Showing posts with label ALIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ALIA. Show all posts

Thursday, October 29, 2015

What Happens When ...




Indeed.

What does happen when ... Rua, Sass, and Alianora in one of her  ... umm ... moods ... come face to face with a situation that demands their attention in a most emphatic way?

Say, for example, they're visiting someone from a very different culture from theirs, where the only thing that matters is conformity.

Rua runs afoul of the status quo, Sass jumps in to exacerbate everything by taking Rua's unintentional faux pas and exaggerating it to emphasize how ridiculous the situation is, which lands her and Rua both deep in the soup and enrages Alianora's sense of justice, sending her into a word-flinging rage of - well - of Alianora proportions.

Keep in mind that the rest of the Characters are standing by, half amused and half concerned, holding their peace for the time being.

Sass and Rua are perhaps the most powerful of a very powerful Cast of Characters and mild-mannered Alianora is infamous for her infrequent but extremely potent 'temper'. 

Yep.

No wonder everyone else is kind of keeping their distance for the moment. If these three can't handle whatever it might be, which is unlikely, they're right nearby - but not too close.

*laughing*

Sometimes stories pop up out of the strangest of places.

Let's just hope MammTwo stays in the wings, with the Sidhe of the Ages, and doesn't ... umm ... join forces with Alia. What a whopping pair the two of them would be. The rest of them would say, 'Uh-oh' and step back another pace or two but be rattling their swords against their shields, yep.

I tell ya.

Finding humor in truly ridiculous situations can be a life-saver.

Sometimes a person just has to shake their head and sigh.

Saturday, January 31, 2015

I have found the Geats!

The map is from the 12th century, but the Geats were there LONG before that ... just wanted to pop this in ... theirs is the blue area with the Swedes in yellow.

Here's an 'earlier' version: it's supposedly from the days of Beowulf ...


Not that they were ever lost, mind you.

It's just that I've only discovered them.

I ask you: how is it that I could have lived so much of my life in North Dakota and Minnesota, where there are plenty of Swedes and Norwegians, and never once in all that time heard a single word about the Geats?

No, it had to wait until I get started on ALIANORA, which takes place during the time of the Vikings, and am in the middle of researching a long-standing trade (friendly) relationship between Dunnottar and Sweden (going back to previous research about the name itself and a possible connection to a Swedish king called Ottar and his ancestors) ... and there were the Geats, smack in the middle of good old Sweden.

Me being me, I saw that word and immediately thought, 'Hey, that's a lot like Getae - I'll make them related to Alaric, but not let on until later in the book!'

Right.

THEN I looked it up.

O_O

I had been getting a chuckle about the Getae of the North having an on-going trade thing with Dunnottar for a really long time without even knowing that they might be related ... and the chuckles went straight into outright laughter when I read about the logic of a serious argument some centuries back when some claimed that Sweden had defeated the Roman Empire.

Because the Geats were Getae (read Goth, read Celt, read Alaric) and a part of Sweden, therefore it was Sweden who triumphed over Rome. Apparently there was a big to-do about it between Swedes and Spaniards in the 1400s.

And I can't help thinking, 'Wouldn't our Alaric have gotten a laugh out of that!'

Yep, and me being me, what have I done, besides putting all of the above into a public blog?

You guessed it. Got the relationship between Alaric and the Geats into the story line first chance I got.

*sigh*

I never could keep a secret.