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

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

A believeable lost book? Maybe a little bit. :)

AFAIK, large chunks of a third-century gospel of James turned up on the (black) antiquities market in Cairo. Gnostic gospels of Mary of Magdala and Judas Iscariot have also turned up (from the 4th and 5th centuries, if I remember right). Anything dating before the 3rd century CE would be a rather startling find; anything before the 3rd century BC, truly astounding. Egypt is generally the best area for survivals, due to the climate conditions.

(The first complete surviving copy of the Torah, I think, dates from the early middle ages, though there are lots of individual books and fragments surviving from earlier periods. The same kind of thing applies to the Bible.)

Being merely a university student of ancient history and biblical studies, I don't know a lot about this kind of stuff. But Professor Karen L. King of the Harvard School of Divinities has several books on the Gnostic gospels, if that's the kind of thing you're heading toward. You might try online journals of biblical and archaeological studies for more info, if you have access to JSTOR.

Um. Not that I mean to interfere.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

No, this is great to know. Because if this thing sells, I may need it.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I was just reading the first chapter of F. W. Walbank's The Hellenistic World (http://www.amazon.com/Hellenistic-World-Revised-F-Walbank/dp/0674387260) and it has a rather good, if brief, overview of things like the survival of papyrus documents. He's referring specifically to the survival of evidence on the Hellenistic period, but the Fontana series seems to be fairly widely available even in public libraries (near me in Ireland anyway, YMMV), and it strikes me that something like that may be useful to you.

I should probably stop indulging my inner archaeology geek now.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

That's ok--I appreciate it.

If this book sells, the documents detail won't take up a lot of room. But it would be nice to have some sound sentences to scatter about, so I would probably ask for more resource texts.