Reading up and outlining
Friday and the weekend was taken up with a series of work and social engagements (and sleep, sweet sleep) but I did read several articles about ancient Goguryeoh and Baekje and write out some of my ideas about Book 1. The most interesting article was about the strategic use of traffic routes by the ancient Chinese to cut the ancient Korean groups from each other and to contain them. It was like watching a chess or Go game in real geographical space, the way these kingdoms used key bases to contain and counter-contain each other.
Did I mention I suck at chess, Go, and any other activity that requires a sense of space? (Cannot navigate my way out of a paper bag, hellllp...) I didn't understand what was going on half the time in that article, it was just place names flying everywhere. No maps in a discussion of historical geography = a big fail in an otherwise brilliant article. I'm going to have to map this for myself on Google Maps, and probably make the rest of you suffer by throwing it up here.
Still, I'm happy to see a scholar arguing that China was deliberately cutting off Korean groups from each other, because it confirms my pet interpretation that My Heroine's moving south was a form of blockade-running to link up with peninsular Koreans in addition to political exile from a lost dynastic struggle. Why just save her and her sons' lives when she can also realize a grand design for her people's future? This sister can multitask, yo!
I'm a little concerned that the way Chinese and Koreans are pitted against each other in my story could make out the Chinese as flat villains or even a race of psychopaths. This is the case in way too many works of historical fiction by Koreans. As in so many other things, telling the full truth is probably the best defense against bigotry: That the ancient Chinese kingdoms were genuinely threatened by the often conquest-happy Korean kingdom of Goguryeoh, and that the Korean kingdoms and groups were locked in their own bitter enmity. It was after all Goguryeoh, not any Chinese dynasty, that warred with and ultimately brought down Buyeo, the Koreanic kingdom in Manchuria. History is never as simple as good country vs. bad country, I've found.
My continuing attempts to outline the second half of Book 1 reminds me again how complicated this dynamic can be, with three kingdoms in a delicate maneuver of cross and double-cross. Sometimes I'm convinced I'll never get it right and the book will never get written, but that's a trick of time perception where it feels like the present is forever. I'll get past this eventually. I already had a couple of mini-breakthroughs today and I think I'm close to a workable story. Come on, self, hang in there!
Dreamwidth entry URL: http://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/55870.html
Did I mention I suck at chess, Go, and any other activity that requires a sense of space? (Cannot navigate my way out of a paper bag, hellllp...) I didn't understand what was going on half the time in that article, it was just place names flying everywhere. No maps in a discussion of historical geography = a big fail in an otherwise brilliant article. I'm going to have to map this for myself on Google Maps, and probably make the rest of you suffer by throwing it up here.
Still, I'm happy to see a scholar arguing that China was deliberately cutting off Korean groups from each other, because it confirms my pet interpretation that My Heroine's moving south was a form of blockade-running to link up with peninsular Koreans in addition to political exile from a lost dynastic struggle. Why just save her and her sons' lives when she can also realize a grand design for her people's future? This sister can multitask, yo!
I'm a little concerned that the way Chinese and Koreans are pitted against each other in my story could make out the Chinese as flat villains or even a race of psychopaths. This is the case in way too many works of historical fiction by Koreans. As in so many other things, telling the full truth is probably the best defense against bigotry: That the ancient Chinese kingdoms were genuinely threatened by the often conquest-happy Korean kingdom of Goguryeoh, and that the Korean kingdoms and groups were locked in their own bitter enmity. It was after all Goguryeoh, not any Chinese dynasty, that warred with and ultimately brought down Buyeo, the Koreanic kingdom in Manchuria. History is never as simple as good country vs. bad country, I've found.
My continuing attempts to outline the second half of Book 1 reminds me again how complicated this dynamic can be, with three kingdoms in a delicate maneuver of cross and double-cross. Sometimes I'm convinced I'll never get it right and the book will never get written, but that's a trick of time perception where it feels like the present is forever. I'll get past this eventually. I already had a couple of mini-breakthroughs today and I think I'm close to a workable story. Come on, self, hang in there!
Dreamwidth entry URL: http://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/55870.html