Comment "hit me up" and I'll pick 3 of your icons for you to comment on! Here are the three
( Read more... )

Has it seriously been a month since I updated? o_O THE TIME WHERE DOES IT GO

My friends who have given me encouragements on the Soseono novel will be heartened to know that my obsession with the project continues apace. I've done a substantial amount of research on the politics of the period, at least in the internal politics among the heroine's ( Read more... )

My heroine, the Lady Soseono, is a famous figure in Korean history and one of the most prominent women from ancient Korean history. She has appeared in numerous works of historical fiction, usually as a supporting character by her second husband's side but more rarely as a protagonist in her own right. Obviously I couldn't neglect the market ( Read more... )

I keep blowing my self-imposed deadlines on the novel, so I've decided to work on it a little every day--specifically at least one hour a day. I'll be blogging about that work, both as a way to leave notes to myself and to show that hey, it's alive!

( She didn't eat rice, at least not a lot of it. )

I am not the first of my line to write about my heroine's times. The celebrated thirteenth-century writer Lee Gyubo (李奎報, 1168~1241) wrote the Lay of the King in the Eastern Light (東明王篇), an epic poem about the first king of Goguryeoh a.k.a. my heroine's second husband. Lee, also known as Master White Cloud (白雲居士) and Lord of Gentle Prose (文順公), is ( Read more... )

After another compulsive bout of reading last night, I finally learned where my heroine's home in the first century B.C. was likely to have been located. Here's what it looks like today:

( Folded for pictures and rambling )

As noted at the end of the notes on ancient names post, our modern pronunciation of ancient names probably doesn't match the way the ancient Koreans themselves pronounced these names. Either Chinese characters were used for their meaning instead of their sound, or the letters fulfilled phonetic functions that didn't involve sounding out the full ( Read more... )

"Sole reining queen and foundress in Korean history, she it was who built the two ancient kingdoms of Goguryeo and Baekje."
- Shin Chaeho, Ancient Korean History

Soseono (pronounced so-suh-no. 소서노 [召西奴]; 66 B.C.- 6 B.C.) was a part of the founding of two kingdoms in ancient Korea, Goguryeo and Baekje. She was the queen of the first king of Goguryeo ( Read more... )