Life Returns to Normal and the Bardic Tradition Explored
I think this is the end of my unrequested backdated entry series!! "Today" is definitely Monday!!
I've been fiendishly hungry in my recovery-again, no surprise. Really plowing through the food, plate after plate; gonna actually have to go grocery shopping again "tomorrow," when I go to plasma for the first time in three weeks. Due to my prolonged absence and their ongoing need for plasma donors amid the upheavals of the pandemic, I got a Super Duper Coupon from them today, which is valuable enough that it'll cancel out about 30 - 40 percent of my sickness-necessitated plasma income losses. That's very helpful!!!!
I did something remarkable today: I wrote a little bit of Mate of Song text, some of the only such text in years! Mate of Song is not going back into active development or anything; virtually all of my Curious Tale energies are being put into the first book of ATH; but my beloved little bard is never too far from my thoughts, and has earned the right to be mentioned in the same breath as Silence and Cherry. Well, no one compares to Silence, but in terms of author surrogacies and stories that deeply move me, Afiach Bard is there! But anyway, I was doing something "today" (don't recall what), and was moved to write an in-world explanation of what a "bard" actually is. I'd never given such an explanation before, and, as you may be aware, it's a word that in our world can apply to all sorts of different things. So it's a topic that I think merits inclusion in the story, lest my ever-uncharitable Hypothetical Reader be inclined to accuse me of sloppy vocabulary. In Relance too it is a word with many meanings, and the type of bard that Afiach is-an entrepreneurial, peripatetic musician and singer and place-singer who entertains, carries news, crafts stories, and preserves histories-is not necessarily the type of bard that a given place or culture is talking about when the people there use that word. It would perhaps have been more consistent with our modern tongue for me to have called Afiach a minstrel, for the bulk of her commercial work is somewhat better associated with the traditions of minstrelsy than with the more esteemed bardic tradition. On the other hand, she is a powerful bard, for various reasons, from her place-singing to her command of special songs. It is mainly the lack of a consistent patronage by which she of necessity customarily resorts to entertainment through busking and shows.
Mate of Song sure does punch above its weight in requiring me to do Relancii worldbuilding!! If only you knew how many things I needed to invent just to write those 700 words or so.
I've been fiendishly hungry in my recovery-again, no surprise. Really plowing through the food, plate after plate; gonna actually have to go grocery shopping again "tomorrow," when I go to plasma for the first time in three weeks. Due to my prolonged absence and their ongoing need for plasma donors amid the upheavals of the pandemic, I got a Super Duper Coupon from them today, which is valuable enough that it'll cancel out about 30 - 40 percent of my sickness-necessitated plasma income losses. That's very helpful!!!!
I did something remarkable today: I wrote a little bit of Mate of Song text, some of the only such text in years! Mate of Song is not going back into active development or anything; virtually all of my Curious Tale energies are being put into the first book of ATH; but my beloved little bard is never too far from my thoughts, and has earned the right to be mentioned in the same breath as Silence and Cherry. Well, no one compares to Silence, but in terms of author surrogacies and stories that deeply move me, Afiach Bard is there! But anyway, I was doing something "today" (don't recall what), and was moved to write an in-world explanation of what a "bard" actually is. I'd never given such an explanation before, and, as you may be aware, it's a word that in our world can apply to all sorts of different things. So it's a topic that I think merits inclusion in the story, lest my ever-uncharitable Hypothetical Reader be inclined to accuse me of sloppy vocabulary. In Relance too it is a word with many meanings, and the type of bard that Afiach is-an entrepreneurial, peripatetic musician and singer and place-singer who entertains, carries news, crafts stories, and preserves histories-is not necessarily the type of bard that a given place or culture is talking about when the people there use that word. It would perhaps have been more consistent with our modern tongue for me to have called Afiach a minstrel, for the bulk of her commercial work is somewhat better associated with the traditions of minstrelsy than with the more esteemed bardic tradition. On the other hand, she is a powerful bard, for various reasons, from her place-singing to her command of special songs. It is mainly the lack of a consistent patronage by which she of necessity customarily resorts to entertainment through busking and shows.
Mate of Song sure does punch above its weight in requiring me to do Relancii worldbuilding!! If only you knew how many things I needed to invent just to write those 700 words or so.