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

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure it's not too far off. I know someone who did a research project on knights and their conduct contrasted with the popular image of a noble man fighting for his lady and king, and let's just say that the real knights did not come off well.

The only problem with having crude knights (unless they're villains) in something that's a romance novel is that romance novels very much buy into the Sir Walter Scott/Arthurian image of knights, which I have some conflict with. Happily, I've been finding more authentic portrayals of the middle ages in more recently published novels, but it's still very much a place where potty humor (burps, farts, etc.) isn't welcome, because of whitewashing.

Also, if my hero is supposed to be this super-awesome knight with awesome leadership powers, then his men should probably follow in his footsteps and be more like . . . uh, Prince Charming than Shrek. :)

I'll probably end up "reforming" the knights if only because it kind of feels like the hero has a chorus of stooges following him around, though maybe I can spin it into the medieval equivalent of your boyfriend having friends you cannot stand.

P.S. That's a super cool story! My family doesn't have anything like that -- we're a bunch of poor English and German farmers, back into forever.