Weekly Roundup Vol. 3
A quiet one
Welcome to the third of these roundups - thank you for following along.
This week was mainly a week for catching up on household jobs after coming back from last week’s travels. One of the main jobs was painting our garden shed, which took a bit of work.
This newsletter has continued to grow, though. Thanks to the the new subscribers! Since last Sunday there’s been almost a daily trickle in, including from writers I admire and have been following on Substack for a while - so if you’re reading this, thanks for the support!
Last Sunday
As well as putting the finishing touches on last week’s roundup, I managed to get through another section of the book on Roman Britain I’m working through. I learnt how each settlement had four elected magistrates and was somewhat independent. The chapter was also about the different capital cities of different facets of the Roman occupation, and how the local tribes were brought into that government. I think it will all be of use when I get round to that more historical novel next year!
On Sunday evening, I had the pleasure of joining a small zoom call with subscribers to Gareth L. Powell’s Substack newsletter, nine of us in total from the UK and US. It was my first time actually chatting with Gareth, and it felt good introducing myself and chatting to others about writing, inspirations, and a touch of Star Wars. I learnt a lot about Wales, and interesting facts about the Appalachian Mountains, mainly their age and the fact that they’re part of the same range as the Scottish Highlands…
The week proper
On Monday I took a trip to Lewes with my father - we shopped a bit, looked a lot more in various bookshops. The Museum of Sussex Archaeology has an amazing bookshop, full of all the research books someone could want... actually, too many, and none specialised enough that I went for them. Still, the small room with shelves on every wall was like a map of my head recently.
On my big Rick Riordan readthrough, I’m halfway through the Kane Chronicles series now, and I’ve enjoyed re-learning some facts and imagery from Ancient Egyptian mythology that may end up as part of the universal mythology I’m making into a sort of pastiche for the last interlude short story on my third novel.
One major writing-related event this week was me applying for an Editorial Assistant job at Penguin in London. It was a good experience writing a book-related cover letter, and gave me a chance to use a writerly CV. I think the entry-level job would just be a great experience for me to learn the world of work, but specifically the world of publishing. To look at it from the ‘other side’ should prove insightful for an author trying to ‘break in’.
Something else that happened this week was receiving a letter that was actually quite sad news. For a long, long time, I’d ‘adopted’ an amur leopard with the WWF. Since I first started, which must’ve been sometime mid primary school, the number of these extremely endangered big cats in Russia and China has gone from 30 to well over 100 in the wild. But the Russian government has stopped the Russian branch of WWF, and so my ‘adoption’ has stopped, they can no longer help these big cats, and that just made me a bit angry. Hopefully the amur leopard will still stay on the up, but I certainly won’t be receiving the photo and camera footage updates to prove it.
As I’m writing this I’m in the midst of my social media-free weekend, reading up on the people, towns and countryside of Roman Britain. This will give more context to both next year’s historical novel and the short story I’m still working on - see last week's roundup. I was particularly interested in the town of Verulamium, the history and geography of that site, as it will be the next sight the magical crystal in the short story sees as it is traded on from the North Leigh villa…
This week’s books
This segment showcases the new additions to my research and fiction collections.
Not many this week, but they’ll both be useful to my writing, and maybe to my travels if I do indeed visit Egypt or Australia at some point. The National Geographic one has great information for the ancient sites, and lots of maps, and I’ve barely flicked through the two large volumes about Australia, but I’m looking forward to finding the time to read through them and look at all the glossy pictures.
Lots of my self-published writing, and my third screenplay which was based on some of the same ideas, is to do with Ancient Egypt and their beliefs. And the same crystal in the short story I was talking about last week will be making its way through there on its journey of trade, so the book will help me plot a route. I’ve also written a short story this year set in Australia, in one of the isolated rock art sites, so it’ll be nice to learn more about all of the heritage areas and their inhabitants. It’s a story that’s self-contained and short enough to be entered into some competitions, following a community of modern-day people meeting their ancestors at the sacred site.
I’ve got a monthly-ish subscription to Marvel’s Star Wars comics, some of the best current Star Wars storytelling. At the moment, as you can see, the brilliant writers are in the midst of a Dark Droids crossover event across the main titles. I’m holding off reading these issues until the whole arc is completed, but a highlight here is D-Squad by, reviving a group of droids from the animated Clone Wars, but with some new additions to the team from more current storytelling. This was the biggest delivery I think I’ve received, a nice treat to open. Anyway, Star Wars nerding over… for now.
Thanks for reading! Let me know how your week went, if you feel like it.
Cheers,
Harvey