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~ The Occasional Blogger

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Monthly Archives: December 2014

Life in a pictish broch

19 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by Paula Beavan in Uncategorized

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Tags

Artisans, Brochs, builders, Caithness, dry stone, Farmers, Hunters, Picts, Prehistoric, Prehistory, Scotland, Warriors

Reader, I love the brochs, and though I find them fascinating and enigmatic, they were the homes of real people. As you can imagine a lot of reading has been happening around here. I’ve been learning about the daily life of the people who lived in these structures.

Diagrams like this are found at almost every broch we visited.

Diagrams like this are found at almost every broch we visited.

We know the brochs had one or more floors that were built in timber on the shelf like scarcements and accessed via the steps built between the double skinned walls.

Some were built on the coast and had other stone buildings constructed close around the base with palisades and ditches built to further protect the inhabitants.

Animals could have been brought into the ground floor for safety and or warmth in times of war or bad weather. The upper floors would have been for living and storage. These iron age castles were well able to withstand whatever the neighbouring clans or tribes might throw at them, not to mention the harsh winds and wild storms blowing in from the North Sea. Well it’s the North Sea in my stories.

With little wood to be found in the immediate area, the waft of peat smoke billowing through the cone shaped timber and thatched roof would have been commonplace. Smoke from peat fires isn’t something we come across here in Australia, so I felt incredibly blessed when a friend offered to light their peat fire for me when we visited Caithness. I even bought some Peatscense to burn and help me remember now I’m home again. Peat is a commodity that takes plenty of muscle to harvest (dig), but peat bogs are readily available in the flow country of Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland.

Which brings us to what the Picts would have eaten. They were farmers, graziers, fishermen and hunters, so I think they would have eaten very well indeed. There have been huge middens investigated, near Newburgh in Aberdeenshire, and it seems they Picts were quite partial to shell fish if the mounds of shells are anything to go on.

Perhaps a hunting scene

Perhaps a hunting scene

They were weavers and artists in stone and beautiful silver jewellery and much has been found to show their skills and abilities. Both the jewellery and carved stones give us the understanding, to a degree of the lives they lived.

Silver work of the Picts

Silver work of the Picts

Pictish brooch

Let’s not forget the Picts were fierce warriors who had the Romans running for the hills and made them build Hadrian’s Wall to keep them safely contained in the wilds of Scotland.

Carving of warriors

Carving of warriors

I have enjoyed learning about the indigenous people of Scotland, though no one is exactly positive that the Picts were the first peoples of Scotland. I have my own theories on this, and if you want to know what they are, you’ll have to read the books. When I’ve written them.

Thanks for popping in, I hope you’ve enjoyed sharing my research and travels as I’ve been preparing and writing my story set among these wonderful and mysterious people.

NaNoWriMo – the good, the bad and the totally ugly

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Paula Beavan in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

distractions, NaNoWriMo, running a business from home, Stressed, Winning, writing

Reader, NaNoWriMo has been a really hard slog for me this year.

download

After returning from our wonderful trip to the UK, a month away from the pressures of my day job, where my focus was almost totally on my writing, I came back to a back log of work plus a few horrid surprises.

I won’t belabour the pity party I indulged in, suffice to say I got stuck in and caught up during October and did a fair amount of research and preparation to begin the umpteenth rewrite of my first YA novel, “Castle Quest” book 1. I was hanging to start, could not wait for the freedom of November. I had managed to get myself sorted to be able to nano without too much in the way of distractions.

Or so I thought.

Our business has an accreditation that requires an audit every 2 years, but it isn’t due until February, so it wasn’t likely to interfere with nano. Right? Wrong. The auditor paid us a nice little introductory visit to say hi and have a quick look at where we are at. And proceeded to tear my little complacent world down around my ears. Suddenly I had a work load that I couldn’t jump over and the audit was booked for the 18th of December not in February as I’d expected. So instead of having a month cleared for writing, I now had a six week to write policies and procedures and implement a million additional processes to our accreditation model. To say I wasn’t happy was a bit of an understatement.

Stubborn thing that I am, I thought I could still write. After all, I write early in the morning, so I’d write creatively in the early morning, and write business policies after that.

Now this is where things started going awry. I have a bit of trouble jumping from one to the other. So when I had time to write, I found myself thinking about the “verification of on board air scales for individual axle groupings”. When I was supposed to be writing the procedure for fault reporting and subsequent closing out of the fault, I was imagining walking along the Scottish coast, high on the sloping cliff tops, with the water oozing from the earth with each step.

Overload

It has been an enlightening time. I’ve learned a great deal about myself. One of these is that I can write rather good business documents, the second and most important is that I struggle to stay in the “stream of consciousness” that I need to be in to write. When I am constantly pulled out of my story I find it really hard to remember what was happening prior to the interruption. That’s ok, I can reread the previous scene and get back up to speed. Well most of the time I can. But as I became more stressed I found it progressively harder to find my characters motivation for their actions. So I’d read back over something and feel as if it was written in a foreign language and that it had little to nothing to do with me.

It is a hard thing to explain, but to lose that fragile gossamer thread can be soul destroying for me. I need to keep momentum up when I write a first draft, that’s why I nano. Not for a 50K word count, but for the motivation and momentum. To keep myself  heading down the same path as my characters and to keep everyone heading in the same direction. That’s why, when I am pulled away and distracted, I come back wondering who is who and why they are doing what they are doing.

And so NaNoWriMo is finished. It’s the first day of December, I have made the 50K, some of which needs a major fix up, but I made it. The story is not done, the first draft isn’t even finished, but thank heavens Nano is.

Winner

So did you attempt NaNoWriMo? Do you like or loathe the 50K in  30 days concept? Did you win? Is it worth it? I know for me, the time set to get the first draft done is as important as a motivator as it is a generator of the actual words, but when life has it’s way, NaNoWriMo, can be totally ugly. Will I do it again? Yep, I think I probably will.

RWA

Paula Beavan Author

Paula Beavan Author

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