text:
Writing By The Seat Of Your Breeches
I was chatting yesterday with a friend – who is a Very Famous Author, I might add, and I'm not going to tell you who they are but I have known them for some considerable time. I say that so you appreciate that this was a most informed and erudite discussion and did not in any way involve discussions about poo.
Anyway, the purpose of this discourse (yes, of course I'm writing one of the new Russell books: he's catching, like the mange) was talking about writing style. I was being interviewed for a blog as apparently I'm an extreme pantser. We decided this was a most undignified manner of description as my friend is also a pantser, to a lesser degree, and we much preferred the term discovery writer.
This conversation seems to have uncorked something and it's ten to nine on a Saturday morning, my house needs cleaning, there's a cat on my foot but I need to set down a certain relation concerning a shiny new ship called the Fair Thomazine and the blustering shyster who's allegedly had her on the blocks in the Blackwall Yards these last twelve months. (Henry "Surely Some Relation" Johnson, as it happens.) And it prompted me to think a bit more about how the book currently known as "Kitchen, Or, Russells 0.5" is being written. (Today is the anniversary of King Charles I's execution, and someone has just passed the title of a 1649 pamphlet across my radar, and the book has quite literally just got a title – A Conscientious Exercise. You read it here first.)
There are bits of it, as I said to my friend, all over the damn' place. Possibly even over two laptops, and that's extreme. It had started as a short story that had been written because I wanted to know what happened – partly, as I often joke, because a certain crazy blond lieutenant still needed his Happy Ever After, but partly (and more reasonably) because there was unfinished business at the end of the Civil War series and that troubled me because I don't like loose ends.
So there was going to be a theme to the series: that, if you like, was going to be the string of the necklace, the series was going to be set around the Russells' courtship and marriage. And this is where the discovery-writing thing comes in: there was no way either of them were ever written to be conventionally romantic. That was always going to be in the background, but it wasn't going to be – to continue the necklace metaphor – the pearls.
Sometimes I know what year the book is set – because chronologically it has to be, in their personal timeline: I know they weren't in London during the Plague, for instance, and only tangentially involved in the Great Fire – and I can work backwards from there. What happened in 1671? Pick anywhere in Europe? And sometimes something will pop up on one of my social media feeds from one of my 17th century academic friends, a snippet of research, a name, a date, and I think – but what if….? And sometimes those things start out as just a couple of hundred words, or a scribble. One notebook per project, no order necessary, just bits and pieces of inspiration as they arrive which may – or may not – find their way into a Word document and be worked up into a scene. Which may – or may not – be then slotted into the working-draft copy, or may end up as the inspiration for a short story, or may end up being a whole new book in their own right, as they feel most fitted.
Thinking about it, I don't think I am a pantser. I have a map in my head for the beginning and the end, and I'm led by the characters as to how they get there. I'd not like to be the author to dictate to Thomazine Russell that the plot dictates she must have an affair with another man, as an instance – she'd not, and that would be the end of that particular plot device: see you back at the drawing board! I'm not sure I'm entirely a discovery writer either because they're not discoveries, they're things I already know. I'm applying how I know my characters will react, to developing situations.
If anything I think I might be an organic writer, or a pearl writer (in my head, the Major does one of his unconvinced sniffs and says nothing, very pointedly, about oyster-snot) but things grow, organically, layer on layer. I can train 'em to grow in the direction I want, and sometimes I have to just let them grow as they see fit and prune them back into shape afterwards. I have a seed of a concept, and it turns into a thing over time, and it's only once it's become an actual thing that I can start working with it. I can't make it coherent until it's grown up enough to be independent, and I suspect Colonel Hollie would be drawing parallels with breaking in a young horse at this point. He'd get it. Sometimes you get what you get, and you have to stand back and let it grow a bit to see what it will be most fitted to become before you start trying to make it into something it maybe isn't fitted to be.
All this being diversion, of course. I'm a pearl-writer, but the oyster is currently the Blackwall Yards in 1665 and my hero has an appointment with a coffee-house, an elderly Sicilian salami, and Henry Johnson Junior – in that order of importance.
By thankful1665in #amwriting, 17th century, history, musing January 29, 2022 January 29, 2022 954 Words7 Comments
Rebel Remounts #3 – The Unnameable Returns (aka Blossom)
So today's rebel remount is Blossom – aka, for most of two books, The Stupid Brown Horse. Now, this is the first time any of the sixth (!!!) Uncivil Wars books has seen the light of day, and it's quite long. But it's set after Marston Moor, after Hollie's beloved Tyburn has been invalided out of the Northern Horse, and it's the first time he's set eyes on his family in almost a year. (Thomazine is just two, at this point. You can see how this is going to pan out for him.)
Oh God but he was lame, he trotted with the tip of his off fore barely grazing the grass so that he lurched rather than the old smooth flow of water flowing downhill –
But he was still Tib, and his head came up and his ears swivelled towards Hollie with the same fierce joy as if he had four sound legs instead of a great ugly puckered scar torn across his chest and all the muscle under it in rags.
Hollie slid off the brown horse's back and his black pearl limped those last strides to bury his head in the breast of his master's coat. (And Hollie wept, not silently and not beautifully, but there was no one here under the shifting underwater golden light of the willow trees to know, save for the ungainly brown horse from the Yorkshire campaign.)
Tib grew bored. Someone – a number of someones, possibly – had made a pet of the black stallion, and after he had lipped Hollie's hair with the evident satisfaction of someone who had found a thing that had been missing, he turned his back and limped away. It was not a dismissal. It was, if you liked, a confirmation. Here you are, and the world is as it should be.
Tib was steel and shadow, but the stupid brown horse stood apologetically with the tips of its ears almost touching with the earnestness of its concern, looking like a clod of earth. It wasn't even a proper colour. It was a murky, messy, indeterminate brown.
He whistled Tyburn, and the black horse came about in a great slow circle. He'd have simply pivoted on his quarters, once. Hollie had something in his eye again. He must be touching the beast, patting and smoothing and straightening, he must be reminding his hands of the feel of a solid shoulder and the sleek of muscle and the long cobweb-drift of a mane –
"Daddy!"
A scream like a mortar-shell overhead, and he automatically stiffened, catching the horse's head because Tib was a battle-horse, he was made to react with fire and fury to every unexpected thing, and Hollie was suddenly cold as his tiny precious firstborn went thundering under the stallion's feet.
And that lethal battle-hardened engine of fire and fury jerked a little, but more in a sort of indulgent disapproval, and then shook his head and touched his muzzle to Thomazine's tangled bright hair.
Exactly as he had done to Hollie. Here you are, too, and the world is as it should be twice over.
There was something stuck in his throat that refused to be swallowed away, looking at his little daughter whose arms barely reached around the stallion's chest but who was hugging him for all she was worth. (Possibly she should prefer the society of other gently-born children. Possibly she ought to have a cap on decently and not to be covered in grass-stains and horse-slobber. Possibly she would have to be somebody else's daughter to be any different.) "Daddy, then, does not get a hug?" he said dryly, and she managed to extract one arm and bury her face in the top of his boots, and Tyburn rumbled grumpily and limped sideways so that he was leaning against both of them.
"Who that, daddy?" Thomazine murmured. Typical of Thomazine that she considered the stupid brown horse a who, rather than a what, and he grinned into Tib's mane for Tib was his dear and his only and the stupid brown horse was –
"Brought me from Yorkshire. Had to make do, lass."
"What's his name?"
The stupid brown horse did not have a name. It was too much like admitting the stupid brown horse would be staying. He turned his clumsy head towards Thomazine, stupid ears swivelling with an eagerness to please that was almost painful. "He hasn't got one, love. He's not mine."
"Whose horse, daddy?" – and with a mercurial change of subject that dizzied him, "Where Uncle Lucey, daddy? Apple come home? Daddy bring Zee present?"
He had a forlorn hope that she would cease asking questions, for she barely seemed to pause for breath between them – no, nor did she wait for answers, which was a relief, for then she released both him and Tyburn and flitted over to the brown horse. "Daddy, hot!" she said accusingly over her shoulder, and before he could stop her she started to unbuckle his harness.
Every. Single. Buckle. Of every single strap, so far up as she could reach, presumably having watched Mattie Percey unharness the family's riding-horses. And once she had dismantled the bridle – left him with his forelock looped up under the cockeyed browband, and the grassy bit pulled through his mouth – and dragged his saddle off sideways by one stirrup, the stupid brown horse stood there as naked as a foal. "You done that, daddy," Thomazine said, glowering at him with her arms full of loose sweaty leather. "He's hot."
The brown horse blinked at them both, his head turning from one to another.
It crossed Hollie's mind for the first time that the brown horse was, perhaps, not stupid. Not precisely stupid, then. Timid, maybe, and confused, and missing his own place and his own people – that he would never see again, that he had been taken from untimely without knowing for what reason or to what place.
Not bright, obviously. Not like Tyburn. He would never replace Tib. Nobody would ever replace Tib.
Very warily, the brown horse who was possibly not stupid, stretched out his neck and gave himself a little shake. Thomazine grabbed a fistful of grass and held it out.
(Hollie, in nine months with the beast, had never petted it. Never given it titbits, or troubled himself to find the places where it liked to be scratched, or given it any more than the attention he gave to his sword or his carbine or his harness. Something mean in him curled up a little and squirmed at the recognition of his neglect.)
"Nice horse, daddy," she said happily. "Zee keep him? Please?"
She was attempting, now, to rub a patch of sweat from where the saddle had been, with a twist of wet grass. If she had been one of his troopers he'd have pointed out that she wasn't trying to get a spot of rust off a blade, and it was only by God's grace that she had not been kicked from here to Colchester. Tib's tolerance would not have extended so far. Not even for Thomazine. Most of the horses Hollie knew would have put her on her back by now, had she scrubbed them so.
The brown horse stood like a table, with the tips of his ears pointed together and his brow earnestly furrowed. He was not at his ease. He was stiff and uncomfortable and all four of his ungainly legs were braced for flight, and yet he stood and let this strange small person scour him as if he were the kitchen floor.
The brown horse was worse-made than Russell's Doubting Thomas. Thomas only looked on the surface as if he had been cobbled together from three other beasts. The brown horse was swaybacked, ewe-necked, over at the knee –
"Job," he said, for the patience of the beast, and his arm tightened around Tib's neck I still love you the best –
"No, daddy," Thomazine said, and the brown horse looked at her out of the tail of his eye. Not menacingly, but shyly – am I done?– and Hollie's little daughter slapped the horse's shoulder like an ostler born to have him stand over.
Very carefully, the brown horse walked away from them. Tyburn jerked his head up in a fractional affront, and then dismissed a badly-made gelding as below his entire masculine contempt and ambled off in the opposite direction, nosing the grass. Keeping a wary eye on the brown horse all the while, mind, just in case.
The spring grass was coming in. There were still patches of winter mud between the trees in the orchard.
Hollie wished, briefly and passionately, that Luce Pettitt was with him. (This time tomorrow, likely, after his mother had gone over him with a nit-comb and bewailed the state of his linen.) Russell would ha' been better than nothing, though he'd have had to explain the joke three times to the marred lad. Slowly and ponderously, the brown horse lowered himself into the darkest, boggiest patch of sloppy mud and squirmed on his back, wallowing in the wan sunlight, the pale flash of his underparts bright as a guinea. Looked like a fat unhorsed officer in a buffcoat, trying to roll himself back to dignity, and God knows they'd seen enough of them throughout Yorkshire. "Goring," Hollie suggested, thinking of that unprincipled Malignant bastard, last seen flat on the cobbles at Wakefield and cursing in all directions.
"No, daddy! A nice name!" She straightened her thin little shoulders, stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled wetly. (Her mother was going to kill him when she got good at it, he thought wryly. The child hadn't learned that trick by herself.) The brown horse upended himself, gave himself a thoroughgoing shake, and then came up at a lollop. "Flower," Thomazine said, "Flower, daddy? Pretty horse."
"A weed more like, wench. Some great raking thing that grows out of cracks where you don't want it."
"Blossom," Hollie said, with his tongue firmly in his cheek. "The leaves are just on the trees, look, so it will be apple blossom time soon. What do you think to Blossom?"
"Blossom," she said, testing the word, "Blossom." And then a great smile spread over her fox-pointed, freckled face, "Zee's horse, daddy! To keep? Promise?"
"Aye," Hollie said, and he hefted her up by the waist. First time he had set his hands on the child in more than a year and he had forgot, almost, how fragile she looked and how solid she felt. All arms and legs, like a little harvestman spider.
She sat on the brown horse's muddy back looking straight ahead of her with her hands clutching his mane and her grubby skirts kilted up around her knees, and neither of them looked as embarrassed as propriety would dictate they ought to.
"You might have to let me borrow him, lass," he said, and she gave him a stern look.
"Look after him, daddy."
"I know," he said meekly, "I'll try and remember." He clicked his tongue and the brown horse – Blossom, who was no longer nameless, but who had a name and a place and a little girl who loved him for his kindness when her father had not – ambled into a walk. "Come on, then. Your mother's waiting on us."
By thankful1665in #amwriting, 17th century, horses, Uncivil Wars August 19, 2020 August 19, 2020 1,927 Words4 Comments
Rebel Remounts #2 – meet Doubting Thomas
An excerpt from The Smoke Of Her Burning, in which Hollie thinks he's doing Russell a favour and if you observe the painting above of the horse Cehero by Johann Georg de Hamilton, you can see why the scarred boy might have taken offence…
"Got a surprise for you, Hapless," Hollie said smugly.
Percey had groomed the bay horse till its coat gleamed like a dark conker. He'd even acquired some chalk from God knows where and he'd whitened the gelding's stockings. There were times when you had to wonder about Mattie Percey's previous career in a stable-yard in Essex. Just how honestly he might have come by certain skills. That lad was a better painter than Lely.
What he hadn't done was improved the big horse's temper, and it came out of the line rearing, ears pinned against its skull. Mattie had his hand gripping the bit-ring, trying to keep the horse's head down, and even so the bay nearly had him off his feet.
It was a bloody fine horse, though. Big-built, not one of your lightweight sprinters like Luce Pettitt's spindly witless Rosa: backside like a gable end and a proud arch to its thickly-muscled neck that hinted that someone might have been a little behindhand with the shears to its gelding. That was a beast that'd go all day chasing Malignants and come in at the end of it dancing. It was the sort of mount any junior cavalry officer with any dreams of a future career in the Army might covet, provided a man could train some sense into its thick head. Plenty of staying-power, plenty of fire and dash, though possibly a bit light on good humour. Hollie closed one eye and looked at the bay horse consideringly where it ramped and curvetted like some maniac heraldic emblem.
"What d'you reckon to him, then?" he said, and looked at the scarred lieutenant, expecting to see gratitude and pleasure on that cold, half-lovely face.
Instead the lad was white to the lips, the great scar on his cheek standing out a most unlovely purple, and his eyes were as mad as the bay horse's.
"Is – thish – intended to be meant in humour?" he said stiffly, and his voice had that funny slur it had when the ragged muscle in his cheek had gone stiff as wood, like it did when he was tired or ungovernable. Or drunk. That was still always a clear and present possibility.
Hollie shook his head, thinking he must have misheard, or Russell must have misheard, because –
"All right, ain't he?" Percey said happily, still being jerked around like a rag doll by the beast's flinging head, but as cheerfully good-humoured as ever he was even when his arm was being yanked from its socket by an unwanted cavalry remount. "Want to take him out, Hap- uh, Lieutenant Russell? Take a bit of the ginger out of his heels?"
"I. Should. Rather. Be. Dead," Russell said, through gritted teeth. Flung his own head up, looking not unlike the bay horse, and glared fiercely at Hollie, and Hollie would have sworn to it the lieutenant's dark eyes were brimming with wholly incomprehensible tears. "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."
"What?" Hollie said blankly, and Russell snarled at him, actually snarled, baring his teeth like a dog.
"The Book of Proverb. Ss." He bit off the last consonant with a hissing, furious sibilance, and then hit himself in the temple with the heel of his hand. "Shir."
And then wheeled about and was gone, shoving Luce rudely out of the way, storming back to the house. "What," Hollie said again, shook himself, "what the bloody hell was that all about?"
"What on earth did you say to him – oh, sir, that was not well done!"
There were times when Luce didn't half remind Hollie of Het. Well, Hollie's wife was his cornet's father's little sister, it wasn't so much of a surprise, but even so. That hurt, shocked, disappointed look was pure Het, an expression she reserved for when he did something completely stupid. What, precisely, he'd done this time, he did not quite know, save that he was still trying to make things all right for a lad who was as tricksy to handle as a barrel of rotten gunpowder, and he didn't know from day's end to day's end what mood he was going to be on the receiving end of. Like walking on eggshells, if eggshells were volatile, suspicious, and prone to soothing their tempers by getting fiercely rat-arsed.
"What wasn't?" he said warily. "What, seriously, sir? You did not mean to be – um – funny?"
"No, of course I bloody didn't!"
Luce gave a great sigh. "Ah, God. So you – you know – did you look at the beast? Other than, um, you know – professionally?"
"What -" With one final jerk of the bit, Mattie had the bay horse with all four feet on the ground. It was still a handsome beast. It was just – odd-looking. Three white feet, and a great lopsided white blaze to its face. One blue eye, and one, slightly manic, brown one.
A perfectly sound, sturdy, fine cavalry mount, who just happened to look both ugly and irregular. It was a bloody good horse, sound in wind and limb, beautifully put together, a mount a man could rely on – could be proud of. But now Luce came to mention it, the brute did look a bit like it had been sewn together from bits of at least two other horses. Good ones, but -.
And that had been a coincidence.
"Ah," said Hollie.
By thankful1665in #amwriting, 17th century, horses, Uncivil Wars August 7, 2020 August 7, 2020 962 Words4 Comments
Behold, A Black Horse
Yes, I know I have been significantly MIA for – well, a year, basically. There has been writing done, there is a new Uncivil Wars book on its way, the third Russells mystery is all but done, and there will be another Russells novel in the autumn.
In the meantime, I was chatting on Twitter last night about horses. I thought it was overdue that I introduced you to the bridle side of the rebel rabble. (I can't believe it's six years since the world met Doubting Thomas, so I'll re-share that again in a day or so.)
First, though, meet Tyburn, in a previously unpublished short story. Hollie's first acquaintance with the colt who was to become his best friend and at times, and quite well deservedly, the only friend he did have…
"You can't keep this up, Red."
Hollie scooped his tangled hair out of his eyes with one hand and squinted up at his spotless sidekick. "I bloody well can, lad. And you can stop there and watch, if you don't believe me."
He probably would, too, knowing Rackhay. He was a lovely lad, was Nathaniel. Loyal, generous to a fault, good-hearted. Shame he knew bugger-all about pain. Nat thought pain was the immediacy of having a wound searched, or a bone broken; not when you woke up every morning and just for a few heartbeats looked at the dawn with a sense of expectancy before you remembered there was no bloody point, none whatever. And you couldn't not go on, because you didn't know how to stop; all you could do was to keep putting one foot in front of the other and stop it hurting the best way you could. He remembered at Dessau Bridge – the first real battle he'd fought in – remembered afterwards, in the pale spring sunshine, sitting in the grass with a white-faced lad not much older than he was. Talking to the lad about the spring sowing, like Hollie had known anything about farming more than the bits they mentioned in the Bible, while the lad tried to hold his guts from spilling in the churned grass. The lad had asked Hollie to cut his throat in the end. Wallenstein's camp surgeon had took one look at the wound and agreed.
He wondered what Nat would say if Hollie asked him to perform the same service.
You might not be able to see any of Hollie's internal arrangements, but it didn't mean there wasn't a hole where half his heart had been cut away and buried in a neat, respectable grave in Amsterdam. And that was a remarkably lucid thought for someone who'd been drinking solidly for two weeks, and that probably meant he was getting sober and that would not do at all.
"No," Nat said, correctly interpreting the sudden gleam in his friend's eye. "That's enough, Red."
"No, it isn't, Nathaniel. It isn't nearly enough."
"Fine." And Nat had leaned across the table, snatched the bottle of geneva and necked it, straight. Shuddered. "Christ, Babbitt, that stuff's like oil of vitriol."
Hollie shrugged. "She'd not want me on the cheap stuff. I owe her that, at least."
Rackhay screwed his face up. "Jesus, Babbitt. That's – well," he looked round the dingy inn with an expression of astonished disgust, "or have they barred you from the Cat as well these days?"
And without thinking, without any conscious decision on his part at all, Hollie was half across the table with his sword drawn, bottles crashing to the floor, bench overturned. And the worst of it was that Nat didn't care, he'd just looked down his patrician nose at Hollie – as if he was a mildly annoying insect – and disarmed him, most ungently.
"You're going to get yourself killed," he said coldly. "You think that's what she'd want, to see you dead in a gutter?"
Not much Hollie could say to that, face down on a not very clean table with his arm twisted up his back. Other than – she's dead, she don't get a say in it. That's sort of the point, isn't it? She's dead. She doesn't get to tell me anything. That's what dead means.
"Get up," Nat said, still in that same cold, furious voice. "I'll not put up with this. If you think the best way to honour your wife's memory is by getting yourself killed, I've got more respect for her than that –"
The badly-scoured wood under his cheek was sticky. On the other hand, it might have been his cheek. Nat leaned, harder, on his twisted arm till Hollie felt the muscle creak but he didn't actually care. Not any more.
"Get off me, Nathaniel."
"Or what? The state you're in at the minute, I could snap you like a twig –"
He closed his eyes, went limp in Nat's grip. Waited till his friend's fingers loosened from hard enough to bruise to just damned uncomfortable, then wrenched himself free, not caring what tore in the process – rounded on Nat panting and shaking with a blinding rage. "Don't you dare talk of my wife –"
And then he was blinded not by fury but by a flat-handed slap across the face that made his eyes water, and after that Hollie was lost to everything but the fierce joy of battle. Nat still had the advantage of weight – sleek, cream-fed bastard that he was. Neither of them, however, had the advantage of the massive bravo who provided the protection in this dockside tavern. He had a vague impression of Nat adjusting his cuffs and easing his way out of the bully's grip. Hollie didn't do urbane excuses – never apologise, never explain – and so the next thing he knew he was flat on his back in a stinking gutter with most of the breath knocked out of him and the world spinning in a way that owed regrettably little to a quantity of cheap geneva.
"Well I reckon that's somewhere else you just got barred from, Red," Nat said beside him, his voice shaking with laughter.
Hollie rolled over and shook his head, touching a hand to his bloody nose and spattering blood across the rotten cabbage leaves and fish heads. Stifling a wild desire of his own to laugh. "By Christ, I must be rough, then," he said thickly – spat a further mouthful of blood into the gutter, ran his tongue across his teeth. All still there, which was something of an astonishment. The wind off the sea was very cold, very fresh, even in spite of the piles of debris from the market that surrounded them.
"You look better for a bit of fresh air," Nat said. (He sounded like her. Oh, Christ, he sounded like her. If he told Hollie he'd feel better if he put a clean shirt on -)
He got to his feet – the fresh air had gone to his head, that or he was dizzy with want of food, but he couldn't stand another bloody second with well-meaning Nathaniel, not without wanting to hit him again. Picked an wet onion skin off his sleeve with dignity, and dropped it on the cobbles at Nat's feet. "I'm going for a walk. Don't bother coming with me."
Though not sure where he was going, for where he went she went with him. Or the lack of her went with him, and the great gap of not-knowing that went with it, for he had not been there, not at the last. (They had said. All along. Not good enough for her, they said, Let her down, they said. Rackety, they said. Unreliable. And he had, and he was, and she had died while he was outside the city walls of Nuremberg and he had no idea if she had wanted him or cursed him at the last because she was gone, she was dead, she was rotting in the ground and there was no more Margriete and no more light in the world, and God was a liar -)
He didn't think he had the stomach for the sea, not to float on it and certainly not to drown in it. No, if Hollie was going to court extinction – and he wasn't still sure that he wasn't – he'd take it at the point of a blade like a soldier, thank you. Up through De Walletje – no, thank you, ladies, he wasn't interested, and they'd have to be hard up to look at him in his current state – and on past the fish market. Without looking, he knew he'd reached the fish market, and once he'd finished puking into the Amstel he felt better. It put the whores off, at least, though. Onto Kalverstraat. Was it the spring market so soon? It had no right to be spring – the world had no right to keep on turning without Griete in it . It should stay frozen winter forever. He could hear the beasts – squealing and trampling in their pens in the marketplace, poor bastards –
– and that was no cow.
They were bidding on a thin, shaggy black colt, all legs and hair. Frightened out of its life, and wearing a heavy bridle with a cruel curb that tore blood and foam from the corners of its mouth – for God's sake, you stupid butterboxes, the beast's barely old enough to be broke, and you have him bridled with that? – lashing out with lethal forefeet at anyone stupid enough to come within range. There was a collective groan from the greedy, angry knot of fleshmongers gathered around the wild colt, and a sudden outburst of shouting – another scatter of shod hoofbeats on cobbles and a squeal of pain and distress –
One of the butchers was down, his thigh broken, apparently, by a well-aimed kick from the colt.
All those avid red faces, waving, stabbing fingers, making Hollie feel queasy. The black colt was scared nearly witless, panicked to madness by the crowd. "Bread and fucking circuses," he said, aloud, in English, and was rewarded by a blank look from the nearest man. Switched to his slow, clumsy Dutch. "What is this? What happens here?"
"The horse is for meat, mijnheer. Unless -?"
The man shrugged. "The beast is useless for anything else. Incurably vicious, as you see. It has killed a man already, they say –"
And he probably bloody well deserved it, if he'd been beating the horse anything like the pig-nosed butcher currently taking a whip to its flanks. Blood and froth dripping from that cruel bit. Under the tossed, tangled black mane, the white roll of a dark eye. Not mad, not vicious. Just scared beyond reason, and hurting, and laying about him the best way he could to make it stop.
Between the two of them, maybe, they could make an understanding. Or they could kill each other in the trying, which was likewise a consummation devoutly to be wished.
"Mine, sirs." He pitched his voice to carry. "What d'you want for the beast?"
Someone snatched at his arm. Nat. Who else would it be? As if Nat Rackhay would think him capable of managing his own affairs without being tailed by his nursemaid. "Red, will you just listen to yourself – pull yourself together, man – you can't afford to keep a horse in town, and you certainly don't want that one."
Hollie smiled, that sweet blank smile that he reserved for the times when he heard what had been said to him and he was being polite but it had gone in one ear and out the other without the words having touched the sides.
"I might as well be speaking bloody Welsh, mightn't I?" Nat said irritably.
"Surely." He reached into his doublet, weighed his purse ostentatiously. That had been what she'd wanted, wasn't it? She'd left him a sufficiency of gold to kit himself out according to his commission. She'd been bloody proud of his commission. (And hadn't the neighbours been outraged by that, that boy of eighteen with his forty year-old wife. Overlooking that that boy of eighteen had been a captain of horse by twenty, and not a penniless, beardless youth any more.) His shoulders jerked though he wasn't sure if he must laugh or cry.
The colt screamed again in fear, shrilly, going straight up on its hind legs, and the crowd scattered again.
Hollie put his shoulder to the nearest well-upholstered back and gave the man a shove. Who turned round, found himself almost nose to nose with a dangerous-looking ruffian with a well-used backsword hanging at his side, and did some shoving of his own – backwards. That much closer to the black colt, and Hollie bit his tongue because there was no use swearing at this lot in English and that was the language he cursed in most fluently. Close enough to see where the tender skin at the corners of the colt's mouth was torn and bleeding – ripped to pieces by that vicious bridle some time previous, by the white scars on the black velvet muzzle – more white scars on chest and flanks and legs, where the horse had been most cruelly whipped. No wonder the beast was ungovernable. Hollie had been, too.
He drew his sword. Just behind him, he heard Nat groan. "The bridle," he said, and he hated that his voice was shaking but he was just about furious enough to gut the butcher on the end of that rein. "Take it off, if you please."
"Mijnheer, this is a dangerous beast, not loose in the street, if you please –"
"Then get me a – " he had to stop, because he was so bloody mad he couldn't even remember the word – "rope." Oh, what the hell. "Five gold pieces, sir, for the horse. I'll not want the harness." He'd done this before. In another life, up on the moors in Lancashire, with the little black Fell ponies that were half this size and a hundred times more biddable, looping the length of rope into a makeshift halter, singing half-under his breath and God knows Hollie Babbitt's singing would have frightened most people out of their wits but the colt was exhausted, shaking with it, and Hollie considered himself lucky to have only been bitten by the end of it.
And yes, he was aware that he'd spoiled their nasty little afternoon's sport, but they could go and find a bear to bait or something. There were mutterings at the back of the crowd and no doubt with his Judas hair they'd be calling him a witch just on the edge of his hearing, making the signs against the Evil Eye, though there was no witchcraft in it. Common sense, and a spark of what decency he had left, maybe. Someone moved, suddenly, in the crowd, and Hollie turned just in time as the colt reared again, squealing in panic. If he hadn't moved the horse's shod hoof would have clipped his temple and he'd be dead on the cobbles with his head caved in. Instead the black colt had only – only! – slashed his shoulder, and it hurt like fire and he was buggered if he was going to let on. Sick with the pain of it, and thank God for his pause by the fish market because he had nothing in his belly to be sick with and he could just stand there grim and dizzy hanging onto the colt's head until it passed.
"That bloody horse will end up killing you," Nat said, quite calmly, and Hollie glanced at him. And then away, back to the shuddering black flanks where the sweat was drying rank and sticky-streaked.
"But you say that like I should care, owd lad?"
The cruel bridle hit the cobbles with a wet clink. Both Hollie and the colt looked at it with mutual disfavour. Somewhere under this mass of hair there was a good Friesland horse – an entire one, if his glimpse when the colt had reared was anything to go by – not such a bad bargain after all, Griete, if I can bring him round. No malice. No viciousness. Just fear, and pain, and misery. How soon one should know another.
"And how do you plan to stable the beast?"
"Oh, shog off, Nathaniel, and don't be so bloody reasonable. I'll find something."
He knew he couldn't keep the horse within the city. He hadn't lived in Amsterdam for seven years without noticing the deficiency of accommodation for the common run of horse. Fine. He'd move. He'd go out of the city – it wouldn't kill him – find himself lodgings in one of the farms outside – he wasn't city-bred, he'd be useful to someone, and there was nothing to stay him in the city itself now –
"The animal doesn't even have a name, Red. What d'you plan – Supper? Sausage?"
The black colt had likely never heard a man laugh before and Hollie thought he was somewhat out of practice himself. It hurt, too. Once he'd got the colt down from bouncing about on its hind legs like some kind of demented stork, he thought the pair of them would have to learn how to do any number of things together, that most civilised men took for granted.
It was like to be bloody hard work. But there. It was something.
It was near dusk when Nat finished his supper in the farmhouse six miles outside the city. Smiled at the goodwife, who carried on looking at him as if he was slightly touched in the head, and went out to the yard carrying a covered plate of bread and good cheese. He wasn't sure he wasn't slightly touched in the head, to be doing this.
The black colt was stabled and fed. Better than some of the quarters they'd enjoyed on campaign, he thought ruefully. A thick bed of straw lined the floor.
"Red?"
The colt lifted its head and looked up at Nat, ears flicking.
It hadn't let them close enough to groom it. It still looked like it had slept in a ditch on campaign, all its ribs showed through its rough coat, and its ears were so suspiciously pricked that the tips of them all but touched. It had not, however, kicked its way through the stall, and Hollie Babbitt was bitten and somewhat bruised but despite all Nat's suggestions to the contrary stubbornly unkilled.
In the gold evening light, sprawled full length in the straw, the redhead was stretched out sound asleep, his head pillowed on his doublet. There was blood on the shoulder of his shirt, bis breathing was easy, and he was relaxed, still. (He had not touched a drink in six hours. A coiled something in Nat's belly that might have called itself fear, if that wasn't too womanish a sentiment, uncurled itself.) The horse snuffed his new master's hair warily and then turned away, apparently satisfied.
Nat wasn't aware he'd been holding his breath, but he let it out in a great sigh anyway.
They'd be fine. The pair of them. They'd both be just fine. Give them time to heal, and enough work to keep the Devil from idle hands and hooves, and they'd come out the other side.
Pair of crazy bastards both. They deserved each other.
By thankful1665in 17th century, Flash fiction, horses, Uncivil Wars August 5, 2020 August 5, 2020 3,299 Words5 Comments
In Praise of the Plain Russet-Coated Captain (or, Why Historical Fiction Needs Anti-Heroes)
I was reading a review of a Bernard Cornwell novel this morning and once again I am inspired to set fingers to keyboard (around the cat, who is demanding cuddles with menaces)
Once again, you see, I cannot do the dashing white knight on his trusty steed thing.
Sharpe. Let's take Sharpe. (Please, someone, let's take Sharpe.)
You know when you open a certain genre of book, or a book by a certain author, pretty much to the last semi-colon what you're going to get. You're going to get an infallible hero, who may be wrong-footed but never fail. He will come good in the end – he will get the girl, kill the baddies, and save the entire planet. Laughing in the face of doom, and clearing tall buildings with one bound.
And, you know, that's kind of nice. It's all soft and comforting and cosy. No nasty surprises.
But history is full of nasty surprises.
After the battle of Naseby, the godly Army of Parliament hunted down and massacred over a hundred Royalist camp followers for the unpardonable sin of speaking their own native Welsh language, and therefore being suspected of being either whores, witches, or dangerous Irishwomen.
After the siege of Bolton, the Royalists massacred anything between eighty and two thousand people, both soldiers and inhabitants including women, making it reputedly the worst massacre on English soil.
That's not nice stuff. On either side.
My Babbitt is anything but indestructible. He spends most of the books wrong-footed, miserable, irritated, wishing he was anywhere else but tagging on the back of the Army of Parliament. Periodically taking a pasting and then, being middle-aged, hurting. Not being irresistible to the fairer sex, even if he wanted to be. Missing his wife and wanting his supper, mostly, and wondering when he's next going to get paid. And how he's going to manage to run a troop till Parliament gets round to paying them.
A superhero, he is not. (He had a cape when he was seventeen, bought for the express purpose of impressing his first wife, but he never got the trick of not catching his sword hilt in its swirliness and Margriete told him he looked a tit in it, so he never really took to cape-wearing after that.)
Hollie's a decent man, fighting a war he doesn't want for a cause that's shafted him fairly thoroughly, and committed to it for the sake of six troop of horse who expect him to stand their corner because he's the only bugger stupid enough to open his big mouth in company.
Luce is a ditherer, a dreamer and a romantic. Luce is a nice boy who ought not to be let out of the house without directions. (Luce is not, bless him, officer material. But you work with what you got.)
Russell – well, Russell's a bipolar functioning alcoholic with anger management issues, and certainly not someone you want to be on the wrong side of.
The Army of Parliament had a bad habit of not winning glorious victories. Powick Bridge – lash-up. Edgehill – no-score draw. Naseby – not the finest moment in Parliamentarian history, gentlemen. No glittering triumphs. No moral high ground.
No heroes. No villains.
Ordinary men – and women – on both sides, people of honour and principle, as well as ruffians and rogues: people fighting to defend their freedom of conscience, or just to stay alive from one week to the next. People not too dissimilar to me and you, standing up for what they thought was fair. A good cause, fought by good men, badly.
Now I ask you. Sharpe and his like – men of honour, or principle? Sexy, maybe, if you like that kind of thing. Love 'em and leave 'em, almost certainly. Daring and gallant and swashbuckling, probably.
Believable – maybe not.
Surprising, amusing, appealing, poignant, gripping – almost certainly not.
So, meh. More people read the adventures of Sharpe et al, knowing what they're getting, than read the misadventures of one plain russet-coated captain of horse circa 1643, where believe me, they do not.
Be nice if millions of people read the Babbitt books. I'd like it. (He'd like it, the smart-mouthed Lancashire bugger. Be thrilled to bits, he would. In a sort of not-admitting it kind of way.) But…. Would I rather write books that make people laugh out loud on public transport, and three chapters later make them cry?
Where people tell me off because it can't end like that?
(Google Burford, 1649, and work it out.)
Ah, hell, yeah, I would. Because Hollie Babbitt is real. He's all the lads in 17th century history whose names never made it into the books, the ones that did their duty and stood their ground, that weren't glamorous or poetic or noble or well-connected. He is what he is and God willing, the lad will remain a joy and a sweary, scruffy, appealing maverick from now until the end of the Civil Wars.
As you were, gentlemen.
By thankful1665in #amwriting, 17th century, history, musing October 26, 2018 838 Words2 Comments
The Road North – a ghost story
It occurred to me, rather suddenly, that the Eve of All Hallows and Edgehill fight were not so very far apart. Luce Pettitt – being twenty, and knowing it all, as twenty year-old men often do – doesn't believe in ghosts. He's a rational young man.
But in October 1644, he might be about to reconsider that opinion….
It was October, and the mists curled up like woodsmoke from the sodden ground, and the nights drew in cold and cheerless in the Vale of York.
They were, however, a company who had been together in some guise or other these three years and more, and they could scratch cheer on a bare rock if need arose. There was a fire, and there was a jug of ale, and when you got more than three soldiers together on a dark night you had a choice of talk: horses, battles, women, or –
"Ghosts," Colonel Hollie Babbitt said, and the corner of his mouth twitched without humour. "I don't talk of what I've seen, gentlemen. Or rather, heard, but not seen…. "
– Drew Venning's dog, under the table, shifted uncomfortably. Tinners didn't like this talk, where voices grew strange and ominous
Luce Pettitt rolled his eyes. "Oh, not this story agsin….."
"What? If you'd ha' been there, instead of under some lass's skirt, you'd not be half so cocky! I heard what I heard, and I saw what I saw, and that I will hold to till my dying day. "
"No faces," Luce said. " You said. "
"No faces. A company of lads, marching north. And no faces under their helmets."
" How d'you see 'em, then? If there was no -"
" Oh fuck off, " Hollie growled, "taking the piss, think you're a bloody hard nut, I tell you what, you wouldn't be talking so big if you'd seen -"
" Or not seen, what with the lack of faces, " Luce murmured, and someone cackled. Hollie growled again. "Smart-arse. No, it didn't bother me, Lucifer. Decent enough drilled lads they was, from what I could hear, and a sergeant not unlike your man Cullis at the heel of it giving them holy hell on. Whoever they were when they were living, gentlemen, they were trained soldiers from head to heel just like me and you -" his eyes rested on Luce, off duty with his coat unbuttoned and his hair a bed-tangle, " maybe more professional than some of us, Cornet Pettitt. Who was it this time, Margaret or Elizabeth?"
"Sarah," Luce said, and yawned. " – For variety's sake. "
"Jesus Christ I despair. No, the idea of a company of soldiers at their duty don't trouble my sleep, so long as their duty takes them up the North road and not under my window at stupid o'clock in the morning. Wiser to be scared of the living than of the dead, if you ask me. "
"Meaning the wench you're married to?" Drew Venning murmured, and the colonel looked at him sidelong.
"Especially the wench I'm married to. When a ghost can see to getting your tap stopped, captain, I'll start paying heed to the buggers. Until then I reckon you can keep your bogey-tales. And with that, gentlemen, I'll bid you a good evening." He stood up and stretched, and then kicked the fire up again. "Bunch of old women. Don't frighten yourselves."
And with that, he was gone, swirling his cloak about himself into the darkness.
Lieutenant Russell, who had said nothing throughout this exchange, sniffed as the door closed and curled his lip. "Superstitious nonsense, fit for credulous fools."
"You could just say bollocks, Hapless. It's quicker. "
"Kiss my arse, Cornet Pettitt."
They were off duty. They could talk to each other how they liked, off duty. Most of the company were aware of the odd, careful new friendship between the officers of its company. "Do you not believe in ghosts, then?"
"I fear nothing from dead men, " the lieutenant said cheerfully, with his mad slanted grin. "Only the ghosts in my head trouble me. They never leave by sunrise. But the past never really dies, does it?"
" Huh? " – it had been a long day, and Luce Pettitt had spent most of it trying to direct idiots using nothing but a yard of silk whilst mounted on a shatterbrained mare, and he was tired. And then he remembered why particularly they spoke of ghosts and dark fancy – because in a week, it would be the Feast of All Hallows, the night when the dead came back to watch the living.
And two years ago this day, or thereabouts, the lieutenant had lost his beauty and a good deal of his wits at the great battle at Edgehill. And Luce – who was still, mostly, beautiful, and who retained most of his common sense – thought that it must indeed cast a long shadow. And possibly why his friend was odder, and spikier, than was customary even for him, this night.
It did not make him any the more comfortable company, but then most of the company was minded to be bleak. It was late autumn, it was cold, it was wet, it was miserable, the better part of them were boys out of Essex and Suffolk and they missed their homes. And the bloody war went on.
It had ever been thus. York had been a city when the legions had marched into Britain – oh, and some of them had marched out. That was one of the stories they told around the fires at night. (And scared the shit out of Hollie Babbitt, who would rather die than admit it. But the Ninth. Who had never gone home to Hispania. Whose nailed boots had gone thump thump thumping into the mists at York, and had never come back. Swallowed up by the dark and the mists. You heard them, they said, sometimes. Their hobnails ringing on the cobbles, their sergeant barking out the orders to march out –
But you never saw them. You heard them. A company of foot, making ready to march North into Scotland. That was the bit that had rattled Hollie, alone in the dark: the thought of being advanced on and overtaken on the road by a company of foot who was not there. )
"I am not good company, this night," Russell said, sounding sad about it. " I think – were I to stay and drink with you – it would not end. "
"Prettily?" Luce suggested , and the lieutenant dipped his head.
"I am not like to end prettily, Pettitt. I am minded to brood, I think. Tonight. I think it best that it is done sober. And alone." And then, not being much in the way of a dissembler even when honesty did him no credit, he corrected himself. "Best done sober…but probably won't be."
" I'm not cleaning up after you, " Luce said, and meant it. "If you must puke, open the window. And Hapless?"
The marred boy stopped with one arm in the sleeve of his coat.
"Leave it open, if you're minded to be sicky, eh?"
It was, Luce thought, a night for seeing unquiet souls by. And how it would be, if you did – if they were sad, or angry, or pitiful – if they knew they were spirits, even, or if they were simply outside and afraid and wondering why you could not see them or hear them or talk to them: greedy for what you had enjoyed, being living, and yet set aside from it for all eternity.
"It's a horrible thought," he said, and the young blue-bonneted ensign passing by him at the time jumped about three feet in the air.
There was little supernatural about Connell, and Luce knew the lad by sight. He mostly looked terrified, presently. "Don't tell me you've seen a ghost as well," he said, " what with Rosie being annoyingly mysterious about it, and bloody Russell stalking about being slightly more alarming than the dead people -"
The lad shook his head, bemused.
"Sit down and have a drink and don't tell me about it, then. Particularly if it was the Ninth Legion with no faces under their helmets. I hate that story. "
"Hwhat?"
" No faces. Colonel Rosie reckons -"
Connell shook his head blankly. "But that iss folly, how could they keep their helmets on without heads?"
– the boy was a Highlander, Luce reminded himself. Hence the heathen superstition and the sibilance. "No faces, I said. Do keep up. Heads with nothing on the front of them."
"Then hwhat-?"
" Dead people in tunics marching about, Ensign Connell. Lots of them. It's not normal, sir. "
"It iss perfectly normal where I come from," the lad said – and grinned, as if it was funny, "- we haff the Second Sight, on the islands, it is pairfectly commonplace, that off which you speak."
"Oh. Oh, I thought you were – you know, the Highlands -"
Connell's level black brows raised, no more than a fingernail's width, but his point was made. "Sorry," Luce said feebly.
" My grandmother. She had the Sight, now. She told my father he would be drown't in the sea and so he wass, in the great storms, and he not even in his boat in the water but drawn up for repairs on the beach, and a great wave came up from the deep.waters and took him -" the ensign's voice had dropped to a low croon and all the hairs stood up on Luce's neck, "- but I, she said, I was not born to die in water, I.wass born restless in my mother's belly and here I am, rootless yet. She said I wass born with the wanderlust on me and I should not rest easy till I had my own plot of earth and maybe not even then, hm?" And then he laughed, a sudden boy's giggle. "This is not a cheerful thing to speak of, with the mist coming in under the door and the wind making unchancy noises in the chimney! "
"Let's stop," Luce said, with enthusiasm. " How's your arm? "
"Marvellous, I thank you," Connell said, and rolled his shirt sleeve back obligingly to show the great purple patchwork where the medics had pieced him back together, after the great battle at Hessay Moor. "Ass good ass new. A pox on Malignant gunnery, I say…I shall be wagging my flag ass bravely ass ever, soon, and kiss my arse to His Majesty."
"I'm glad." – and Luce meant it, for it had been touch and go for the young ensign, and after those first hectic days when any man who could wield a bone-saw un a straight line had been hard at it, he had not seen the ensign. (The Scots commander, my lord Leven, and Hollie Babbitt, having served together in Europe and sometimes on the same side, preferred not to be in the same place at the same time.) "You must be very new healed, though?"
The ensign nodded ardently. "I am, so. I am like a new man."
"Well, much though I hate to sound like an old graybeard – or your mother, for that matter – as a medical officer, even a very junior one, I would commend that you get in out of the night air. Falling-damps are not healthy, especially in a weakened state." He closed his eyes, the better to.remember the most modern scientific theory about bad airs.
"Quite," a much more familiar voice said, " God knows what I'm doing stood here in it.- Lucey, who are you talking to? "
"Ensign Connell, from Leven's company – you remember, the young man who had his arm brake by shot at midsummer, and then the wound was poisoned and we had it all to.do again? Do you remember – well, really, Hollie, what are you doing here, for that matter? "
All muffled up in his scruffy old cloak, Hollie shoved mist-damp hair out of his eyes and grinned ruefully. "I remembered the date. The boy Hapless tooled up clasping a bottle of brandy like it was a long-lost girlfriend, and I counted on me fingers and rearranged the duty rota. What I don't want is our bright lad out tomorrow with a hangover and a fierce desire for attitude adjustments, if you get me. So he's got his hands full taking out a sentry patrol that's jumping at shadows – on grounds that idle hands are the Devil's playground – and I've come to get you before you get bored without the company and start likewise."
" Don't be ridiculous, " Luce sniffed. "I'm not that much of a child. Ensign Connell was very impressed by my expertise."
" Connell, " Hollie said, very carefully, after a brief pause, "has been dead a week. He died before we left York, brat. I should know – they borrowed the old bastard to preach over him. I don't know who you been prosing on to, but it weren't Connell. "
Luce stared at him, a cold ripple running down his spine. "But it was, Hollie. He showed me his arm. I'd know my own handiwork anywhere. He was the first man I'd worked on – really had to fight for, I mean. He can't be dead! His arm – it was healing, it had healed, beautifully, he would have had the full use of his fingers sgain – he can't be, I saw him! He was looking forward to taking up his old post again!"
Hollie gave him a smile that was oddly shy. "Aye. And maybe that's why he came, then. It wasn't his arm that took him, brat. God knows what it was. He just never woke up. Maybe he knew it mattered – he mattered – that it would trouble you, if you thought it was summat you could have done. " And ducked his head, and muttered, "I used to dream of Margriete. Sometimes. After she died. Or she came to me. Dunno. But that she was all right, that I hadn't- "
"Yes." Of course. It explained why Hollie was quite so casual about ghosts, then. He had his own. Of course. But of all men, he understood, and did not laugh, or cross his fingers.
"Come on, then, brat. I'm not so bothered about running into dead men walking. I'm more bothered about the live ones, who've still got half a watch to cause havoc tonight if they've a mind to." He put his hand out, and touched Luce's shoulder gently. "He'll be all right, Luce. If you were worried. I don't reckon as he'll want for company, you know?"
They could have been talking about Thankful Russell. They were not, of course. Both of them knew that. "No," Luce said, and swung his cloak over his shoulders. " No, I imagine they can always find a space for a keen officer. Wherever he comes from. "
By thankful1665in #amwriting, 17th century, Flash fiction, history October 21, 2018 October 21, 2018 2,489 Words1 Comment
The Alchemy Of Memory – remembering Diana
I had meant to write a blog post all about the way music entwines itself with my writing, mostly inappropriately and unhelpfully.
And instead I received news that I lost a dear friend, and one of the longest-standing and fiercest fans of my books. So I'm going to write about Diana instead.
She'd fallen in love with Thankful For His Deliverance Russell a couple of years ago, in the days when he was no more than a rather prissy young lieutenant in the New Model Army, and she loved seeing how he grew up through the books into a mostly-competent officer in his own right. I was just reading back over our messages on Facebook and she really did love that boy. She particularly loved – and shaped – the awkwardness and the kindness and the desire of his early courtship with Thomazine, when he wasn't sure most of the time if he was coming, going or been, and how far it was appropriate to do any of them with his old commander's daughter. She'd been there, she knew whereof she spoke, and she wasn't backwards in telling me when I'd got it right. (She wasn't always tactful about it either, I might add. If I got it wrong, I got it very wrong.)
I think Diana was probably about as delighted as both Russell and Thomazine when they finally got together. I sent her the first draft of the novella Entertaining Angels and she messaged me at some ridiculous hour in the morning to tell me that she'd just finished it, she was in tears and that the ending was Just. Right. He deserved his happy ending, she said. What next?
So I said, the usual pro forma is they get married and they live happily ever after.
Well, she said, I wouldn't believe it, not with those two – Zee wouldn't just put up with his funny moods and she won't be shy in telling him either. And if he spends the rest of his career overlooking sheep in Buckinghamshire he'll be bored to tears within the month. So it's never going to be happy ever after, because those two are far too lively to disappear into domestic obscurity peacefully.
Had it not been for Diana, Major Russell would have been very lovely and very chilly and very proper, and he probably wouldn't have been very much different from the literary ice-maidens who throng the pages of romance having their drawers melted by the Right Girl. And as it is, there was a Diana, and he became wry and very aware of the difference in their ages and rather embarrassed about being quite so keen on what he would tactfully call country matters, and Thomazine became fiercely protective of her darling (what scar?) and most enthusiastic about knowing all about the aforesaid country matters so often as she might contrive.
Like the Velveteen Rabbit, Thankful and Thomazine Russell know sometimes you have to get hurt before you can become real, and they are more real because Diana loved both of them. I'm sad that she won't be around to review the second one. I'm more sad that she won't be muttering about the cover art and cheering the release. She'd have liked that he will be carrying on adventuring well into his sixties, with his other half continuing to pester him for sexual favours despite the fact that technically he's supposed to be brooding and disfigured and all that. She'd have been delighted that there will be fat blonde Russell-babies and a horrible little black dog and a number of indispensable horses.
An Abiding Fire is your book, duck-lady.
By thankful1665in #amwriting, #rememberingDiana, 17th century, musing August 3, 2018 August 3, 2018 630 WordsLeave a comment
The Roaring Girls – some thoughts on women in historical fiction
Aphra Behn, sketch from a lost portrait
Isn't it reassuring to know that all those heroines of historical fiction, who found that they just weren't maternal, or meek, or submissive enough – that they identified themselves more strongly as masculine, that they cut their hair, or wore breeches, or climbed trees – they were all sweet, frilly girlies, really: because with the right man, you can get better!
Five hundred years ago – three hundred, two hundred years ago – women weren't allowed to identify with masculine gender stereotypes. We conformed, to the Gospel according to St Paul; we learned in all subjection, we were respectful, we covered our hair and our bodies as we were taught, or we paid the price of social ostracism.
You know the old chestnut of the girl who dresses as a boy to follow her soldier lover to war and bring him home safe? Don't get many of them in the 17th century. In fact, there are very few examples of a woman who enlists as a soldier during the English Civil Wars – maybe that's because women were following the drum anyway, in the guise of camp followers, or maybe it's because until the creation of the New Model Army in 1645 no one was looking, or maybe it's because many 17th century women were more than capable of fighting the good fight in skirts, viz. Lady Derby, Brilliana Harley, Elizabeth Lilburne, I'll stop now but I could keep going all night. The 17th century highwaywoman Moll Frith lived and dressed as a woman – as attested by her nickname, Cutpurse Moll – and anecdote reports that at one point she robbed Thomas Fairfax, shot him in the arm and killed two of his horses. Which must have pleased him no end…s
(An aside: Dr Mark Stoyle has done some recent fascinating work into the female soldier of the civil war period, covered in a recent Guardian article)
But it's not really till the 18th century that we start to see the "mannish" woman appear – Kit Ross, who followed her man into Marlborough's Army and then decided that she quite liked the Army life and lived as a soldier for the better part of ten years, serving in two different units undiscovered; Anne Bonney and Mary Read, that pair of unglamorous pirate captains, who were as fierce and merciless as any of their masculine counterparts – what's interesting is that most of the 18th century women who disguised themselves as men disguised themselves successfully, and lived within close male communities undiscovered – or undeclared – for long periods, but that they also were considered as equals of their male counterparts. Kit Ross was officially pensioned off, despite the discovery of her gender; Anne Bonney and Mary Read were sentenced to an equal punishment to their male counterpart, Calico Jack Rackham.
So, you know, there are hundreds of years of history of women living successfully as men, competing with men, existing forcefully in a male-dominated society. Succeeding, on their own terms, against men. (If piracy is your thing, obviously.) Being acknowledged as comrades and peers, by men. Women in Restoration England were running their own businesses, their own coffee-shops, although they weren't permitting female customers in those hotbeds of political discourse and dissent. Women in 1649 were presenting petitions to Parliament saying…"Have we not an equal interest with the men of this Nation, in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and the other good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken from us more than from men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the neighbourhood?"
And now, four hundred years later, we're still seeing this denied in mainstream historical fiction.
The tomboyish heroine, that old romantic favourite, who's not satisfied by a life of conventionally girlish pleasures, and who finds freedom and self-expression as an equal in masculine company – she changes, of course, when she meets the right man. (He "makes" her a woman, as often as not. *shudders*)
All those strong women, who lived and worked and loved as women in their own right, who ran businesses and ships and companies of soldiers in their own right – they just needed a man, to make them want to give up their independence and be hobbled by skirts again?
I was talking to Kim Wright from the arts programme Art2Art on Swindon 105.5 FM a while ago (just thought I'd drop that one right there, me on the radio, not swearing, not once. Hardly. Much. At all) – he had the idea that this sudden gender conventionality in fiction was a reaction against women's freedoms in World War 2, where women were suddenly doing men's work, men's equals, threatening established masculine domains, and the womenfolk had to be groomed a little into getting back into their boxes after the war. And, you know, perhaps the reason for the popularity of that aggressively masculine, Chandleresque stuff was that a lot of women were comfortable within those boxes, too.
And that's fine, if that's what works for you, but it's not right for everyone. We're still promoting the idea of binary genders – of girlie girls and butch men – and pushing the myth that if you are not a pink princess, or a brave hero, you can't have romance, you can't have adventure, you can't be successful. That to be atypical, in fiction, makes a character a curio, a freakshow. There was a Paul Verhoeven film called "Flesh + Blood" in which Rutger Hauer's mercenary band contained, amongst others, two sniggering and not always very kind best mates, who were rough and tough, who always had each other's backs, who were a pair of loutish young gentlemen always spoiling for a fight.
At the end of the film one of them is killed and you realise, by the response of the other, that these two testosterone-fuelled hooligans were a deeply loving and long-established couple.
And it's not relevant to the plot, it's just a throwaway scene where actually, these two brawling roughs are seen to have a capacity for deep emotion – but it's two men who are in love with each other.
Does that matter? Yes. They're a pair of aggressive street bravos who've systematically gone through life as their own two-person gang, and now all of a sudden one of them is alone, and we see a vulnerable, frightened side to him.
Does it matter that it's two men? No. Or it shouldn't. As Het Babbitt points out to Hapless Russell in "A Wilderness of Sin", "There is, in my opinion, an insufficiency of people loving each other in this world, dear. As if it were something to be ashamed of."
Takes all sorts to make a world, as they say in Lancashire, but if you're going to write, the world is at your fingertips. Women, and men, in history fought hard to live outside convention, knowing they faced exposure, ridicule, social ostracism, even death, for disclosing themselves. And they still do, we have not yet come so far.
We owe it to readers to write those men and women back into historical fiction, not as plaster saints or wayward sinners, but as real, rounded human beings. Just lke us.
By thankful1665in #amwriting, 17th century, history, musing April 16, 2018 April 16, 2018 1,235 Words1 Comment
– or, let's talk about tits.
As I have been banging on about of late, I'm upping my 17th century game and I'm doing marvellous things with my everyday wardrobe.
This morning I slipped on a lovely olive green and white print blouse and my first thought was – ooo, low-slung tits, girl, pull 'em up a few notches. How unflattering. How dowdy. How –
How right for the shape of the blouse and the design period?
Convo I often have with a mate who is similarly built, but why would I aspire to have two rock-solid semi-spheres clamped to my ribcage, unless I happen to be involved in 1770s re-enactment? What with – as one Regency fashion commentator described – the "disgusting fleshy shelf"? See this lady here with her low-cut bodice – a lady of ample chest, by the look of her – is she rocking the teetering titties, or are they sensibly secured?
Occurs to me that the eye of the beholder is so wretchedly attuned to what we consider beautiful now, that anything that doesn't conform to the right shape, regardless of size, looks wrong to us. We often see tavern-wench bodices, even when we should be working Lady Fanshawe's discreetly low-cut charms, because we think up-and-at-'em is the look that women must have aspired to.
(Do we? Should we?)
This is me starting a revolution, right here, right now. The discreet charm of the boobs-goisie. Lower-cut and flatter. (Surely we're not thinking that mature ladies might be represented as having aspirational mature figures, instead of fake porn-star tits?)
Have it!
By thankful1665in 17th century, history September 17, 2017 264 Words3 Comments
But Is It Authentic?
A sort of conflation of ideas whizzing about today.
A conversation about 17th century re-enactment over on Facebook – about being too authentic, becoming intimidating, becoming contemptuous of those who don't count stitches, or who use wool-blend fabrics. Now for myself, as an author, I consider re-enactment as research for my writing and vice versa. Thomazine's snapped stay-bone in Imperfect Enjoyment – I've done that. (I still have the scar, too: I had to wear the things for the rest of the day, and it didn't half bleed.)
I haven't belted anyone in the face with the guard of my sword, but I have considered it. I digress.
And I admit it: I'm one of the stitch-counters. And what I find is increasingly it fills me with a horrible inertia. I have linen to make s new jacket, but I need silks to embroider it. Embroidery silks aren't good enough: I need silk thread. I need metal spangles. I need – I need – I need.
And till I have, I do nothing.
Actually, I made a conscious decision with my polychrome coif, and my spangled jacket – not to make them period-correct, but to make them touchable, holdable. Hundreds of pounds worth of metal spangles on a jacket, and I'm going to let strangers pick it up, stroke it, hold it up, try it on? Or keep washing my coif after a couple of hundred grubby little fingers have stroked the ladybird or opened the peapods? But that's what they're for – to be touched and delighted in, not just admired from a distance. That was what the originals were for: to be worn and used and to give pleasure to their wearer as well as the people who saw them.
It's the same with my new wardrobe: I want wool, I want silk, I want…I want to not start till I have all the things, rather than to use things I have that are not quite right.
My first thought in the authenticity debate was that it's necessary, because what's it for, otherwise? But I'm not sure now. I think it's more the desire of the moth for the star, than a desirable outcome. I think I could spend my whole life not wanting to do better, but wanting to do nothing. Waiting for the perfect set of circumstances – all the aces, metaphorically, in my hand – before the time is right to do anything at all.
And then you get to be dead, and all the time is used up, and it's never happened. That book half-written in your head but never started, that jacket you loved…all gone.
Carpe diem.
By thankful1665in #amwriting, 17th century, history, musing September 13, 2017 September 13, 2017 446 Words6 Comments


At Vanity Fair tells the story of Bunyan's powerful metaphor, exploring how Vanity Fair was transformed from an emblem of sin and persecution into a showcase for celebrity, wealth and power. This literary history, focusing on reception, adaptation and influence, traces the fictional representation of Vanity Fair over three centuries from John Bunyan's masterpiece, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), to William Makepeace Thackeray's own Vanity Fair (1847-8). It explores the influence of anonymous journalists and booksellers alongside well-known authors including Ben Jonson, Samuel Richardson and Thomas Carlyle. Over time, Bunyan's dystopian fantasy has been altered and repurposed to characterise consumer capitalism, channelling memories that inform and unsettle modern hedonism. By tracking the idea of 'Vanity Fair' against this shifting background, the book illuminates the relationship between the individual and the collective imagination, between what is culturally available and what is creatively impelled.


Capitalism is 'hegemonic,' dominant throughout society, even in the ideas of people who want to see social change. In this context the theory of ideological hegemony, developed by Antonio Gramsci in the early 20th century, still has relevance nearly a century later.
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian revolutionary socialist who lived from 1891 to 1937, and became active in socialist politics from 1916. Along with VI Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and others, Gramsci broke with the Second International – at that time the dominant international organisation of socialists.
Leaders of the Second International had opted to support the imperialist slaughter of World War I. Rather than fighting for socialist, internationalist politics here and now, these leaders argued that economic struggle would inevitably lead to socialism at some point in the future.
[The Bolsheviks] are not 'Marxists', that's what it comes down to: they have not used the Master's works to draw up a superficial interpretation, dictatorial statements which cannot be disputed. They live out Marxist thought… In this kind of thinking the main determinant of history is not lifeless economics, but man; [sic] societies made up of men, men who have something in common, who get along together, and because of this civility they develop a collective social will.
Gramsci's Prison Notebooks explored Italian cultural and social history, but the goal was more expansive. Whereas many of Gramsci's journalistic writings outside prison by his admission "were written with the day and were supposed to die with the day," his Prison Notebooks were intended as a more general historical exploration, even an "absolute historicism." This absolute historicism is a toolbox to be adapted to changing circumstances and historical conditions, with the unifying aim of overthrowing ruling-class power.
As the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check… it is as a rule the state of the powerful, economically dominant class.
Although Gramsci was a Leninist, his theory of hegemony has distinct observations from Lenin's theory of state and revolution, dealing more extensively with ideological and cultural struggles in non-revolutionary conditions.
Russia's Tsarist regime relied heavily on direct repression; massacres of workers and peasants who fought back. However, more developed capitalist states (particularly in the imperialist world) have a more sophisticated system for maintaining hegemony.
State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.
This is a carrot and stick approach; consent is the carrot, coercion is the stick. The army and the police force apply direct coercion where necessary; using guns, batons, pepper spray, tasers, prison cells when workers and the oppressed get out of hand. However much of the time, guns are unnecessary, as the system relies on consent, through an ideological system that justifies capitalist rule.
Capitalism is hegemonic within trade unions, political parties, churches, media institutions and other civil society bodies. Particularly in non-revolutionary times, the dominant forces within most of these organisations lead towards collaboration with the state to ensure consent, to direct discontent into appropriate channels.
This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but any sustained engagement with civil society bodies, such as trade unions and community sector organisations, will show their limitations. Queer support organisations rely on state funding and grants, limiting their ability to openly challenge government policy, let alone the ruling order which leads many queer/trans* youth to suicide or homelessness. Trade unions must compromise with employers to settle disputes, for example the Public Sector Association agreeing to redundancies in exchange for defeating a wage freeze attempted in late 2009.
To counter these pressures, Gramsci argues for a long-term war of position, a protracted cultural struggle in preparation for the war of manoeuvre, a revolution or frontal assault on the state. Gramsci notes that while frontal assault on the state was appropriate for Russia in 1917, "war of position… was the only form possible in the West," because civil society is more developed.
In waging a war of position, socialists must develop a counter-hegemony. Hegemony operates through ideology, and through meeting needs, in ways that justify the prevailing system. Counter-hegemonic projects seek to construct a new hegemony, by formulating ideas and meeting needs in ways that sustain an oppositional culture.
For example, in her essay "Ideology, Hegemony and Inequality" published in Studies in New Zealand Social Problems (1990), Allanah Ryan notes the importance in a Gramscian approach of not simply seeking "narrow interests," but incorporating "popular views" of various groups. Working in early 1990s Aotearoa/NZ, Ryan suggests "women's rights and peace issues" as subjects that any meaningful counter-hegemonic bloc must address.
In reality, Gramsci had become increasingly critical of the Stalinist turn in the world communist movement, particularly the 'Third Period' which saw a sectarian turn against reformists in the working class movement. Gramsci had returned to the idea of tactical unity with other working-class forces while retaining an independent communist organisation, recommended by Lenin in 1921. However, the Italian Communist Party sought to use Gramsci's name in death to shore up their sectarianism.
In the early 1960s, the Italian Communist Party published Gramsci's full works uncensored. After Stalin's death, many Western Communist Parties took a sharp turn away from the sectarianism of the Third Period towards accommodation with ruling Western regimes. At this point the Italian Communist Party used Gramsci's work, particularly his criticism of the Stalinist Third Period, to justify their 'historic compromise' with the ruling regime in Italy.
This laid the basis for what became known as Eurocommunism, defined by compromise with dominant political order. Eurocommunists came to defend the existing Social Contract, rallying to the defence of existing democratic institutions tied to capitalism.
However, socialism cannot come through defence of declining democratic institutions, through voting Labour or joining your union. Although engagement with institutions is necessary, the system is ultimately broken. Socialism can only come through sustained independent opposition in every sector; in the electoral, workplace, campus, community sectors; and the formation of a historic bloc bringing these struggles together in unified opposition to the ruling order.
Gramsci's revolutionary work was centred on the Turin factory council movement, democratic bodies of workers which sought control over production. In the 21st century West, the Occupy movement has offered a glimpse of what this direct democracy could look like, particularly Occupy Oakland's combination of a radical, democratic commune with militant industrial tactics in the port.
The Italian Communist Party in Gramsci's period also contested elections, with the intention in his words "to rip the democratic mask from the double face of the bourgeois dictatorship and show it in all its horror and its repugnant ugliness." In non-revolutionary conditions, counter-hegemonic engagement in official politics such as elections must always be oppositional. There are no short-cuts, and by entering into capitalist governments, we run the risk of sacrificing long-term strategy. Community-based organisation can both win concrete reforms, and lay the basis for winning peoples' power.
Today many 'Gramscians' have no meaningful connection with attempts to develop a new communist practice, instead using the notion of a protracted cultural struggle, a "march through the institutions," to justify their turn away from revolutionary politics. While the first generation of Eurocommunists had used Gramsci to justify a 'historic compromise' with liberal democracy, many current Gramscians abandon even the superficial trappings of openly communist politics.
In a particularly revolting UK example, "social entrepreneurs" The B Group grouped around capitalist Richard Branson appropriate Gramsci's call for cultural struggle, without any notion of abolishing private property and exploitation. Subtler examples abound throughout academia, with liberal academics speaking of "hegemony" and "counter-hegemony" totally divorced from anti-capitalism.
This confirms one of Gramsci's key ideas; most intellectuals operate as functionaries, mechanically serving the ruling order. Stalinist politicos, academics, "social entrepreneurs" and others have claimed Gramsci's argument for a protracted cultural struggle, while divorcing it from anti-capitalist politics.
Gramsci himself was an organic intellectual, a worker from a poor background – unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin and other revolutionary leaders who had betrayed their privileged class origins and committed themselves to revolution. Although it is not enough, lived experience of oppression is crucial to the collective process of developing revolutionary consciousness.
Gramscian cultural approaches contrast with the 'mechanical materialism' often associated with vulgar Marxism. 'Mechanical materialism' denies lived experience of oppression, and the complex relationship between culture and lived experience, in favour of lifeless economic determinism.
Revolutionary consciousness must be rooted in local conditions, in the memory of the class. We must study our own environment, our own history, our own place in society. An encompassing cultural struggle must draw lessons and knowledge from intersecting struggles; worker, student, queer, feminist, indigenous, anti-imperialist and ecological struggles among others.
The possibility of a new communist vanguard seems remote today in Aotearoa/NZ, just as the Bolsheviks did not predict the generalised strike action that led to the 1917 Russian revolution. However, we can only forge an egalitarian society through meaningful commitment to the praxis of revolutionary socialism.
Paraphrasing Gramsci, we need pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.


text:
Are Nick and Selena Dating?
By Seventeen Magazine Published: Aug 12, 2008
Are Nick Jonas and Selena Gomez an item? Well, that's for you to decide. They say no, but we have a sneaking suspicion that there's at least been some make-out action between the two!
According to people.com, the two tween stars have told suspiciously similar stories about first dates! In one interview, Selena was quoted: "I said, 'I don't kiss on the first date.' Then he said, 'Well, I never really play by the rules.'"
Sounds romantic, huh? Well, Nick seemed to think so too. While talking about one of his own dates, Nick said: "On one date, the girl said to me, 'I don't kiss on the first date.' So I said, 'I don't follow the rules.' Ooooh! It was so good!"
Is it just us, or are you thinking these guys were on the same date?! Hmm ... has Nick moved on from Miley to her YouTube rival, Selena? Give us your take below!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Howard Jones offers free download to concide with UK tour | FESTIVALPHOTO
Howard Jones offers free download to concide with UK tour
Howard Jones is offering fans a free mp3 download of "Like To Get To Know You Well" to coincide with his Nationwide UK Tour, which starts on Wednesday April 11th. This is the first time Howard will undertake a nationwide tour to perform his first two studio albums "Human's Lib" and "Dream Into Action" back to back, in their entirety.
The live track, originally recorded on November 6th 2010 at the London indigO2, is now available to download for free from HowardJones.com. The live recording also appears on a free limited edition double live CD which, given to all VIP ticket holders at the London's Shepherds Bush Empire show on April 21st.
Howard currently presents his own radio series "Electronic 80s with Howard Jones" on Absolute 80s, Sunday evenings at 8pm.
Howard Jones April 2012 UK Tour:
Wednesday April 11th O2 Academy Bristol
Thursday April 12th O2 Academy Sheffield
Friday April 13th O2 Academy Liverpool
Saturday April 14th O2 Academy Birmingham
Tuesday April 17th O2 Academy Newcastle
Wednesday April 18th O2 Academy Glasgow
Friday April 20th O2 Academy Bournemouth
Saturday April 21st O2 Shepherds Bush Empire, London


Recognized technology leader, passionate about building technology, processes and teams to drive innovation alongside business & customer success. 2016 Indianapolis CTO of the Year leading hc1.com with the best-in-class healthcare CRM platform. Diverse technology background across a variety of technology stacks - multiple Linux and UNIX stacks as well as Windows, including enablement platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and a variety of IaaS vendors. Purdue University graduate in Mathematics.


• High protein yield independent of protein size, localization, modification, etc.
* Binding capacity of DNA < 10 μg, strongly depending on RNA amount bound to the membrane.
** Kits to be used for research purposes only.


text:
Q: Speeding up Zygote.jl AD I'm using Julia's Zygote.jl package for its auto-diff abilities to calculate option greeks (i.e. the derivatives of the option price relative to the parameters). See below which calculates greeks for a call option using Black Scholes. It takes 40 seconds on my laptop to run. Am I doing something wrong that would cause it to take this much time?
My guess is that the hard part comes when Zygote has to differentiate through Distributions, but I'm not sure.
using Distributions
using Zygote

function bs_call(theta)
    s = theta[1]
    k = theta[2]
    r = theta[3]
    t = theta[4]
    sigma = theta[5]
    vol = sigma * sqrt(t)
    d1 = (log(s / k) + (r + 0.5 * sigma ^ 2) * t) / vol
    d2 = d1 - vol
    n = Normal()
    price = cdf(n, d1) * s - cdf(n, d2) * k * exp(-1.0 * r * t)
    price
end

function main()
    theta = [100, 110, .20, 1.0, .50]
    println(bs_call(theta))
    println(bs_call'(theta))
end

main()

Edit: using SpecialFunctions (to build a cdf function from erf) instead of Distributions gets me down to 25 seconds. See below:
using SpecialFunctions
using Zygote

function cdf(x)
    0.5 * (1 + erf(x / sqrt(2)))
end

function bs_call(theta)
    s = theta[1]
    k = theta[2]
    r = theta[3]
    t = theta[4]
    sigma = theta[5]
    vol = sigma * sqrt(t)
    d1 = (log(s / k) + (r + 0.5 * sigma ^ 2) * t) / vol
    d2 = d1 - vol
    price = cdf(d1) * s - cdf(d2) * k * exp(-1.0 * r * t)
    price
end

function main()
    theta = [100.0, 110.0, .20, 1.0, .50]
    println(bs_call(theta))
    println(bs_call'(theta))
end

main()

A: Given your main function, you might be executing this in a script. In Julia,you are far better off starting a session (in the REPL, VSCode, Jupyter notebook, or other environment) and running multiple workloads from the same session. As Antonello suggests in a comment, your first call will be dominated by compile time, but the later calls (with the same argument types) simply use the compiled code and can be a completely different experience from the first one.
Some workflow tips can be found in https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/workflow-tips/.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Rádio - Top 100 (Rádio Top 100 Oficiální) är Tjeckiens nationella spellista, och publiceras av IFPI Czech Republic varje vecka.

Referenser

Noter

Externa länkar
ifpicr.cz
Rádio Top 100 Oficiální

Musik i Tjeckien
Topplistor

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Check out this month in Real Estate around the country and in Centre County Pa!
Average list price 310,524 Average Sale Price 296,503 with 93 units closed so far this year.
38 units closed this year.
Call the Annette Yorks Group today if you are thinking of Listing your home to get the most up to date info on your area.


Our daughter came home to us at 5 months of age. By 10 months, I was growing concerned about her speech which was very limited and not growing as it should.
Her doctor wasn't overly concerned, yet, because she was babbling and understanding our language; however, our daughter was starting to get frustrated by her lack of language. So, one day I downloaded a simple baby sign mini-poster and began using some signs with her.
A year later, she has progressed a little in her spoken language (added 10 more words, maybe), but her signing is great!
Between the words she speaks and the signs she's learned (and made up a few on her own!), we almost always know what she wants to tell us!
This has given her a sense of control (she can tell us what she needs or wants) and helped her communicate until her spoken language catches up.
I suspect we'll have to rely on some outside help to assist her with her spoken language (the lack of which may be related to some early trauma), but I am so thankful that she is able to communicate with us through signing!


The quality of service and hospitality at Relais Villa d has been identified as outstanding based on consistently high customer review ratings.
Relais Villa d has achieved a score of 79 / 100 based on 15 customer reviews and has therefore qualified to receive an Outstanding Service Award from Go Hotels.
With its central location, Relais Villa D Assio Hotel is within easy reach of most tourist attractions and business addresses in Rieti. The Relais Villa D Assio Hotel boasts a convenient location with modern amenities in every guestroom and superb service. Each guestroom features amenities such as non smoking rooms, air conditioning, bathrobes, desk, television, shower, separate shower and tub. Hotel facilities offered at this Rieti accommodation include 24hr room service, bar/pub, laundry service/dry cleaning, meeting facilities , restaurant, room service. For a more enjoyable stay, guests can take advantage of a variety of recreational facilities, including golf course (on site), tennis courts, outdoor pool , garden. Modern comfort and convenience are seamlessly combined to ensure the guests' satisfaction. With elegant facilities and hospitality, guests at this hotel will surely have an impressive stay. Make your reservation at the Relais Villa D Assio Hotel Rieti now by selecting your chosen dates of stay and submitting our secure online booking form.


text:
Andrej Anžič, slovenski policist in politolog, * 13. november 1947, Ljubljana.

Življenje in delo
Diplomiral je iz politologije leta 1973 na tedanji Fakulteti za sociologijo, politične vede in novinarstvo. Magistriral je leta 1991 in doktoriral leta 1995 iz političnih znanosti na Fakulteti za družbene vede v Ljubljani, pod mentorstvom Franceta Vrega in somentorstvom Antona Grizolda.

Leta 1970 se je zaposlil na Sekretariatu za notranje zadeve, najprej kot kriminalist in kasneje kot ravnatelj Šole za miličnike v Tacnu.  Leta 1988 je začel delati na Višji šoli za notranje zadeve kot predavatelj. Od leta 1999 do 2015 je bil namestnik generalnega direktorja Policije, nakar se je upokojil.

Odlikovanja in nagrade
Leta 2001 je prejel častni znak svobode Republike Slovenije z naslednjo utemeljitvijo: »ob deseti obletnici osamosvojitve za zasluge pri obrambi svobode in uveljavljanju suverenosti Republike Slovenije«.

Viri in opombe

Glej tudi
 Seznam prejemnikov častnega znaka svobode Republike Slovenije
 Seznam predavateljev na Fakulteti za varnostne vede v Ljubljani

Živeči ljudje
Slovenski policisti
Slovenski politologi
Veterani vojne za Slovenijo
Predavatelji na Visoki policijsko-varnostni šoli v Ljubljani
Nosilci častnega znaka svobode Republike Slovenije
Namestniki generalnega direktorja policije (Slovenija)
Magistrirali na Fakulteti za družbene vede v Ljubljani
Doktorirali na Fakulteti za družbene vede v Ljubljani


Introducing FRESCO – the Perfect Rustic Textured Look AND my Hometalk News!
This post is kinda BIG in a way – as in, BIG NEWS kind of way!
We've just launched a super new product AND I have some fun news about America's biggest DIY Network – HOMETALK. Eek!
I love new things to play with, especially of the furniture painting variety, so when Fusion Mineral Paint introduced their new texturising medium, Fresco, I couldn't wait to try it out.
Look at the yummy texture and crackle here that just screams "perfect aged patina"!
I decided to have a play with the Fresco on these old wooden stands that my husband originally made for his studio speakers (he's a video/audio engineer). They had been replaced for a while now and sitting in my "pile" for a greater purpose!
And that greater purpose will be some plant stands. So I bought these pots to go with the plant stands, and we'll make them look funky too!
Prep is good, no matter what the surface.
They're ordinary plastic pots, so before I painted them, I wanted to scratch up the surface to give the paint more grip. I used my SandiHands Sanding glove to do this.
Sanded pot surface, ready for painting.
Mix with a wire mini whisk or a stirring stick. Don't mix thoroughly as the lumps are all part of the textured look and are desirable. I used one of the Fusion 2″ Brushes, but you can use any brush. I prefer to use one that is not "precious" for this technique.
As the paint dries, the Fresco shows it's beautiful texture "magic"!
I then mixed up some Fresco with Fusion Mineral Paint colour, Limestone.
Note: you do not need to mix Fresco in with more than the first layer of the paint. I decided to, simply because I didn't feel the gray I mixed had enough texture for what I was wanting. The reason being, I may have over mixed the Fresco/paint mix. This time, I left more lumps.
I glopped this new Fresco mix onto the surfaces of both the pots and the stands. And painted it on with a stippling motion.
When the paint/Fresco mix has dried slightly, but still moveable, I dragged a clean paint brush over the high points, knocking them down a bit and creating more texture with the dragging motion.
I used a hairdryer to help create some lovely crackle to add to the effect!
For the final step in transforming my pots from plain boring plastic faux terra cotta, I used Fusion's colour Upper Canada Green to paint straight over the top of the Fresco layers. No Fresco was added in this layer.
For the final layer of Fusion paint on the Speaker/Plant stands, I used the colour Pebble from the Penney & Co designer collection of Fusion Mineral paint. It's the perfect greige – a soft gray with undertones of tan. Using a wet sanding method and my SandiHands Sanding glove, I wet sanded both the pot surfaces and the stand. Here's the result, a lovely aged, sea-swept look showing layers of the Old World it has lived through. Sanding the plant stands had a similar effect, whisking away the top layer of Pebble colour in the high points, revealing the white raised Fresco areas and the darker gray in areas where I sanded more heavily. You can see below, on the corner of the stand, the left has not been sanded, the right side has.
Oh … and my Hometalk news?
I'm super excited that I have been asked to join Hometalk on their Facebook Live segment sharing this very project and how I completed it, including a demo on that missing speaker stand that you don't see in any of these final pics. I'm saving that stand for the Hometalk Facebook Live, so I hope you'll join me.
We're scheduled to shoot the live segment on September 15th 7pm EST (for my USA/Canadian friends), which will be September 16th at 9am AEST (for my Aussie friends). See you there – you'll be able to join the live comment feed, so bring your questions if you have any!
Kitchen Scale Sideboard Milk Paint Makeover = Happy Customer!
Create a Concrete Pot Without using Concrete!
Now that is an improvement. This is the first "distressed" or aged project that I've seen that I really like! Great job!
Thanks Marilyn. What a lovely compliment!


TempRite® and Thermostrip® Dishwasher Temperature Labels are used to ensure FDA compliance by testing the level of heat used to clean dishes in a dishwasher. Dishwasher Temperature Labels meet FDA requirements for food sanitation. Temp Labels are available in two temperatures for use in situations where heat must reach 160° F (71° C) or where heat must reach 180° F (82° C).
Great For: monitoring the temperatures of dishwasher environments.
Usage: TempRite® Dishwasher Temperature Labels turn from blue to orange when the appropriate temperature is reached. Thermostrip® Dishwasher Temperature Labels change from white to black, permanently, when the specified temperature has been attained.


ICFF is now accepting submissions for the 12th annual ICFF Studio, a collaboration with Bernhardt Design that provides a platform for undiscovered design professionals to present new prototypes to the global design community.
"ICFF Studio gives emerging design professionals a chance to showcase their undiscovered work to the global design community," said Kevin O'Keefe, ICFF event director. Studio designers participate in a juried design competition with selected winners receiving a coveted spot within the ICFF Studio pavilion at ICFF NYC 2017.
To be considered for ICFF Studio, a designer must have a working prototype that is not in commercial production. Entries are judged on design aesthetics, ability to be economically mass produced, marketability, and commercial viability.
"ICFF Studio continues to launch careers, helping the design world discover the next generation of design professionals," said Jerry Helling, president, Bernhardt Design.
The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2017. To submit application, visit: .
The 29th Annual ICFF luxury furniture fair returns to New York City May 21-24, 2017.