Saturday into Sunday

[ksmith]

It was nice to watch a Cubs game without having to worry about the outcome. Of course they won. A one-hit shutout. Multiple pitchers, yeah, but still.

Playoffs start Wednesday.

Prepare to mock me come Monday, because unless a miracle occurs, the GIDEON proposal will not be done. Still working on Ch 2. trying to seed backstory without falling into the "as you know, Bob" trap, which is proving difficult because the two people who are talking know what's going on, so no explaining is necessary. Which means that hints just need to come up while they're talking, oblique references that need to straddle the line between taunting the reader with just enough information to keep them reading and not withholding so much that they get lost/pissed off.

It also means that Ch 1, which I thought was just golden, is going to need to be tweaked with backstory so that this conversation in Ch 2 makes sense.

This is backstory that didn't exist a week or so ago. And some of it is Biblical, and I am so not a Biblical scholar. But how much do I need to know to invent a lost book?

And then there's the fight scene, and the killing. Those are tough because actions need to be described and explained without slowing the pace, because killing scenes really shouldn't drag.

Also shopped and cut the lawn today. The fun never stops.

Comments

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Good lost book: found in a cave in modern day Israel, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan or Iraq. Location's plausibility will depend on desired age and authorship of book. Buried in a jar also works well.

Bad lost book: found in a library. Found at the Wailing Wall. Found in North or South America, sub Saharan Africa, Asia, or Europe.

There's a (very outdated) book The Shroud of Turin (http://www.amazon.com/The-Shroud-of-Turin/dp/B000CSRJR2/ref=pd_bbs_12/104-2504946-5682361?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191149989&sr=8-12) that does a pretty good job of showing what not to do with your sacred Christian and Jewish objects. Because the provenance (if genuine) is long, complicated, and has something like a half dozen Amazing Escapes and Miraculous Rescues, and only some of the scientific evidence meshes with the proposed provenance... it's hard to buy that the Shroud is genuine. (The book's author believes the Shroud is genuine, but well... the author also admits there's room for doubt)

If you need to create text for your Lost Book, you'll need more background. I know there's at least one Catholic university in Chicago, and there's got to be a Jewish institution there too. Most Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis know enough Greek, modern Hebrew and Latin to let you create something convincing to other non-Biblical scholars. If you need/want long passages, you'll want someone involved in textual analysis or the archeology department. Biblical Greek, Aramaic, yet more Hebrew, and possibly some older languages would all be useful. I can't really suggest names of people to talk to, since all I know is the (very rough) basics you get from Catholic schools.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Good lost book: found in a cave in modern day Israel, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan or Iraq. Location's plausibility will depend on desired age and authorship of book. Buried in a jar also works well.

Bad lost book: found in a library. Found at the Wailing Wall. Found in North or South America, sub Saharan Africa, Asia, or Europe.

There's a cloudier option, in that some people found it years ago, while others chose to ignore it. But background still needs to be discussed.

Luckily, it's a subplot, not the point of the exercise. But one does like to inject verisimilitude, since that *is* one of the points of the exercise.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Yah. The main thing is to make the provenance convincing. I really like the book on the Shroud, since the author's reconstruction of the Shroud's provenance reads like an awesome adventure novel. Since the supporting evidence for it is pretty slender, it's not very convincing. It wouldn't take a lot of evidence for it to become convincing, and the book does a good job of pointing out what evidence would help, and why.

It's by no means a good book on archeology since it's very motivated by faith.