Cave Paintings

 

https://www.wikiart.org/en/nicolas-poussin/et-in-arcadia-ego-1639-1

I am in a situation which is unusual for me.  I am actually making progress on my novel and the plot hasn’t been reduced to tiny shards by writer’s block yet.  I have a sneaking hunch that one of the reasons that this is happening is that I have set myself a schedule to publish chapter by chapter and made the sometimes regrettable decision to say that I was doing so in a setting where other people might actually see the promised schedule.

Well, I assumed that people would look at it and poo-poo my attempts and that would be the end of it.  As they often say in good labs doing real science “well, that didn’t work did it?”

But it appears that a teenager from Germany with excellent English skills is actually reading my stuff and asking questions.  (this is quite unusual, I came to Dreamwidth to escape trolls and haven’t really advertised my presence here, I just use it as a way to post and keep track)

So, this self-inflicted quandary forces me to figure out how to answer the comments and not mess up my pretty blog with intermediary posts. So I am posting responses here for the questions that require more than a yes/no answer.

I hope that this doesn’t complicate things, But I do tend to complicate things.

The message is: Feedback

Dear John,

first of all, thanks for gracefully looking at my comments and commenting.

then: As you might know from JMG´s blog I´m from Germany, so many things you´re alluding to go right over my head, hopefully, that isn´t a soucre for misunderstandings.

Also: I have been given to understand, that sometimes my feedback is a bit too harsh, so if so, please let me know it is not intentionally! Also if it is too much/ too focused. Thanks.

You have the "Companion" so you´re already ahead of me, because I only read the - what is eleven in Latin? WoH and to the Haliverse belonging sequels several times. I have never read Lovecraft, as my first story was the one with the Shoggoths and I really found them too scary for me, strange isn´t it, if one consideres that the only lifeform that does that is an asfalt-street building human-gang.

Well, back to your story: two things strike me as...maybe not quite fitting in what I´m used to from the books JMG wrote - and maybe it is of help for you - if it isn´t please roundly ignore! And having written all of the below one further questions went up.

1.) In your book the characters (I always have problems with the who-is-who until I´ve read a book like 8 times or something, sorry!) talk about their hunt, and how one character doesn´t embellish his ...whats the english word here...shot animal by adding more antler-ends than there originally were. I just reread the Chorazin passage, where the Mighty Messenger tells the Chorazin folk that they don´t have to worry about having lost their old rites (which kept Yhoundeh alive) because the Great Old One would teach them new rites and suchlike. I imagine, that would also extend to the giving thanks from the hunter to the hunted. In some Native American customs, that meant e.g. putting red paint and ...buntings (?)...on the skull and apparentely hang it somewhere in the wilderness. So this is an individual offering. For the Chorazin people it could also be a group offering at at certain day/time of the year, but in one of JMG´s books he writes about an emerging spirituality in America that puts the indivdual at the center (...Tamanous...) and maybe you´d like to help establish that - or your Chorazin-WoH-America does things differentely.

If you like the idea of a personal giving of thanks to the hunted, the hunter could reminisce in the part where they talk about the hunt someting like this: "...and he well rememberd getting up(out) the next day at dawn (dusk) to XX (put something back for what he has taken/ sing a hymn, burn something, ....) or just ignore this, because that part is not essential for what you want to do with your story.

2.) When the other person (Carl?!) enters his shed actually two things struk me, so:

a) the phrase "...and the space (place?) lit up." I like this phrase very much, it gives the idea of what hollywood films do when they enter a totally differnt place, e.g. the batcave or a laboratory and want to show off how nice and nifty it al is - still...since the guy is trying to use little energy, wouldn´t he have cleverly designed "glass-ceilings" (correct english word missing again here, I mean some shedlike trancelucent placticparts under some brambles which can be blinded by night or something), use only one LED and recharge every other month or so?

Aha, but maybe that misses out on comfortab

leness, on the feeling of home. Hm - undecided - a litte voice keeps insisting that he then should get upt early and get to sleep early to work with the daylight...

b.) I didn´t quite understand why he wants the solar panel inside during the night, probably some knowledge on my part missing - I wonder if not the greatest risk for being spotted would be during dayleight, when those things reflect?! I imagine theft would not be an issue in Chorazin,yes? Or is a solar panel perceived to be rich and therefore out of the question? But then the same would apply during daylight. Hm.

One thing that caught me was also: why ASCII? Cheap encoding? Or easy writing and transfering? And I´m too less of a programmer to understand that it´s probably quite great that he can read it just like that? My exposure to ASCII is only the yearly snowballs and suchlike, so I´m missing backgroung knowledge. Still, probably everybody knows about this, because it probably was in e.g. "big bang theory", which having no television for almost 20 years and watching series only sporadically for 10 years went by me, even if everybody else knows about this (so if your "target-audience" is American and younger than 45 don´t worry about this last thing).

Still, could you write your 14th chapter faster, so I can read the 4th chapter soon? That would be very nice, I enjoyed the ride so far! And that the main characters know something in a "here-we-great-actions-heroes/big guns-are-and-we-don´t-panic-but-it´s-serious"-way didn´t hurt the suspense one bit!

. OK:  Answer to question one is quite simple.  For some odd reason there are two methods of counting the number of antler branches (called points) on a deer in America.  In the western US, only the number of “points” on one of the antlers is counted.  In the eastern US, the number of points on both horns are counted. 

As for the questions about ritual, this scene is well past the hunt, these are two young men chatting at home while doing chores.  Emily:  You might want to look up “badinage”.  Young men (Soldiers especially) show their love for each other by humorous and clever abuse.  

The second question is that Americans like a lot of light and having a big string of LED’s really brightens the room.  As part of this, the solar panel comes in everyday because he doesn’t want someone to steal it.  

The third question about ASCII is that it is so small and easily encrypted.  If all you are looking at is words on a screen with no formatting and no graphics or colors, the sizes of files are very small and can sometimes be hidden and encrypted inside of other files.

I think that Emily should take a moment to read one of JMG’s old articles.  

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-11-19/the-heresy-of-intellectual-choice/

A part of my thinking about what I am writing is how do people “step-down” from technologies?  I think that computers will still be useful for centuries to come.  I think the catchy phrase by William Gibson (My second author) is appropriate here:

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

I think the slope to the future will be shallow with the occasional fast drop off.  We aren’t going to be doing cave paintings anytime soon.

PS:  I am publishing chapter four today