The Dragon's Back

November newsletter

My garden gate has a latch that hasn’t worked in at least sixteen years. To keep it closed, somebody welded a pair of hex-nuts to the gate and wound a thick wire of appropriate length around the frame. When you exit the gate, you can, if you turn around and use both hands, hook the wire through the hole in the outermost nut and close the gate.

It was a Sunday afternoon, chilly and bright gray. I closed the gate behind me and turned from it to stride off in the direction of dinner with friends. I was thinking, “Finally. I broke the dragon’s back.”

At 9 AM on Saturday, I had called Pavlina, away on a team-building, and told her I planned to relax and “play with Thracian.” I shut my laptop on Sunday, at 1 AM.

I know more or less what I was trying to do. There are two fairly good examples of the past tense used in inscriptions on Thracian grave markers: igekoa and gegeoeka. It’s plausible that they are both past tenses of “I live,” related to English “quick.” The i- at the beginning of igekoa looks like the augment that prefixes Ancient Greek and Sanskrit past tense verbs (English “I lived”). These languages also reduplicate the first syllable of a verb to mark the perfect aspect (English “I have lived”). The -k suffix might also indicate the perfect, as in Greek. Was it the same in Thracian? In pursuit of this question, I burned my entire Saturday.

There is nothing that it’s like to be caught up in an obsession. It’s a flow-state, a fugue, when awareness, reflection, and memory are swallowed up by the task. 1st person active present athematic. 1st person active present imperfective. 1st person active present thematic. I ground down my list of Proto-Indo-European verb suffixes, walking each through the sound-changes I’d derived, comparing each to Ancient Greek, Phrygian, and proto-Albanian. Every mistake or new interpretation would pull me back up to the top of the list to start the grind again.

Did igekoa mean “I had been living” and gegeyoeka “I had lived”? The truth is that there isn’t enough material to answer questions like that. If Thracian were just a little better-preserved, I’ve be able to definitively answer questions about its grammar. If worse, I could just invent whatever I wanted without fear of contradiction. But the language is just the right combination of known and unknown to draw me on. Endlessly, I now see.

That’s why I smiled on Sunday. Before, for years, there had always been family or work to force me out of my fugue. I’d think, during a class or a meal or a trip to the beach, that if only I had enough uninterrupted time, I’d be able to determine for certain how an ancient people spoke. When I finally got that time and sacrificed it, the answer I got was “You won’t.”

On Sunday, I slept in, had my breakfast, called my family and went back to my book. When people read Wealthgiver, they’ll like it for its characters, their relationships, and the atmosphere of exotic danger that surrounds them. Only once they’re drawn in will they bother to read the made-up words in italics, and very, very few will ever examine the suffixes. I want those who do to find something, but “world-building” is fundamentally decorative. These active-indicative-past-perfect flourishes might amuse or intrigue, but they will never warm a heart or nourish a soul. For that, I need to live a life.

With this in mind, I finished the translation I hadn’t even started on Saturday. It was the last one I’ll need to make, since the rest of the book is in English. With the dragon’s back broken, I went downstairs and took a hot bath. I soaked and read about determinism until it was time to get ready for dinner. I got dressed, went out to see my friends, and closed the gate behind me. Those eight seconds of messing with the hook gave me more to write about than fourteen hours of obsession.

Now, in December, it is the month of sales. My alternate history Tesla-punk romance The World’s Other Side is now on Kindle Unlimited, so you can read it for free if you’re a member. And even if not, it’s not that expensive and it has hover-cars. Treat yourself.

While you’re at it, take advantage of my sales on Patreon and Substack, where for less than $3 a month, you can join the readers of Wealthgiver and tell me whether I got the imaginary verbs right.

***

And I read some things in November:

Undermining the System by Inadvisably Compelled

The previous book in the series ends with Cato freeing one planet from the oppressive artificiality of the System. Now he has to do the same thing on as many planets as possible simultaneously, facing resistance from enemies who take him seriously. The author digs deeper into why someone might support the System, although some of the arguments are better than others.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

I listened to this audiobook on my morning runs, and it make pre-dawn exercise a pleasure. I was reminded of Tom Sawyer, except it’s set in turn-of-the-century India with international espionage as the plot. Otherwise, there similar humor and compassion, with brightly-colored impressions of broad, deep characters. “She chuckled like a parrot over the sugar-lump.”

What Christians Believe by C.S. Lewis

Lewis takes you from atheism to "a child saying a child's prayer," then to the problem of evil and the nature of Christ. I appreciate his religion as a way for people who are already adults to continue to grow up. I'll have to read it again.

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Like Innocents Abroad, this is a collection of short essays, descriptions, and reminiscences that the famous author wrote as a famous author. Some of it seems to have been written to give his readers something to do, but there are a few spots of real inspiration. The story of Twain’s past as the pilot of a paddle boat are the perfect balance of fact and feeling.

Biomedical Self-Engineering by Jon Svenson

When Carl, a divorced night watchman in his 70s, is bitten by an alien, he becomes an animorph. He absorbs DNA from every animal he touches and can use those genes to alter his body. So, after he clears out his tumors and shrinks his prostate, Carl touches a dog so he can sniff out buried gold, which he uses to invest in failing business. It’s…not what I would do if I had DNA powers, but after a while I really wanted to know if Carl would be able to turn that restaurant around! Like most LitRPGs, this book is idle wish-fulfillment, but it’s saved from being boring by an unusual protagonist with interesting things to do.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

This is the most distance I’ve seen between a book’s reputation and its content. At best, people talk about Atlas Shrugged like it’s a shoddy story straining under its philosophical burdens, but when I read it, I saw a Russian science fiction novel.

In one scene, a group of government functionaries on a train need to be in California by midnight. Because most of the rail line’s employees were hired for political reasons, all rail lines but one are closed and there is no functioning diesel locomotive. The management, also political, is less concerned about fixing these problems than passing the blame, so the decision of what to do is finally made by a mid-level manager. This manager had a brother who killed himself after his workplace was nationalized by the People, and the news of this suicide was suppressed so as not to damage the People’s morale. Now, the manager orders that the a coal-burning locomotive should pull the train through a tunnel in the Rocky Mountains, a solution that will asphyxiate all its passengers but get their corpses to San Jose on time. “And?” the manager thinks to himself, “who is on that train? I bet it was People.”

I’m going to have to write a longer review of this book.

See you next month.