wherein Liz votes and talks about Narnia

I have voted! It was interesting being at the polling place -- I was only the 253rd person to cast a ballot, but it was quite busy while I was there, probably because it was shortly after 6pm and people were heading in to vote now that they were home from work. Also, this being a Democratic primary election, there was a bit of confusion with people who were Democrats and therefore wanted to vote, but who might not have ever officially registered as Democrats and therefore were not in the election workers' lists. *sigh* As long as we have a closed primary system, you really DO have to make sure the Board of Elections has you on file as belonging to a particular party; otherwise, no votes for you. I am not sure how to beat that into people's heads in a polite fashion.

I then headed in to the library to pay a fine on an overdue book -- I'd gone off to Minnesota without realizing it would be due while I was away, and then somehow managed not to notice the reminder notice in my email for a couple days -- but apparently I got it in within the grace period so I owed nothing. (In retrospect, this must be because the library is not open on Sundays until later in September, so they had no way to tell if I'd returned the book then or one day earlier, on Saturday, and therefore gave me the benefit of the doubt.)

And now I think I will go buy Chinese takeout and head home for dinner. :-)

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I have been doing a slow editing pass through "Out of Season," fixing little inconsistencies, smoothing awkward or excessively long phrases, and murdering quite a lot of commas. I have a love-hate relationship with commas. When writing, I sprinkle them in everywhere, and it takes me a fair bit of time until I regain the objectivity to actually SEE the infestation and root the extraneous ones out like the evil little beasts they are. For obvious reasons, I did not have time to do that with "Out of Season."

I have also been plugging away at that post on Calormen. Thus far, I have reached Rabadash's reign, and am bashing at events to make my ideas play nicely with Lewis's flippancy. Then I think I will do a quick skim up through the Telmarine era all the way to The Last Battle, because the Calormenes' role in that book is... um... problematic, to say the least, and I would like to iron it out a little.

[Meta] Thoughts on Calormen, part 1

This is for rthstewart and animus_wyrmis, who asked, respectively, about my Calormene pantheon and my Calormene world-building in general.

So, what are your thoughts on Calormen, Liz? In brief, they are an attempt to elaborate on what Lewis wrote in his books while mitigating his racism, ethnocentrism, and religious... um... blinders, shall we say. Extra-canonical material, such as the Narnian timeline that Lewis wrote at some point, is incorporated or ignored depending on whether Lewis's ideas make sense or sound to me as if he was talking through his hat. Also, please bear in mind that I am not Christian, that I read the books in complete ignorance of Lewis's Christian allegory for most of my childhood, and that I have always fervently disliked the theological aspects of The Last Battle. With that basic framework in place, I will now sketch the history and culture of Calormen.

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The History of Calormen, in 2,900 words and 2,500 years

( Sometime around the year 100, counting from the creation of the Narnian world... )

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I will talk about religion and culture in the next post, which will be written when my brain feels less like cottage cheese. *wry*

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ETA: Thoughts on Calormen, Part 2! (LJ crosspost)