1 September 2003
La rentrée
Can you match these quotations to their authors?
The novel is a vehicle to explore other lives and other realities.
The novelist is free, the biographer is tied.
The real victims of [medieval] war were, of course, the peasants and townsfolk, who served as foot soldiers or were innocent victims of the sacking of towns and villages.
The tragedy of sex
lies around us, a wood lot
the axes are sharpened for.
The way that women were treated in the religion I grew up in, which was Catholicism, made me a writer, because women were seen as the source of evil in the world, the source of sin.
These are the authors:
Michèle Roberts, Lesley Glaister, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, Alison Weir. But which wrote which?
I've been on holiday. The last page I wrote for this website was an Advice to writers article about how to keep the fires of the imagination burning while not working. Did it work for me? I think so ...
One of the ways I get back into my work is to re-read some of my background material. Skipping through the hyperlinked web of research on www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk works well, including the quotations I've shown you above. Sometimes you need more random stuff too.
That's the reason why the research database contains daily esoteric oddities called Did-you-know? For example:
For thousands of years, possession of a relic has been supposed to endow with the gift of prophesy – the ability to predict future events.
The gift – or should I say trick? – of prophesy often trades on fear. Without the threat of disaster, history has shown that prophesy is, generally, impotent.
Because I also want to get back into the Occitan voice of my medieval characters, I will look at the proverb pages:
Michanto sëzou, qan-t-un loub manjho l'âoutrë. (It's a bad season when one wolf, eats another.)
When times are hard, thieves fall out among themselves, bullies turn on one another.
Qâoucuno li sëra coûrto. (One day will be shorter for him.)
… and that day, shorter than all the others, will be the day of his death.
Gouto-à-gouto, l'aizino s'agoûto. (The pitcher drains drop by drop.)
Our energy wanes, the stock in the winter larder reduces, our allotted days slip by. I imagine the pitcher is probably cracked …
That's enough of that! On the one hand, I need to focus in on my story, not other people's. Also, I must search the archive to look for something more encouraging!
Enjoy the Labyrinth!
