I’ve been using the English place name generator for the estates and towns in a couple of stories. I just asked it for one for Mr. Dunkirk’s estate and it offered me, “West Rootsex.”

No. No, I don’t think so.

Edited to add: The next one was “Sex cot in the Vale.” Really, it’s usually better than this.

Oh my. I just realized that, in Shades of Milk and Honey, I’ve created a world where it’s quite likely that shadow puppetry would never have arisen. In fact, I think that puppetry and mask work may only have come up as a form of sham glamour.

This is very strange for me.

I’m thinking that if it did arise it would be like the interplay of Kabuki and Bunraku, or even as the puppet operas did. A way to poor-man’s way to mimic what the “real” artists did, and then gradually become an art form of it’s own. Okay. Yes, I can see that happening.

Whew.

Mind you, this has almost zero bearing on the story. But still. A world without puppets? Ugh. I shudder.

For those of you who are not reading along as I post chapters, I’ve posited that magic works, but it’s confined to glamour, so a glamourist can make illusions but it takes a physical toll in the form of energy, just like running up a hill or biking in the wind. The more complicated the illusion, the more energy. It’s relegated to a women’s art, along with painting, music and embroidery and they are frequently fainting from over-exerting themselves.

In fact, the vocabulary they use to discuss it is taken from dressmaking. If a piece of glamour is “tied off” then it can continue without costing the creator energy, but it is tied in place. So a person can use folds of glamour to create an image of a character but have to constantly work the folds if they want the character to move around. That would be its own form of puppetry and maybe someone would have created a physical puppet in order to work multiple characters at once, without fainting.

My waaaay deep idea is that it developed as a protective technique and then as people evolved it slowly had less importance until it became strictly a decorative art.

Maybe I should be writing the novel now instead of rambling about the imaginary relationship between puppets and magic in my Regency England.

Today I waited around the house for my DSL connection to be hooked up because Qwest said that I had to be home between nine and five, which was a nice, narrow window. It was okay, because I also had to be here for the gutter guys to come give me an estimate, and to sign for my cell phone when it arrived.

The downside to this, was that I also had to go down to the Portland Spirit to do a video shoot as the Cinnamon Bear. I was getting ready to leave and–behold!–UPS arrives with the modem setup for my DSL. He rang the bell and just dropped it off; I didn’t have to be here at all. For that. But the gutter guys were still coming, so I wrote a note, apologizing for having to leave, and explaining my concerns about the roof. I taped it to the front door and biked off.

Slowly. We were having some Icelandic weather here. The wind was so strong that it was like biking up hill all the time, so it took me twice as long to get there as usual.

It took about three minutes to shoot the promotional spot (I have to say, that my bear suit is nicer, but it’s also more expensive so, there you go.) and then I got on the bike to head home again.

There was an estimate taped to the door. I’ll call them tomorrow.

No cell phone. So I call and discover that the order had not gone through. The guy tries to cancel it and redo the order. He’s very nice; we get everything sorted out. Then two minutes later he calls back to say that the first order went through after all. Oy. So two cell phones are coming here. I’m supposed to be able to send it back and get a full refund. He was really apologetic.

So after sorting all of that out, I talked to the window folks again and got that lined up. He’s dropping off the contract tomorrow.

Which just left me time to go down to the NaNoWriMo write-in downtown. It’s nice to sit around other people who are frantically typing. I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but the companionship was a nice change.

The really fun thing came on the bus ride home (remember the wind? Add rain to that and darkness. Not good biking conditions). I struck up a conversation with a fellow who makes his living betting on horse races. Fascinating. He said that he used to go with his dad when he was little, and has been betting for thirty years. The way he talks about it, it’s like a full-time job. He was just coming home from a track and was going home to go online to research the races for the next day. We had twenty minutes of conversation about a world that is completely alien to me. I loved it.

Andrew at PuppetVision has a great post on the giant marionette that was supposedly in Reykjavik which has some cool behind the scenes photos of the standard sized marionette on a greenscreen.