wherein Liz beats her head against the joint history of Archenland and Calormen

Tonight I picked away at ch. 5 of "The Courting Dance," which has been stalled out for several months on account of, well, history infodumping. I had to put the history lesson in sooner or later, and Corin seems to have gotten the short end of the stick -- he gets to explain it all to Cor.

It is really frustrating to compress everything and try to make it sound vaguely like a plausible conversation. At the moment, it's not especially realistic -- the paragraphs are too long, with not nearly enough back-and-forth or background scene-setting stuff going on to ground the dialogue. But!

1. I have successfully plowed through the Archenlandish civil war, the settling of Telmar (and associated Calormene invasion of Archenland -- I love coming up with explanations for stupid things Lewis put in his timeline *grin*), and some culture clash stuff.

2. I have also managed to interlock "The Courting Dance" with "The Corners of the World" -- my unfinished story of how Jadis got from the end of MN to invading Narnia around the year 900 -- which makes my world-building heart absurdly happy. *bigger grin*

3. This means I've reached the interesting parts, which deal with the Long Winter, pirates, banking, differing cultural definitions of honor, the slave trade, and economic crises. *biggest grin*

And once this chapter is finally done, I can get back to the romantic "comedy" aspects, which will hopefully go faster. \o/

(950 words and counting -- since chapter lengths vary from 1,100 words to 1,800, I probably have... 600-700 more to go? *crosses fingers*)

local car accidents and the theory of unnotability-by-association

As I was walking to work Thursday morning, I saw a #10 bus drive past me on Tioga St. That was odd, because the #10 is supposed to turn off Tioga on Court St., not continue down to Falls St. But I figured maybe the driver was taking a slightly sideways route back to the TCAT garage on Willow St.

About five minutes later, another #10 bus went past, also on Tioga St.

When I got down to Court St. myself, I saw a police SUV parked across the turn into Linn St., blocking any traffic from passing. So I figured someone had gone around the turn too fast and crashed, and that TCAT was therefore rerouting the #10 to reach the Stewart/University intersection from a different direction.

I was right about the busses, but not quite right about the accident. Instead of someone taking the Court St. turn too fast, someone was driving down University Ave. too fast, crashed through the guardrail, and fell down the embankment to hit two houses on Linn.

The accident made the front page of the Ithaca Journal today.

I always feel weird when something I have 'seen' myself gets into the news -- I tend to feel that my life is deeply boring (mostly by choice!) and therefore any event I am so much as on the fringes of must be boring by association. And boring things don't make the news.

Funny how egocentric my worldview can be sometimes. *wry*