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It is after midnight and I am giddy with that giddy feeling one gets when one suddenly discovers that one is not quite as miserable as one spent much of the day being. What does this inspire me to do? Why, blather on about my NaNo, of course! (What ought I to call it now, anyway? Any work I do from here on after will not be NaNoage as such, but 'the Evangeline project' is only any good as a Livejournal tag, and I won't have a title for it until I have written a whole draft or two and discover what it is really about.)

[livejournal.com profile] bonny_kathryn replied to my "HERE IS MY BATTERED SHAMBLES OF A STORY PLEASE SEND HELP" email with some questions and thoughts that had my little brain-cogs whirling round again, only ... thus far in a very unproductive manner. (A too-substantial amount of these thoughts run a bit like this: 'oh dear, half of her questions are my questions too! why on earth did this person do that? why do I know nothing? DRAT YOU CHARACTERS ALL.') Also I am reading a book called Encyclopedia of the End: Mysterious Death in Fact, Fancy, Folklore, and More, which is very very fascinating and has lots of interesting folklorey bits though not much on vampires I haven't already heard often and in more detail but anyway.

(Oh oh oh and speaking of folklore my current favourite?: stealing the left sock of a vampire and filling it with things and then throwing it into the nearest river. The vampire, who is clearly obsessive-compulsive, will then leap into the river to retrieve it, and will then ... drown? I don't know. [Vampires wear socks? Did anyone ever see Angel wear socks? Perhaps socks are like the pyjamas that NO VAMPIRE POSSESSES.] Folklore is awesome, you guys.)

Hey, look how far I have got without blathering about the Story! Perhaps if I stop now everyone can breathe a great sigh of relief and go home?

(TOO BAD.)

in which i blather about the story. ...ahahahaha. )

... I think Dad wishes for me to depart for bed now. Although I have lots more I could say, about What My Vampires Are and Things I Don't Understand About My Characters and Guess What I Put Some Hyphens Back Today!. (But I was blaring Lisa Hannigan a bit ago, and he was singing along -- not in a knowing-the-words sense, but snapping his fingers and humming and things, and it was very sweet.) 
ontology: (Default)

Here, have some overdue linkage. 

i. 20000-Names.com. I found this when Googling for the meaning of the name Nox (I knew it, but I wanted to be sure), and it looks to be an excellent resource, despite it sort of being Made of Banner Advertisements. You can search for names by nationality, which isn't anything special, as Behind the Name has, I'm sure, a vaster database (and is prettier and ad-less!), and, more interestingly, you can also search for names by particular categories of meaning--dark names, colour names, moon names, and various other sections with titles in varying degrees of silliness. What you get are names with meanings relating to your category from a rather decent amount of languages (depending on your category). So, 'dream names' gets me Ialu, an Egyptian name meaning 'field of dreams', Gaelic Aisling ('dream, vision'), and Hungarian Almos ('dreamy; sleepy' or 'the dreamt one'), among others. It's not always your best bet for things, but when you're looking for a name with a particular symbolic meaning (especially for minor characters, who I am rubbish at naming out of thin air), it's a rather nice source. (Also, there are, like, a billion 'wolf names'. That? Was me, stifling a chortle.) 

ii. International Children's Digital Library. I'm kind of fangirling this right now, actually. In a nutshell, it's got children's books from all over the world that are either in the public domain, or they've somehow got permission to publish scans online. Some of these books are gloriously, exquisitely old--I've been skimming this 1910 publication of Celtic Tales by Louey Chisholm with very 1910 illustrations by Katherine Cameron. There seem to be a lot of folktales and fairy tales and the like, now that I'm looking. It appears that a substantial amount of these scans comes from the Library of Congress. And, gorblimey, some of these books are age-spotted and weathered and they must smell magnificent up close. If you like old books or children's literature, you really ought to poke about and find something to read. 


I'm kind of not doing anything productive at the moment. Argh. Still trying to write and failing rather dismally. Oh, well, today was rather cosy, anyway.

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