#Thoth and his e-scooter

[kirk-goes-to-gallifrey]

Egyptian Gods Today (12/15) - Thoth

God of the sacred texts, master of knowledge, god of mathematics and sciences, messenger of the deities, patron of scribes.

based on this post by our beloved @dduane

[dduane]

Since Thoth uses (in this day and age) an e-scooter, is he the patron of small electrical transportation? Users of said e-bikes, etc. certainly need deity intervention, because they bomb around as madly as skateboards did before them.

Well, I wouldn't like saddling a busy deity with my own ideas. But who knows, he might take the duty on.

...as long as everyone is careful, like him, to obey local laws, be thoughtful about pedestrians, and always wear a helmet. :)

[dduane]

we heard that you are jewish. is it true? either way, we appreciate you for respecting jewish culture!

I'm not Jewish. I did, however, grow up in what was for a while a very Jewish neighborhood in the Long Island suburbs... which is probably where I initially learned the respect. I remember during elementary-school-period catechism (one of my parents was Catholic) getting deeply pissed off at the nuns for talking shit about my Jewish friends—claiming that their prayers to God only went "so high" (indicating a measurement at about knee level)—and decided then and there that This Religion Was Crap and I was going to do some reading to find one that worked better.

And guess what? I'm still doing the reading. :)

People who read my work will find all kinds of influences surfacing, (More data and specifics in this old post.) And as it says over there, if it all seems a bit syncretic, and that makes me a syncretin? Guilty as charged.

Meanwhile—to keep all the differing religion-adjacent approaches in my mind from getting uncomfortable with one another—when I swear, I do it by great Thoth: inventor of alphabets and the art of writing, master of scribes, god of the invention and wrangling of languages, deviser of calendars and project manager of the infrastructures of spacetime.* Does that make me some kind of pagan, then? (shrugs) Damned if I know. After I'm dead, I'll inquire. :)

(ETA: Sometimes people will see/hear me saying, "Sweet Thoth on his e-bike...!!" or "...e-scooter"!" about something. For the edification of those interested: here he is.)

*Probably also patron of fountain pens. See up above there? The thing he's carrying in his non-handlebar hand is the pen-case that scribes keep their equipment in. It's one of his formal attributes. ...Now let's all fight over which pens he uses, and what nibs. :)

[dduane]

...”First light” test render on an Ancient Egyptian House set. (Because Thoth needs somewhere to keep his e-scooter, after all...)

[dduane]

Thoth and his e-scooter

[dduane]

How I Probably Got Myself In Trouble Today

 Over on Twitter...

...And can she keep her big yap shut? As we say over here, “Can she feck.”

And then, so belatedly, the penny drops.

...When will I learn. Honestly.

[dduane]

Afterthought

...to this:

(tags in the image above rendered in text below)

(...and the brain wakes me up out of a sound sleep [having only had three hours’ sleep after working late the night before] and says:)

WRITER’S BRAIN: But not just that. Why think small?

(beat)

Steampunk/cyberpunk AU 22nd-century Sherlock Holmes. 😄 …And Army High Fleet armored-suit warrior & surgeon Dr. John Watson!)

DD (over helpless LAUGHTER while making notes): Okay, brain, now you’re just jerking me around.

...

…But still…

Mr Sherlock Holmes

Capt John H. Watson MD RAMC FRCS

(...And now for the cat people and the space sabertooths...)

[dduane]

Just follow the thread. Go on. :)

[dduane]

Hey, AO3 folks (and fanfic writers elsewhere)... if you see this offer, RUN AWAY FROM IT. IT’S POISON.

Please read this twitter thread and then stay FAR AWAY from the people being described...

https://twitter.com/aj_spinner_/status/1557083021949505549

The tl:dr; version: These people want you to “file the serial numbers off” your fanfic and publish it with them.

The catch: If the IP owners ever come after you, you’re on your own... and you have to pay the publisher damages! (Not to mention the IP owner...)

Also: their advances are CRAP. Also: Your advance (such as it is) is obtained by crowdfunding. WTF!!!

So:

AVOID AVOID AVOID. Dear sweet THOTH on his e-scooter, stay away from these people.

ETA: Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware has looked at the contract and declared it “completely incoherent and inadequate”.  

So, honestly... AVOID.

[dduane]

Hi DD,

I'm having a bad day. I want to try to counteract it somewhat by picking a random person to say nice things to. That's you :)

Just wanted to pop in to say I'm glad to exist on this planet at the same time as you, so I can tell you directly that all your writing, especially Young Wizards and the Middle Kingdoms, is very good and very important to me. Your books got me through some hard times as a kid, and continue to support me as an adult.

I hope that you are having a pleasant day and that something really nice happens today for you and PM to enjoy!

(oh hey, it worked, I do feel a little better about my own day, now that I've typed some kindness into the world)

Hi there Nonny!

Briefly: thanks for sending me this. I needed it today.

I've been having one of those days that's all about (a) WORKWORKWORKohgodohgod, and (b) a sense of great weariness founded on a feeling that it's never going to be enough and I am never going to get caught up to the point where I can just sit back and breathe for a while without worrying about deadlines and health issues and money and delayed projects and, and, and... Now, naturally, all of this is conditional, and much of it will sort itself out over time. I'll make my way to where I need to be eventually. But at such times it's unusually nice to have someone wander up to you unprovoked and administer a dose of (the positive version of) Melville's "Universal Thump". ...So very welcome. So thank you for that. :)

Anyway, I hope your day smoothed out a bit. Gradually, now, mine's doing the same. Most specifically, as bedtime gets close I find myself grateful for not being able to stay stressed when I start to get sleepy. (Friends over many years have teased me over my [general] inability to stay up late, but that cloud does definitely have a silver lining. It takes really serious anxiety to make me lie awake, and whatever else is going on today, that condition's not applying at the moment.) I'll go crash shortly.

But as regards the books: I'm glad they were there for you. It's always fabulous to know that something I love to do, and which I'm pretty sure I simply couldn't live without doing, makes people happy and gives them (when they need it) something to lean up against. This certainty is one of the things that gets me out of bed on days when I might otherwise want to just pull the covers up over my head, pull the iPad in there with me, and lie there reading fanfic all day. :) ...So thanks for that too. It's good to know I'm getting the job done.

(And yeah, what you note there definitely works: adding kindness to the world, as a conscious act, unquestionably makes a difference. ...And sweet Thoth on his e-scooter but can the world use it right now...)

Anyway, thanks again. :)

(ETA: Doubtless other folks will be reading this and be concerned-at-one-remove about the money thing. Yeah, all midlist writers have bare patches in the finance department; it comes with the territory. If anyone wants to assist, feel free to (a) go over to Ebooks Direct and check out our sale inventory -- everything's 50% off right now -- or (b) buy us a cuppa. [Or if you prefer, the store's got a Paypal.me.] If you're inclined this way, let me say "Thanking You!" in advance, as I won't be awake much longer.) :)

[dduane]

(World-)Building John Watson

...So some of you will have seen this start happening: in which I started to get into a Particular Kind of Trouble. (Story trouble. Sudden story trouble. In which you drop a jokey answer onto an amusing question, and suddenly discover that you’re going to have to write the novel that is the full form of the Jokey Answer.)

...O WOEZ. :)

...Well, I more or less immediately had some ideas that flowed from the Jokey Answer. (See the tags below, in which most of them are enumerated.) But ideas are easy—the very, very easiest part of storytelling. Ideas are ten a penny—as shiny as tinfoil, and about as robust. Building them into something with enough (story-)structural integrity to survive a decent amount of stress-under-plot? That’s another story altogether.

Anyway, let me remind you what the tags on this very basic project-idea looked like.

Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, The Cat Gap, The Giant Rat of Sumatra, space cats, space cats probably with blasters and starships, and sabertooths, probably I should to go bed now before CJ Cherryh comes after me, and as for the Sherlock Holmes connection, I can just see Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke running down Baker Street at the head of a pack of space sabertooths, Make sure you have your blaster, Watson, sweet Thoth on his E-scooter but 2023 is starting to look crowded..., now with added steampunk

...You with me so far? 1895 Holmes & Watson vs. giant (space) rats. With the assistance of Giant Space Cats and other assorted sentients. The venue: not the usual 1895 London, but a cyperpunk-y, steampunk-y one. With interplanetary/interstellar travel, and some sort of expansion of Victorian(-ish) Britain into the outworld spaces.

...Nothing to do now but rationalize how we got there, and then set the characters down in it and turn them loose.

Let’s deal with the whole mid-Victorian megillah first. The surrounding world inevitably both creates and influences character, and one thing became immediately clear to me as I looked over the horizon (as it were) of this setting. I wanted to have fun here, and I really did not want to be constantly having to look over my shoulder at the 17th- and 18th-century histories of British colonialism and slavery. “So,” I said to myself, “what do you do to a (planetary) society so that you come out in the mid-1890s with enough science to support the cyberpunk and steampunk parts of the setting, but also with entirely different results from the British Empire’s aggressive colonial tendencies and the slave trade(s) of the 15th through 17th/18th centuries? Ideally with the result that their worst effects are either derailed early, or very significantly mitigated...”

Solving a problem like this presents various challenges. (And “solving” is no more than an approximate term. A problem of such complexity is never fully solved; it always throws up new problems of its own. But that’s okay.) ...What I usually do in a situation like this is look for a suitable “hinge period” during which several potentially useful conditions overlap in a kind of co-reinforcing Venn diagram. Then all that’s needed is to find the best year (or years) in which to make the necessary change. After an hour or so of consulting various history sources and deciding what conditions needed to be in place, I found my year (in this case, it looks like it’s 1690). Hint: one statue standing in front of Westminster Hall is not of Winston Churchill, but Sir Isaac Newton... 

(A reminder here, BTW: this public working-through of process is not a solicitation of suggestions for possible alternate solutions. I’ve got the one I need. Thanking everybody in advance, as I have no desire to have to lock down my ask box or take other similar precautions to prevent myself seeing things that will expose me legally...)

...Anyway. By 1895, this seriously-adjusted Britain is societally, culturally and technologically a very different place from the one that appears in the canonical works of Arthur Conan Doyle; and I’ve got a good sense of why. So now I can turn, with much better informed intention, to character history and design.

Holmes... Holmes is fairly straightforward, as I see him. I’ll be dealing with adjustments to his character design in the days to come. But John Watson is more of a priority for me right now.

Here’s the man as we first glimpsed him when this set of ideas hit me, in the first-draft “mess dress” version of an armored warrior’s under-armor synsuit.

...I started having Thoughts about this initial concept about five seconds after I posted it: and the first of these was "Gods but I'm a lazy b*tch." Because when I was in the white heat of thinking about the characters for the first time, I simply grabbed somebody who happened to be standing around in the same shot, cloned him, pulled the clone’s clothes off, gave him a shave and a different hair style, and shoved him into the suit to see how it'd work with the first kinda-blond guy who walked by. (And it’s entirely possible that some people may have noticed this.) :)

(chuckle) It would be safe to say that his Grace the king of Arlen has had a lot worse in his last few years of personal timeline than a minor case of bodyjacking. ...But hooking his body to the John Watson character was never going to be more than a temporary measure, as I insist on character faces being unique if I’m going to work with them in any depth. Freelorn’s the only one who gets to use the almost-undifferentiated version of Daz’s Gianni 7 figure in the long term.

As I started hunting for John’s more permanent face, other thoughts started impinging. In my head I started lining up armored-suit-talent!John and cyber/steampunk!Sherlock in potential cover shots, and immediately some part of my brain rolled its eyes and said to me, “Oh great. Two white guys again. So tell us: why exactly? And is it just possible you’re missing an opportunity or so here?”

...Fair question. I sat with that for a bit. And as the new background-world started sorting itself out and slotting its pieces together, it became plain that there was already one fairly straightforward option for not going that way. After all, a lot of people of Afro-Caribbean heritage—in our timeline, and in this new one—have either Scottish names, or Scots ancestry, or both. (In that timeline, of course, the reasons for this are going to be much different.)

So: Dr. John Watson... war hero, specialist surgeon for suit soldiers in the field (and sometimes also for their armor, since the two are routinely intimately interconnected); commissioned officer and (now semi-retired due to injuries suffered in battle) “suit talent” in Earth’s interplanetary-defense force, the High Guard.

The chance to change things up a little on the basic character concept is welcome... and not just in terms of personal heritage. We’ve had a lot of attention on tall Sherlock/short John pairings of late. Seems like a good time to reverse that polarity and see how it plays. :) (For those who’re curious: the figure I’m presently using for Sherlock is supposedly about 6′2″. The new figure I’m using for John looks to be, in this version, about 6′5″-ish at the very least.)

...I’m finding this prospect intriguing for another reason: as a physical symbol of an old perception of mine regarding this team—that John, despite the various damages he’s suffered before meeting Sherlock, is not only the most interesting one of the pair, but the most powerful. (Cf. @earlgreytea68​’s recent post here.) Both as POV character (and the lens through which we normally view Sherlock) and as his enabler and stabilizer—the one who “keeps Sherlock right”—no matter how dynamic and charismatic and wildly deductively intelligent Sherlock is, it’s John who (in Canon) can be seen to quietly hold him steady and grounded in a (personal/psychological) place where he can actually reliably do good. More recent takes on the characters reinforce this trait.

In brief, John Watson (as I see him) is nobody’s sidekick. Yes, Sherlock supplies things in his life that John lacks, exactly as John does for Sherlock—this being part of what makes their relationship so durable. But as I see it, that situation serves to make John more powerful, and more himself... not less so.

...Anyway. These characters’ takes on the immemorial tropes will start sorting themselves out as this project goes forward. At least things are rolling now...

[dduane]

...So when I say “Sweet holy Thoth on his e-scooter”: This is sort of who I mean. :) (An approximation. The Daz platform is kind of short on bird-headed people, and this bird-head was as close as I could get to a genuine ibis. Unfortunately the beak’s the wrong color, and the only way to correct it would/will be to handpaint the injection file. Didn’t have time last night.)

(And thanks again to all the kind people who responded to the Please Buy Some Ebooks Or A Cuppa tweet yesterday... it’s really been making a difference.)