More progress to report
Sep. 19th, 2002 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerrLast night, I investigated "Herne the Hunter" on the Internet--if you'll remember, I ran across the name on that backgammon table at the Ren Fest, which listed Jack Spring, Jack Frost, John Barleycorn and Herne the Hunter. I found enough to decide that he's an entity who is closely identified with the British Isles, and so don't think I'll pursue that thread any further (although I will say that Charles DeLint did a pretty interesting job bringing the legend of the Green Man to Ottawa, Canada in Forests of the Heart).
I called the Minnesota Historical Society today to inquire if they knew of any novels written about either the Winter Carnival or Ice Palaces. Besides the murder mystery I already knew about, there was apparently just one other. No fantasy. Good. Then I threw another question, just as an afterthought, and hit pay dirt. "Were there any non-fiction books about the Winter Carnival?" Yes, one was just released by a local community's historical society just a few years ago: Icy Pleasures: Minnesota Celebrates Winter, and I've already located a copy and ordered it off the Internet at about one third cost (isn't that a great title, Icy Pleasures? I'd like to find a way to work the idea of an "icy pleasure" in somehow). I might try to contact the author at some point, if I need some historical help on the subject.
Anyway, so . . . I think I've identified and ordered some really key research books at this point. Now I have to wait for them to arrive and start reading them, so I can continue to "supersaturate" my idea-generation solution. When I interviewed Tim Powers about the process of writing a fantasy/alternate history novel, he explained that what he does is to read history, always asking himself, now what is the real reason, the magical explanation, for why these people did these inexplicable things? What I'm going to be doing is looking for patterns. How far apart in time were the ice palaces constructed? Can I think of a magical explanation of why those intervals of time might have been chosen? Can I tie the building of the ice palaces to any other patterns or events, i.e., historical happenings in the Twin Cities or Minnesota? Weather? The 17-year cicada cycle? The founding of the Heart of the Beast puppet theater? Anything?
I thought about lacuna of summer magic during winter and vice versa, what would those be? An ice rink during summer, I thought, and perhaps the Como Park Conservatory during winter (the Conservatory skates perilously close to Emma Bull's gravitational pull; she used it in War for the Oaks. Must be careful about that if I use it, too.)
Peg
I called the Minnesota Historical Society today to inquire if they knew of any novels written about either the Winter Carnival or Ice Palaces. Besides the murder mystery I already knew about, there was apparently just one other. No fantasy. Good. Then I threw another question, just as an afterthought, and hit pay dirt. "Were there any non-fiction books about the Winter Carnival?" Yes, one was just released by a local community's historical society just a few years ago: Icy Pleasures: Minnesota Celebrates Winter, and I've already located a copy and ordered it off the Internet at about one third cost (isn't that a great title, Icy Pleasures? I'd like to find a way to work the idea of an "icy pleasure" in somehow). I might try to contact the author at some point, if I need some historical help on the subject.
Anyway, so . . . I think I've identified and ordered some really key research books at this point. Now I have to wait for them to arrive and start reading them, so I can continue to "supersaturate" my idea-generation solution. When I interviewed Tim Powers about the process of writing a fantasy/alternate history novel, he explained that what he does is to read history, always asking himself, now what is the real reason, the magical explanation, for why these people did these inexplicable things? What I'm going to be doing is looking for patterns. How far apart in time were the ice palaces constructed? Can I think of a magical explanation of why those intervals of time might have been chosen? Can I tie the building of the ice palaces to any other patterns or events, i.e., historical happenings in the Twin Cities or Minnesota? Weather? The 17-year cicada cycle? The founding of the Heart of the Beast puppet theater? Anything?
I thought about lacuna of summer magic during winter and vice versa, what would those be? An ice rink during summer, I thought, and perhaps the Como Park Conservatory during winter (the Conservatory skates perilously close to Emma Bull's gravitational pull; she used it in War for the Oaks. Must be careful about that if I use it, too.)
Peg
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Date: 2002-09-23 03:13 am (UTC)My son is named for Herne the Hunter. Yes, definitely a British Isles deity. (There's a statue of him in Windsor Park.)
I'd heard the seasons related to (among other things) the four Jacks. Jack o' the Green, John Barleycorn, Jack o' Lantern, and Jack Frost. Cheating a bit, but it's a cool way to twist new threads together. (Besides, stricly speaking Herne is a Summer through Winter deity, especially in his Winter aspect as "Lord of the Hunt" which hunts across the winter night skies.)
And just to toss in... what about the "Year Without a Summer". There seem to be several, in which summer just never came.