  Would it have been a better book with a female narrator?  I'm not sure it would.  I think Boudicca of all women is probably one where you can kind of use a little distance to look at her from.... 

Although this week has been somewhat frantic with visitors and much roleplaying, I still found myself infected by the second ninth-eagle fanmedia challenge.  ( I wonder if antibiotics would help? ).  This required more research into very early second century Dacia and goggling at photos of Trajan's Column than I really had time for, but I still had much fun with it.    Though now I look back on it, the writing is rather choppy and it probably needs another polish really.  Oh well. 

Title: Very Far from Home
Inspired By: Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth, with a nod to Gillian Bradshaw's Island of Ghosts, another nod to Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin  and most immediately, this photo. 
Rating: gen
Length: 2,422 words

Summary : When Marcus Flavius Aquila arrived at Isca Dumnoniorum to take command, there was an auxiliary troop of Dacian light cavalry already there, led by Lutorius, who struck Marcus as 'reserved to the point of sullenness with all men' until the tribal revolt where Marcus was injured, and Lutorius was killed. This story tries to explain why Lutorius was so grumpy, how Marcus dealt with that, and why Marcus had so many problems with arguments between his Gauls and the Dacians...

( It was raining again, as Lutorius and his Dacians rode up from the river-meadows where they had been carrying out exercises. A grey sheet of damp was hanging over the fort on the Red Mount. Presumably somewhere, away over the river there, the sun was setting, but you couldn’t tell, Lutorius thought. The sky was grey, like the rain, and the river. Only the mud had colour, the puddles around his horse’s feet, opaque reddish brown. It was a miserable place, this damp corner of a primitive little island tucked away in the far corner of the world. )

( Many Notes! )