The Post-Bath Society

When just flipping innocently through channels, how can we be certain, with only a moment's glance, that whatever is on is supposed to be some sort of historical or pseudo-historical (as in GOT) drama?

 Because nobody on screen looks as if he ever, in his entire lifetime, combed his hair, let alone washed his hands, changed his clothes, or trimmed his face.

Do whatever you want, but please do it downwind

  There were bathtubs in the Bronze Age. In any respectable Mycenaean palace there were scores of ladies working as bath fillers, water warmers, laundry maids, seamstresses, lice scrubbers, and barbers. Clearly something even more important than the safety pin (fibula) was mislaid between millennia. Or else the costume and makeup departments have been allowed (encouraged?) to enjoy themselves far too much.

Dirty fingernails? Not a chance.

Okay So Far

Spent the month of December writing, rewriting, editing, negotiating, arguing, discussing, rewriting again until the whole vocabulary of promotional material for The Peryton was satisfactory both to me and to my agent, Italia Gandolfo. There is a tag line, a log line, a short synopsis, a longer synopsis, the cast of characters,  the four manuscripts themselves, the epilogue - an entire panoply, complete with horses, snakes, monster bugs, and midgets. (All right, no midgets. Saving them for Samson.)

A collection of that material was then submitted, in mid-January, to a few publishers whose names made me blink: Holt, MacMillan, Hachette, Penguin and Grove Atlantic.

Well, okay then.

 

 

Even before ThePeryton is accepted by a publisher, work must go on. Next will be Warrior, the autobiography of Ajax, which is making itself into the verbal equivalent of a magic box: it can only be told, it seems, in two different voices, that of the young, naive, idealistic Ajax in the present tense, accented with past-tense commentary from the disillusioned, cynical old suicide.

If these Egyptian ladies can do it, so can I

After that, The Samson Midrash is waiting, and not patiently. Yes Samson, with the lion and the bees and the jawbone of the ass. And Delilah.

Watch this space. Or, better yet, check the list on the right side of this blog for progress on all three projects.