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April Showers? I’d Rather Have A Bubble Bath
April begins on Hump 🐫 Day this year. Huzzah! We’ve got a lovely ramp to coast down into Easter weekend…
Fools Among Us
April 1st. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four. ~Mark Twain
I could be unkind and say some of us are more foolish than others, but we’re reminded of the old chestnut:
All the world is queer except for ye and me, and I’m not overly certain about ye…
It’s a bit too easy to become socially balkanized, so I’d like to avoid that for now.
Let’s be charitable, in the spirit of Holy ✝️ Week, and forgive one another for our petty idiocies.
It’s about time for some 🌱 social renewal, 🌼 some grace, 🌷 some forgiveness and we’ll see what 🌹 blooms in a reborn garden of amity. 💐
💐 April 🌷
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Being a dedicated pluviophile, April ☔ showers are something I look forward to.
They wash the accumulated grit of the previous season away.
All the icemelt, the microgravel, all the dirt that festooned the remaining scraps of snow and ice get washed cleanly away to make room for green grass and happy flowers.
🌧️ Not that I’d actually go out to see any of it. I prefer to view a calm, drizzly day under a blanket of comfortably dreary grey clouds from my little writer’s perch inside. ☺️
Do April showers bring May flowers?
The flip side of that glorious drippy calm is the signature havoc of April Fool’s Day.
No, my shoes aren’t untied because I wear slip-ons. 🙄 There is some concern of pranking today.
Kelly and Connor are notoriously whimsical, so I have to be on guard for trickery today.
Here are some ideas I hope they absolutely do not try on me.
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Sweet Showers
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote… ~Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (General Prologue, c. 1387–1400)
I actually got to meet Alan Tudyk at a comic con and personally thanked him, as a former English major, for slapping Chaucer up and down the length of Europe.
Middle English is a challenging anachronism to tackle. It’s easier to understand than Old English, aka Anglo-Saxon, but still a challenge.
The thing about previous versions of the language is that not only do you have the unusual spelling of words such as “shoures soote” in place of “showers sweet“, but the social order of what’s being said is also just as different.
It’s literally a window onto a world we barely have a grasp of anymore, but that’s what makes it such a valuable resource.
A lot of modern fantasy is a RenFaire LARP instead of having the slightest idea of what medieval life was like.
It makes the work more legible for surface readers.
Has cape, sword and horse = medieval, great.
If you want to go a bit deeper, you start digging into source material such as the Canterbury Tales and other works of the period.
On the other hand, you’ve got modern urban fantasy of the sort I’m examining in The Sentinels Chronicle.
It’s a lot more accessible because it represents modern society (for us), but what happens when it becomes as archaic as the Canterbury Tales or Beowulf?
Well, if you’re doing your homework and worldbuilding to create a rich verisimilitude, then you could be creating a window into the 20th/21st Centuries for some future enthusiast of creative anachronisms.
Until then, the good news is that I’ve finally broken into book 3, The Sentinels: Heartstrings.
This one’s going to be a bit longer than the first two because it covers a longer stretch of 2005, but I’m still keeping it in the 150K-225K that epic urban fantasy works can tolerate on the shelf.
It’s off to a strong start and I know where it’s going, so the interesting part is to see how you get there from here…
That’s all for today. See you back on Saturday for Easter 🥩 ham…