Pomegranates and Bats: Details in Revisions

[blairmacg]

Sand of Bone heads off to its editor and final reader tonight, so I'm taking a little break in order to let me brain think about something else for a bit.

I am not a structured worldbuilder. Before writing, I do not sit down to answer a hundred questions about culture, religion, navigation, textiles, government, livestock, gender relations, history, trade, exploration, child-rearing, and economics. That's not my process. (For that, check out this post, wherein I discuss altering my worldbuilding to fit the plot rather than the other way around.)

That doesn't mean I don't care. I deeply care. I don't expect to get everything right, but I want it to be right enough to keep the reader with me.

There's a great deal of writerly talk about educating ourselves on history, government, economics, and culture. That's absolutely necessary. But what hangs me up more often than not is geology and botany. Certainly I could just make everything up, but constructing properly integrated flora and fauna and climate and geography from the ground up is beyond my ken. So I do what most of us do: attempt to match my world and plot needs to a Real World equivalent, and adapt within parameters broad enough to be flexible yet narrow enough to avoid (as much as possible) Flying Snowmen.

"...every now and then, fist-sized bats swooped in to feed on the pale moths flitting around pomegranate trees not yet in bloom."     Sand of Bone

The sentence fragment is from a scene that takes place in a desert with a short winter and long summer, at a time roughly equivalent to late February in the northern hemisphere. It has to be that time of year in order for the timing of other events—one around the solstice—to take place. And I wanted bats. Not hibernating bats, but active bats.*

The only bats I knew of hibernate from fall to spring. Thankfully, I discovered there are many species of bats that don't hibernate—enough I could play with size and habitat to fit the plot—so I was in the clear.

Next, I needed something for the bats to eat, and I wanted their airborne prey to be large enough for the viewpoint character to see from the balcony. Do these non-hibernating bats feed on moths? Yes, I discovered, they do.

Next question: are those moths around in late February? This took a little more Google-Fu than the bat question. Eventually I came across a couple websites with February photos of moths, mostly taken by folks looking to identify them—in desert terrain. Ta-da! Moths and bats.

Finally, the pomegranate tree. I had one in my Southern California backyard when I was a kid. Every year, it produced a zillion pomegranates the size of softballs. Not until I moved out on my own did I realize just how expensive pomegranates could be. I can't tell you how many times I've wished that tree could be transported to my current home. (The lime tree would be nice, too, because it produced like there was no tomorrow. My sister and I made pocket money pulling our wagon through the neighborhood to sell limes door-to-door.)

As clearly as I remember gorging on pomegranates, I have no recollection of the seasonal timing of blooms and fruit production. That, of course, might have something to do with the shallow seasons one experiences in Southern California. The answer was simple to find, though. I could have my pomegranate tree for the character to look upon, but no blossoms until mid-spring.

This, my darlings, is why revisions can take me so long.

Will most readers give a damn? Gods above, I hope not. I mean, if my readers are more focused on the damned moth than the plot and characters, I have most likely failed to tell a compelling story.** But such "unnoticed" details form a larger picture, and sometimes its faults are actually easier to see in the whole than in the parts. The non-detail-oriented reader might not be able to point out what seems amiss, but that indistinct sense of imbalance will put distance between the writer and the story.

Distance is bad. Immersion is key.

However, unrelenting specificity will kill interest just as quickly. My reader doesn't need to know everything about the Muscat mouse-tailed bat (though I do think it's cool one of their designated roosting sites is "in pyramids). The reader simply needs to believe the bat swooping through the courtyard fits in the world the characters inhabits.

Having said all that, I expect I've made a glaring error or two that an expert will one day find. I'll research and fact-check every piece of worldbuilding I don't hold complete confidence in. It's the things I'm certain I know—but don't—that will come back to nip my rear someday.

*Hibernating bats would have added a different creepy to many cavern scenes—and I reserve the right to use such later—but would not have served the plot so well.

**Yes, yes, I know a subset of readers will enjoy the details. If you are one of those readers, AWESOME! Just don't expect the majority of readers to be on the same, er, page.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"there are actually fewer readers who understand pre-industrial life than *believe* they understand science."

Except SCAdians, and even in the SCA, there's a tendency to think "Hey, this stuff's not so hard." Well, no, it's not, when one can choose when and how much to do it, and doesn't have to do ALL The Things all the time, come winter, come war-time, come plague, famine, tyranny, pregnancy. Fine to deal with our well-fed, well-sheltered, veterinary-attended modern horses with their professionally-made tack, but those are not the horses of the pre-industrial age.

It doesn't take too much effort and organization to travel 20 miles on foot if one's destination will have food and a bed - if the road and the weather are good, one really only needs to bring a hearty lunch and a jug of water. If it's sloppy weather, bad terrain, and one has to sleep out, something to sleep under is called for, plus a warm cloak, a tinderbox, and a bigger sack of provisions. But the people of the olden times were great walkers, and a lot of folk lived their whole lives without ever owning more than they could easily carry with them, so many of them might have done 20 miles without even thinking about it.

LOL, "A Hobbit will carry a set of cast-iron cookware all the way to Mordor, and cry when he has to throw it away. An Elf flits out with a pocketful of cookies wrapped in a leaf."

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

Most folks would have trouble walking 20 miles today, though, let alone knowing what they'd need (and not need) to bring. There isn't much of a frame of reference.

And it's indeed *very* different to live pre-industrial for a weekend than for lifetime. The practicalities of food acquisition and storage alone is daunting, and takes far more skill and effort than most imagine. Every natural disaster demonstrates how little thought most put into it.

(Digression: I'm a staunch believer in the responsibility able folks have to be prepared for emergencies, thus allowing limited resources to go to those who are unable to prepare.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Twenty miles is a pretty long haul for a single day, it's true - call it 2 miles per hour, with an hour for lunch and a couple of good breaks, that's 12 hours; one would certainly be very ready for supper and bed after that.

On the other hand, two miles an hour is not a very strenuous pace (assuming decent weather and terrain.) A great many folk today would complain bitterly if they had to walk one mile, and would be totally outraged if anyone expected them to cover 20 between dawn and dusk, but that doesn't mean they couldn't do it if they had to - aye, and get up the next day and cover 20 more.

*shrugs* I'm 56 years old, thirty pounds overweight, with high blood pressure, a surgically-repaired knee, and arthritic feet. Fifteen miles is about as far as I want to walk in a single day any more, but I could do twenty if I had a reason - LOL, such as being lost as hell, with no choice but to keep walking till I found my way, as sometimes happens.

Nobody really lives pre-industrial even for a weekend at camping events - it's just not feasible. Without bottled water, it wouldn't be possible to even have camping events in most places, and without porta-potties? No way! Potable water and sanitation are the crucial issues, as every natural disaster demonstrates - without them, people don't live long enough to starve to death.

It's pretty wild where I live; there's a lot of local agriculture, and most people grow, gather, hunt and/or fish for at least some of their own food. This doesn't mean we'd be able to keep everybody fed if we suddenly lost electricity and were cut off from the mainland - the population's just too high; plus most of the agriculture relies on electrically-pumped irrigation. If we had a year to prepare...? It could be done; that doesn't mean it would be.

I hear a lot of silly young survivalist-wannabees talk about "taking to the mountains" in case of disaster. Yeah right; there's no food up there; that's why the Native people all lived along the shore. They still live there, in fact, and own most of the tidelands, and aren't patient with trespassers. Seems to me that anyone fit enough to take to the mountains in case of disaster would do better to stay and volunteer their services to whatever relief-efforts were going on: more chance of getting fed, and less of getting shot.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

Watching and learning from my Amish neighbors was extremely educational. Certainly some of them use some modern conveniences, but mostly to make it easier to interact with the English, not to survive. If the End of the World comes, it's the Amish who will have all the skills they need to survive -- farming, hunting, animal husbandry, food preservation, carpentry, smithing, all non-electric supporting skills, and strong community.

Surviving in the mountains would depend on what climate of mountains. Sierra Nevadas provide far different resource bases than, say, Appalachians. But the shore is certainly an easier environment in which to survive!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

What we've got here is the Olympic Mountains rising up out of the temperate rainforest. It's not that there's no food up there - there's deer, elk, black bear, invasive mountain goats - but they'd be hunted to extinction in a single season if the hunting wasn't so strictly regulated.

Same with all the wild foods. The Native folk here never went hungry - "acres of clams", as the song says - but if all the people currently living on the northern Olympic Peninsula had to rely on shellfish as a primary food-source, the tidelands would quickly be devastated. So would the local tribes who own them, because they sure would not let them be taken without a fight.

It would be easy enough to survive in the Wild here, as long as the Wild was not full of starving, gun-toting city-dwellers fleeing the destruction of their cities - scaring the game, trampling the ecosystem, fouling the waters, starting forest fires... that'd be a nightmare. All these survival-fantasists seem to assume that they'd be the only people 'out there', and/or that the Wild is so big and bountiful that it can support any amount of large, voracious omnivores indefinitely.

The Amish ways are very cool - I never knew any of the Amish personally, but used to go to Lancaster PA when I was a student, and particularly admired their fine horses. Unfortunately, if the End of the World comes, the Amish will be over-run, and all the stuff they have will be taken from them - probably by Duly Constituted Authority acting under the provisions of Martial Law, who would get around to them long before the gun-toting survivalists did. Unlike the Native tribes around here, the Amish have no tradition of armed resistance to Authority, so most would probably comply.

The SCA has always been full of people who think songs like this are how things would really be If. They seem to forget that the cops have helicopters and firebombs, and are not afraid to use them.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

If neighbors of the Amish were smart, they'd guard Amish homesteads against violence as if the homes were their own. And I do know some folks who would indeed take on the role of protector.

Hmm. (wanders away to must about storylines...)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

That's certainly true, but I think well-intentioned bureaucratic officialness would be a more immediate threat to their orderly way of life than violence. The kind of mind-set that goes with the job of enforcing long-term martial law tends not to be the kind that groks the value of cultural diversity.

The Amish country would have the same problem the Olympic Peninsula would have: all the hungry refugees fleeing the nearby urban areas, over-running the countryside. The same problem only worse, because we've got natural barriers of sea and mountain; there's only two roads that come here, and the off-road terrain is too rough to traverse. We've also got a significant military presence that would check-point those roads, and no doubt coordinate aid and ration resources.

Myself, I would lend my support to the people who took on the role of protector long before the disaster started, even though it's possible I would not agree with a lot of their decisions. As long as the Rule of Law holds, we've got the Constitution to fall back on, and a lot of the people who took an oath to uphold it really did mean what they said. But if the Rule of Law falls, so that the citizenry starts shooting at its own erstwhile duly-sworn guardians, we're all screwed.

Of course the ideal thing would be if everybody pulled together - civilian and military, urban and rural, alternative and mainstream - to keep Life As Usual going on as smoothly as possible for everybody during the 'temporary inconvenience'. I guess it would all depend on the nature of the inconvenience, and how temporary it actually turned out to be.