dragonlady7

Well. Just wasted 45 minutes of my life deleting the 100+ comments smacked onto my site by some dude selling lipitor. Yay! One day I will hunt him down and kill him, but for the meantime I'm busy.

Dave got hisself registerified for classes at RIT last night using their phone system and his old password from 4 years ago. So, that's good. His first class is tomorrow, so he'll be in Rochester by midday to get things finalized and all that.

This coming weekend will be busy-- the Allentown Art Festival, which is always a cool Buffalo thing, is on Saturday and Sunday. Also, the Buffalo Bisons are playing the Rochester Red Wings, and Dave's mom has free tickets through her school. So if anybody wants to see them, let me know. :)
There's some kind of quilt show too... Dave's aunt is a crazy quilter. Most of her most gorgeous efforts she donates to charity. Mostly, homeless shelters, where they're given to the unfortunate, who drag them around the streets. But a couple of them recently got donated to a charity auction instead because the woman in charge exclaimed that they were too pretty to get dragged around. I've seen a lot of her work and it's breathtaking.
I'd have trouble giving my artworks away anyway, much less to have them dragged around the streets by vagrants. But, hell... I can never finish anything, so it's moot.

Speaking of finishing anything, I had settled upon finishing one of my novels this summer as being a worthy goal. Since I started one in January and was hell-bent on finishing it by my 25th birthday.
But that one needs a lot more work than I'd anticipated. It's plotted thoroughly and the characters are fairly decent, but there are major, major issues with the setting, which i was careless about and said I'd worry about later. So it's kind of set in a white room with painted backdrops, which makes for a pretty poor novel.

So I've been looking at my other novels. NaNoWriMo 2002 isn't really... well, it's not a style I'm really that good at, so it's a weird effort at all, and I just don't think I can face it just now.

Next I considered The Novel.
Well, if I cut most of it, and start over, I have something promising there, but... dear Lord, can I even do that? That's the one i started in 1991. To cut most of it would be somewhat painful...
That one needs to be made into a website.

So I looked at NaNoWriMo 2003.
That one was a novel sparked by an incident in one of the family genealogies.

You know, that one might be feasible... The plot's already determined for me, and rather than having to make up a setting, i simply have to research it.

So i dragged Dave downtown to the Central Library of the Erie County Library System, and made him get a library card so I could check out books. After some struggles with the card catalog (it's all online anyway, and I eventually figured it out) I found seven relevant books.

I've read four of them so far, and am working on the rest. I'm researching the English Civil War, and Early Colonial New England. I need more information on Puritan theology and linguistic patterns. It's really fascinating stuff.

But, at the moment, I'm finding more material for a master's thesis than I am finding for a novel. It's fascinating stuff, great examples of how politicized history is. Each book has its particular bias, especially the ones about Puritans. The first one I read had as its thesis the radical notion that "Puritans loved their children", which seemed comical to me: surely nobody could seriously stake their scholarship upon an entire society being pathological?
But then I read the next book, which claimed to be an objective history (part of a series of "Daily Life In..." books), and it read like a surrealist tract. I mean, the entire thing was written in the most hostile fashion possible. The Puritans were indeed pathological in every aspect of their lives, and of course they didn't love their children, and we're not going to address why they're so weird.

Oh...kay.
So, suffice to say, a lot of historians concerned with Puritans hate them, which strikes me as an odd thing-- why on earth would you focus on these people, as a scholar, if you find them abhorrent?

I am interested in writing about this ancestor of mine because he was simultaneously a good Puritan (he took a bullet for Cromwell, yo) and a bad Puritan (he freaked out at his first wife's death and abandoned his children for 2 years, to go take the aforementioned bullet for Cromwell). He was a very human fellow, and yet thoroughly Puritan. So I want to write about that.

However, most of my information is better suited to a history paper than a novel, so I'm going to have to work on that.