Some day, we are going to have to do a long post about Doggerland. Right now is a busy time of year, so I don’t have the time for that at the moment, but long story short, Doggerland has everything.
Doggerland was an area that you probably know as “the bottom of the North Sea.” Apparently, there is a shallow area there, with evidence that when sea levels were lower, it was once not only exposed but inhabited. This vast area of land would have joined England and Ireland to what is now Holland and Denmark. The proximity to Holland, plus the theory that Doggerland is the setting for The Lord of the Rings, are what I mean when I say this place has everything.
For now, let’s put a pin in this article. Jean Deruelle, the French guy with the theory, has detailed ideas about exactly what the inhabitants of Doggerland got up to. He assumes (reasonably, I think) that they were part of the Old European megalithic culture. The article also includes lots of cool speculative maps of Doggerland in various stages of submersion by the sea. We can argue about the exact timing of it all, later.
In spite of the mask and theatre hat he wore, I could see at once that Kenn Gifford was exceptional-looking; not handsome, quite the opposite in fact, but striking all the same. The skin I could see above the mask was fair, the type that reveals blood vessels beneath it and looks permanently pink after a certain age. He hadn’t reached that age yet, but the theatre was hot and his colour was high. His eyes were small and deep set, hardly visible from a distance and of an indeterminate colour, even close up. They weren’t blue or brown or green or hazel. Dark rather than light; grey perhaps came the closest, and yet I didn’t look at him and think, grey eyes. Large, half-moon shadows lay beneath them.
We now get up to seven a day, including blue from our Americauna, white from our Leghorn, pale brown from various ones, dark brown possibly from the Rhode Island Red, the occasional brown speckled one, and someone is laying pink.
Here is the basic wooden door pull that finally came off my son’s closet in our rented farmhouse. The closet is plywood or chipboard or something like that, hollow, and from repeated usage, this screw had stripped around itself and now just popped out whenever you tried to open the accordion door.
Here is the replacement, from my best bud, Hobby Lobby.
I love Hobby Lobby. It’s my source for knitting supplies, including wool and cotton yarns and needles; affordable canvases, acrylic paints, palettes and brushes for my (and my son’s) painting vice; model-railroad materials for whenever I need to build a model of Tenochtitlan; fabric for a Renfaire tent or a cave woman costume; and wood for those hippie woodburning projects, not to mention the usual scrapbooking supplies, gift wrap, stickers, and Christmas decorations.
Sadly, or perhaps happily, this post is not a paid promotion.
In addition to all this, Hobby Lobby has an impressive selection of themed shelf brackets, towel and key hooks, and drawer pulls, often in cast-iron. These are not just cutesy country style fixtures (though they do have that). You could put together a goth or steampunk or French Country or Log Cabin look for a room, easily, with the supplies found there.
Long story short, I walked into the Hobby Lobby variety-drawer-pull section, and within seconds I had found the beauty above. It was 50% off, so I think I paid about two bucks for it. In order to put it into the plywood door, I had to use a plastic drywall anchor.
The thing that made this find so serendipitous, though, was that the closet in question resides in the room of my rabbit-obsessed son. (Rabbits!) Additionally, said room has the following window valance:
I mean.
The only downside is that, as I now notice in the picture, the rest of the door looks kind of bad by comparison.
The upside is that this post is now long enough to appear on a Friday and not on a Monday.
Stephen Renney was in his windowless office, eating a sandwich and drinking Fanta from a can. He sensed me standing in his doorway, looked up and then started making those slightly embarrassed, fidgety movements we all make when we’ve been caught eating alone. As though eating were some sort of not-quite-respectable indulgence instead of the most natural thing in the world.
“Sorry,” I said, giving the time-honoured response, and looking slightly embarrassed myself, as though I’d caught him on the loo.
“Not at all,” he responded, ridiculously forgiving me.
I chose this photo off Pexels, and now I almost can’t stand to post it, because it could be my dad in 20 years.
I’ve been thinking lately about how the death of the mentor, in fiction, is often more poignant than the death of the Significant Other. Maybe it’s because the former happens more often. In a normal quest-type story, the mentor gets killed at some point, often kind of early in the action, and the S.O. doesn’t get killed at all, or often even threatened until later in the story. The exception would be crime-fighting superhero tragic back stories, where having a beloved wife killed off to serve as motivation is so common that it has been given a derogatory name (“fridging”).
Anyway, the above paragraph is, of course, just about stories that follow very conventional models. Stories in the wild are quite individual and they go all over the place. Here are some mentor deaths that spring to mind, from stories good, bad, and ugly:
In Star Wars: Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon Jin, Darth Vader
In Dr. Strange, which I just watched last night: The Ancient One
In Harry Potter: Sirius Black, Dumbledore (not to mention Harry’s parents)
In Narnia: Aslan
In The Hobbit: Gandalf doesn’t exactly get killed, but he leaves the party right before they enter Mirkwood
In LOTR: Gandalf
In Genesis: Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel (I am thinking of mentors who had a chance to give final curses and blessings and instructions before they died. Of course they all die, good and bad, IRL)
In the comments, please add your own.
Perhaps another reason that the mentor’s death is more poignant than the S.O.’s is that the relationship has gone on longer and has been, in a sense, more important to the young protagonist. It is, of course, in a sense the mentor’s job to die. He or she will have to take a less prominent role in the young hero’s life as the latter matures. And, older people tend to die. Joseph, on his deathbed, says, “I am about to go the way of all the earth.” But a tragic mentor death, like the ones above, seems to happen too soon, when we still need them, when we’re not ready.
I myself have ruthlessly killed off my characters’ mentors, sometimes more than one in the same book. I did not plan to do this in order to torture my young protags; it was just the way the story unfolded. One or two deaths even took me by surprise. However, some of my older men and women managed to survive the story long enough in order to be a rock for the rising generation.
Story Deaths and Stages of Life
Some people, sadly, have really tragic childhoods and are faced with death, loss, and betrayal well before they should have been. For young readers not in this position, I find that the type of story death that they find most poignant (and that therefore is most likely to appear in their literature) changes with stage of life:
for a kid: the stuffed animal or pet
for a teen: the mentor
for a young adult: the Significant Other
for a middle adult: the baby or child
for an older adult: ??? I don’t know yet, since I haven’t really hit this stage. But my mother-in-law is certainly going through it! Spouse? Best friend? Sister? Everyone your own age who remembers you when you were younger?
So, when I was a kid, it was stories of animals (including toys — I’m looking at you, The Velveteen Rabbit) that really got me. Now that I’m a parent, it’s stories where the baby or toddler dies that I really can’t stand to read.
It’s as if our hearts are pieces of leather that just keep getting softer and more tattered and beat up the more they experience.
I’ve been busy lately, so this post was written in one sitting. I apologize that it’s sort of a mind dump. I’m sure all these things have been articulated before, and much better than this, probably by Jordan Peterson.
