I’ve managed to work three long days in the last fortnight – last Tuesday and then this Monday and Tuesday just past. That put the formatted document of The Princes of the West at around 70% complete: I have reached passage 1500 and there are not yet 300 pages.
During the process of pasting in the 800 or so passages, I’ve made countless small edits. Some are responses to comments made by two of you – Andreas and Oliver – from as long as a year ago. Some are edits to systems that I intended to fix months ago and left hanging. For example, as I have reached each beer passage, I’ve checked the possible rumours against a long list. The list was originally thirty rumours long, but when I wrote the smuggling module, I had to include another twenty or so rumours. These needed dropping into the most-appropriate pubs – and logging, so that each was hearable the right number of times – normally in two or three different pubs.
I even invented a new item (something I really try not to do any more) to help give colour to the velosteam repair system, which has felt a bit repetitive. But the rarer or top-level engineering components were too tricky to get hold of – the titanium alloy particularly – and I wanted to create something that could be bought in a workshop of forge, so that mending your own velosteam was once again the cheaper option.
But today I’ve just sat down (7:37pm) to write this update for you. My eldest three are in bed (wait – Emmanuel has just returned to the living room and is swaying towards me without looking me in the eye – he is hoping I will let him lie down on the sofa) – and the baby is with Cheryl getting to sleep. Today I have done my best not to think about being productive at all.
I’m trying to re-learn how to sabbath!
On a Friday? Some of you might ask. Or, what’s that? I’m trying to take one day in seven off – a day without work. After all, if it worked for Almighty God, it should work for me. But the challenge for me is that a Sunday is typically a work day – I might rise at five, finish preparing a sermon before breakfast, feed the family, help get the children ready, travel to church, prepare for the service, run the service, preach, pray with and for church members or visitors for a couple of hours after church and then close up (if it’s my turn) around three or four in the afternoon. We typically head over to my inlaws’ house then for some child-friendly tv and a family meal.
My Saturdays often include planned activities or jobs to do as well, so Friday has become the day when I can permit myself to achieve nothing – that’s the key. To tell myself that it is alright if, one day in the week, I aim to get nothing done. I might still prepare three meals (as lightly as I can!), change six or seven nappies, but if I limit the housework to ‘fill and turn on the dishwasher’, then I can both enjoy being with my family and even get some relaxation time for myself. Which today meant enjoying a couple of glasses of merlot, playing my new 12-string guitar (a gift from the church for my recent 40th birthday), a lot of lego with the boys, lots of cuddles and stretches with Raphael, my youngest, who is learning to take steps, and enjoying a good book.
Another birthday present (along with the wine and the guitar) was a book voucher. I headed to Foyles in Charing Cross on Saturday – a rainy, tourist-thronged afternoon – and bought a copy of the Stranger Things Choose Your Own Adventure, which has already disappointed me (although I’m new to the franchise) and something far more predictably pleasurable – a volume of Ursula K Le Guin’s Orsinian stories, called Orsinia: Revolution is in the Air.
Now Ursula is a bit of a friend of mine. A one-sided friendship, perhaps, but I enjoy her company enough to re-read everything I have by her. I have a bruised copy of The Dispossessed with a letter from a good friend folded into it after I lent it to him twenty years ago (it came back about a year later) and I have a school paperback copy of A Wizard of Earthsea and I have a hardback copy of Tales from Earthsea that I began transliterating into the feanorian tengwar in coloured ink, right on the page, and a Gollancz paperback of Always Coming Home, which reads to me like a dream I might have had.
I wasn’t really aware of Orsinia, although as soon as I saw the title I recognised that China Mieville probably was when writing about the third city in The City and the City. And I’m about four-fifths of the way through the novel, Malafrena, which is the first part of the collection. It reads a lot like The Dispossessed, but set in a fictional nineteenth-century central Europe – in a sort of Ruritanian cardboard kingdom that the Steam Highwayman is on the very cusp of taking a flight to. In fact, I have felt like I am reading set in my own ‘world that never was but should have been’. There isn’t really much steampunk in Orsinia, but it has all the ingredients, just as my world has – social inequality, rural and urban tensions, industrial revolution, a growing labour movement, high society, free agent adventurers…
Cheryl asked me how I was finding it. I said, a bit slow, and it is. The first fifth of the book is the coming-of-age for three cousins of the rural gentry – it reminded me quite a lot of Tolstoy – and a large part of the book is relationships, rather than directly-propounded philosophy or social ideation, like The Dispossessed. But slow is exactly what I’ve needed – although I read quickly – because it means my mind is resting, having to focus on descriptions of rural life or quasi-european court social interactions, because if I were to skip on until the action, I would be writing off a very large amount of the book.
I do wonder who else has read it. Any of you out there? Anyone fancy a try after this strange recommendation?
I intend to finish the paste-up by my next update. I won’t be on schedule to fulfil by end of February, but I think I will be able to share an electronic version with keen proof-readers and playtesters. Watch your inboxes!
By next update I intend to:
– finish formatting passages 1501-2263
– complete the introduction, together with rules for new systems
– complete the end paratexts – adventure sheet, beer list, Devon music tour, codeword list etc
Next update due: 27.2.26