. . . and the noodle's noodling and oops! it's going to be another novel, I think
I'd been playing around with an idea about a drummer boy and now suddenly I have I think a full-fledged, entirely new novel in Fantasy Not-Poland Not-Early-Twentieth-Century, involving inheritance, sibling rivalry, a magical wild sow, a foresty marsh, and the aftermath of war. I wasn't even thinking about fantasy when I started. But while I was rationalizing making up a country instead of doing three years of research for what was going to be a novella for my own amusement I was taken with some remembered passages from Landscape and Memory, and the Lithuanian Cow became the Great Sow of the Marsh, and well, the rest is coming together.
The drummer boy is still central, of course. And the collision of semi-modern (trench) warfare and the style of warfare that pertains to black powder technology.
Once again, I am harmed by the absence of the nice fellow, whose thing was military history, and who always had to say something about the broader implications of military technology.
Stupid translating engine story of the day: Google can handle "stony" and it can handle "brook" but it can't handle "stony brook."
The drummer boy is still central, of course. And the collision of semi-modern (trench) warfare and the style of warfare that pertains to black powder technology.
Once again, I am harmed by the absence of the nice fellow, whose thing was military history, and who always had to say something about the broader implications of military technology.
Stupid translating engine story of the day: Google can handle "stony" and it can handle "brook" but it can't handle "stony brook."