January posting meme: birds
So for today 
philomytha very kindly asked me to explain how I was ambushed by birds in the course of writing the Waters of Time series. I should say first that although I am quite fond of birds, and feed them so I (and the cats) can watch them out the window, and find them fascinating in all their dinosaur-descendant weirdness, I'm not what you'd call a bird enthusiast. But in the back of my head where lurk all the serendipitous oddities that create writing coincidences, there must be a bird name repository. Not that this explains everything that happened bird-wise.
I did make one bird joke on purpose in TFT, and that was Eagle Costuming and its employees Phoebe Black and the unseen Robin (in TAF there's also Ava). I believe I decided at the time that the owner was a Mr. Bob White, though that's never actually stated. I also named a character Brant, although this is not because he's a goose. George's surname, Merrill, was chosen for its watery referent, but as I discovered when looking up the etymology while writing TAF, it can also be derived from French merle (blackbird, Latin merula, Dutch merel). I think at this point I had already named Lena Vogel, but only afterwards decided that this was a pseudonym and her real last name was Raaf (Dutch for raven). In that book I use as a character a real historical personage, Adriaen Pauw, whose surname is Dutch for peacock.
And I think that was it until I got to Time Goes By, which has an entire scene set in an aviary because I needed to work off my feeling of being followed around by birds. There's a sequence of George's dreams in the book that involve maritime figures that all look alike and are associated with time travel devices, and the first one is explicitly a ferry captain in Boston Harbor (the Americans' Tim), so when I had him dream about the Russian equivalent I then decided that their time machine is named Perevozchik, which does mean Ferryman - but when I looked it up I found it also meant sandpiper.
There's also a minor plot point involving passenger pigeons, and I know there are cormorants out of Andrew Marvell, and a fairy tale with giant birds that steal things, and probably some others I'm forgetting (besides the utter bombardment of real and symbolic fowl in the aviary). Anyway, you can imagine how I felt when I started watching Person of Interest and encountered Finch and his many bird aliases. I have a character with many names as well, though his all have to do with peace - and I decided that before I realized that he'd need to own many things emblazoned with doves.
So there you have it. Chirp, flap.
This entry was originally posted at http://hedda62.dreamwidth.org/75499.html. There are currently
comments there. Comment here or there.
philomytha very kindly asked me to explain how I was ambushed by birds in the course of writing the Waters of Time series. I should say first that although I am quite fond of birds, and feed them so I (and the cats) can watch them out the window, and find them fascinating in all their dinosaur-descendant weirdness, I'm not what you'd call a bird enthusiast. But in the back of my head where lurk all the serendipitous oddities that create writing coincidences, there must be a bird name repository. Not that this explains everything that happened bird-wise.
I did make one bird joke on purpose in TFT, and that was Eagle Costuming and its employees Phoebe Black and the unseen Robin (in TAF there's also Ava). I believe I decided at the time that the owner was a Mr. Bob White, though that's never actually stated. I also named a character Brant, although this is not because he's a goose. George's surname, Merrill, was chosen for its watery referent, but as I discovered when looking up the etymology while writing TAF, it can also be derived from French merle (blackbird, Latin merula, Dutch merel). I think at this point I had already named Lena Vogel, but only afterwards decided that this was a pseudonym and her real last name was Raaf (Dutch for raven). In that book I use as a character a real historical personage, Adriaen Pauw, whose surname is Dutch for peacock.
And I think that was it until I got to Time Goes By, which has an entire scene set in an aviary because I needed to work off my feeling of being followed around by birds. There's a sequence of George's dreams in the book that involve maritime figures that all look alike and are associated with time travel devices, and the first one is explicitly a ferry captain in Boston Harbor (the Americans' Tim), so when I had him dream about the Russian equivalent I then decided that their time machine is named Perevozchik, which does mean Ferryman - but when I looked it up I found it also meant sandpiper.
There's also a minor plot point involving passenger pigeons, and I know there are cormorants out of Andrew Marvell, and a fairy tale with giant birds that steal things, and probably some others I'm forgetting (besides the utter bombardment of real and symbolic fowl in the aviary). Anyway, you can imagine how I felt when I started watching Person of Interest and encountered Finch and his many bird aliases. I have a character with many names as well, though his all have to do with peace - and I decided that before I realized that he'd need to own many things emblazoned with doves.
So there you have it. Chirp, flap.
This entry was originally posted at http://hedda62.dreamwidth.org/75499.html. There are currently
comments there. Comment here or there.