The clip show of newsletters
By Jesse Mostipak in blog
July 19, 2023
The pressures of my coursework have compressed my days into a steady cycle of get up, work out, work, read, write, and sleep. This has left me in a bit of a lurch with this newsletter, as I continue to toy with what it should be. I adore the weekly schedule because it keeps me accountable to sharing my writing, but it frustrates me because a week simply isn't enough time to develop a piece that feels worthy of sharing.
This is, I suppose, the nature of creation.
And so this week, increasingly aware of the fact that I need to submit 3,500 creatively fictionalized words on Æthelflæd by August 1st, I'm using this space to round up what I've been reading and thinking about for the past seven days:
On writing and medieval history
I continue to struggle with what it means to write historical fiction, and after filling several pages of a notebook with ideas with questions like Could I take Æthelflæd out of the 9th//10th century? Out of England? Into today? Into fantasy? Into speculative fiction? I found this article from Zadie Smith to be both a warning ("Not all historical fiction cosplays its era, and an exploration of the past need not be a slavish imitation of it.") and reassuring in the amount of time it takes ("Like doing a Ph.D. and writing a novel simultaneously. So many notes!")
- On Killing Charles Dickens by Zadie Smith
On Vikings
On a fundamental level I know that in many ways we haven't behaviorally evolved very far from our medieval ancestors, but reading articles like this always makes me laugh. It seems that grifters are always going to grift and men will always lose important things as they stumble home, drunk.
- 1,000 years on, perils of fake Viking swords are revealed by Maev Kennedy
On Valheim
I'm not one for survival games, but both last summer and this I've found myself obsessed with Valheim. Last year I mostly ran around and chopped down trees in an attempt to soothe away job stress, while this summer I've been more focused on playing the actual game. There's something comforting about logging in to a world, gathering resources, and corralling chaos.
What's particularly appealing to me is using Valheim to attempt to authentically recreate Viking structures, from a hall to a church to a village to a longphort. But why stop there? I could conceivably build out locations to mimic the burghal system in England, or rebuild Pont de l'Arche. There's enough raw material to recreate an entire world, if only I can get to a high enough level where I have all the perks of resource management and collection.
However one of the perks I've unlocked and quickly given up on is carts. I lost the first cart in my moat, and subsequent carts have tipped over if I hit a pebble at the wrong angle. And it turns out the only way to right a cart is to run into it at top speed and hope I've gathered enough momentum to flip it over.
My media consumption habits
Movies
TV
Books
Until next week!
xo