Oh, challenges

I really need to be asleep, but I have tomorrow afternoon to nap all I want. Also, I am totally engrossed in reading about the fall of Llywellyn the Last (which I will never be able to spell right more than once).

I'm having difficulty summoning up sympathetic feelings for the English, which is Big Trouble, because my hero and his entire family are English, and I need to make the heroine's Welsh family into the bad guys. But Longshanks is really showing his ass here, so I'm having trouble doing anything but go, "Oh, the poor oppressed Welsh!"

Did you know that in 1275, Longshanks hired pirates to kidnap Llywellyn's betrothed/wife, Eleanor de Montfort when she sailed from France to go to Llywellyn in Wales? (Freaking pirates! And I always thought that section of "Hamlet" was really far-fetched.) He did! And then he held her hostage until Llywellyn met his demands. And then, in 1283, after Llywellyn had been killed/murdered, his infant daughter Gwenllian was captured by the English, and held in a convent her entire life. She died without issue, natch. And then Longshanks basically ransacked Wales, and appropriated a lot of the most symbolic objects of Gwynedd and scattered them to the wind. Quoting the Wikipedia article on Llywellyn, "Commenting on this [the appropriation of Gwenyedd's treasures] a contemporary chronicler is said to have declared 'and then all Wales was cast to the ground.'" It wasn't just a military defeat, but a political and spiritual one.

So, basically Longshanks is coming off as a big, tall bastard to me. How can I make the Welsh the bad guys after learning all that? I kind of want to rewrite history and make the Welsh victors. I could right now be typing this in Welsh, and you wouldn't even notice because it would be the same as English to us.

But I can't end the story with my hero and heroine living under the threat of the hero being executed for being a Welsh noble and the heroine being locked away as a prisoner until she dies. That's just not the Romance Way.

Another thing I discovered: Everybody in Welsh history appears to have been named Owain, Gruffydd, or Llywellyn. Toss a Rhys and a Rhodri in there, and you've got like 95-percent of 13th-century Welsh males. I can only imagine that you'd walk into a bar, shout Owain!, and everybody would turn around.

Can we do it? Yes, we can! Rhys the Welsh Guy . . .

So, I've got an hour and a half to get out 1500 words, which I think might be doable. Unfortunately, I no longer have malted milk balls, which really did work well as a motivator. Apparently getting me to sit down and write is exactly like potty-training a toddler. Only I generally don't go running out into the living room with my pants down, screaming, "I wrote! I wrote on the 'puter! Gimme candy!"

You guys know how I arranged all those medieval-ish songs to put me in a medieval-ish mood? Well, apparently what puts me in a medieval-ish mood is Patrick Wolf and the Vitamin String Quartet covering Red Hot Chili Peppers. I am not even joking. I cranked out 2000 words last night, listening to that. I wrote about nuns.

There is something about "Dani California" and "Tristan" that just does not say "nuns" to me.

Whatever! I'm not going to question it. I'm just going to crank it and make like a monkey with a typewriter.

I'm also trying this thing where I write longhand on the cheapest paper I can find, because what I write on there doesn't count at all. I can illustrate a scene with stick figures, and it doesn't matter. I'm just writing. It's about breaking expectations and getting out of the habit of always writing with a certain pen on a certain kind of paper or needing a computer to get the thoughts out. By changing your environment, it's supposed to make you less fearful of what you're tossing up on the page. In theory. I might just feel silly for writing a romance novel in a notepad that features an anthropomorphic bear wearing a shirt but no pants on the cover. Writing that in blue scrapbooking pen, no less. I'm shaking it up!

AND! FURTHERMORE! I've been outlining a scene that happens way in the future of where I'm writing right now, and I cannot get the lines that Benedick speaks to Claudio in "Much Ado About Nothing" when the former confronts the latter about Hero's death. Something like, "You have wronged a fair and gentle lady," except I can't find that scene in my version of the play. Maybe it's just in the Kenneth Branagh version, because it is his delivery on it that's stuck in my head.