Mmm, pickles and crudites

[msmcknittington]

I am totally stress eating my way through my last few thousand words with pickles and diet pop. And crudites and Catalina dressing!

In related news, crudites is a way better word for raw vegetables than raw vegetables. Which is why I use it all the time. Crudites, crudites, crudites. Crudités, crudités, crudités. See, the spell checker in Firefox totally thinks that the é is pretentious, because it doesn't recognize that spelling.

In further related news, the knights in my novel have become these sort of terribly crude frat boys. Whenever I need the heroine to feel frustrated or distanced from the hero, the knights show up and fart and burp their way into her ire. Like, I just wrote this:

_{[Context: Their manor house is all beat up and in pieces, the only bedrooms that are really liveable are their bedroom and the soldiers' barracks, and the hero's parents have just shown up for an unexpected visit. So, ring the doom bells, her in-laws are on her stoop.]}

"We cannot put your mother in the barracks. Your father perhaps would not find it such a hardship, but we cannot house a countess with those . . ."

"Those what?" he asked.

"Those men you call knights!" she practically shouted, gesturing toward them.

Luc looked at them and saw what she was on about. The men were currently engaged in a game of . . . well, he was not sure what, but he supposed it could be called wrestling, though a less astute observer might assume they were beating each other.

I have been spending way too much time with my brothers and their friends, who are not knights, but who do stuff like that all the time. So, they'll be talking to each other, one of them will fart, the other one will fart louder, and it spontaneously turns into a brawl -- only they're laughing.

I think I gave up any pretense that I'm writing a romance novel about five thousand words ago, and it's now more of a Judd Apatow film set in the middle ages.

_{My despair, she is deep! My sense of humor, she is weird! I think I'm a little punch drunk.}

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, I totally want to read this when you are done. I think there are snickers just waiting to happen. That sounds just like a batch of boys no matter their age or time period!

[(Anonymous)]

Suggestion regarding social structure: regular fighting guys with decent arms and armor would be "men at arms" vice knights, and likely most of the actual fighting guys would be archers.

More comments about barracks and housing arrangements if you want them...

Pedantic, me?

[beraht.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I was raised in a family of women. I didn't have to put up with that.

Which isn't to say your gender's any less coarse. :p

[hohenstein.livejournal.com]

Your depiction might not be that far off...there is an oral history on one side of my family tree that claims the ancestor that started their rise to nobility was a common archer who got knighted by a bunch of drunken young nobles who were impressed by his ability to still shoot straight after consuming prodigious quantities of ale. From the actual records i was able to chase down, this seems to be a true story. The cleaned up version which has him being knighted by the Black Prince for his skill, bravery & drinking ability seems to be a total fairy tale. (That side eventually ended up as dukes-the other side of the tree were royals that kept getting on the losing side of political conflicts & being executed, exiled, or dispossessed).

A.