Weekly Roundup Vol. 1
Launching my Substack / My Birthday
An alternative subtitle to this post could’ve been ‘Conquerors’, as I’ve spent this weekend away from social media and instead have been reading a book on Roman Britain and the English Settlements, one that Tolkien marginally helped with on the mythology side. I’m researching both for a short story I’m partway through and a novel probably for next year. (There might be more on that in a future Writing Journey post).
I’ve enjoyed really digging into the tribes of pre-Roman Britain and how the natural landscape divided them, and learning of the many important battles of the Roman conquest - some story potential there! I ended up making four A4 pages of notes to be typed up by some unfortunate future me, mostly of background information that’ll help me set the scene and figure out exactly when and where I might set part of my next novel-length story brewing in my mind, whilst also informing my short story and its tracing of a magical object through prehistory to Roman times and beyond as its traded through the empire.
Dedicating the weekends to reading through the shelves of research material for my historical-fantasy-science-fiction, to coin a phrase, is a new routine I’m, trying out. If you’ve seen my first post, you’ll know I have a lot to get through. Weekends might not be enough:
Get to Know Me through My Shelves - by Harvey Hamer
An intro to the who, what, where, when and why of this newsletter.
The other kind of conquering that alternative subtitle could have referred to is conquering this Substack platform. Just kidding. This is only my first week here. But again I’d like to thank my family and friends for their support and subscriptions, and perhaps more thanks to my subscribers who didn’t know me already! (What are you doing here? Maybe explain that to your friends, and tell them to tell their friends...) Anyway, I’m really enjoying the freedom to write these posts, a lot less restrictive than the carefully measured, researched and myth-imbued fiction I’m working on.
The other main source of enjoyment this week has of course been my birthday, and all the accompanying wishes and gifts - over 30 books I think! I don’t know the legitimacy of this, but apparently every seven years every cell in your body has been replaced - so I’m now Harvey 3.0 I suppose. Turning 21 doesn’t feel any different, yet. The occasion was marked over a few days by meeting some friends, a day trip to Brighton (where yes, more books were bought), and a nice homecooked meal and cake.
Another cool thing that happened this week relates to the research of my completed second novel, but very much to the mythology of the third I’m working on. When I visited painted caves in France last year, I was fascinated by the geometric signs that were all over the place, but all similar basic shapes or runes of a sort. I did some research, and found a TED talk by paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger which discussed 32 common signs across Europe’s caves, and with more research I found that all over the world there are countless similarities, despite the distance between sites both physically and through time.
Pretty interesting, but something that would’ve made my research that much easier would’ve been a database of sorts for these universal markings. This was the main question I sent to Genvieve, now that she’s a regular guest on the World of Paleoanthropology YouTube chancel and wider community. Since sending the question I’ve got to talk to Genevieve and Seth who runs the channel and they’re both kind and passionate people so check out the channel if you have an interest in prehistory, or want to educate yourself on the topic. They have a weekly podcast too! All they’re sharing has been invaluable to my recent writing, so it was a nice birthday week treat to receive my answers. Here’s the video dedicated to my questions:
It’s been a good week. I’m glad I’ve started this Substack journey, and am looking forward to what future weeks will hold. Hopefully there’ll be some news beyond the usual what I’m reading and writing as I should be hearing back from some opportunities and a pitch event - plus I’m visiting Stonehenge and the Salisbury area next week!
Thanks for reading,
Harvey