madwriter

ILLUSTRATED PROGRESS REPORT FOR 10/19/11

New Words: 1950 on Chapter 1 ("Those Who Came First") Section 2 ("The Dancing Spirits") of Arizona. Ooljee and Yiska, trying to lead some of their people back to their ancestral homeland, end up paying more in tolls, as it were, than they had anticipated.

Total Words: 18700.

Reason For Stopping: Getting ready for work.

Book Year: 941 B.C.

Mammalian Assistance: I invited Vegas in and he wasted no time accepting. I found the typical on-the-box-stack poses of Vegas I was looking for, which are from about 4 1/2 months ago, shortly before I finished To Murder an Empire.

And a Nate, too!

Exercise: Walking down to campus; walking Tucker the Big Dog around the windy neighborhood.

Stimulants: The last of the birthday egg nog.

Today's Opening Passage: Ooljee hadn’t thought it possible that she could sleep that night, but she awoke before dawn with a start realizing her family was surrounded.

Darling Du Jour: Just a bit of info-dumping that I like...

em>Yiska’s and Ooljee’s trek was made possible by the fact that people of a common stock had roamed from Southwestern America to Mexico and Central America, northwest to southeast and back, for millennia. This stock would come to be known as Uto-Aztecan, named for the northern Ute and southern Aztec peoples who descended from it, and the core of it would stretch from Oregon and Idaho to Guatemala and Honduras. In short order the cultures grew vastly different, but early on they shared a common language, along with two things equally important: a love of trade and a love of knowledge. Even in the mid-10th century B.C., roughly a generation after the death of King David of the Israelites and a generation before the death of King Solomon, threads of general knowledge about things like weapons, pottery, and the existence of other peoples were spreading across a vast swath of the world that reached as far as the builders of the great mounds along the Mississippi River to the stela-builders of the Maya.

While specifics about far-distant places were hard to come by, even a person who never left his village might hear about routes through the Sierra Madres from jade traders heading north or turquoise traders coming south; they might know that peoples to the south erected tall stones carved with storytelling pictures; they might know how many days’ walk the sea was on either Mexican coast from those who brought shells. The land was sparsely populated by modern standards, but by the standards of three thousand years ago it teemed with people from Southern Arizona and California to the Andes, and most of those people seemed born curious about the world around them and outside the one they knew.

Non-Research / Review Books In Progress: Michener; Ford.