From My Fantasy Writing Desk:
I’m writing a first draft of the next book. This is the stage that is both the most fun and personally compelling, but also the most exhausting. The job is to write every day and meanwhile shut off that inner judgmental voice so the drafting can flow—all words once on the page can be edited, trashed, adored. Words still out there in the ether unwritten are useless. Most of the time my in-process sense of the quality of my writing is way off anyway. Distance is crucial.
Location, Location
This particular book (3rd in the Tesha series, follow up to Sorcery in Alpara) is also pushing me back into research mode more than I have been for a while. There are several topics driving that research need, but one is location.
Part of the action will take place in Hattusha, the capital city of the Hittites who serve as my world-building source. I’ve never written scenes set there before, so I’ll have to freshen up my understanding of this World Heritage archaeological site. My husband and I visited it twice before on our Turkey trips, and it’s been excavated for decades, so there’s plenty of material to put back into my brain.
Of great help are frequent downloads from Academia.edu where Hittitologists now commonly post their papers. Yeah for open source scholarly materials. Interpreting Bronze Age ruins takes more than a village. The photo (with my husband at one side) shows how extensive this site is—acres and acres with a citadel, a lower city, upper city, temples, storage rooms, palaces, archives and various mysterious buildings whose function is highly debated. They’ve also found here rock carvings, thousands of cuneiform tablets, and a huge variety of artifacts.
What’s in a Name?
I’m still debating whether to keep the name Hattusha (sometimes written as Hattusa, but not pronounced that way) or shift it as I usually do with historical names in my fiction. I’ve chosen to shift names away from their historical originals in order to cue my readers that I’m writing fiction that combines fantasy and history.
The first Hittite king who ruled from Hattusha changed his name to Hattusili, “man of Hattusha.” My fictional Hattu had the historical name of Hattusili–the third Hittite king with that name. So he was also a “man of Hattusha.” I rather like keeping that actual historical echo Hattu/Hattusha for thematic reasons in my fiction.
How much I alter names has varied quite a bit, so I’m not sure keeping the actual name of the capital in this case will be a problem at this point. Sometimes the names I pick have been very similar to the original. Besides Hattu/Hattusili, there are Lawaza/Lawazantiya and Egarya/Egypt, for example. Other times, I’ve gone far from the historical name as with Tesha/Puduhepa or Gerose/Ramses. What do you think?
Share your thoughts on my naming process in this series in the comments. I’d love some reactions.
Archaeology I Enjoyed:
Troy at the British Museum
The allure of Achilles and Troy endures. Alas, I won’t be in London for this exhibit at the British Museum, but as the author of a novel set in the Trojan War (Hand of Fire: A Novel of Briseis and the Trojan War), I’m so pleased to see that this is going on. Several newspapers have featured articles about the exhibit. This one in the Guardian does a nice job of discussing the long tradition of Troy in literature and art, as well as highlights of the exhibit. Click here for the Guardian “From carnage to a camp beauty contest: the endless allure of Troy”
Reconstructing Mesopotamian Recipes
It is complex to reconstruct 4,000-year-old recipes from cuneiform tablets. I do a fair amount of dabbling in recipes with historically accurate Bronze Age Middle Eastern ingredients, but the scholars in this article are using the decidedly vague instructions found on tablets and a lot of careful experimenting. Their process is similar to Laura Kelley’s with ancient written recipes. I put together a cookbook with my Bronze Age recipes, and Laura contributed a couple of her truly authentic reconstructions. The way to get a copy of that collaboration cookbook is by signing up for my newsletter on my website. The cookbook is the gift that comes along via email after you’ve received a short story.
From this intriguing article about this reconstruction project:
“What the researchers revealed shows, in part, the evolution of a lamb stew that is still prevalent in Iraq, hand-in-hand with a glimpse back in time at the ‘haute cuisine of Mesopotamia’ that highlights the sophistication of 4,000-year-old chefs, said Agnete Lassen, associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection.”
The scholarly cookbook they’ve put together, Food in Ancient Mesopotamia, Cooking the Yale Babylonian Culinary Recipes by Gojko Barjamovic and others is available as a pdf download on Academia.edu.
So you can read this delightful article, sign up for my newsletter for a cookbook, and hop over to Academia for yet another ancient cookbook. How cool is all that? Click here for the BBC Travel “The World’s Oldest Recipes Decoded”