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I've fallen way behind this week. I can't sleep, can't read, can't write, can't *think* due to worrying about the future. Could it be politics making me anxious? Who's to say. Whatever the cause, I've resumed panic attacks after going several years without. One a night two nights in a row.

Intervention was obviously needed so I've stocked up on sertraline (the GOAT of SSRIs IMO.) And while it won't properly kick in for a full week, it just might take the edge off and let me sleep this weekend.

Back to blathering next week, I hope.

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Update: I found my book! It (alongside my hand-written first draft of about 80% of Honour and Obligation) is now sat in their permanent display spot, on a high shelf gathering dust and being inaccessible to the dogs. I'd add a picture if I could but I'm on my desktop right now and apparently that's not allowed.

I lost my book

I'm a terribly lazy editor. It means if I have a chunk of material typed up then instead of reading it properly and rewriting chunks as required, I will copy and paste the bad stuff perhaps only changing occasional words.

So I write the first draft by hand. It's tedious and painful, but it forces me to rewrite the second draft in its entirety, and that makes my writing so much better.

The Witch Trials of Meryton first draft was written in a black notebook which my puppy savaged a couple of times, so it's very beat up.

But when I'm 70-80% of the way through the book, I'm enough in the swing of things I don't make such a mess of the first draft. So the last part of the book was never hand written. And some time between the last hand written chapter and finishing the book a couple of weeks ago I lost the hand written version.

I'm very sad about this. That notebook is almost full of rubbish which has been magnificently improved to make a publishable novel, so it has no artistic merit. Nor does it have any financial value. But I really wish I still had it.

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Smuggling then

I finished Mark Urban's "The Man Who broke Napoleon's codes" and got started on my smuggling books. Now honestly, I don't intend to read either from cover to cover, but rather to use them as reference tools for how I can make my novel work.

This is easier on Project Gutenberg, where I can Ctrl+F for any term and thereby jump to the relevant information. Sadly, King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 - while incredibly valuable if I end up including an actual smuggling scene - only has a few sentences which answer my immediate concerns.

Wars are expensive and the government needed more money fast, so raised taxes on imported items. "It was not merely the tobacco, spirits, and tea which in the early years of the nineteenth century were being smuggled into the country, although these were the principal articles. In addition to silks, laces, and other goods, the number of pairs of gloves which clandestinely came in was so great that the manufacture of English gloves was seriously injured."

Smuggling also meant money literally left England - never to return. "The smugglers, after sailing away from England, used to purchase the tea abroad sometimes with money but at other times with wool. That was a serious matter in either alternative if, as was the case, the transactions were carried on to any large extent; for the country simply could not afford to be denuded either of its valuable wool—since that crippled the wool manufactures—or of the coin of the realm, which made for bankruptcy."

And, of course, when at war with the French, smugglers interacting with the French brings additional problems. "England was at war with her neighbours, and the French only too gladly admitted the smuggling vessels into her ports, since these lawless and unpatriotic men were able to give information of the state of affairs in England."

This is all the information I needed for this week! Everything I learn for the rest of the week is gravy. And, since I already mentioned I've looked through my other book as well, I should probably fill you in on my discoveries there.

Richard Platt's "Smuggling in the British Isles, a History" from 2011 has some very inviting chapter headings. "Famous and Infamous smugglers" instantly caught my eye, promising some nice ready-made bit characters. Unfortunately the timing and locations are such I think only one of them was alive, actively smuggling, and in the correct part of England to be usable.

It also has an Index! (I love a good index. They're the Ctrl+F of printed matter.) I obviously looked for "France" which was absent, but "French Revolutionary Wars" was right there and pages 133-135 are all about how smuggling enabled spies to communicate, and ferried gold (hundreds of thousands of £s of bullion, apparently) to fund French armies, alongside the obvious support offered to French industries through buying copious quantities of their brandy.

I suspect smuggling ships were also used to ferry spies back and forth, but that isn't mentioned. Perhaps human cargo took up valuable space and was therefore undesirable? Or perhaps there was a limit of people per boat* and if one of your people is cargo, that reduces how many crew you have available.

This is a brilliant start to my research into smuggling. Astonishingly enough when you consider how few resources there are on the matter, I've got exactly what I wanted almost immediately.

NB* I don't think there was a health and safety limit per boat, even though this kind of reads that way. I just doubt there was much non-working space to just give to a whole person who might need the toilet, or be seasick, or otherwise not contribute to the work that needed to be done.

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The hazards of amateurity

Aside from the fact that amateurity isn't actually a word, the main problem with it is endless, boundless, unrelenting ignorance in just about every field.

On the one hand, it means I get to do a lot of research upon very little provocations. On the other, my Google Fu may set a new definition for "weak" so my research is rarely on point.

Take this Monday, for instance. I decided it was terribly important to know two things in preparation for my new novel (another Pride and Prejudice variation, as yet untitled):

The name of a magazine/ periodical which Lizzy Bennet may have sent a secret message to.

What impact smuggling during the Regency actually had on the war effort and whether or not the War minister (as opposed to the tax department) would have cared enough to get involved.

Now I grant you I should maybe have sought these answers before making the two assumed facts the basis of my new novel. As I did not, I went barrelling around and as a result, my browser history for Monday is somewhat extensive. I'm actually irritated at Google, because it used to be easy to scroll through your history and revisit links, or even export a huge amount of data but now the page just jumps around so I'll be lucky if I ever get to revisit the more interesting-but-not-useful-enough-to-bookmark pages. (If you bookmark everything interesting you need a search engine just to find stuff in your bookmarks.)

So, having done what I can to review my activity, the search process went something like:

I will write the scene where Darcy tries to cheer up Georgiana by showing her a magazine puzzle.

What should the magazine be called? There must be puzzle magazines from the 18th century, right? Ooh, this looks interesting. And it cites this resource.

Sidebar: Did they call them puzzles? Riddles? Conundrums? What does etymonline say? Conundrums is a good one.

Back to the resource from point 2. Oh hey, Jonathan Swift had an enigma published in a journal called Muse's Mercury? Cool name, no wikipedia page. Ooh, they have scanned copies on archive.org. Oh, it's a century older than I want it to be. MF the 1800s are the NINETEENTH century! Get it together girl!

But there must be other magazines on archive.org. I'll filter and see what we get. Ladies Weekly magazine? No (for reasons). Gentleman's weekly? Also no (for other reasons). Oooh, The Weekly Entertainer and West of England Miscellany. Looks good! Is Derbyshire in the West of England? Close enough.

Now for smuggling. Any mention of it in my history books or wiki pages on Napoleonic wars? Nope. Is there any mention of any famous smugglers? Ooh, there's a wikipedia list of pirates. Hmm. They're all American. But there's some books linked as additional resources... and they're no good either.

OK, new tack. Smuggling in the Regency generally. Blog post about Smuggling in Jane Austen's time... And links! To the Liverpool Maritime museum! What a brilliant idea, they're bound to have something. Couple of resources I can't access until I'm in England, but a few websites. One really old one that references a book now available on Project Gutenberg! I do love me some project Gutenberg. (King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 by E. Keble Chatterton) And a book I need to buy. That's fine I can afford one book.

I don't like Darcy calling that magazine the Entertainer, it's too vague. Let's just double check its full name... Oh, no. Published in America. Not Entertainment Weekly in the West of England but to the West of England. Drat. Other options... (for the next half hour I looked at other options. Failed to find any in the right period and country of origin which I could actually use. Then I left the computer to read my code-breaking book, returned and spent another hour on the futile search for a magazine.)

That was Monday. Monday evening I wailed to my husband about how hard it is to find an appropriate journal and suddenly recalled my Full works of Lewis Carroll. It includes a series of mathematical problems which were published in a journal (if you aren't aware, the guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland was a university maths lecturer called Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.) And if I can find that journal, and it's old enough, I'll be in business.

Tuesday morning: the books. Ah hah! Carroll/ Dodgson published his puzzles in the Monthly Packet. Umm, no good. But maybe there's a wikipedia list of magazines published in Britain. There is! Can't filter it by year, so I'll just click the links that look promising aaaaaaand Bingo! There is literally a monthly magazine called "The Monthly Magazine" which published poetry and letters. They would certainly accept an enciphered letter and call it a conundrum.

OK, it's been two days of research, I should probably go and work on other stuff.

I know women weren't accepted in formal education, but why? I wonder if there's something there I can use...

Everyone keeps telling me I'm not neurospicy. I have my doubts.

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I lost my book

I'm a terribly lazy editor. It means if I have a chunk of material typed up then instead of reading it properly and rewriting chunks as required, I will copy and paste the bad stuff perhaps only changing occasional words.

So I write the first draft by hand. It's tedious and painful, but it forces me to rewrite the second draft in its entirety, and that makes my writing so much better.

The Witch Trials of Meryton first draft was written in a black notebook which my puppy savaged a couple of times, so it's very beat up.

But when I'm 70-80% of the way through the book, I'm enough in the swing of things I don't make such a mess of the first draft. So the last part of the book was never hand written. And some time between the last hand written chapter and finishing the book a couple of weeks ago I lost the hand written version.

I'm very sad about this. That notebook is almost full of rubbish which has been magnificently improved to make a publishable novel, so it has no artistic merit. Nor does it have any financial value. But I really wish I still had it.

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A new project begins...

Having self published my latest (The Witch Trials of Meryton) on Kindle, I've found myself desperately wanting to produce more and more on my weekly schedule. This means - glory of glories - that I've finally got into the habit of writing and no longer need to rely upon my somewhat dubious self-discipline.

(Dubious here should be defined as "non-existent".)

Anyway, the most difficult part of this process - if one doesn't count the editing, or the dark scenes, or any of the other difficult bits - is the birth of the new idea.

I, luckily, have an exceptional font of ideas. I married him a few years back, and it was a marvellous decision. He's not big on details, but he does suggest a concept, and that gives me an anchor to work off.

His suggestion? Napoleonic code breaking.

The man's a genius.

And, unlike his last suggestion ("How about Pride and Prejudice and Puritans?") I already have a bunch o' stuff to get going with; the first of which (freely available on Kindle Unlimited) is "The man who broke Napoleon's codes" - a book my husband bought me a few years back because it's perfectly in the centre of the Venn diagram of our shared interests.

His interests: Military history, statistical analysis, encryption techniques

My interests: Napoleonic wars, code puzzles, narrative histories

I read at least the first third but have forgotten everything. So I'm back to reading it, and this time I'll take notes.

As it's a hardback book, I'll probably take notes by using post-its and marking pages strategically. But I'll be honest, the material in this is unlikely to affect my plot - this book is entirely in Spain/ France, and my characters will never leave England. It wouldn't make sense for them to communicate directly with anyone I'm on the cusp of reading about. But it does talk about specific ciphers and the types of messages that were sent, so it'll help give me context for what my characters would choose to do.

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Not my normal sort of post, but my poor family has had enough of my complaining on other sites.

I'm so fed up of this cold.

Pros:

Both nostrils are working

I feel way better than I did yesterday

Cons

The cough has turned aggressive

I only slept about six hours and I probably need way more than that

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Damnit. I've changed my mind. All social animals have some sort of cultural rules/ social norms/ learned behaviours.

Without self awareness, how can you follow those rules?

Chapter four of Laland today (in fairness it was alongside a bunch of other stuff... But also in fairness I read it enthusiastically and could have carried on but chose to play a game instead) and had another random thought.

Self awareness.

It's been in my mind for a week or so now for reasons unrelated to this project and I wondered (as occasionally I do) if non human animals might be self aware.

For the first time ever, I'm pretty confident the answer is no.

This answer is based somewhat on the assumption that some of my previous ideas are right, but it boils down to this: self awareness enables us to critically assess our behaviour.

But what's the point of that? And why couldn't other species need it?

It's the flip side of empathy.

This is kind of my answer to all the questions I've come up with in this thread, and I feel it's currently incomplete. But if empathy is indeed key to community building - fairness on behalf of others means you can build trust to a degree not usually found in competitive breeding species - then it's not enough to just "give a shit" as it were. One must also tailor ones actions to be appropriate to the situation.

Culture will build from there very quickly (providing the rules and standards that makes it easy to interpret behaviours), but the initial impulse to care and self correct has to be internal.

So now I have that question hanging over me... I really need to get back to the original one and work on that some more.

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Chapter five of Darwin's Unfinished Symphony is underway and hit a sentence that triggered an old, old memory.

Motivation, rather than cleverness or ability, is what explains patterns of innovation here

A long time ago, possibly even before I started my career as a learning technologist, I saw a presentation about the value of YouTube as a teaching tool. The speaker was enraptured with his own son's success in learning an obscure skill from a single, low quality, YouTube video. His argument was that it proved you could learn anything that way, and we didn't even have to worry about the quality of materials.

My gut told me something was missing, but it was at least a few hours - possibly a few days - before I realised the single most significant thing he hadn't said.

Motivation.

His son had heard about this type of throat singing and *wanted* to learn it. There were no local experts, so he sought online. This was the only resource he found. He watched it many, many times until he learned.

If he hadn't wanted to learn, he never would have looked

If he hadn't wanted to learn fervently enough to overcome the initial hurdle, he would have stopped looking when there were no easy resources

If he hadn't wanted to learn well enough to get it right, he'd have watched once and wandered off after a few strange noises.

What made the difference was never the technology. It was always his motivation. It was always him, driving himself forwards, because he *wanted* this skill.

In Aesop's fables, there's a fox who wants a bunch of grapes. He keeps trying to get them, but they're too high. Eventually he claims they're sour and he never really wanted them in the first place, and slinks off.

Obviously the fox wanted the grapes. But is he wrong to claim he never wanted them? Because he's proven he never wanted them *enough* to keep trying past a certain point. And does that alone truly earn him the somewhat judgemental moral "many people belittle or despise that which they cannot attain", or is there an argument that he's avoiding the sunk cost fallacy, and bolstering his stance by guarding against future temptation?

When motivation is survival, there are almost no limits to the extremes we push ourselves through. When motivation is indulgence, there are many limits.

A lot of the experiments discussed in the last few books I've read use food, and eating related behaviours, to ensure participation. But it's food in a high stress, unfamiliar - albeit predator free - environment, and I'm not sure how the differences impact the accuracy of the results. Chapter four discussed the evolutionary differences between three- and nine-spined stickleback fish that significantly informed their learning strategies. Well, that all came down to predators, and there were no predators in the test environment. What about babies? And hunger? If you're eating frequently, or moving through feast and famine stages, I feel like your relationship to food is going to change.

I no longer know where I'm going with this post.

Edit: I should finish chapters before saying they're missing stuff. They've not introduced predators, but they are looking at correlations between feeding success and innovative behaviour over longer periods (skinnier fish are less complacent, and try new things more). There's also some gender based observations which is discussed as related to babies.

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Chapter four of Laland today (in fairness it was alongside a bunch of other stuff... But also in fairness I read it enthusiastically and could have carried on but chose to play a game instead) and had another random thought.

Self awareness.

It's been in my mind for a week or so now for reasons unrelated to this project and I wondered (as occasionally I do) if non human animals might be self aware.

For the first time ever, I'm pretty confident the answer is no.

This answer is based somewhat on the assumption that some of my previous ideas are right, but it boils down to this: self awareness enables us to critically assess our behaviour.

But what's the point of that? And why couldn't other species need it?

It's the flip side of empathy.

This is kind of my answer to all the questions I've come up with in this thread, and I feel it's currently incomplete. But if empathy is indeed key to community building - fairness on behalf of others means you can build trust to a degree not usually found in competitive breeding species - then it's not enough to just "give a shit" as it were. One must also tailor ones actions to be appropriate to the situation.

Culture will build from there very quickly (providing the rules and standards that makes it easy to interpret behaviours), but the initial impulse to care and self correct has to be internal.

So now I have that question hanging over me... I really need to get back to the original one and work on that some more.

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You know how sometimes you have ideas that you have *no idea* how to go about investigating and then someone says something that alludes to your idea and it's not helpful in furthering your own thoughts so it's mildly infuriating?

The other day it occurred to me to wonder how many revolutions (industrial, economic, social, etc) follow a communication development. The industrial revolution I was taught about at school kick-started in 1760, according to Wikipedia. Also according to Wikipedia it succeeded an agricultural revolution, which is credited from 1550s onwards. The first mainstream British newspaper was apparently 1702 although pamphlets, articles and "relations" were distributed from the very early 1500s.

I have reason to believe (Georgette Heyer was most successful as an author of Regency fiction, but her historical research is spoken of very respectfully. No citations, because I don't think I stand on extremely solid ground here) that "gentlemen farmers" - landed gentry who took a sincere interest in farming developments - used these pamphlets. I have no specific pamphlets to refer to, and no evidence to support their contribution to the first agricultural revolution, but this was the birth of my idea.

And now Laland (I'm only on chapter three, it's been a busy few days) is talking about models of social learning and *not referencing* communication between generations - no mention of oral or written history that allows individual "innovation" based off of *reported* rather than *observed* success.

I said to my husband yesterday that if this turns out to be the "revelation" of the book I'll be both happy and annoyed.

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My mind screams empathy

Today I've made a start on Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind and - perhaps unfortunately - an idea I had previously is colouring practically everything Laland has written.

I started this journey because I suddenly saw the importance of community as a "character" in stories, and wondered where it came from. Well, my reading suggests our history of stories is closely tied to our history of communities and social development (although correlation and causation don't appear to have been proved) and perhaps the stories we tell are purely the result of the community niche we've constructed? Perhaps to our brains, stories without community evolution are unsatisfying?

Then a few weeks ago, while I was thinking about those early stages of building community, I realised that the multi-species sense of fairness only applies to the self. To build an effective community, you need to care about fairness *as it affects others*. I figure this is a definition of empathy, and being able to see another point of view.

And what is a story, if not another point of view?

So I'm reading Darwin's Unfinished Symphony, and I'm not even through the first chapter, but several times now I've read a sentence and my mind has asked "have you considered the impact of empathy on this statement/ situation/ question/ interaction?"

Preconceived notions can *really* weigh you down. If I can't let go of this idea, I'll never be able to take on new ones.

Le sigh.

Edit:

Ha! Pp19-20 and we're onto the ultimatum game. See? Humans punish people who aren't empathetic in their offerings.

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The honest octopus

So I've been doing a lot of academic type reading lately and I'm sort of splitting what I learn into two categories:

Factual stuff for my research project

"but what if?"'s inspired by factual stuff that can lead to fiction

A month or so ago I read Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans and this week I'm reading Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness and here's my latest idea that would be *brilliant* if it were real, and I'm sure will be viable for a plot point.

But first, you need a little background info.

I'm Adam's Tongue, I was exposed to the idea of "cheap signals" in non verbal species. Basically, signals have to be trusted to be valuable, so most signals are resource expensive (peacocks wave a giant tail to show their health, and it's trustworthy because you have to be healthy to produce such a tail, let alone wave it about). But cheap signals - like words - can be lies, so why would anyone have any conversations in the first place? It's not exactly the reason no other species bothered with speech, but you can see the dilemma, right?

From Other Minds, I've been learning about octopuses, and cephalopods generally. Couple of things I've learned, in no particular order;

They're not very social creatures. They connect to mate, then separate. They don't mutually groom, co-habit, or generally seem to seek close contact with each other.

They colour change. As in, their skin turns all different colours in sequences that sometimes seem to be patterned, and sometimes not. Their eyes, incidentally, seem to be colour blind.

Their nervous system is more physically distributed than ours. They have a central brain, but most of their thinking is done in their tentacles (and possibly skin).

So here's the thing...

Maybe it's because I was a kid in the nineties, but the way the octopus colour changing is described sounds an awful lot like a mood ring.

And while their nervous systems are radically different to ours, I'm going to assume that squid ink, and squirting it as a fear response, is evidence of bodily fluids that change depending on mood. So, while they may not have pheromones (I'm 95% sure they haven't been mentioned in this book) they likely have some chemical that reflects/ affects/ directs their current mood.

So it seems to me there's space in the universe for a fluid dwelling species which is slightly psychic, communicates through skin colour, and absolutely refuses to become involved with any species that is so dishonest as ours.

Now I just need a plot, and a story, and a character...

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My Christmas card design this year was "elegant simplicity" and it came together rather nicely, if I do say so myself. The factory production line was still a little tedious, but we got there in the end!

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Note to self: empathic species would have no storytellers.

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Now I'm writing an academic paper about my idea... Things are escalating a bit quickly.

But hey! I get to write a paper!

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Alright, I have a problem.

I've been reading a lot on story craft and it's given me an idea. I first asked "why those seven story types?" And I sort of have an answer. It's not concrete yet, but I'm working it out.

And in working it out, I've radically changed my perspective on how you should go about writing a story.

And unfortunately for me, the only way I can go about the "new" way is to plot. Properly plot.

I'm a lifelong pantser who reluctantly shifted to plantsing recently. And now I have this new idea, I have to be sure my story is properly constructed before I can write it.

Which, I will admit, seems sucky to me.

Worse, I sketched out a kid's book in my mind (because kid's stories are the hardest, y'all) and verbally told it to someone. They were far more impressed than I expected.

So this bastard "new" way that involves all this bloody plotting work... It has proven initially successful. So I need to put proper time into it.

Damn.