Today we spent the afternoon up at our local vineyard with a bunch of other mums and lots and lots of small children. (Yes, we do live in Wales. Yes, it rains a lot. Yes, there is a vineyard here.)
I actually packed my computer and notebook, intending to get on with some work (I’m desperately trying to finish off a novella that’s tied in to my forthcoming book, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, and I have a freelance project due at the end of next week), but the weather was so nice and the kids were having so much fun that I left it all in the car.
Somehow, we seem to forget that this vineyard is nearby and that it’s absolutely great for kids (there’s a stream and plenty of places to play) and of course for adults, and then we remember and absolutely swear that we’ll come back. The Easter holidays are just beginning, and my brother Martin is bringing his kids down to stay for a couple of days, so if we get some nice weather (not guaranteed here!) we’ll have to bring them all up for an afternoon.
In the meantime, we’re not planning to go away anywhere over the break, so we’ll be trying to do some day trips with the kids. I’m going to take them to the aquarium in Bristol, and their grandma will be taking MrD to the science centre in Cardiff (his little brother, MrX, is too young for that), and then we’ll see. We’re thinking about the Wales National Showcaves, which look absolutely awesome but may need a few days rather than a day trip.
In between all of that, I’ll have to try to get some work in.
Still, it’s spring and it’s been warm, and I’m feeling happy. It’s funny how that can make everything seem much more possible.
I've realised a lot of images on my website are of Tyrannosaurs.
This week was half term, so we took the boys up to London to register them for their American citizenship (they now have dual British-American nationality, British from me, American from Steph). After 3 hours sitting waiting in the US Embassy, we rewarded the boys with a trip to the National History Museum, and particularly the dinosaur gallery.
Baby X is a little young for it, but he likes crowds, but Mr D had what may have been the absolute best time of his life. He loves dinosaurs and adores animals, so he tore around, identifying species and boggling at everything. We chased after, trying not to lose him in the ridiculous crowds.
Anyway, we had a good time, and half term is over tomorrow, so Mr D is back to school and Steph and I have to get back to work.
Right now I’ve cleared out all of the freelance work I’ve had, so I can dive into writing. I don’t have long to draft my new book, and I have loads of figuring out to do before I can even start, so it’s going to be a busy few weeks.
Last Friday, we were driving back from holiday, passing through Wiltshire and Somerset (in the U.K.), and at the same time, I was just starting the latest big fat fantasy novel I’d come across. (Well, not at exactly the same time, but, you know what I mean.)
Anyway, one of the coolest things about taking that route (other than getting to pass through Bath on the way) is seeing the names of the towns and villages that you go through.
Names are important. They tell whole stories just by themselves. For example, on our drive, we passed Dead Maids and Cold Ashton. I have no idea what the story behind ‘Dead Maids’ is, but you don’t have to to immediately know there is a story there.
If we’d been a bit further south, we might have passed through Buckland St. Mary or Netherhampton. If we’d been a couple of hundred miles further north, in Yorkshire, we could have been in the fantastically named Ravenscar (the ‘scar’ being evidence of the Norse influence in the region, deriving from the word for a cliff or a steep, rocky slope) or Stainforth.
Every one of these names is suggestive of a history, a location, and a culture. Just by their names, they conjure little stories.
By contrast, the fantasy novel I started reading was full of the far-too-common fantasy nonsense names, like Blargh and K’ching (I made these up, to save the blushes of the author of the book I’m reading now). These randomly made up names do absolutely nothing for a book. They don’t give a sense of place or culture, and they certainly don’t give any history. They make a book feel thin.
Tolkien, of course, was the master of using names to lend verisimilitude to his books (look at how the names of places reflect the history and the nature of their peoples). George RR Martin does it well, too, with names of places in the North and Dorne being quite different from those in the Riverlands, and different again from those in other countries. (There is a reason Vaes Dothrak is not next to Riverrun; the names tell you about the people, their culture, and the place; they’re not random names.)
There’s not really any excuse for using random combinations of letters as names of places in fantasy novels. It’s simply the equivalent of shouting, ‘Hey! I couldn’t be bothered to do any real worldbuilding for my book!’ Which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly a selling point.
Anyway, because we were on vacation last week, I didn’t do any work, so this coming week, I’m on super-extra focus to make some real progress in figuring out my next book.
Oh yeah. And I’ll be setting it in the real world. Where the names have already been sorted.
If you use WordPress for your website, almost every plugin you use will load extra junk into the site, slowing it down. This plugin can help you control that and speed things up again. I’ve been doing this manually, but for my next site, I’m going to try this.
It was a beautiful, warm, sunny Sunday here in Wales today. This doesn’t happen very often. Mr. Darcy, Baby X and I decided to take a long walk, first along the nearby canal, then up into the hills. We went up to Keeper’s Pond, in Blaenavon.
This whole area is absolutely fascinating. The Welsh valleys were big mining and industrial areas, so parts of the hills look like scenes from Mordor, with great heaps of old slag. Keeper’s Pond was actually the pond that supplied water to an enormous forge that produced hundreds of tons of iron. This is what it looked like in the nineteenth century:
Now that entire forge and the village that came along with it are completely gone.
We sat and had our sandwiches looking out over the pond to the bleak moors beyond. There was hardly any breeze but plenty of haze, and the sunlight intermittently breaking through. Mr. D. searched for predators, checking for footprints and investigating ‘scat’ (thankfully just lumps of soil…), while Baby X stared around with wide blue eyes from the safety of his buggy.
It was Mothers’ day over here in the UK, too, and the boys did a fantastic job of choosing a Mothers’ day present (a lovely heart necklace).
