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@quillcraft
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Write it badly or it'll never be written
Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again
One of the most common ways you preserve pork without refrigeration is keeping it in really salty water. This makes the pork borderline inedible because it’s so salty. What you don’t see in medieval fantasy is people soaking their meat in water for a bit before they cook it.
That’s also a reason to boil your meat though. Like yeah meat tastes better if you sear it first but sometimes you’ve gotta get that salt out.
You can also smoke your meats and make them into jerky basically. It’s not as juicy as pickling them though.
Also medieval peasants had more meat than you’d think because of these preservation methods. You can feed a pig scraps for the whole year and then butcher it at the start of winter and preserve the meat. Because of this they also often had access to lard.
Medieval peasants also didn’t eat chicken very often. That’s a source of eggs. If you’re lucky enough to own a cow it’s also unlikely you’d eat it unless it’s on its way out anyways. That’s a good source of milk. It’s more advantageous to keep a cow or chicken alive than to eat them.
These days chicken is usually the cheapest form of meat available. If someone is eating a chicken in a medieval setting though it’s either because they didn’t need that chicken anymore or because they’re rich enough to have chickens for eating.
If we’re talking mutton, European sheep are more often kept for wool or milk while middle eastern or African sheep are more often kept for eating. Europeans would of course eat sheep sometimes but it’s another one of those cases where it makes more sense to keep the animal alive rather than eating it.
Fat from a fat tailed sheep makes for good cooking fat if your setting is more middle eastern or North African inspired. European settings would prefer butter, lard, or olive oil depending on where exactly they are.
Goats weren’t super popular in Europe during medieval and ancient times. Very common in the Middle East and North Africa though both for milk and for meat.
A cow or ewe must have a calf or lamb every year to produce milk. Half of those offspring will be male, and thus will not produce milk. Ergo they were eaten, because you only need one bull or ram for a much larger number of breeding females.
The limiting factor for livestock keeping in the medieval period was winter fodder--there was enough summer grazing for the spring births in fallow fields that they fertilized with their manure , but not enough hay and grazing to get them through the winter. So the lambs--all the males and some of the females--would be butchered in the fall. A bull calf might be butchered as veal (or "baby beef", depending on timing) its first fall or might be over-wintered and butchered as beef the following fall. A few of the older ewes would be butchered as mutton, replaced with female lambs from the spring births. A female calf would be traded, sold, or kept as a replacement.
Similarly, half of the chicks born would be male, destined for spring/early summer butchering. (Or caponed, castrated, though that's much more difficult with a bird.) Chicken is a lean meat, though, and rather tough in a free-range bird, so it was usually stewed rather than roasted. Capon was a bit of a luxury food due to the difficulty of castrating them. Geese were much more popular due to the fattier meat.
Pork was plentiful due in part to the large size of a sow's litter. Over-winter one sow, and you get eight piglets or so, much more than a cow's single calf or a ewe's one to four lambs. Even if you didn't keep your own sow, buying piglets to raise and fatten was common. Most medieval pigs would forage rather than being fed scraps--hence the ubiquity of swineherd as a humble occupation.
If you see this post, back up your writing
I cannot believe I’m only 10k words away from writing the end of this 5k fic
like many people have said this better than me but no it IS odd that we've come to think of potatoes as so quintessentially european that their presence in historical fantasy where they're anachronistic doesn't jar. and yes people are trying to have the trappings of post-colonial europe without engaging w the icky colonialism part and yes people are neglecting to imagine what a european cuisine without potatoes would be like.
im fully in favour of 'let people have fun w their fantasy world' but is considering how the potatoes got there in the absence of colonialism not a fun exercise? maybe every year the dragon riders go on a great transatlantic potato pilgrimage
perhaps a good way to sum up the issue here is:
if you put potatoes in your medieval european style fantasy world people will by and large not find it jarring and accept it as a normal fantasy trope
if you put, say, black people in your medieval european style fantasy world a whole demographic of people will get very angry and accuse you of breaking their immersion
this is in spite of the fact that black people were a lot more common in medieval europe than potatoes.
“this character did not act in the most objectively logical way possible!” is not ! actually valid literary criticism
i have trust that the media literacy enjoyers will find this one idk
I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."
never related to authors being like "childhood is such a blessed innocent time", catch me with that jane eyre shit like "such dread as children only can feel" and "I then sat with my doll on my knee til the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room"
"Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing."
I find this passage from the Mary Oliver essay "Staying Alive" very poignant and true.
things in fic I'm used to people kind of faking their way through writing about:
the city of los angeles
the city of new york
sex
how drinking alcohol works
how getting high works
how a child of any age speaks
how nuclear physics work
how [my job] works
how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is
how hypothermia works
things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:
what french toast is
read through the notes on this one trust me
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
Anthropic class action folk: another issue to check
If you’re in the class of writers affected: Did you discover, as part of the Anthropic copyright settlement, that your publisher failed to register your copyright?
The Authors Guild is collecting information for a potential class action. Fill out the form here:
The Authors Guild has heard from many authors who told us that their publisher failed to register their book with the U.S. Copyright Office
there's a lot of talk about reading comprehension and one thing i think is the biggest barrier to people on this site getting better at it is simply... rushing. rushing to share something you haven't understood, rushing to have an opinion without taking the time to think about it, rushing to declare that you don't understand something
take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)
the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it
but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first
comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now
please just simply slow down. you don't always have to respond to everything within a second or two. it is okay if it is not an instantaneous understanding. we all need to get more comfortable with thinking more slowly and more deeply and more carefully, and not letting our instant split second responses drive us all the time, because they are a barrier to genuine reflection
Ways I Show a Character is Emotionally Burned Out (Before They Even Realize It Themselves)
I love writing characters who think they’re fine but are actually walking emotional house fires with bad coping mechanisms.
They stop doing the things they used to love and don’t even notice. Their guitar gathers dust. Their favorite podcast becomes background noise. Their hobbies feel like homework now.
They pick the path of least resistance every time, even when it hurts them. No, they don’t want to go to that thing. No, they don’t want to talk to that person. But whatever’s easier. That’s the motto now.
They’re tired but can’t sleep. Or they sleep but wake up more tired. Classic burnout move: lying in bed with their brain racing like a toddler on espresso.
They give other people emotional advice they refuse to take themselves. “You have to set boundaries!” they say—while ignoring 8 texts from someone they should’ve cut off three emotional breakdowns ago.
They cry at something stupidly small. Like spilling soup. Or a dog in a commercial. Or losing their pen. The soup is never just soup.
They say “I’m just tired” like it’s a personality trait now. And not like… emotionally drained to the bone but afraid to admit it out loud.
They ghost people they love, not out of malice, but because even replying feels like too much. Social battery? Absolutely obliterated. Texting back feels like filing taxes.
They stop reacting to big things. Catastrophes get a blank stare. Disasters feel like “just another Tuesday.” The well of feeling is running dry.
They avoid being alone with their own thoughts. Constant noise. TV always on. Music blasting. Because silence = reckoning, and reckoning is terrifying.
They start hoping something will force them to stop. An accident. A missed deadline. Someone else finally telling them, “You need a break.” Because asking for help? Unthinkable.
In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s.
The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style.
But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.
— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.
What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.
— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.
why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? it won't hurt him....
[ID: tweet from @/MrNeilScott reads: "Why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him." Nabokov to his New Yorker editor. Attached is an excerpt reading: I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift. In other words, I would like to discriminate between awkward construction (which is bad) and a certain special — how shall I put it — sinuosity, which is my own and which only at first glance may seem awkward or obscure. Why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him. /end ID]
not now kitten. daddy's realizing that the scene he invested 1000 words into could be significantly improved but only if he started over from scratch
fun fact there were at least two people named lancelot recorded in the 1292 paris census so I think we know what the 13th century equivalent of naming your kid sasuke was
other names that sound normal now but are actually From Pop Culture- meaning they were used for fictional characters before they became real-people names -include:
- Mavis (from the book The Sorrows of Satan, 1895)
- Pamela (from the book The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, late 16th century, but popularized by the 1740 novel Pamela)
- Imogen (from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, c. 1611. possibly a typesetting error on the earlier name Innogen)
- Enola (from the book Enola, or Her Fatal Mistake, 1886)
- Vanessa (from the poem Cadenus and Vanessa, 1812)
- Cedric (from the book Ivanhoe, 1819. transposition of letters from the earlier Saxon name Cerdic)
- Dorian (from the book The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891. similar masculine names had previously existed, like Dorus, Doros, and Dorios, but Wilde is believed to have coined this specific usage)
- Jessica (from Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, c. 1596-7. Possibly an Anglicization- Italianization? -of the Hebrew name Yiskah, since the character is Jewish)
– Wendy (from Peter Pan, 1904. It was sometimes used beforehand as a nickname for Gwendolyn, but wasn't used as a given name until J. M. Barrie popularized it.)
– Cora (from the book The Last of the Mohicans, 1826.)
– Lorna (from the book Lorna Doone, 1869.)
– Miranda (from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, c. 1610-11.)
– Norma (from Alexandre Soumet's play Norma, ou L'infanticide, 1831, best known as the source for Bellini's opera Norma, which premiered later the same year.)
