Well, swipe me!

[essayel]

I think I've wittered on about the movie that has been made locally. "Resistance" is based on a novel of the same name by local novelist/poet Owen Sheers and it will go on general release on 25th November. Well, astoundingly, the film premiere is going to be at our tiny local cinema on Monday 21st. And even the hoi polloi can attend if they can get one of the few public tickets. The curator is going, natch, and one of my colleagues is determined to attend, to represent the custodial stuff [makes us sound like we carry night sticks and tasers, dunnit?]

I'm not going because a] £40 to watch a film I can see a day or two later for £6.50 doesn't seem like good sense to me with Christmas coming up and b] Nanowrimo will be kicking my ass about then. But I tell you who IS going! Only HRH Charles, Prince of Wales and Duke of all kinds of other places, and presumably an awful lot of scary men in suits with bulges under their arms. Curator and colleague's dress buying activities are going to be even more strenuous now.

I'm having my usual love/hate relationship with Nanowrimo. Last year I just wrote as fast as I could and didn't worry about anything other than my word count [and trying to end each day with a bit of a bang to amuse the people who had been added to the Gdoc of it]. This meant that I wandered off the point a lot and 50k was only half a story rather than a whole one. This year I'm not nearly as well prepared, even though the plot is laid out for me, and I'm finding I'm wandering about again. I've managed 15k and had hoped to actually have the real business of the story going, but instead I'm fiddling around with character development stuff. I need to have some big jumps in time scale to just get the damned story written!

Comments

[innerslytherin]

That looks like a fascinating movie. I hope it makes it my way. :)

I'm doing a rotten job at NaNoWriMo this year. I keep getting caught up in research and not doing the actual writing. Any chance you could point me in the direction of a good source on medieval mining? Or even Roman era? Gold, coal, whatever, doesn't really matter. I'm just having a devil of a time finding stuff about anything before, say, 1820. *sigh*

[essayel.livejournal.com]

The best source I know for everything from Roman to the Victorians is the Free Miners organisation of the Forest of Dean. There were Roman mines for coal and iron ore that just continued to be worked all through the dark ages, medieval period and into the modern age. The Forest is riddled with workings, some of whch you can go down. I've been deep level caving through the Roman parts and it's very eerie seeing the pick marks in the walls and knowing they were made 1400 years ago. Also - tunnels two feet deep, with 3 inches of water, pushing a basket and operating by the light of a candle stuck to a stick held between the teeth - they were MEN then. Or slaves, which is a more worrying thought.

There's some info here http://www.clearwellcaves.com/freemining.html and more elsewhere on the web.

Incidentally the stick with the flared end that held the candle was called a 'nelly' and I wonder if that it the origination of the phrase "not on your nelly".

[innerslytherin]

You are awesome! I knew you would know something about this. Thank you so much! I especially love the ochre mining. And now I have another reason I want to visit the Forest of Dean when I finally make it to England.