CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

May 2_ 476 word count

A breakthrough for me today on Book One of The Civil War Series-Remembrance at Morning. I began writing on the novel itself! A partially sleepless night last night (one of the many) had me wide awake and considering character sketches. I thought of some more to add to the character sketch I had worked on yesterday; then I planned out two more characters in detail. All three of these are characters who first appeared in the Stage Play I wrote April 1-15 for Script Frenzy, so mainly they needed only fleshing out, connections (between each other and to others  within the Play), and backstory. I also thought of some further settings, and some additional characters (after all, these folks did not spring full-grown from the forehead of Zeus, as did Minerva; so they surely had to have parents. In two of the cases (The Major and The Captain) I decided that their parentage is going to be really significant, both in forming their characters and in providing their external and internal conflicts. In fact, in the case of The Captain, portions of his parentage are going to lead potentially to damaging external conflicts and will directly affect at least one other character. So you see I am still somewhat working along the lines of Karen Wiesner's First Draft in 30 Days.





All day today, despite five hours from mid-morning to mid-afternoon battling a sudden, unexpected, and debilitating allergy (apparently pollen or something similar-as it affected sinuses, vision, and thinking processes, and only ended when I moved my location away from the line of shrubs bordering the yard) I read, for research and for pleasure, Edward Ball's excellent nonfiction generational saga, Slaves in the Family. I cannot highly enough recommend this book. I am only 100 or so pages into the more than 400-page book, but I have tons of notes and am learning so much, and marvelling. Excellent background for my own upcoming novels.





One interesting point I learned today is that English philosopher John Locke, so acclaimed (in fact, North Carolina has a think tank institute bearing his name) condoned slavery and even wrote provision for enslavement into the formal legal contracts he prepared for his employer, Lord Ashley Cooper (whose names were given to Charleston's two rivers). Lord Cooper was one of the prime investors in The Lords Proprietors, the group which funded English immigration to Carolina, as it was then called (South Carolina as we know it today-Charles Town, now Charleston).





Proposition 110 of The Fundamental Constitutions as created by John Locke read:





“Every Freeman of Carolina, shall have absolute power and authority over Negro Slaves, of what opinion or Religion soever.”





and at a later date Locke wrote, any person who “attempts to get another Man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him.”