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There's a (very outdated) book The Shroud of Turin (http://www.amazon.com/The-Shroud-of-Turin/dp/B000CSRJR2/ref=pd_bbs_12/104-2504946-5682361?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191149989&sr=8-12)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.

[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.

[cabri729.livejournal.com]

Are you a White Sox fan too? Or Bears? Because neither one had a particularly good Sunday...

*waves the Detroit banner* (http://photobucket.com)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Sox, no.

Bears, yes, but I'm braced for a bad season.

Looking forward to the Bulls.

[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.