Swan Tower

No, seriously, this short story is trying to kill me. It has taken me two. hours. to write about five hundred words, and that's with me saying "screw it, I'm going to let this turn into a synopsis, and then go back and flesh it out into an actual story later." By my calculation, it is going to take at least two more multi-hour sessions before I have something resembling a draft.

Note to the wise: do not, repeat, DO NOT attempt to write a short story in Anglish. I kind of want to light this thing on fire.

So one of the things I'm doing with the new series is basing the dominant ~European religion on Judaism, instead of going with the usual default of pseudo-Christianity. Which leads, of course, to me having to make lots of decisions about random worldbuilding details. I'll talk about those more later, probably -- I'm having an interesting time extrapolating both a nineteenth-century form of Temple-based worship, and a widespread state-religion form of rabbinic Judaism -- but one of the most obvious flags on the reader's end is the names of things.

See, in light of the aforementioned extrapolations, I don't want to make the reader think this is supposed to be straight-up Judaism, as it was practiced in the real-world nineteenth century. Because of this, and because the main character comes from a British-equivalent country, I'm mostly using English-language variants on the Hebrew names for things; for example, they have a holiday that corresponds to Purim, but I'm calling it "the Casting of Lots" instead. (Insert lots of thoughts here about how English terms and concepts from Christianity are often unmarked and can therefore be read as "generic," but terms and concepts from other religions are marked and therefore assumed to be referring specifically to the real-world version.)

This method currently falls down in two particular places: the name for the ~Hebrew language, and the name for the religion itself. My current placeholder for the former is "Ivrit," which is, yes, the name of Hebrew in Hebrew. (Presuming Wikipedia hasn't lied to me.) I cannot keep this, unless I want it to be an in-joke for the Hebrew readers in my audience. The current placeholder for the latter is "[Judaism]," because the one time I referred to the religion as a whole I was tired and just wanted to get the night's writing done instead of bogging down on naming. I cannot keep this, period.

Suggestions for either one? I can't read the Hebrew alphabet well enough to do my usual thing, which is to look up semi-random words and then fiddle with them until I get something I like. The language could be based on the real Hebrew word for "speech" or something in that vein, following the common tendency in some parts of the world for a tribe's name to simply mean "the People." The religion . . . I dunno. A currently-unsold book idea of mine has already laid claim to the word "Messianism," which I kind of feel works better for ~Christianity anyway, given the different attitude toward the whole Messiah thing. I need something that can be used to refer to both the Temple-based form of the religion and the rabbinic offshoot (which in this setting occupies the role of the Protestant Reformation, in terms of dividing up ~Europe along religious lines.) Not sure what would work for that.

Any ideas?

Early because the news comes a couple of months before my birthday, late because it won't actually become a reality until a couple of months after: the historical thesaurus to the OED will be going online in December.

It feels kind of like a sign from On High, that this won't be available until after I finish drafting and revisions on the Victorian book (though copy-edits will likely still be ahead of me, and page proofs definitely will). i.e. the universe is saving me from what might otherwise happen, which is that my progress would slow to a crawl as my obsessiveness in checking my word choice shot through the roof.

Anyway. Yes. I'm an enormous geek. Not that this comes as a surprise to anybody who's been reading this journal. But some of you are enormous geeks, too, so I thought I should share.

My apologies for continuing to discuss profanity here, but it's just funny.

New seventeenth-century insult for my vocabulary: "windfucker." Which, bizarrely enough, was apparently a northern term for a kestrel. (They also called it a fuckwind.) And then it got borrowed as an insult. From which I conclude that the seventeenth-century mind? Really not so different from the twenty-first century mind.

This is why I should not be let within three miles of the OED historical thesaurus. It's bad enough when I find these things by accident, looking stuff up in the ordinary OED; if I had the thesaurus to play with, I'd never get the book written.

Anyway, now I want to revise Ashes to put the term in there somewhere. Antony probably wouldn't say it, but Jack totally would.

Judging by my progress so far tonight, I have not yet found the hole that noveling buried my story mojo in.

That, or having to consult Panlexicon, the OED, or a Latin dictionary -- worse case scenario, all three -- every sentence or so is killing my forward progress.

Probably both.

I should just write the damn story and worry about the language later, but I hear blood vessels rupturing in all the prose-stylist writers of my acquaintance, at the thought that these two things are separable. Really, I should just write the damn story and give up on the stylistic experiment I'm trying to carry out . . . but where's the fun in that?

Can anybody recommend a translation of Beowulf that sounds as much like the original as possible? I don't want accessibility here; I want the linguistic knack I had back when I was translating pages of Old Norse every week, for making my English flow in different patterns. But my Norse is too rusty, and this is supposed to be Anglo-Saxon anyway. Any Anglo-Saxon text would work, I suppose; I just keep turning to Beowulf because it's the only one I know.