Crescendo

Last week, I reached a point in City Novel that I had been looking forward to since I started writing it - a twist I had been thinking about and planning for a solid six years. It was as satisfying as you'd hope; this is my primary reason for never "jumping ahead" when writing, even if I'm stuck in a slump and the Good Part feels impossibly out of reach.

I'm not sure if it has been (I am far too tired to count now, at 11.35pm on a Friday after editing a late episode of Sylvpod), but it feels like the longest stretch since I last published a book. I think the effect is compounded by the fact that even if Sylvestus Vol II only came out two years ago or so, I had been writing Sylv for a long time, as three novels in the end front-to-back. I was writing City on and off for half the time I was writing Sylv. Dying Ember was published in 2014 when I'd already started Sylv, so -

Wait.

Each Separate Dying Ember was published nine years ago? Well, dunk.

I guess when you hit your 20s, the years really do start racing by. I hesitate and frown when people ask how old I am now, second-guessing myself - 25? That can't be right. I finished university four years ago? No, that doesn't seem true. We've lived in this house for fourteen months? No, I must be confused.

The best way, I've heard, to not feel like your life is rushing away from you is to fill it with as many new experiences as you can, as much variety as possible. It also keeps the wonder there, stops nostalgia from casting a pallour over the current day to make yesterday seem brighter.

Things are never perfect, but a missing pet is found again, a weekend arrives, a friend is visited, a sunset is watched, an annoyance is forgiven, a moment is savoured, a long-awaited crescendo is written. The wave crashes to shore and slowly withdraws. We ready, once again, to hurl ourselves forward into the new day.

Back and Forth

I feel recently as though I have been struck with an introspective mood, perhaps because for the first time in a long time, things are just... good. I love my job, I love where I live, I'm emotionally and financially stable - little day-to-day things come up, but compared to the past few years... yeah. It's just. Good.

And it's hard, in its own way, to know what to do with that. I don't want to spend the good times just waiting for the other shoe to drop, but there's also this looming anxiety: Is this what it's supposed to be? Is life supposed to be this easy? Am I allowed to just... be happy?

 

That's a pretty tragic thing to say, I guess, but it's true. I feel guilty for how good things are, as if all the terrible before didn't happen, as if happiness should be earned, as if good fortune is an undeserved reward, unrelated to hard work and perseverance.

On a completely different note, it's now just past the ten year anniversary of what I think of as the start of my novel-writing... phase? Experience? I wrote about it extensively here, just before the eight year anniversary, and re-reading that post back today I'm struck by how wise 22 year-old me is. He had a reeeaal rough two years ahead of him, in which he went back to barely writing and making no art, and I feel like I only now have the space to begin moving forward again. And by moving forward, I'm moving backwards: back into who I was two years ago, before I was knocked so hard back into trauma and doubt.

It's okay, my friends keep reassuring me. It's okay to react like this. You spent over a year being deeply traumatised. You're still recovering. You recovered before and you'll recover from this. I fall back into habits I thought I'd left behind, repeat bad cycles I worked years to overcome. Things are a lot better, but I still feel further behind than I did two years ago. And that's okay, that's okay, that's okay.

It's a back and forth.

I think that's where I am at the moment. Back and forth. In time, in my own head. My Chemical Romance is back and listening to them again in some ways brings with it the headspace of ten years ago, when I had barely started writing The Red Prince, and in other ways is a whole different experience shaped by what's happened in that decade. I listen to Panic! at the Disco for the first time in a few years and think about characters I haven't thought about since they slid out of the front of my brain. I see North from Dying Ember in a whole new light, feel my chest clench up with an understanding I didn't have when I actually wrote him. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is the best time of my life and it cannot stay and what could go wrong and things never stay right. I do not have to repent for happiness.

I do not have to repent for happiness.

Historically, things have always changed for me in September. Between it being my birthday and it being the start of the academic year, it was always a much more significant indicator of change than the meaningless transition from December to January - I even managed to keep that pattern after leaving education, getting my first full-time job in September, then changing it next September. The September after that was quiet and I planned to not change anything else again until the coming one, but things did not work out that way and everything was instead uprooted at the end of March. Like, March? What the heck ever happens in March?

So, I still feel like I'm waiting in a way. Like this is the interstitial period, like nothing good can stay so don't worry lad, just hold on another two months or so and it'll all go tits-up again. I am trying to be more optimistic than that, though. I will endeavour to hold on to what is good, to let go what does not serve me.

Re-playing games I first loved two years ago. Writing the novel I started five years ago. Re-listening to music I loved eight years ago.

Putting away the harmful habits of six months ago. Leaving behind the trauma of one year ago. Planning, for maybe the first time in my life, the future two years from now.

Back and forth.

I should do another digital portrait again soon.

Identity in Sylvestus

CW: sexual assault, abuse, trauma.

This post contains unmarked spoilers for both volumes of Sylvestus. 

 

This is a post I've thought about for a long time, including many drafts and plans done on bus journeys and sleepless nights. I never wrote anything down, though; as I've explained before, how I want to say things evolves so continually that it would have been pointless and left me frustrated, and I knew I couldn't publish any thoughts on it until Sylv Vol II had both been published, and had been out long enough that I had a small chance of getting two or three readers who had already finished it and wouldn't find the contents spoiled. However, in the few months since that deadline actually passed... I find that my desire and inspiration to actually talk about it is nowhere near what it was. Maybe the pertinence has passed; maybe the brain-space I'm in is so removed from when it's at the top of my mind that I can no longer summon the words; maybe the theory of something I knew wouldn't see the light of day was a lot less intimidating than the practice of writing something that definitely will.

It's not the only reason this blog has been quiet for the past few months, but it's one of them, for sure. So, this post is about identity in Sylvestus, obviously, and... other stuff.

Here goes.

Superficially, I've talked about gender identity in Sylvestus before. That was just over a year ago now, and it's worth noting that at the time, I was out as a non-binary queer person. A few months later, I accepted myself as a gay trans man, though it took until recently to fully come out as such and begin transitioning.

I described in the above-linked post the view on gender in ancient Rome that based identity upon sexual acts. Now, we have gender identity (what the person feels), gender presentation (what the person shows to the world), gender role (what societal expectation the person fulfills), and all of those separate to sexual identity, romantic identity, sexual preference, and now the internet is getting very big on the politics of position and kink intertwined with all of those...

But back then, it was both simpler and, to us, more obtuse: men penetrated, women received. They may not have had acceptance for and understanding around "trans" people insofar as we would recognise it today, but that isn't to say that trans identities didn't exist in some form.

This isn't another essay about Sylv's gender identity, though. I think I talked around that as much as I can in that previous post. But what I couldn't expand upon then because of the whole spoileroonies thing was the whole "Sylv's gender and sexuality are both intertwined and linked to his trauma" part - specifically, the nature of the trauma.

 

I said to my friend after she beta-read the first draft of Vol II that I was amazed no-one had ever asked me, after reading Vol I, why Sylv was The Way He Was around sex, and what the trauma flashbacks and night terrors were about. I wish we had been talking face-to-face, because I want to say "she looked at me perplexed", but unfortunately this was a text-based conversation happening in the middle of a pandemic, so I can only say what her written reply was, and not the tone with which it was intended.

She replied: "It was always clear what was happening to me, so I didn't want to ask more questions".

Just like that, I was fully knocked down. It's so hard to gauge whether things are too explicit or too unclear or the perfect amount of subtle, and all this time I had bemoaned the fact that I wasn't sure which it was but didn't want to ask anyone who'd read Vol I about it in case it drew their attention to something they had previously disregarded and spoiled the Vol II twist. But, to be fair... it was never about a twist. It's not even really a reveal - more of a confirmation. The only thing that she was surprised about who was who was committing the abuse.

Yeah, it feels good to finally be able to talk about it explicitly.

Throughout Vol I, Sylv has night terrors that involve having something shoved down his throat, being pushed to the floor, being struck and pressed down upon. They are no more explicit than that, made of shadows and metaphor, a bear that turns into a faceless man and a wine bottle that turns into a "hot choking weight" before he wakes with a scream. He is guarded because he does not trust anyone, including both himself and the reader, similar to how we get no real insight into his inner workings.

In Vol II, Sylv is much more open. He reveals a lot more about how he thinks and why he does things; the only time he hides his plans is when he is again doing something he is ashamed of or troubled by, like Pulex's trial. And even then he later looks back on it and reveals all in a demonstration of introspection that did not exist a few months prior. This is a good narrative tool, but also an intentional shift in tone for the reader and their closeness to Sylv. And, consequently, his night terrors become more explicit as well. He reveals actual truths to Pulex and Lavi after lying throughout Vol I even to the reader - and as we know him, so do other characters; Velleius and Scaurus deduce some aspect of his personal history after the trial even when he thought he was being as impenetrable and clever as ever. He is opening up as, for the first time in his life, he both comes to trust people, and is made vulnerable by his connection to Nahvo'que.

And for a lot of stories, that slight opening up would be enough. But for Sylv, it wasn't.

It had to be explicit, and the scene - the flashback in the temple of Nahvo'que where he takes Lavi into his past and vice versa - gave me more trouble than any other scene in either novel, even more so than Lavi's death.

Ever since I first started writing Sylvestus, I knew there had to be that kind of reveal, that kind of openness. Everything was obscure and shadowy because Sylv had not accepted what had happened, and he needed to.

Those early drafts - written maybe five years ago now - were brutal and explicit. I was bound by the age-old adage of "show don't tell"; for Sylv to accept what had happened, the reader had to be as uncomfortable as him, we had to see and hear and smell every detail, taste what he tasted, feel what he felt, it had to be awful and sickening.

And it was triggering as f*ck, and it sucked.

I've said before that Sylv shaped who I was in the six years that I wrote him, and that what I went through shaped his story. That first draft of one long novel that I later broke into two and re-wrote, I was a late teen recovering from some impressive childhood trauma... and going through some more. I was brutal inside, trying to write a story about accepting what had happened to you while I was still going through things I wouldn't accept for years more.

And about a year after I wrote that first version, while I was crawling my way through the first proper draft of Vol I, I was raped.

I had already "lost" Sylv, and this pulled me further from him. It had happened in a way I thought he would not approve of. I imagined him mocking me, cold and ruthless, for what I had let happen. He was the voice of my own shame, an echo of things my rapist's friends, my housemates, my family, had said to me.

I went through a lot of sh*t in that year I don't want to talk about here. Parts of it I think I'm still not allowed to talk about. I keep typing sentences to try and summarise it in a way that both demonstrates the horror and doesn't get me sued for libel and then backspacing them and staring off into the distance for a while.

The story of that year, I guess, is Pulex's, not Sylv's. Sylv says the things to him that I wish someone had said to me. That I had to say to myself.

There were small victories, but mostly, like Sylv, I did not get justice. Like Sylv, I walked away from a battle it was impossible for me to win. It felt like it must have for Sylv, running, shaking, into the night, concealed under a cover of darkness, the coward's way out, wishing I had the courage to do a Pulex and stand up there in court and declare it - but in truth, I know now and knew then that it would not lead to a miracle of justice, a happy ending. There was no Sylv to convince the judge, no Velleius to sway the public opinion, no Scaurus to make the arrest against his better judgement.

But I did not need to, because I had already done my Pulex. And I had had my Sylv.

I had stood up on stage and, to an audience of friends and strangers, performed a piece of prose about it I had written called Hell Hath No Fury. There is a recording of it, but I am not ready to show it to the world. I don't think I ever will be. I'm not even sure, again, that I'm allowed.

Sylv told Pulex that he had to stand with his own feet, breathe with his own lungs, speak with his own voice, and that was what I did. But it was not just that moment. It was the campaigning before to be allowed to even perform, the viciously polite emails exchanged with people who had once upon a time promised to fight for me now covering their own asses as we bickered about drafts of the piece and details I could and couldn't say, the friends I sobbed onto or watched movies and ate pizza with afterwards to gather the strength to go on with it. It was the ones who did fight for me, who argued behind closed doors without ever expecting me to find out they had done so, who wrote emails, who cut off contact with people who had spoken against me for no other reason than knowing it was right, who told me things I would later tell the audience in a second piece, performed with two other survivors, called The Things They Said to Me.

And it was worth it, because my counsellor told me, a week later, something she shouldn't have. She told me that another survivor had come forward since attending that performance to make their own testimony, claiming that my performance had inspired them. Further, the entire performance, and all of the amazing powerful people who told their stories that night, raised money for Swansea Women's Aid.

And if nothing else did, that alone made every inch of the battle worthwhile.

I found Sylv on that stage, and in the lead-up to it. And I've kept him with me since. It was the self-acceptance after that made me realise that he would never have hated, judged, or mocked me for what I went through.

The original Sylv did not care for Pulex at all. It was ambiguous, but it was implied that he only used Pulex for his plans, and did allow him - even drive him - to commit suicide afterwards. But in this version, I knew that was not right. Sylv cherished this child he saw himself in. He did not disapprove because he had been drunk, or because he had been attracted to his rapist, or because he considered Pulex's trauma lesser than his own. Sylv still manipulates Pulex and his life in canon, because he is not a good person, but he does care for him, more than he admits or anticipates. This is the way I have hinted at, so many times before, that Sylv shaped me and yet what I went through shaped Sylv.

I have a jaguar skull tattooed on my hip from around that time. It is not meant to be the Vol I cover, despite the inevitable visual comparison, but it is, without a doubt, a little bit of Lavi, a little bit of Sylv. Its meaning is refusal to be polite, a jagged-toothed agreement to never hesitate to rock the boat, to capsize it when necessary, to be teeth and claws when needed. I have another tattoo from a year after that reminding me to put away the fangs and be vulnerable sometimes.

But there's one last way - okay, so very many, but the last one of this post - that Sylv and I's influence on each other affected the novels you have today.

Let's go back to that scene. I'm not going to copy-paste a section into this post; if you want to read it again to remind yourself, it's chapter 40 (XL in Roman numerals) of Vol II. Like I said, the original was brutal and harsh and explicit because at the time, both as a person and a writer, that was the only way I could think to be shocking in a reveal of something that had already been shown more obliquely several times before.

But I knew going into it this time around that I had been looking at it completely wrong.

Sylv trusts the reader and he trusts Lavi and he needs to acknowledge what happened. So that doesn't mean that any of them need to be shown what happened.

Quite simply, for the first time in his life, Sylv needed to tell someone what happened. "Show don't tell" isn't an all-encompassing rule. For this, it was simple: Sylv needed to tell.

I had written and re-written and memorised and practised that performance of Hell Hath No Fury, I had carefully placed pauses, choreographed clenching fists and a furrowing brow, because I know how to perform, I know how to take words on a page and make them into something powerful. But the actual performance was so much more raw and hurried than I could have anticipated. Watching the video, I don't even remember it.

Except for the moment I actually said... it.

The layout of the piece was this: I described experiences from growing up, I described how society and teachers and peers and doctors reacted to them, and throughout it I built to how that informed how I had reacted...

"When I was r-"

And I hit a wall.

I can see it again, watching the video, feel that jolt in my chest. I had been powering my way through, barely holding it together, racing along the line between "too much of a practised performance with not enough raw emotion" and "too much hysterical emotion with not enough rational calm behind it", and then I hit that word, and I crashed to a halt.

Because I couldn't say it.

I had mumbled what had happened to people while I was drunk, implied my way around it with family members, called it "sexual assault" and "the incident last year" sitting stiff-backed in front of university staff, metaphored around it in poems... but I had scarcely said the word before. And now, in front of a faceless audience filled with just too many faces I did recognise...

"When I was-" I tried again. I choked softly, physically jolting forward as I hit the wall a second time. The darkness began to swarm, a crescendo in my ears, like buzzing insects and an orchestra of out-of-tune string instruments all swelling and pressing in around me. I could see my friends in the wings off the stage, reaching out, gesturing to me to come back, to give up, to walk off and look after myself first.

"When I was- when I was ra-" I gasped for air, feeling the hand over my mouth like moths filling my throat, the soft "sshhh" like the shushing of wings, the weight on my hips like a tiger pressing against me.

"When I was raped-"

And I was through. In reality, I rushed through again, found my stride, continued with a shake in my voice and a clenching fist that had not been choreographed. But inside, I was gasping for air, and it was light and still and quiet.

I don't need to explain how directly that translates into what appears in that chapter, and much of Sylvestus before and after.

When he says it for the first time, when he finally acknowledges it, when he tells someone, when he admits it to himself, all of it goes quiet. And it doesn't mean that the happy ending starts now, it doesn't mean he's magically cured of his trauma, it doesn't right the wrongs of all the years, but it's the first step.

I remain proud of that piece of writing like no other.

People can get so accusatory around representation in media at the moment. Yeah, Disney does need to try a lot harder, but that doesn't mean that every indie book needs to be filled with every single identity of queer and PoC and disabled - but yes, I still get insecure about Sylv as the main character of my novel. He is so intentionally a subversion of "masculine soldier protagonist in historical fantasy" - ace, traumatised, chubby, short, autistic - but it's like every time I describe the book to someone in the creative communities I'm on the fringe of, I have to start with those things, rather than letting them be a natural part of the story as they read it. No-one wants to read Yet Another Story About a Straight White Man, but maybe, just maybe, a story isn't automatically sh*t just because it doesn't feature enough of whatever identity is the buzzword of Twitter this week.

Sylv's identity is complicated because mine is complicated. I am not trans because I was raped, but my discomfort and dysphoria around gender and sex cannot be untangled from what I experienced, because every source of strength and comfort I could seek in media about my experiences - music, movies, art, poems - is about women being abused by men. I was driven away from male recovery spaces by cisgender survivors because they did not consider me valid, verbally abused for daring to have a vagina when I was raped, and yet equally, constantly misgendered in and driven away from female recovery spaces. There are a lot of songs on Sylv's playlist by women about their trauma and how they reclaimed their identity and bodies, because there aren't many at all by or about men - and those songs and how I wrote and formed him as I listened had a huge influence on how I perceive him and his story. In Sylv's world, his understanding of his gender and sexuality cannot be untangled from that core Roman tenet of men penetrate, women receive.

Sylv's story and Sylv's identity is about being trans and being male and being sexually assaulted and dealing with all of that while you have a whole lot else going on in your life. I don't need to justify why he isn't a woman or pansexual or "more explicitly" non-binary.

It wasn't the story I set out to write. It wasn't the plan all those years ago. It's not the secret message behind the book. But it is true. Sylv will always be there, a part of me. A part of my identity.

I guess that's all I had to get off my chest about it.

Just Write, Dude

This post contains reference to spoilers for Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise. Spoilers will be clearly marked above and below in bolded text so the rest of the post should be safe to read.

 

People don't tend to ask me for "writing tips", as such, but they do ask me how I managed to finish a novel, let alone five of them, and how I stuck with one story for so long and got through all of the writers block and plot canyons, and to be honest I think that any "tip" that deals with any part of writing other than Just Doing It is rubbish, because everyone's process is going to be different. You can learn grammar and the theory of story structure and good practice for character development, but at the end of the day, that stuff can be edited and adjusted. Experiment and try stuff out - you might find that plot diagrams and timelines and character profiles help you, but they hinder me personally - but don't feel like you're failing because you don't follow the advice of Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. Just look at how different every major writer's advice is from the others.

But actually writing that first draft? That's the most important thing. And as mind-numbing as proof-reading and formatting and editing can be, I think writers united can agree that it's that first draft that juuust knocks you down most of the time.

That's where my only bit of writing advice comes in. It's not the only trick I have, but it's the only one I'd even pretend is helpful to anyone else. And I'm not promising it's universal, but whenever someone protests it, I do kinda wanna just be like... yeah. I know. I have been exactly where you are. And only sticking to my core tenet got me through it.

You probably guessed from the title of this post what it's going to be, and to be honest, it does kind of make me wince to look at it, because... condescending, much? It kind of feels like when you're sat at a desk surrounded by study materials staring off into space for three hours and then when they see your grades someone is like, "just study more", or when the executive dysfunction and depression kick in and you're laying in bed half an hour after your alarm staring at the clock watching the time until you're late tick steadily closer and chanting in your head "just get up, just get up, just get up", and you want to get up and you need to get up and it's not even like you're tired or don't want to go to work, every part of your brain is screaming to just do it, but your body won't f*cking move-

And yet, here I am, bein' all "just write dude idk", so like... yeah, it isn't as simple as that. I know. I don't mean that you should or will be able to just sit down at any time and pound out 5000 words. That's not what I mean.

More... change your expectations about what "writing" means.

We all know how it goes. You have a great idea, you get very excited, you pound out the first three chapters in the space of two days, you infodump to all your friends about the super great plot points that are going to happen right at the end, you make character playlists and consider commissioning character portraits from your cool artist friends, and then... it's gone. You try to write chapter four, and you just have no idea where this story is going or how to get from this boring-ass introduction into the real stuff, and then you've lost the momentum and you tell yourself you'll come back to it in a few weeks and maybe you get excited again sometimes and re-write those first three chapters, but four years later it's buried under a pile of other, equally-abandoned WIPs.

So you want to turn that into a novel? You want to stick with this one, because you know it's going to be the winner?

Just. Write. Something.

Write one sentence today. Even if it doesn't make sense and it's boring as hell. Write two sentences tomorrow. Write one sentence the day after. And in two weeks, you're suddenly at that exciting bit again, and with the boring stuff written and the renewed excitement for it, the words will flow out of you. And in a few days, you'll finish that exciting bit and they'll be gone again.

So write one paragraph. Write one sentence.

Here's the priority, the secret, the thing they don't tell ya in Year Eight English: it doesn't have to be good, bro.

I felt this in Sylvestus more than anything I've written before. Huge chunks of both of those books, the first draft was just... not very good at all. The sentence structure was repetitive, the language was boring, the plot was absent and full of holes, the characters had inconsistencies in name spelling and eye colour, and reading over it again would make me miserable because it would be like, man if I find this boring how the hell am I supposed to sell it to a reader in good faith?

But uh... no-one's gonna read that version, bro. It's okay.

 

Your characters are stuck in the cave and there's a deep emotional conversation you're excited to write to have outside the cave but f*ck the words just won't come today y'know? And suddenly you've lost all the momentum and you don't touch it for months because you just got stuck on how they leave the damn cave.

So today, write:

"They left the cave."

And tomorrow, write the scene outside you're excited about. And maybe when you come back in a few months or years, you'll have the experience and energy to turn that into a whole 'nother exciting chapter about the adventure as they left the cave. Or maybe you'll still not want to do it, and you can turn it into:

"It took some scrapes and a little effort, but in a few hours, they had escaped the cave. "I hate bats," Character shuddered."

They're out of the cave, the reader still gets a little insight into that something happened in the cave, and you probably didn't need those extra eight pages anyway.

Or maybe the whole plot is going to change, and they never got into the cave in the first place, and aren't you glad you didn't waste six months of your life frustrated about that one chapter that you ended up cutting?

The transition from A to B can be frustrating and disheartening and uninspiring, but as long as it happens, it doesn't have to be great first time. It just has to happen. So often we get bogged down and lost over one line of dialogue or detail or sentence, and it's so freeing to just be able to take the pressure off, lower your expectations, and write.

 

Major spoiler for Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise in the following paragraph.

 

It's not just those transitional boring bits that can bog us down. Sometimes we have such high expectations for a chapter - the conversation, the kiss, the betrayal, the battle, the death - that it's that part we struggle on. And that can be heartbreaking because this was the bit we were so excited about from the beginning and was motivating us to do all the boring bits and now it's sh*t and it's all ruined.

Yeahh you know what I'm going to say. Just do your best. No matter how good it seems, what you write now won't be the final draft of a part so important - which takes the pressure off to make it that good this time!

Lavi's death in Vol II was a huuuge example of this for me. Technically, it was very difficult to write (the fast action versus making it clear what's happening versus Sylv's disassociation versus all of the emotions versus reality conflicting with delusion), and it also has the huge pressure of being a controversial and upsetting plot-point. So, it went through more re-writes than any part of any book I've written so far. I have entire documents on my old Sta.sh of drafts of it, when normally for me a re-write means literally writing over the original in a No Going Back determination. I originally wrote it in 2016 or so, and it annoyed me a lot because it just wasn't right. Each re-write I did approached it from a different angle - focusing on the fast action or the clarity or the disassociation or the emotions or the reality or the delusion - and none of them were good enough. This amazing character and the very serious and traumatic nature of her story deserved more than I could give.

Because I just wasn't a skilled enough writer then. It bogged me down and annoyed me and made me feel like I could never do her justice.

And maybe I'll look back in a few years and realise that I didn't anyway - in fact, I hope I do, because it means I'm still getting better - but I definitely learned and grew and became a lot more skilled of a writer the second (or uh, eighteenth) time around. In the new first draft of Vol II, I just wrote it one clumsy bold go, rather than getting caught up and delayed in expectation and hesitation. I got over myself and wrote something that wasn't very good, and then I finished the novel, and then I left it alone in a proverbial drawer for a few months, and then I went back and re-wrote and re-wrote and edited and edited and crafted and crafted until I had something that I could truly and confidently say lived up to the standard Lavi - and the story and the reader - deserved.

The same could be said of the reveal of Sylv's history to Lavi in the silver pool a few chapters before that, but that's a conversation for another post.

End of spoilers.

 

There's other stuff alongside that.

You really, genuinely cannot figure out what happens next? Make that one sentence something buck-wild or unexpected or random or inconsequential.

"Lavi was upside-down." There's one. I wrote that one day, and the next day I wrote:

""Lavi, why are you upside-down?" asked Sylv."

And the next day I wrote three sentences about Lavi being upside-down, and the next day I wrote the rest of the conversation they were having, and the next day I wrote the rest of the chapter, and I like it quite a bit.

Kill a character. Bring a new one in. Have someone walk in and say "what the f*ck?" and figure out what made them say it later.

 

You're completely jammed into a corner and hate where your characters are and the whole thing? Do something drastic. Delete the entire chapter where they got into the cave in the first place. Send them to a shop or a lake instead. Sometimes they need the change of scene.

And so, to be fair, do you. Get up, walk around, stretch, make a cup of coffee, then sit down and write that one damn sentence and then let yourself off the hook for the rest of the day.

 

If you set a daily goal of 1000 words and you're never hitting it and hate trying, make the daily goal 100 words. Sh*t, make it ten words. Achieve something every day, and realise that what you have done is still an achievement.

Maybe just don't write this novel at all for a while. Write a self-indulgent few chapters of something unrelated that you're more excited about. If it becomes a chore, you're not going to want to do it, and the more resentment and anxiety you build up around not being able to write well, the less you're going to want (or be able) to go back to it when you do have the inspiration again.

I read a thing by Terry Crews a while ago where someone asked him for gym routines and tips, and what he said always stuck with me. His advice wasn't to work until it hurts or to have body goals or to stick with discipline and all of those parts of the diet and fitness industries that normalise exercise as self-harm.

His advice was just to enjoy going to the gym.

He said he sometimes just takes a magazine and sits in the changing room for half an hour; he doesn't work out if he doesn't feel like it. He uses the machines that make him feel good, he goes because he enjoys it. When you have the pressure of hating your body and comparing yourself to other people and wanting to lose weight or get buff or any of that sh*t, you aren't living for what your brain and your soul need: you're making it a chore.

I've tried to run, I've tried to use ellipticals and do yoga and push-ups and punches, I've tried to force myself to enjoy it because everyone promised that the dopamine hit would override the pain eventually. It never did, I was just hurting myself and hating myself because people told me I should and it was another way to self-harm without visible scars (and one that was praised by people around me, no less), and like writing without love, I stopped as soon as I skipped one session because of a bad brain day or an inevitable injury. People say that you should write every day as discipline, like you should work out regularly as discipline, but that's not true. You don't need discipline if you love it.

I love swimming, I can bring myself to get up an hour earlier in the morning when normally I can barely drag myself to the bus on time if I know I have a session booked before work. I go four times a week now, and if I wake up in the morning and don't want to go... I don't go.

I don't swim to lose weight or build muscle - I love my body as it is and have no desire to change it in those ways and won't let anyone try to convince me it should be changed - I just do it because it makes me happy.

And that seems to confuse people. The idea that if I didn't want to go one day, I just wouldn't. That I'm not doing it to keep fit or slim or even to "exercise the depression away". People have such a hard time living for the joy of life, I think.

Similarly, I don't write to be famous, or to spread a message, or for discipline or therapy. I write because I love it, because the stories bubble up inside and want to be shown to the world, because the characters push their way out and I love giving them the stage.

Go to the gym to read a magazine. Draw a small frog in ten minutes and then put the art stuff away. Write one sentence.

Just write, dude. Not for discipline or because you have to. Because you love it, and you want to see where this story goes, and because even if it's a sh*t sentence, at least it exists now, out there in the world, and you can make it a better sentence later.

See? You made a thing! You tangibly impacted this world! That's amazing, bro. Take the afternoon off for all that good work. You get to write one more sentence tomorrow.

[Image ID: a digital painting of a small dark green frog wearing a hat. The painting was clearly done in less than ten minutes. The frog is smiling benignly and has big eyes staring blankly off past the viewer. There are clearly no thoughts in its head. The hat is a purple party hat with gold spots that is secured around the frog's head with string. End ID]

Leap Before You Think

I was obsessed with the game Okami for a significant chunk of my childhood. It had everything: wolves; mythology but not Greek or Egyptian; dry humour; beautiful stylised art; gameplay that was challenging but accessible to an eight year-old; women with huge badonkahoongas who turn into murderous foxes; being on the Wii so I could actually play it; a story that made me cry; wolves; women who no, seriously, really gave me a challenge for my sexuality at eight years old...

I was. Obsessed. With it. I played it again a few years ago on the PS4 remaster, and it fully withstood the test of time. It was equally as fun then as eight, ten, twelve years before. And thinking about it, my obsession then opened up so many doors to what would come in my life later. Before Okami, my internet usage was limited to Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Neopets. My desperation to consume more of the game than the game itself had to offer led to googling pictures from the game, which led to looking at fanart of the game, which led to deviantART, which I joined (with parent permission, to be fair) at the tender age of ten.

The internet was a much more lawless place then; before five big media corporations owned every website and it was all about social media, forums and small home-grown websites grew their own jungles. The other huge impact on my internet usage was Warrior Cats (much the same story, except it led to writing RP forums rather than dA), but specifically I was thinking about it earlier, and. Well. Maybe I'd have made my way there on my own eventually, but I joined dA well before the existence (or at least, the spread in my age group) of Tumblr or Facebook, and connected with millions of people and hundreds of communities, for ah, good and ill. I was exposed to things I shouldn't have been, but eh, that builds character. I knew enough to keep myself mostly safe and when to click off things I didn't like. Nothing had content warnings or age barriers or tags in those days, y'know.

My writing itself was heavily influenced by those forums that all came from Warrior Cats obsession, but I would never have progressed remotely as far as I did with my art or other parts of my writing if it weren't for deviantART. I'd never have written The Red Prince if it weren't for the art I did alongside it. I'd never have finished writing Seeking, the first novel I published, if it weren't for the small community of writers on dA that inspired me and gave constant feedback and encouragement, and I'd never have published it if not for them, and the same for Each Separate Dying Ember, and while I stopped posting my stories chapter-by-chapter online after that and left dA behind for good, I'd never have written or published Sylvestus without those.

And for me, it all goes back to typing Oki and Amaterasu into Google Images every single day, and following the link on one of the paintings there, and ending up in this mysterious world where people made art and other people looked at it and everything opened up ahead of me.

But there's another way Okami has stuck with me all these years, other than a general fondness and whatever latent effect childhood obsessions have on adult personality.

The wolf/sun goddess you play as, Amaterasu, has a very small companion, Issun, a wandering artist and moderate lecher, who provides all of the dialogue for the non-verbal Ammy (with his own twist, and sometimes in opposition to what she actually wants). One of his catchphrases was a surprising balm to a kid with severe anxiety: uttered on the several occasions where you are required to quite literally take a leap of faith into the next area (into the lair of Orochi the Eight-headed Serpent, or (after being shrunk down to Issun's size) into the throat of the sleeping emperor, or straight off a cliff into the ocean), he would spend a few moments airing his anxieties and bemoaning how he was too young and handsome to die, and then shrug and say:

"Like my momma always said... Leap before you think!"

It was a neat way of resolving his internal dilemmas of this mildly selfish yet equally reckless character, while also convincing kids playing the game that it was okay to mess up or jump off the edge of the map and just see what happens. The game also rewarded those leaps with beautiful graphics and a certain joyous flourish, an immediate reward for your courage: never a tough boss battle without some spectacular landscape and quick comedy first.

It's a simple mantra, and I still pull it out - I have since I first played the game too many years ago. I'm not at all that impulsive when it comes to the important things - I'm careful with money, I spend months or years planning and debating tattoos, I'm good at carefully planning a trip or a move or a big purchase - but equally I've learned to enjoy the spontaneity in things too. Get on the back of a motorbike with no helmet going 60 mph through Marrakech morning traffic, leap before you think! Make that scary phone call you've been putting off for three months right now with no script or planning, leap before you think! Drop everything and go and visit your friend who's in a bad mental place right now, leap before you think!

Some things you can build up and debate over for months, thinking and building ladders and establishing timelines and drafting plans. You can save money by booking early, you can avoid disappointment by preparing in advance, you can manage your expectations by doing research. But so many things in life will always, in the end, be a massive hole in the ground that leads straight down into the dark with noxious purple smoke pouring out of it. There's no other way into Orochi's lair. You can go around it a few times to be sure and stock up on health-restoring bones and equip your favourite weapon, but if you keep thinking about it, you're just going to be walking around the edge hesitating until he awakens and destroys the whole of Nippon.

Sometimes you have to shrug, kick off your shoes, and mutter, "Leap before you think," to yourself.

 

Join the art website that will change your life, giving you new skills, many years of anxiety and negative social interactions, and the motivation to follow your dreams and publish your books. Press the "finalise publication" button even though people might not like the book and it might get bad reviews and there might be typos you missed and once you do this you'll start losing Sylv again. Walk onto that stage and perform the poem that will officially excise you from the good graces of people who want you to keep your mouth shut about the things they did to you.

Make that phone call.

Are you standing at the edge of a new area today?

[Image ID: a screenshot of the original Okami game, showing a blurry gameplay screen of Amaterasu, a white wolf with red markings and a fiery shield on her back, looking over the edge of cliff. Below is a historical Japanese village and beyond it, the ocean. All of the artwork is in a traditional Japanese style as if painted with ink and brush. End ID]

A Year in Media

It's a post about all the sh*t I made and did this year. Idk, I thought it would be interesting.

Like, you don't have to read it.

I would I guess like to preface that if you didn't get anything done this year, that's more than okay. You survived! You made people smile! And those are worth infinitely more than a wordcount or new job. But even if I repeatedly failed at stuff like "reply in a timely manner to important emails" and "do the washing up", I did make a fair amount of sh*t, and watch and read and play stuff too, so I'd like to celebrate those. It was a pretty phenomenal amount of stuff, too, more than I've done since I was in high school, which conclusively of course proves that capitalism stifles creativity and innovation.

Anyway.

Compared to all the artists I know, I barely made any art, which is one of the reasons I think it's important to gauge and celebrate only yourself, without comparison. Especially considering that I recently tried a bit of the ol' self-flagellating woe-is-me "I'll never be as good as you" on an artist friend I admire, and he retorted with the exact same thing at twice the intensity about his own art. It really do be a pointless circle of comparison and imposter syndrome. So here's a thing everyone was doing in like November: all of the art you did this year, and how you felt about it (obvi, red is "oh bad", yellow is "yeah that's aight", and green is "this is an acceptable piece of art" (jk, green is "this is good", but that's still a thing i struggle to accept)):

ID: a watercolour of a magpie in flight with a red squiggle over it; a digital painting of an elf's face with a green squiggle over it; a digital painting of a an elf with a bow with an orange squiggle over it; and a digital painting of a qunari and dracolisk from Dragon Age (a tall grey-skinned person with horns, and a creature the shape of a horse with a dragon's head), with a green squiggle over it. End ID

ID: a watercolour of Sylv from Sylvestus, a white man, in a bath with a tiger leaning around him, with an orange squiggle over it; a marker pen drawing of an orc's head with an orange squiggle over it; a marker pen drawing of three elves and a tiefling walking, with a red squiggle over it; and a marker pen drawing of Sylv illuminated by firelight seated on a throne, with an orange squiggle over it. End ID

ID: six marker pen drawings of Cillian Murphy, with a red squiggle over it; a digital painting of the She-wolf from Sylvestus, a white woman in a pink dress and long brown hair looking down onto the camera, with an orange squiggle over it; a digital painting of Sylv with contrasting shadow and light huddled in the dark, with a green squiggle over it; and a digital painting of a man's torso with the heart replaced with a moth, with a red squiggle over it. End ID

ID: a digital painting of Sylv and Lavi, a southeast Asian woman, from Sylvestus back-toback, with a green squiggle over it; a digital painting of Romulus from Sylvestus, a cream and brown dog, running, with an orange squiggle over it; a digital painting of a gnoll, a hyena-person, stabbing a sword into a giant heart, with a green squiggle over it; and a digital painting of a tiefling, a person with grey skin and gazelle horns, holding a flame, with "have you heard the news that you're dead?" written behind them, with a green squiggle over it. End ID

ID: a digital painting of a bald dwarf woman wearing heavy grey armour and black tattoos on her face, with a green squiggle over it; and a digital painting of an elf woman looking over her shoulder, with an orange squiggle over it. End ID

Overall, I'd say I'm happy with how my year in art went! It feels like it's been slow progress, but also I do feel like I made a breakthrough in like... technical skill in the middle of this year, developing my style and stuff. I'm excited to continue and try and develop more skills and create more art. That can definitely be seen as the general vibe moves from orange interspersed with red, to green interspersed with orange. Even if my art doesn't look like all of the "artsy animal paintings" artists I follow on Instagram, or the ten minutes of fanart in the Critical Role streams, doesn't mean it's not good, it's just different and mine. Someone called it a "unique style" and I took it as a compliment.

Of the pieces of art I've done this year, therefore, eight were related to Sylvestus, five were related to D&D, four were related to Dragon Age, and one was... literally just a bad painting of a magpie.

Obvi, the big one is next: a year in writing.

This year, I wrote just over 90,000 original words of Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise, as well as about 10,000 stray words in other projects. I also re-wrote and edited large chunks of Sylv, but that's much more difficult to quantify. I've also read it more times than I care to think about.

This is phenomenal compared to previous recent years; I have less of a clear division, but I believe I wrote about 55,000 words in 2019 (just over half of this year), and maybe 30,000 in 2018. Before that it gets shaky as I was spread across a much greater range of projects over multiple platforms (now I write almost exclusively on BigHugeLabs' Writer software, which is perfectly minimalistic for my needs, but before that I skipped between dA Sta.sh, Word, physical notebooks, and more).

In poetry, I've actually gone down from the two years or so previous; I think I moved away from novel-writing into poetry in a big way 2018-19, but have since migrated my focus back to novels, though I still retain love for the format. I'm going to avoid word counts for this one, but I believe I produced nine original full poems this year, which isn't bad going, even if half of them were about the same thing (see: the entire previous series under the "actual poem" tag on this blog). More than volume, though, I'm genuinely quite happy with how my style has progressed and become cemented. Compared to what I had previously considered my best work, Churchyard, my more recent pieces have, I feel, a more... Like, the format looks better without sacrificing flow. They retain my narrative style and colour without being just sprawling trains of thought like my earlier work. I like that.

Finally (for the creative side), I published 23 (including this one) posts on this blog, the first one ironically when first lockdown hit and everyone was publishing new creative stuff, and somehow managing to keep up almost to that pace even when I started working again. Four were readings from Sylv or Dying Ember, eight were poems (though several of them had been written in 2018-19 and only published this year), three were housekeeping/life/Sylv updates, four were fun Sylv things, and two were general unquantifiable talking to myself about myself. One was this, obvi.

This is up from four posts in the entire of 2019 and three in 2018. Lmao. We ignore 2017 bc even though it had even more posts than this year, they all like... Sucked.

Onto stuff I did when I wasn't working or creating!

According to Roll20, I played just over 160 hours of D&D this year, although that doesn't account for the fact that one time we played a non-D&D game. Including the one I'm gonna be playing on NYE, this was with five characters (an elf cleric, a gnoll warlock-ranger, a tiefling warlock, a tiefling cleric-rogue, and a goblin artificer, for those curious) across two campaigns and three one-shots. I also ran five one-shots and one campaign which is still ongoing. I wish I had like... Been counting how many dice rolls I did and how many crits I got. Might do that next year cos that'd be pointless but joyful, innit.

Further, I played about: twenty hours of Mass Effect (one playthrough); 45 hours of ME2 (two playthroughs); forty hours of ME3 (one and a half playthroughs (second ongoing rn)); ninety hours of ME: Andromeda (one playthrough); forty hours of Dragon Age: Origins (two playthroughs plus Awakening); 25 hours of DA2 (one and a half playthroughs); and like ten hours of DA: Inquisition (dipping back into my third playthrough of 2019). Stepping away from BioWare, I also put about ten hours into God of War (2018), five hours into Amnesia Rebirth (i wanna go back but too spoopy!!), fifteen into Dream Daddy, nearly a hundred into Stardew Valley, and maybe twenty hours into Among Us and Jackbox Party Pack 7 with friends. There were also negligible amounts into a dozen PS2 games and bored forays back into games such as Hollow Knight and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, that I have previously blitzed but couldn't quite pick back up when I was so dang busy with BioWare RPGs.

Spotify Wrapped had, as usual, its time in the spotlight, but I do not desire to share the intricacies of my listening habits with everyone, so you can just have my total listening time:

ID: a blue square with "minutes listened: 30,534" in green, with the Spotify logo in blue against a green rectangle below. End ID

This is much less important to me, however, than my Podbean listening stats:

ID: a screenshot saying "Listening Level" along the top. Below, it says "2014h 46m, Total play time" and "3h 5m, Intelligent speed saved" in green. End ID

... yeah. That's all since December of last year. I like podcasts a lot. In case you're curious, that amounts to about 5.5 hours a day. This year, I wanna say those were mostly Sawbones, My Dad Wrote a Porno, Hello from the Magic Tavern, The Besties, This Week in Parasitism, The Adventure Zone, Wonderful!, My Brother, My Brother and Me, and very recently, Dungeons & Daddies.

Watching is less quantifiable, so I'm gonna go for impact rather than volume. My biggest associations for watching habits this year are Community (all of it, twice), Critical Role, Awful Squad, Gill & Gilbert, Taskmaster, Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Aggretsuko. I really moved into YouTube and back into Netflix this year, having never been huge on YouTube before, and not having really touched traditional ""telévision shows"" since like 2016.

Finally, I read I think seven and a half books in the entire year: The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss in the space of eight days (which lemme tell you is a helluva feat); Tevinter Nights, a collection of short stories from the Dragon Age franchise; The Sight by David Clement-Davies, which I read over and over again as a kid but couldn't finish this time around; A Darker Shade of Magic and A Gathering of Shadows by VE Schwab (i love them but this was my third re-read so i lost steam before hitting the last book in the trilogy); The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, also by VE Schwab; and Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers. I'd say that I kinda wish I had read more, but in truth I tried to and just couldn't get into it (as evidenced by getting halfway into The Sight, and two thirds of the way through a trilogy by one of my favourite authors).

And I think that's the thing with rating a year by how productive or whatever it was: it's always subjective; and it's never enough. Many people, including Younger Me, would count reading seven and a half books in a year as an appalling display of anti-literary laziness; just like many people can produce a piece of art like the ones I've rated as my rare I'm-actually-happy-with-this pieces as a warm up sketch every day before doing their real art; and many people play a diverse range of games rather than seven RPGs by the same company over and over again; and many people count 100,000 words in a year to be the low side of average...

But many more people read no books, because it just isn't their thing, or produced no art in 365 days, just looked at other people's and wished they had the talent, or are kind of ashamed of how many games they played and TV shows they watched, or wrote 10,000 words in the entire year and are still happy they managed to write any at all.

And those are good too.

'Cos you made it. Even if all you did was play Animal Crossing for 400 hours, showered eight times since January, and play D&D once a fortnight. Even if you didn't get out of bed, or get a job, or do the dishes. Like, I'm kind of proud of listening to over 2000 hours of podcasts in twelve months, even if objectively it's Not Really an Achievement. Despite the fact that most people would count it as much more important, notice that I haven't yet mentioned I got two jobs this year, as well as passing an exam and doing most of a professional qualification. I'm not really proud of those, they just kind of happened because they had to, because capitalism. I enjoy parts of my job and it's important and stuff, but my year for me has been defined by it being the one where I got back into D&D, and made a breakthrough in my art style, and played ever so many Mass Effect and Dragon Age games.

So, what did you do this year? It doesn't have to be "an achievement". It doesn't have to have advanced your career or been impressive. You're alive, so it was enough. Go forward with kindness. Try playing a podcast in the background.

A Spiritual Connection to Pliny the Elder

There's a recurring joke in Vol II which is extremely specific and probably only relevant to about six people in the world who will get it, but damn if it doesn't make me happy, so I'm fighting to keep it in. I'm not gonna... Like, if I was just gonna talk about what it means, I should wait until it's at least published, but I wanted to talk about Pliny the Elder today, so I guess what I'm saying is that this was a sh*tty intro to excuse talking about him on my writing blog.

It started with Sawbones:

This is, specifically, the Pliny the Elder episode, but he gets brought up almost every episode, because it's a medical history podcast and he wrote a lot about medicine. A lot. Except like, ancient Roman medicine, which gets kinda buck-f*ck-wild. And, it turns out, not just medicine, but zoology, geography, philosophy... The Natural History was supposed to cover the existence and history of the entire world, and damn if he wasn't going to give it his all.

It started when I was writing Vol II and thought, I love inserting discrete real historical details into these novels; I should find some real ancient Roman treatments for some of the stuff that happens to Sylv and his associates, and slip it in there as worldbuilding. It was the kind of research rabbit hole I avoided when I first started writing him, so in the original draft and to a degree in Vol I, everything is extremely vague; all medicines are simply referred to as "tonics", any kind of anaesthesia as "vitiation", wounds treated with "foul-smelling poultices". But since then, I've gotten really into medical history through Sawbones. I enjoy the challenge of balancing an interesting fantasy world with the real minutiae of ancient Rome, and this was such an opportunity - and most importantly, I had an in to begin my research. As someone who dropped history in year nine, I really struggle to research related topics in the same way I can confidently find reliable sources for science things; I have a collection of books on Roman culture and Latin, and details such as the Roman beliefs on the afterlife can be pulled fairly easily from the internet, but generally I am not confident researching historical fact. But I knew that the full works of Gaius Plinius Secundus, aka Pliny the Elder, a real Roman, err, scholar?, were available online, and it doesn't get much more reliable than a primary source.

You can search "Pliny the Elder [medical condition]" on a search engine and easily be taken to his writings on that topic - and he probably wrote on that topic, whatever it is - and for a while that's what I did, dutifully inserting into Sylvestus his confident cures for blindness, broken bones, and fever. From my understanding, his works were considered by his peers to be dependable and his writings were well-respected, and though we cannot know for certain whether they really believed that putting a live lizard in a small wooden box under one's pillow cured fever, I consider it my tribute to Dr. Sydnee McElroy to mention it. And given that people nowadays readily believe that melting a candle inside one's ear draws out the evil humours- sorry, toxins, I'm pretty confident they were willing to give anything a try. Further, I was overjoyed to discover that Pliny the Elder was writing and publishing at the time Sylv was around. My shameless headcanons had a basis in history... Kinda.

But I got curious, and perhaps that was my downfall. Why stop reading at just what I needed? I spotted a tab that seemed relevant to my interests in natural history, and then... Well, then it kind of took over my life for about four hours. It would have been a lot longer, but I had to bail at that point or I'd have attempted to read all 37 books of The Natural History in one night.

I banned myself from it for a few weeks, only to fall down the vortex again the next time I needed his advice on what a Roman would think of a tiger. And then again, when someone asked me whether Sylv would know the difference between a moth and a butterfly.

Reading The Natural History drives me f*cking insane, but it's hard to pin down why. So, I decided to put my growing obsession to good use, and try to categorise my highlights of Pliny the Elder's interpretations of... Everything.

For reference, here is where I'm getting all of these from. To be entirely honest, I feel at this point as though I owe this website part of my life-force.

First: from the dedication in the first book, PLINIUS SECUNDUS TO HIS FRIEND TITUS VESPASIAN.

"... all this you have done for the service of the Republic, and, at the same time, have regarded me as a fellow-soldier and a messmate. Nor has the extent of your prosperity produced any change in you, except that it has given you the power of doing good to the utmost of your wishes. And whilst all these circumstances increase the veneration which other persons feel for you, with respect to myself, they have made me so bold, as to wish to become more familiar. You must, therefore, place this to your own account, and blame yourself for any fault of this kind that I may commit. But, although I have laid aside my blushes, I have not gained my object; for you still awe me, and keep me at a distance, by the majesty of your understanding."

Y'all. Y'all. I do not have a heterosexual explanation for this. I do not accept one. Gaius Plinius Secundus had a biiig home of sexual crush on his best friend the emperor's son, and dedicated his 37 books to him and his "fertility of genius". That's one I only discovered today, but I love it very much.

There are four books with ~40 chapters each called AN ACCOUNT OF COUNTRIES, NATIONS, SEAS, TOWNS, HAVENS, MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, DISTANCES, AND PEOPLES WHO NOW EXIST, OR FORMERLY EXISTED. I'd make fun of how many books he spent on it, but to be fair he's attempting to categorise like, everyone in the world, and I dig the dedication. I have not really touched these books beyond checking in on places such as Macedonia and Syria which are mentioned in Sylvestus, because geography bores the hell out of me. If ur curious, the link is right up there.

I knew I was in for a treat when I discovered that the next book was called MAN, HIS BIRTH, HIS ORGANISATION, AND THE INVENTION OF THE ARTS. And it's as great as it sounds! I particularly love the first chapter: MAN. It's a fairly long chapter as they go, so the following is my favourite segment.

"The nature of the animated beings which exist upon [the world], is hardly in any degree less worthy of our contemplation than its other features; if, indeed, the human mind is able to embrace the whole of so diversified a subject. Our first attention is justly due to Man, for whose sake all other things appear to have been produced by Nature; though, on the other hand, with so great and so severe penalties for the enjoyment of her bounteous gifts, that it is far from easy to determine, whether she has proved to him a kind parent, or a merciless step-mother.

In the first place, she obliges him alone, of all animated beings, to clothe himself with the spoils of the others; while, to all the rest, she has given various kinds of coverings, such as shells, crusts, spines, hides, furs, bristles, hair, down, feathers, scales, and fleeces. The very trunks of the trees even, she has protected against the effects of heat and cold by a bark, which is, in some cases, twofold. Man alone, at the very moment of his birth cast naked upon the laked earth, does she abandon to cries, to lamentations, and, a thing that is the case with no other animal whatever, to tears: this, too, from the very moment that he enters upon existence. But as for laughter, why, by Hercules!—to laugh, if but for an instant only, has never been granted to man before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity. Introduced thus to the light, man has fetters and swathings instantly put upon all his limbs, a thing that falls to the lot of none of the brutes even that are born among us. Born to such singular good fortune, there lies the animal, which is destined to command all the others, lies, fast bound hand and foot, and weeping aloud! such being the penalty which he has to pay on beginning life, and that for the sole fault of having been born. Alas! for the folly of those who can think after such a beginning as this, that they have been born for the display of vanity!

... Other animals, in fine, live at peace with those of their own kind; we only see them unite to make a stand against those of a different species. The fierceness of the lion is not expended in fighting with its own kind; the sting of the serpent is not aimed at the serpent; and the monsters of the sea even, and the fishes, vent their rage only on those of a different species. But with man,—by Hercules! most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man."

This is one of the first chapters that really stuck out to me. Given that I was introduced to Pliny the Elder as "ancient man who wrote funny and wild things about medicine", I was unprepared for the sheer degree of philosophy in this chapter. There's something poetic and beautiful to me about the way in which he approaches the same hypocrisy of existence so many others have written around. "Born to such singular good fortune, there lies the animal, which is destined to command all the others, lies, fast bound hand and foot, and weeping aloud! such being the penalty which he has to pay on beginning life, and that for the sole fault of having been born." We may now know that rats laugh when tickled, that animals feel joy and pain as much as humans, that their tears and laughter are simply expressed differently, but I am nonetheless drawn to his description of "Man alone, at the very moment of his birth cast naked upon the laked earth, does she abandon to cries".

The chapter MARVELLOUS BIRTHS. is,, not great for a lot of things, mostly in being understandably offensive with regards to disabled, intersex, and non-Roman people, but I am gently intrigued by the way in which he challenges that it's very unlikely triplets could be born, then a paragraph later confidently declares:

"Also, Alcippe was delivered of an elephant—but then that must be looked upon as a prodigy; as in the case, too, where, at the commencement of the Marsian war, a female slave was delivered of a serpent."

Okay! That's wild! Thank-you, ser!

Given the questionable nature of many of the "monsters" described in MARVELLOUS BIRTHS., I was hesitant to engage with MONSTROUS BIRTHS., which comes a few chapters later. But fear not! It's actually an entire chapter about a guy named Marcus Agrippa, who was the only person ever to be born feet-first and survive.

"And yet, even he may be considered to have paid the penalty of the unfavourable omen produced by the unnatural mode of his birth, in the unfortunate weakness of his legs, the misfortunes of his youth, a life spent in the very midst of arms and slaughter, and ever exposed to the approaches of death; in his children, too, who have all proved a very curse to the earth, and more especially, the two Agrippinas, who were the mothers respectively of Caius and of Domitius Nero, so many firebrands hurled among the human race. In addition to all this, we may add the shortness of his life, he being cut off in his fifty-first year, the distress which he experienced from the adulteries of his wife, and the grievous tyranny to which he was subjected by his father-in-law."

Amazing!

The chapter SOME ACCOUNT OF THE TEETH, AND SOME FACTS CONCERNING INFANTS has me utterly enthralled, because of the surprisingly astute observations regarding teeth, interspersed by entirely wild claims out of left-field.

"The teeth are the only parts of the body which resist the action of fire, and are not consumed along with the rest of it. Still, however, though they are able thus to resist flame, they become corroded by a morbid state of the saliva. The teeth are whitened by certain medicinal agents. They are worn down by use, and fail in some persons long before any other part of the body. They are necessary, not only for the mastication of the food, but for many other purposes as well. It is the office of the front teeth to regulate the voice and the speech; by a certain arrangement, they receive, as if in concert, the stroke communicated by the tongue, while by their structure in such regular order, and their size, they cut short, moderate, or soften the utterance of the words ...  Women have fewer teeth than men. Those females who happen to have two canine teeth on the right side of the upper jaw, have promise of being the favourites of fortune, as was the case with Agrippina, the mother of Domitius Nero: when they are on the left side, it is just the contrary."

I... I don't know how to explain my fascination with the person who knew how teeth were important in forming words and chewing food, and described it so extensively, yet also with utter confidence declared that women have fewer teeth than men. I mean, had he looked in a woman's mouth? Did he hear it somewhere and decide to believe it and write it down? Did he not check?? I'm fascinated.

SOME REMARKABLE PROPERTIES OF THE BODY. has me flipping out again, predictably. Why?

"We find it stated, that there are some men whose bones are solid, and devoid of marrow, and that one mark of such persons is the fact that they are never thirsty, and emit no perspiration. At the same time, we know that by the exercise of a resolute determination, any one may resist the feeling of thirst; a fact which was especially exemplified in the case of Julius Viator, a Roman of equestrian rank, but by birth one of the Vocontii, a nation on terms of alliance with us. Having, in his youth, been attacked by dropsy, and forbidden the use of liquids by his physicians, use with him became a second nature, and so, in his old age, he never took any drink at all. Other persons also, have, by the exercise of a strong determination, laid similar restraints upon themselves."

It's just not true! Why did he think it was true!! He much later states that humans die without food after seven days but he thought they could go their entire lives without water! What!

The Roman orators had some insanely impressive memory tricks, so I find myself hesitating over his chapter MEMORY. - because... This sounds ridiculous, surely?

"King Cyrus knew all the soldiers of his army by name: L. Scipio the names of all the Roman people. Cineas, the ambassador of king Pyrrhus, knew by name all the members of the senate and the equestrian order, the day after his arrival at Rome. Mithridates, who was king of twenty-two nations, administered their laws in as many languages, and could harangue each of them, without employing an interpreter. There was in Greece a man named Charmidas, who, when a person asked him for any book in a library, could repeat it by heart, just as though he were reading."

... But what if it isn't? I hate that I almost believe him. I'm becoming indoctrinated to Pliny the Elder's bullsh*t.

This next one fascinates me just by chapter names. I am not going to read all of them, as much as I want to.

Here's the thing! He's like... Listing the best people (we're still in the book about man and his organisation and stuff). The fact that the most notable people he wanted to dedicate chapters to were MEN OF REMARKABLE GENIUS, MEN WHO HAVE BEEN REMARKABLE FOR WISDOM, THE MAN WHO WAS PRONOUNCED TO BE THE MOST EXCELLENT, and THE MOST CHASTE MATRONS, shortly followed by SLAVES FOR WHICH A HIGH PRICE HAS BEEN GIVEN... I'm obsessed with this list. Those were the people he considered most important to Rome.

So of course, when I saw that immediately after was SUPREME HAPPINESS., I of course had to know what he considered to be the greatest happiness ever experienced by a human. Except it isn't! Because immediately follow a chapter entitled MEN WHOM THE GODS HAVE PRONOUNCED TO BE THE MOST HAPPY.! With regards to supreme happiness, though, he dips back into that philosophy that drives me insane.

"The human judgment cannot, however, possibly decide what man has enjoyed the highest degree of happiness, seeing that every one defines a state of prosperity in a way different from another, and entirely in conformity with his own notions. If we wish to form a true judgment and come to a decision, casting aside all the allurements and illusions of fortune, we are bound to say that no mortal is happy. Fortune has dealt well, and, indeed, indulgently, to him who feels that he has a right to say that he is not unhappy. For if there is nothing else, at all events, there is the fear lest fortune should fail at last; which fear itself, when it has once fastened upon us, our happiness is no longer unalloyed."

S E R ?

Okay. All of that was just from one book. Which is a very good book. But not even my favourite! Buckle up...

THE NATURE OF THE TERRESTRIAL ANIMALS brings us right into my territory. I have a BSc in Zoology. I could not contain my excitement the first time I came across this book. Y'all, the first twelve chapters of this book are about elephants. Pliny loved elephants. The fourth chapter is even called WONDERFUL THINGS WHICH HAVE BEEN DONE BY AN ELEPHANT. - Pliny is a white eighteen year-old girl on a gap year in Thailand paid for by her parents. He spent thirty chapters on the entire human race, and twelve on elephants. And if you were curious, as I am, what wonderful things Pliny thinks have been done by an elephant?

"Hence it is that, when their tusks have fallen off, either by accident or from old age, they bury them in the earth."

... Do they, Pliny? Do they?

"When they are surrounded by the hunters, they place those in front which have the smallest teeth, that the enemy may think that the spoil is not worth the combat; and afterwards, when they are weary of resistance, they break off their teeth, by dashing them against a tree, and in this manner pay their ransom."

He's saying that elephants know their tusks are what hunters want from them so they sacrifice their children to them then smash their own tusks on trees when they lose the fight rather than be taken. He sounds so admiring of the elephants' honour and battle wits. I don't have the heart to mock him.

Okay, so, twelve chapters about elephants, what animal did Pliny consider the next most important for his book?

DRAGONS.

"Æthiopia produces dragons, not so large as those of India, but still, twenty cubits in length. The only thing that surprises me is, how Juba came to believe that they have crests. The Æthiopians are known as the Asachæi, among whom they most abound; and we are told, that on those coasts four or five of them are found twisted and interlaced together like so many osiers in a hurdle, and thus setting sail, with their heads erect, they are borne along upon the waves, to find better sources of nourishment in Arabia."

That's the whole chapter. Five dragons curl up together and use their crests to sail to Arabia. Okay.

Similarly, on SERPENTS OF REMARKABLE SIZE.:

"The serpents which in Italy are known by the name of boa, render these accounts far from incredible, for they grow to such a vast size, that a child was found entire in the stomach of one of them, which was killed on the Vaticanian Hill during the reign of the Emperor Claudius."

The biggest snake indigenous to Italy is the four-lined snake, which at a push can approach 7 ft long. The largest thing they can eat is small rabbits and they are non-aggressive. But, then, the Romans did a lot of exploring; they brought tigers into Rome, is it so hard to imagine that they shipped in a real boa only to lose track of it in the city, like the alligators which supposedly infest New York's sewers after being flushed away by ill-equipped exotic pet owners in small apartments? I like to think it was the case. Don't engage with inhumane exotic pet trade, kids.

There then follow two chapters about all of the species of deer, elk, etc., and then five on lions (including, to my delight, the phrase "inflamed with a strong desire to become acquainted with the natures of animals"), including WONDERFUL FEATS PERFORMED BY A LION.:

"In the same manner, too, Elpis, a native of Samos, on landing from a vessel on the coast of Africa, observed a lion near the beach, opening his mouth in a threatening manner; upon which he climbed a tree, in the hope of escaping, while, at the same time, he invoked the aid of Father Liber; for it is the appropriate time for invocations when there is no room left for hope. The wild beast did not pursue him as he fled, although he might easily have done so; but, lying down at the foot of the tree, by the open mouth which had caused so much terror, tried to excite his compassion. A bone, while he was devouring his food with too great avidity, had stuck fast between his teeth, and he was perishing with hunger; such being the punishment inflicted upon him by his own weapons, every now and then he would look up and supplicate him, as it were, with mute entreaties. Elpis, not wishing to risk trusting himself to so formidable a beast, remained stationary for some time, more at last from astonishment than from fear. At length, however, he descended from the tree and extracted the bone, the lion in the meanwhile extending his head, and aiding in the operation as far as it was necessary for him to do. The story goes on to say, that as long as the vessel remained off that coast, the lion showed his sense of gratitude by bringing whatever he had chanced to procure in the chase."

I want to believe it. I want to believe it so badly. It literally reads like a Dodo story about a dog and a goat becoming best friends.

Shortly after comes TIGERS: WHEN FIRST SEEN AT ROME; THEIR NATURE. Given the content of Sylvestus, obviously I had to check it out. Unfortunately, it's just a description of some quietly disturbing animal abuse and the claim that tigers are extremely fast. So then I tried THE RHINOCEROS. because that had to be interesting, right? Well, apparently:

"This too is another natural-born enemy of the elephant."

And I'm like, wait, what's the other natural-born enemy of the elephant? So I did some digging back, and sure enough, back in the extensive elephant section:

"But it is India that produces the largest, as well as the dragon, which is perpetually at war with the elephant, and is itself of so enormous a size, as easily to envelope the elephants with its folds, and encircle them in its coils. The contest is equally fatal to both; the elephant, vanquished, falls to the earth, and by its weight, crushes the dragon which is entwined around it."

Listen. Listen. I know by "dragon" he just means "big snake". But please. I'm so fascinated by what it must have been like inside this man's head. Every chapter reads like Aesop's fables or a Rudyard Kipling book.

It gets even better in THE LYNX, THE SPHINX, THE CROCOTTA, AND THE MONKEY.:

"Æthiopia produces the lynx in abundance, and the sphinx, which has brown hair and two mammæ on the breast, as well as many monstrous kinds of a similar nature; horses with wings, and armed with horns, which are called pegasi; the crocotta, an animal which looks as though it had been produced by the union of the wolf and the dog, for it can break any thing with its teeth, and instantly on swallowing it digest it with the stomach; monkeys, too, with black heads, the hair of the ass, and a voice quite unlike that of any other animal."

Interestingly, the footnotes for this chapter note that the sphinx was probably a monkey, with a human-like face and breasts, a thick mane of hair, and a tail. And that... Actually makes sense. I'm kind of shook about it. No forgiveness for the winged horned horses tho.

In WOLVES; THE ORIGIN OF THE STORY OF VERSIPELLIS, Pliny the Elder makes another, ahh, bold claim:

"That men have been turned into wolves, and again restored to their original form, we must confidently look upon as untrue, unless, indeed, we are ready to believe all the tales, which, for so many ages, have been found to be fabulous."

OH OKAY SURE, PEGASI, THOSE ARE A THING, WOLVES CAN STEAL MEN'S VOICES WITH THEIR "NOXIOUS EYES", BUT WEREWOLVES? NOOO, THAT'S BULLSHIT.

There's a total of 84 chapters in TERRESTRIAL ANIMALS. and we're still fairly early in the 37 volumes, so after this point I become a little more choosy with my chapters, because while I could definitely sit here for four solid days creating a thorough essay on the complete Natural History, neither of us wants that. But NATIONS THAT HAVE BEEN EXTERMINATED BY ANIMALS.? Oh, we have to check that out.

"M. Varro informs us, that a town in Spain was undermined by rabbits, and one in Thessaly, by mice; that the inhabitants of a district in Gaul were driven from their country by frogs."

AMAZING. Thank-you, Pliny, for this mental image.

HEDGEHOGS.? Don't mind if I do.

"Hedgehogs also lay up food for the winter; rolling themselves on apples as they lie on the ground, they pierce one with their quills, and then take up another in the mouth, and so carry them into the hollows of trees."

Best mental image. Thank-you again, ser, for my life.

There's a few chapters on dogs and horses, to fulfil the Romans' tax for their love of these animals, but it's clear that Pliny cares for them far less than he did for elephants. Moving onto THE NATURAL HISTORY OF FISHES., and in particular my new favourite chapter title, OTHER WONDERFUL THINGS RELATING TO DOLPHINS. Man loves elephants and dolphins! He's literally a teenage girl, I'm obsessed!

"Dolphins, also, form among themselves a sort of general community. One of them having been captured by a king of Caria and chained up in the harbour, great multitudes of dolphins assembled at the spot, and with signs of sorrow which could not be misunderstood, appealed to the sympathies of the people, until at last the king ordered it to be released."

Oh, that's... That's actually true. The community and empathy part, not sure about the king releasing a dolphin cos the others cried at him. The juxtaposition of Pliny's accurate accounts and his very sincere bullsh*t are a huge part of what appeals to me about these books.

For instance, please, Pliny, do tell me HOW MANY KINDS OF FISH THERE ARE.

"There are seventy-four species of fishes."

Okay!

... So close, bud. You were real close.

I did an entire dissertation on the pearl mussel, so I'm real fascinated to see what Pliny thinks of PEARLS; HOW THEY ARE PRODUCED AND WHERE.

"The origin and production of the shell-fish is not very different from that of the shell of the oyster. When the genial season of the year exercises its influence on the animal, it is said that, yawning, as it were, it opens its shell, and so receives a kind of dew, by means of which it becomes impregnated; and that at length it gives birth, after many struggles, to the burden of its shell, in the shape of pearls, which vary according to the quality of the dew."

I am... Actually impressed that he, knew that pearls are produced by oysters, and knew that oysters are animals. And tbh, I prefer this explanation to my 6000 word report on the parasitism of pearl mussel glochidia on the gills of fish, so I might just try to believe it.

Next up, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF BIRDS. First chapter? OSTRICHES. F*cking superb, you funky little Roman.

"They have cloven talons, very similar to the hoof of the stag; with these they fight, and they also employ them in seizing stones for the purpose of throwing at those who pursue them. They have the marvellous property of being able to digest every substance without distinction, but their stupidity is no less remarkable; for although the rest of their body is so large, they imagine, when they have thrust their head and neck into a bush, that the whole of the body is concealed."

How marvelous the mental image Pliny conjures of an ostrich picking up a stone with its foot, chucking it at a hunter, and then sticking its head in a bush! "Their stupidity is no less remarkable"? Astounding!

There's a chapter called THE WOOD-PECKER OF MARS., which I got very excited about only to be disappointed upon realising it's named after the deity, rather than being Pliny's venture into sci fi. It's also a boring chapter. Then I get hit with THE ONLY WINGED ANIMAL THAT IS VIVIPAROUS, AND NURTURES ITS YOUNG WITH ITS MILK. And I get excited again, because ohhh shit what bird does he think gives birth to live young...

"Among the winged animals, the only one that is viviparous is the bat; it is the only one, too, that has wings formed of a membrane."

... Okay. You did got me there.

How about WHAT ANIMALS ARE SUBJECT TO DREAMS.?

"It is pretty generally agreed, that dreams, immediately after we have taken wine and food, or when we have just fallen asleep again after waking, have no signification whatever. Indeed, sleep is nothing else than the retiring of the mind into itself. It is quite evident that, besides man, horses, dogs, oxen, sheep, and goats have dreams; consequently, the same is supposed to be the case with all animals that are viviparous. As to those which are oviparous, it is a matter of uncertainty, though it is equally certain that they do sleep."

This is a peaceful and humble chapter. I like this chapter. This chapter makes me smile restfully.

Immediately after this, we move into THE VARIOUS KINDS OF INSECTS., where I get batcrap crazy again, specifically starting with THE EXTREME SMALLNESS OF INSECTS.:

"Indeed, in no one of her works has Nature more fully displayed her exhaustless ingenuity. In large animals, on the other hand, or, at all events, in the very largest among them, she found her task easy and her materials ready and pliable; but in these minute creatures, so nearly akin as they are to non-entity, how surpassing the intelligence, how vast the resources, and how ineffable the perfection which she has displayed. Where is it that she has united so many senses as in the gnat?—not to speak of creatures that might be mentioned of still smaller size—Where, I say, has she found room to place in it the organs of sight? Where has she centred the sense of taste? Where has she inserted the power of smell? And where, too, has she implanted that sharp shrill voice of the creature, so utterly disproportioned to the smallness of its body? With what astonishing subtlety has she united the wings to the trunk, elongated the joints of the legs, framed that long, craving concavity for a belly, and then inflamed the animal with an insatiate thirst for blood, that of man more especially!"

I really, genuinely love this part of this chapter. He writes with such open wonder and astonishment. Having studied the physiology of insects in great detail, it's easy to overlook the basics that someone writing 1800 years before the theory of evolution might be fascinated by. This is a good chapter.

Then we reach... BEES. Specifically, 23 chapters on bees. That's the most chapters yet. That's more than elephants and dolphins put together. Pliny the Elder really, really loved bees. I only touch on one, which is THE MODE OF GOVERNMENT OF THE BEES., because:

"When he is weary, they support him on their shoulders; and when he is quite tired, they carry him outright. If one of them falls in the rear from weariness, or happens to go astray, it is able to follow the others by the aid of its acuteness of smell. Wherever the king bee happens to settle, that becomes the encampment of all."

First of all, Pliny knew that there were drones and workers and a... Ruling bee. Second of all, Pliny describes workers supporting their weary ruler like soldiers carrying a general from the field, to the chair in his tent where he may touch one of their faces and empart final whispered knowledge before he perishes, leaving his second-in-command to avenge his father figure. Thirdly, he thought that the ruling bee was male. He refers frequently to the king bee.

He got the spirit.

INSECTS THAT ARE PARASITES OF MAN. WHICH IS THE SMALLEST OF THE ANIMALS? ANIMALS FOUND IN WAX EVEN. has the kind of title which makes it very obvious that everything Pliny wrote was a first draft, because he couldn't just press backspace on his rambling and typos. But it also drew me in because of my further interest in parasitology.

"These insects infest birds too, and are apt to kill the pheasant, unless it takes care to bathe itself in the dust. Of the animals that are covered with hair, it is supposed that the ass and the sheep are the only ones that are exempt from these vermin. They are produced, also, in certain kinds of cloth, and more particularly those made of the wool of sheep which have been killed by the wolf. I find it stated, also, by authors, that some kinds of water which we use for bathing are more productive of these parasites than others. Even wax is found to produce mites, which are supposed to be the very smallest of all living creatures."

I find it most interesting because he's right in a lot of ways about what parasites are and where they can be found... But he did also believe in spontaneous generation, which is to say the belief that if you just leave something long enough, eventually an animal will form out of the material without prompt, which is an idea still used today to try and refute evolution. Wildin'.

There's a lot of chapters in this book and it moves away from insects again shortly, but before that, we just have to drop in on AN ANIMAL FOUND IN FIRE - THE PYRALLIS OR PYRAUSTA.

"That element, also, which is so destructive to matter, produces certain animals; for in the copper-smelting furnaces of Cyprus, in the very midst of the fire, there is to be seen flying about a four-footed animal with wings, the size of a large fly: this creature is called the " pyrallis," and by some the " pyrausta." So long as it remains in the fire it will live, but if it comes out and flies a little distance from it, it will instantly die."

Just imagine being a zoologist in the days when you could say "yeah bro there's a bug that lives in fire but you can't see it cos it dies as soon as you put it out". Fantastic.

I was very excited for THE HEADS OF ANIMALS. THOSE WHICH HAVE NONE. cos hooollleeyyy shit Pliny please tell me what animals you think don't have heads is it gonna be somethin wild like dogs that live without a head or a species of snake or something-

"Animals of the oyster and the sponge kind have no head, which is the case, also, with most of the other kinds, whose only sense is that of touch. Some, again, have the head blended with the body, the crab, for instance."

... oh. No that's... That's actually correct. He even knew that sponges are animals, which most people now don't. Sh*t. He really got me there.

Well, surely THE BRAIN. will prove that Pliny had a lot of things wrong still, right?

"The senses hold this organ as their citadel; it is in this that are centred all the veins which spring from the heart; it is here that they terminate; this is the very culminating point of all, the regulator of the understanding. With all animals it is advanced to the fore-part of the head, from the fact that the senses have a tendency to the direction in which we look. From the brain proceeds sleep, and its return it is that causes the head to nod. Those creatures, in fact, which have no brain, never sleep. It is said that stags have in the head certain small maggots, twenty in number: they are situate in the empty space that lies beneath the tongue, and around the joints by which the head is united to the body."

There we go. I couldn't even make it up. Astute observation about the brain as the centre of thought and soul; and then immediately afterwards, an equally confident declaration that all stags have twenty maggots in their brain. Fantastic.

Next, THE THEORY OF SIGHT - PERSONS WHO CAN SEE BY NIGHT. Gotta be good, right? Mostly accounts of people with weird eyes, but then:

"The Emperor Caius had twenty pairs of gladiators in his training-school, and of all these there were only two who did not wink the eyes when a menacing gesture was made close to them: hence it was that these men were invincible."

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? WHAT IS HAPPENING?!

Then immediately after that, in the same chapter:

"Beyond a doubt it is in the eyes that the mind has its abode: sometimes the look is ardent, sometimes fixed and steady, at other times the eyes are humid, and at others, again, half closed. From these it is that the tears of pity flow, and when we kiss them we seem to be touching the very soul."

I'm losing my sh*t. How is this the same person. Humans... Are spectacular.

One line from THE HEART; THE BLOOD; THE VITAL SPIRIT. stood out to me:

"It is said, too, that the eyes are the first organs that die, and the heart the very last of all."

... Bro, that's poetic as sh*t. He does then claim that the mind lives in the heart, which is... Interesting, given the previous claims about the brain. He was trying. Galen had just kinda messed up everyone's understanding by convincing them the heart was where blood was destroyed after being made in the liver or something, so you can understand the confusion. Again, man's got the spirit. Also, this was chapter 69 of that book. Nice.

There's a lot here on various organs and which animals supposedly don't have them, but none stood out to me especially. That is, until ANIMALS WHICH ARE WITHOUT BLOOD AT CERTAIN TIMES OF THE YEAR.

"Those animals which conceal themselves at certain periods of the year [bears, dormice, serpents], as already mentioned, have no blood at those times, with the exception, indeed, of some very small drops about the heart. ... It is a well-known fact, that when a man is in fear, the blood takes to flight and disappears, and that many persons have been pierced through the body without losing one drop of blood; a thing, however, which is only the case with man."

... Okay. Okay. That's fine. That's okay. Fine. Okay. Sure.

Also worth noting that in the middle of this book which is supposedly about insects and now seems to be about general anatomy, he takes an entire chapter to talk about VARIOUS KINDS OF CHEESE. I will not be quoting from it, except to say that he does claim a man named Zoroaster lived for thirty years on cheese and was consequently immortal until he ate something that wasn't cheese. Maybe my spirit lives in Zoroaster, rather than Pliny.

We've now passed the golden segment of The Natural History, at least for a while, as we move into several books on the history of trees and grain. I found it interesting that he mentions what seems to be chilis, though called "Indian pepper", in THE PEPPER-TREE - THE VARIOUS KINDS OF PEPPER - BREGMA - ZINGIBERI, OR ZIMPIBERI, given that all my (fairly extensive) previous research indicated that Romans would have never encountered chili peppers, hence why its discovery is a not insignificant plot point in Sylvestus, because I guess pious d*ckheads on the internet haven't actually checked primary sources because they call themselves ancient history experts after watching 300 and Sparta, and at the time I didn't have access to primary sources myself, but that's fine.

At this point, several books later, we do start to get into the medical section. Time to crack my knuckles and make another cup of coffee. There are far, far too many to cover completely (several books of many chapters, all of which claim to have dozens of remedies listed) but I'll try to breeze through my favourites to offer a selection.

From ONIONS: TWENTY-SEVEN REMEDIES.:

"There are no such things in existence as wild onions. The cultivated onion is employed for the cure of dimness of sight, the patient being made to smell at it till tears come into the eyes: it is still better even if the eyes are rubbed with the juice."

Ser. SER. You can't just say that there's no such thing as wild onions (blatantly untrue) and then tell me to rub onion juice in my eyes if I'm blind. S e r.

"In combination with woman's milk, it is employed for affections of the ears; and in cases of singing in the ears and hardness of hearing, it is injected into those organs with goose-grease or honey."

:(

From ROCKET: TWELVE REMEDIES.:

"The seed of rocket is remedial for the venom of the scorpion and the shrew-mouse: it repels, too, all parasitical insects which breed on the human body, and applied to the face, as a liniment, with honey, removes spots upon the skin. Used with vinegar, too, it is a cure for freckles; and mixed with ox-gall it restores the livid marks left by wounds to their natural colour."

... It's better than onion-eyes.

In GRAPES, FRESH GATHERED.:

"Grapes fresh gathered are productive of flatulency, and disturb the stomach and bowels; hence it is that they are avoided in fevers, in large quantities more particularly."

... heh.

SIXTY-ONE OBSERVATIONS RELEVANT TO WINE.? Don't mind if I do!

"Pure wine, too, acts as an antidote to hemlock, coriander, henbane, mistletoe, opium, mercury, as also to stings inflicted by bees, wasps, hornets, the phalangium, serpents, and scorpions; all kinds of poison, in fact, which are of a cold nature, the venom of the hæmorrhois and the prester, in particular, and the noxious effects of fungi."

Sorry sorry hold on wait sorry hold on a second... Why would you need an antidote to coriander? Did Pliny have the cilantro-soap-taste gene??

"A fomentation of hot wine applied to the genitals of beasts of burden is found to be very beneficial; and, introduced into the mouth, with the aid of a horn, it has the effect of removing all sensations of fatigue."

:(

Intrigued by this sentence from CITRONS: FIVE OBSERVATIONS UPON THEM.:

"Citrons are good, also, for a weak stomach, but it is not easy to eat them except with vinegar."

Hmm, yes, this lemon is somewhat too bitter for me to eat by itself; I think I shall dip it in vinegar.

With regards to ZOPISSA: ONE REMEDY., Pliny discovers how to make people leave his villa because he regretted putting a ? at the end time of the party he hosted when he was feeling more extroverted than he is now:

"We have already stated that zopissa is the pitch, macerated with salt-water and wax, that has been scraped from off the bottoms of ships. The best kind is that taken from ships which have been to sea for the first time. It is used as an ingredient in plasters of an emollient nature, employed to disperse gatherings."

Not 100% on the validity of "employed to disperse gatherings" as a "remedy", but it made me snort.

PLANTS THAT HAVE BEEN MOISTENED WITH THE URINE OF A DOG: ONE REMEDY.!? Pliny!?

"A plant upon which a dog has watered, torn up by the roots, and not touched with iron, is a very speedy cure for sprains."

... like, any plant? Pliny? Pliny??

In REMEDIES DERIVED FROM MAN., Pliny loyally describes a dozen diseases which can be cured by cannibalism, then quickly clarifies:

"We do not look upon life as so essentially desirable that it must be prolonged at any cost, be it what it may—and you, who are of that opinion, be assured, whoever you may be, that you will die none the less, even though you shall have lived in the midst of obscenities or abominations!"

The exclamation mark gets me.

He then, however, continues to list in further chapters many uses of the human body, including REMEDIES DERIVED FROM THE WAX OF THE HUMAN EAR.:

"The human bite is also looked upon as one of the most dangerous of all. The proper remedy for it is human ear-wax: a thing that we must not be surprised at, seeing that, if applied immediately, it is a cure for the stings of scorpions even, and serpents."

... Like, did they think the human bite was venomous? 'Cos I would have killed many people by now.

Then, yet again, REMEDIES DERIVED FROM THE BLOOD, SEXUAL CONGRESS, ETC. - mm, no, Pliny, actually I think that if the first two items on your list are "blood" and "sex", you legally have to tell me what's on the rest of the list, because "etc." is not going to cut it.

"There are many kinds of diseases which disappear entirely after the first sexual congress, or, in the case of females, at the first appearance of menstruation; indeed, if such is not the case, they are apt to become chronic, epilepsy in particular. Even more than this-a man, it is said, who has been stung by a serpent or scorpion, experiences relief from the sexual congress; but the woman, on the other hand, is sensible of detriment."

Like, that's fine I guess.

I hesitantly ventured into REMEDIES DERIVED FROM WOMAN'S MILK., and it lived fully up to expectations.

"It is asserted that if a person is rubbed at the same moment with the milk of both mother and daughter, he will be proof for the rest of his life against all affections of the eyes."

Oh, ser... That's a kink, ser. You walked in on that happening and someone said "no don't worry i'm just proofing myself against all affections of the eyes" and you believed them.

He further makes an interesting claim in SEVEN REMEDIES DERIVED FROM THE HIPPOPOTAMUS.:

"The hippopotamus was the first inventor of the practice of letting blood, a fact to which we have made allusion on a previous occasion."

Okay.

TWELVE REMEDIES DERIVED FROM CHEESE.? Heeeecckkk yeah.

"Cheese is best for the stomach when not salted, or, in other words, when new cheese is used. Old cheese has a binding effect upon the bowels, and reduces the flesh, but is more wholesome to the stomach. Indeed, we may pronounce of aliments in general, that salt meats reduce the system, while fresh food has a tendency to make flesh. Fresh cheese, applied with honey, effaces the marks of bruises. It acts, also, emolliently upon the bowels; and, taken in the form of tablets, boiled in astringent wine and then toasted with honey on a platter, it modifies and alleviates griping pains in the bowels."

Hm. Okay. Might just. Eat the cheese actually thanks.

I'm almost certain "generative organs" means pebis n vagiba, so I was of course drawn to REMEDIES FOR THE DISEASES OF THE GENERATIVE ORGANS AND OF THE FUNDAMENT., and it did not disappoint:

"Swellings of those parts are treated with veal suet—that from the loins in particular—mixed with rue. For other affections, goats' blood is used, with polenta. Goats' gall, too, is employed by itself, for the cure of condylomata, and sometimes, wolf's gall, mixed with wine. Bears' blood is curative of inflamed tumours and apostemes upon these parts in general; as also bulls' blood, dried and powdered. The best remedy, however, is considered to be the stone which the wild ass voids with his urine, it is said, at the moment he is killed. This stone, which is in a somewhat liquefied state at first, becomes solid when it reaches the ground: attached to the thigh, it; disperses all collections of humours and all kinds of suppurations: it is but rarely found, however, and it is not every wild ass that produces it, but as a remedy it is held in high esteem. ... Riding on horseback, we well know, galls and chafes the inside of the thighs: the best remedy for accidents of this nature is to rub the parts with the foam which collects at a horse's mouth. Where there are swellings in the groin, arising from ulcers, a cure is effected by inserting in the sores three horse-hairs, tied with as many knots."

Presented without comment.

Yet despite the confidence of all of the above, in his chapter on REMEDIES FOR FEVERS., Pliny has the gall to question:

"For quartan fever, the magicians recommend cats' dung to be attached to the body, with the toe of a horned owl, and, that the fever may not be recurrent, not to be removed until the seventh paroxysm is past. Who, pray, could have ever made such a discovery as this? And what, too, can be the meaning of this combination? Why, of all things in the world, was the toe of a horned owl made choice of?"

That's what you find issue with, ser?!

There are many, many, many, many more, but our time with Pliny the Elder for now draws toward a close. Before that, I was drawn with hope toward REMEDIES FOR THE DISEASES OF ANIMALS., expecting some wild claims, but was only granted with three short lines:

"A decoction of frogs in water, reduced to the form of a lini- ment, is curative of itch-scab in horses; indeed, it is said, that a horse, when once treated in this manner, will never again be attacked with the disease. Salpe says that if a live frog is given to dogs in their mess, they will lose the power of barking."

Then we leave remedies behind and enter the natural histories of metals, precious stones, and a few others for the last five books, which I did take a browse through, though little stood out so spectacularly as previous, though this account of MIRRORS. piqued me somewhat:

"But, really, it is a very marvellous property that this metal has, of reflecting objects; a property which, it is generally agreed, results from the repercussion of the air, thrown back as it is from the metal upon the eyes. The same too is the action that takes place when we use a mirror. If, again, a thick plate of this metal is highly polished, and is rendered slightly concave, the image or object reflected is enlarged to an immense extent; so vast is the difference between a surface receiving, and throwing back the air. Even more than this-drinking-cups are now made in such a manner, as to be filled inside with numerous concave facets, like so many mirrors; so that if but one person looks into the interior, he sees reflected a whole multitude of persons."

Throwing back of the air? Close enough; even I barely understand how they work. The cup story was genuinely interesting, too.

THE MAGNET: THREE REMEDIES is surprisingly charming in its description:

"She had given a voice to rocks, as already mentioned, and had enabled them to answer man, or rather, I should say, to throw back his own words in his teeth. What is there in existence more inert than a piece of rigid stone? And yet, behold! Nature has here endowed stone with both sense and hands. What is there more stubborn than hard iron? Nature has, in this instance, bestowed upon it both feet and intelligence."

Downright whimsical.

Given how we started off, so strongly, with that introduction and then MAN., I was hoping that the final chapter would give us a suitable outro. It's called A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF NATURE AS SHE APPEARS IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. THE COMPARATIVE VALUES OF THINGS., which was... Somewhat promising?

"Having now treated of all the works of Nature, it will be as well to take a sort of comparative view of her several productions, as well as the countries which supply them. Throughout the whole earth, then, and wherever the vault of heaven extends, there is no country so beautiful, or which, for the productions of Nature, merits so high a rank as Italy, that ruler and second parent of the world; recommended as she is by her men, her women, her generals, her soldiers, her slaves, her superiority in the arts, and the illustrious examples of genius which she has produced."

Yep, about what I expected. It goes on for several more pages explaining how the past 37 volumes have conclusively proved Italy is the best place on earth.

After all that, it's still hard for me to really, precisely sum up what so intrigued me about The Natural History. Part of it is no doubt the crossover of my interests in ancient Rome (insofar as it pertains to Sylv), medical history, and podcasts. He covers geography, geology, history, and the arts in as much detail as natural sciences, but those don't really grab my attention, whereas his suggestions on human nature, cures for diseases, and the character of various animals drives me absolutely insane. Maybe it's just a more relatable and interesting link to the past than I was ever given in my much-loathed history lessons in early high school. All of the secondary (?) sources I find about Rome make it very dry and boring and dark; dogs aren't allowed in the house and are considered dirty, everyone died young and lived on stale porridge, chilis weren't discovered and tigers probably never made it to the Colosseum. Yet primary sources, when I can find them, are always vibrant with life and surprise, from an epitaph to a beloved dog who slept on her mistress' pillow, to 37 books confidently detailing the sum of Roman knowledge of the world.

Some of what he says is surprisingly accurate, or close to accurate. Some is hilarious nonsense. Some elicits a wince, some a laugh or a thoughtful pause. I think most of all I am enraptured by this man's genuine passion for the world around him, his desire to document and understand it, even when he got things extraordinarily wrong. This appeals to my creative and scientific nature in an acute way.

Thankfully, Gaius Plinius Secundus has here himself provided a helpful epilogue, so that I may steal his words to close this extremely long and pointless post without putting much effort in:

"HAIL to thee, Nature, thou parent of all things! and do thou deign to show thy favour unto me, who, alone of all the citizens of Rome, have, in thy every department, thus made known thy praise."