Not a land, a castle!

The littlest one (bottom right) turned out to be surprisingly well researched. Go figure.

Last week I took advantage of my local library and sheepishly checked out half a shelf worth of children's books on castles, medieval times, and knights. I've been reading serious scholarship on the topics of late, but I needed visual reference. Books with plots, plans, diagrams, arrows, maps, and PICTURES. You see...

I have written myself into a few corners with this story.

First, the captain of the castle guard ended up in the Castle Aco prison for no apparent reason, and I didn't know why he would deign to do so. I wasn't even sure what a castle prison should look like. Or if castles had prisons at all. Or guard captains. I knew that the idea of prisons for long-term punishment was not medieval, but the "dungeon" was. I needed help.

Second, Lamb was locked out of the Castle Aco kitchen, I and didn't know how to get her back inside.

It was fun to figure out these puzzles. Just like solving "problems" when directing a play, the search for my solutions required creative thinking, and the results ended up being much more interesting than they would have been without the struggle.

It turns out it's not a land I need to draw, it's Castle Aco. 

Working on the Lenovo

So far I am writing Lio and Lamb on my Lenovo Yoga laptop.

And, surprise to me, I am enjoying it. I purchased the Yoga in 2013, but it sat around unused and uncharged for most of 2014. This revelation, that I don't hate the machine, has me perplexed.

Graciously so.

The biggest difference, which I have mentioned in earlier posts, is moving the cursor around. On Apple keyboards, moving to the end of a line is a simple command+arrow. I have that shortcut fused into my subconscious memory. I think of moving to the end of the line and barely register hitting the keys to get there.

It doesn't work so easily on a windows based keyboard. Instead, to move to the end or start of a line, I need to hit the devoted "end" or "home" key, which are both easy to hit, but they require moving my hands away from the touch typing position. And I'm just not used to it.

Also, the PC delete/backspace key is slightly to the right of the Apple one, so my touch typing is a little off sometimes. I end up with ////// or  ====== where I meant to delete the word broken, for instance. And if I overcompensate, I end up at "home" and the cursor moves to South Dakota for a few minutes -- until I realize what I've done and find it. Then it's undo undo undo undo undo until I fix the mess I've made in the interim. I should call this move the South Dakota shuffle.

I will admit the Lenovo's touch screen is convenient at times. To move the page up or down, I just swipe it, like on my phone. I'm even faster with the magic mouse on my Mac, though. All in all, using the Lenovo's page up and page down keys is actually more efficient than swiping. Here's why: moving the page up and down with swipes means that the cursor ends up in odd spots.

And we're back to doing the South Dakota shuffle.

A Created Land

I'm thinking about drawing a map of the "land" in Lio and Lamb. 

That's usually one of my favorite parts of vaguely medieval fantasy. Tolkein's Middle Earth. Le Guin's Earthsea. Martin's Westeros (et al). I prefer the maps to be part of the books' pages, not just printed on end flaps. And I usually turn to them often enough to break my bindings there. 

Here's a picture of one of my favorite created worlds. This poster of Tolkein's Hobbiton hangs in my piano room. I bought it the last time I was in London, at my fourth favorite tourist spot there, the British Library. 

Tolkein painted this himself.

Do you want to guess my three favorite tourist spots?