The hardships of documentation

Documenting yourself for a historical novel isn't easy. It takes some guts, lots of patience, and *organization*.

Guts, because you have to read lots and lots, about things you didn't know, or you thought you knew, but now are starting to realize you weren't even that close.

Patience because getting to the information isn't always easy. The further you go to the past, the hardest is getting reliable information. Any kind of useful information. Historical, archaeological, hoplological, cultural, linguistic, social . . . You name it, and I can show you what we don't know it's about 90% of what we think we could know about it, which will probably raise up to 99% once we dig a bit under the surface . . . Besides, once you have that information, you find that more is less, because your favourite historian of the time was, well, biased, and the next one gives completely different numbers, names, places or even events. What's right? What happened? Heh, that's where the fun really starts . . .

Organization because, well, you are dealing with zillions of facts, data, names, places, movements, situations, most of them unknown to you before the fact, and you must become *intimate* with them, or it won't work. *Organiçação* as the saying goes . . . *Get Things Done*? I wish I could . . . Anyway, complexity is my third agnomen (after Simius Excalibor, I am called Difficultas. OK, I am not, but you know how this works, right?), I'll manage . . . (I hope)

Lastly, it takes actually starting to write. Alaric? It will be in NaNoWriMo, next November. And I will finish it. I would like to. Not necessary (except for publication) but nice, nevertheless . . . It will be done, yeah.

*Bí go maith* (which is irish for "be good", now that's an official EU language, I can do a bit of a show of my habilities, ahem :-).

New blog? OK!

OK, I start a new blog, this one with a focused spirit in History and related to my Historical Novelling interests.

I will mostly write in English in this one, while Spanish will be the main language in my LiveJournal, but expect some posts in Spanish, Latin, or any other language from time to time. It comes with the Job Description, sorry :-)

Well, to give a focus to this blog, it will be about discussing History for my novels, and any related subject that can be born from those discussions. Wish me luck.