Ahhhh....Sunday 18

Figured when you got out of school, that was the end of homework and reports and all that stuff. It is if you don't really plan to put any effort into anything you do.

The LAST place I figured I would have to do any of that is fiction/fantasy writing. Wrong. Because I feel I need to have some idea of what I'm talking about, I find myself having to pour over al sorts of articles and such, piecing together pieces of medieval life and war and administration and such oddly for the sake of dismantling it and replacing it with one of my own. But it serves as a reference. A kind of border between being as realistic as possible. But I can see why some of the dramatizations in history and stories occur.

Bigger is always better and if there's a battle, EVERYONE seems to attend. Numbers are in the hundreds of thousands. Aside from the East, the Near-East, and Rome these were unreal numbers. But you can hardly make epic battles with only bands of hundreds to, at most, a few thousand men can you?

I research to answer questions and one seems to lead to another, so now I'm looking at all sorts of videos and such trying to build up a true image apart from the romanticism of what Medieval times were like. By all accounts, in Europe, it seems to be a bunch of bastards who kill each other as often as someone else and scrape around building their rising culture around the remnants of Rome's lost one. The lords were not great protectors of the people, but of their own land and wealth. It seems that back then and now, it was merely about attaining and defending ones self-interests, though many florid reasons and romanticism are attributed to these actions. After all, persuasion is the skill of kings.

Basically, I may be over-researching. Perhaps all I need to do is to think of all the goods and bads of today and wonder how people got along in the places they exist in with the things they had. But I think I'm justifies a little pedantic streak. I spend a lot of time building my world because I intend to use it for more than one thing. I loved the Dungeons and Dragons universe where so many tales were spun out of one of the most diverse worlds ever. Besides, I'm a huge history fan in that I like to wonder on the thoughts and reasons of the people who lived in the times. How they managed and what were they like. Probably no different than us. Certainty not dumber. We have built things they could not. And they have built things we could not.

I think I will be old before I ever sit down and piece this whole thing together. I hope I am not too old to see the effect of my writings. That would be the ultimate robbery.