More Egypt

This is the last week of March?  A quarter of the way through the year already?  It isn't possible!

I still don't have Journey of a Thousand Truths finished.  It has stalled at a scene I simply can't 'see' yet, though I think another little piece of it came to me tonight.  I hope that it all comes to me in the next few days so that I can get to the ending.  I'm getting close.  It's silly to hold up here, but it happens sometimes.

Devlin 4 has been published and is selling surprisingly well.  I guess I won't wait so long for the next Devlin novel!

My current editing project is a major bit of work, though, and is going to take me a while.  I'm working on Raventower & Merriweather 2: War.  The chapters are long, and I am only getting through one of them a day.  Editing takes longer than writing the same amount of words, I think.  Or at least as long, but is more difficult.  Or something.  It takes a long time.  LOL.

The story is good, though.

I have watched ten classes on reading and writing hieroglyphs, and I am really enjoying what I've done so far!  In fact, I find more of my free time taken up in practice than in anything else right now.  The hieroglyphs are the simplified written style, of course, but once you start learning them, you can recognize the fancier versions chiseled in stone.  Learning to recognize letters is just the small step, though.  Learning to read them -- that's the fun part.  I'm beginning to recognize words!  As the instructor put it, we're mostly in the 'See spot run' phase, but I'm still amazed at how fast this is going.

I love learning new things.  This is probably one of the most challenging, and interesting, things I've tried to learn in a long time.  I love it.

And yes, something of it is bound to show up in a story at some point.  Russ pointed out how cool it would be to use in a mystery novel.  Back on 2/27/17, I wrote a bit about an odd story idea I had -- the letter one.  This might be another part of that plot, where perhaps the way in which someone writes a sentence points out that he or she was not trained in Egypt.  Oh, and there were female scribes in Egypt, though not many.

The reed pen is their child,
The stone surface their wife…
Death made them forgotten,
But books made them remembered.

Scribes sometimes wrote their name at the end of a text, apparently because of the Ancient Egyptian belief that 'to speak the name of the dead was to make them live again.'

Meanwhile, it's back to drawing the damned quail chicks (u,w sound).  I think I've finally gotten a reasonable vulture (a) and owl (m).  They used far too many birds in their writing.  I've never had a very steady hand, but as long as I can tell what I've written, all is good.  It's not like I'm going to go out and write hieroglyphs for a living.  Sometimes you just do for fun.