Happy Monday!
Happy 4th of July to those observing!
I am attempting Camp NaNoWriMo this month. The goal is to add 30,000 words to India House, my novel in progress.
For those not in the know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November, where people try to write a novel in one month. The goal is usually 50,000 words, which makes for a pretty small novel (so you usually need to continue the momentum well into December to finish your novel).
But there’s Camp NaNoWrimo events in April and July where you can have different goals, like adding different word counts, or editing a certain number of pages, or doing a certain amount of research, and you can measure your progress in varied ways.
The first couple of days went pretty well - I added about 2300 words. Then I could only manage 125 words, and then 0 words. Hopefully I still manage to get to 30,000 words by July 31.
I’m excited to do this, because I’m now in the fun and games section, when the protagonists are still a few steps ahead of the bad guys. Once the bad guys catch up, it’s going to be harder to write, but now let’s write about smuggling manuscripts to Berlin, bomb manuals from Russians, and carrying national flags into Stuttgart.
Of course, there’s the wildcards of a very demanding baby and the employer who funds the whole show, so let’s see how that works out.
Onto our links!
They found the remains of a Chola-era palace in Gangaikondacholapuram. Given this was actually one of the capital cities of the Cholas, it isn’t entirely surprising that you’d find a palace there. The article doesn’t talk much about what artefacts were found, apart from bricks that were fired in a kiln, pot shreds of different sorts, decorated knobs, and also Chinese celadon pottery (the green jade stuff). It isn’t surprising, because we know the Cholas had long-standing connections with Southeast Asia and a rivalry with the Chinese for control of those waters, but it’s still so exciting. It’s also so surprising these excavations haven’t been conducted until now. You’d imagine they’d have dug out a Chola capital threadbare by now.
But better late than never. And they are studying the drainage and water supply to this palace now, and given Chola achievements in that direction, the findings are probably going to be quite interesting.And now another, much older excavation from Tamil Nadu - They found a 2300 year old stepwell near Erode. Last year, they found a wall that they supposed was the wall of a waterway. So they dug near it this year to see where the waterway led to, and they found this stepwell.
The area around had previously been found to have iron forges, and also a semiprecious stone making site.
How and Why? Then it turns out, this town was on the trade route between the Chera capital of Karur and the port of Muziris in Kerala. Was it close to iron ore deposits? Probably. I don’t know which ones. But that’s pretty exciting to learn about what an industrial village might have looked like all those centuries ago.ICYMI: My latest excerpt from my novel. I’m publishing these as I’m writing them. This time, our characters are trying to design a national flag that encompasses the idea of India, while also making a new friend who is looking for a famous Russian bomb doctor whose name no one knows. It makes references to things like Bofors and Marx and Lenin, as well as the cool flag of Baroda which has a hand with a sword in it. Read it. It’s fun AF.
Anglerfish love their mates so much, they delete a part of their immune system to fuse organs with them to become one. This piece is WILD. Anglerfish apparently find it very difficult to find mates. So when they do, they actually fuse to become one creature, sharing respiratory and digestive systems. How do they do this? Turns out, there’s two parts to our immune system - one that keeps bugs out with skin, hair, mucus, and bug-eating cells. The other is the T-cell stuff that makes custom antibodies to fight infections. They just gave up on the antibodies so they could reproduce this way.
Do they breed a lot to make this worth it? Well, turns out they only reproduce once a year, when 300k to 2 million eggs are released. How many make it to adulthood? I don’t know. But the article does state that it is difficult to find anglerfish at all, so I’m assuming the oceans aren’t thick with them. Is it all worth it? I don’t know, but they still exist, so something must be going right.The USPS now has a Raven stamp based on a Tlingit tale about how the sun, moon and stars came to be in the sky. It’s designed by the Tlingit artist Rico Worl, and I love everything about it - the raven, the stars all over him he’s trying to grab, and the frenzied energy it communicates.
I love the art of the Pacific Northwest. It’s very different from anything else I’ve seen. There’s bold blocks interspersed with blank space, and I really would like more words to describe how it is different from other styles.