Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 32

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Thomas interposes himself between Harry and the fireplace, getting himself a couple of broken ribs and very likely saving Harry's life. Obviously everyone's a bit distracted by the active fight going on, but it's nonetheless interesting that this goes essentially unremarked, given how thoroughly at odds this is with Thomas's characterization up to this point. Something like two chapters ago, he said "I like you, Dresden, but I like myself a whole lot more", and suited action to word by betraying them at a critical moment. This, more than anything Thomas has said since arriving at Harry's apartment, not only establishes his sincerity about helping them now, but lends credence to the idea that his apparent betrayal at the party really was a ruse, that he might really have intended to help them as soon as he got the chance.

Michael gets between Lydia and both of them, sword drawn, but the Nightmare points out, and Harry corroborates, that it's wearing Lydia's real body. She's an innocent in this, and hurting her with the sword risks unmaking it, and would, you know, be wrong. So Michael drops the sword and throws her into the couch, trying to keep her occupied while Harry gets set up to perform an exorcism. He puts down a salt circle and uses those trick birthday candles that can't be blown out to anchor the directions, which is honestly kind of brilliant. I don't know why those aren't more readily available in non-birthday shapes and sizes - fire risk, I guess. When he gets the spell going, the energy forms a small vortex, swirling down into the earth, where the dark spirits energy will be absorbed and grounded once it's removed from Lydia. So that's actually fascinating. I think this is the only time we actually see Harry perform an exorcism on the page, so this vortex doesn't come up again, but what we're seeing here, on a reread, is the basic structure of the Darkhallow. "Not a new spell, just a really, really skewed application of an old one." The Darkhallow is an exorcism, scaled up and turned inside out, so that instead of drawing one possessing spirit out of a person and into the ground, it draws many spirits out of the surrounding environment and into a person. That's very cool, both as an element of worldbuilding and as a reflection of the amount of thought Jim Butcher started putting in after the first few books. Once the circle is empowered, Harry just needs to put the Nightmare off balance so it can take effect. He uses what he thinks is its name, Azorthragal, but of course it doesn't work, because the Nightmare is not, in fact, the ghost of Azorthragal. Nightmare Lydia breaks Michael's hand, and in his efforts to fight her off, he inadvertently breaks the circle. 

Harry tries to hit her, which isn't a very good plan, but good plans are in pretty short supply here. She slams his head into the floor (he sees stars, so that's concussion number four), and...look, I need you to remember that I didn't write this, okay? I'm not responsible for what goes on here. She starts humping him. Looked at objectively, I suppose this is foreshadowing for the sexual trauma yet to come, but subjectively it's weird, uncomfortable, and more than a little jarring. Except also, as Harry's going to realize in a minute, we've been referring to Nightmare Lydia as "she" or "it", but that's the ghost of Leonid Kravos in there. I... don't know where Butcher was going with this. It feels transphobic, certainly. (Broadly transphobic, to be clear - while this can certainly be taken in a transmisogynistic "man disguised as a woman" way, we are nonetheless looking at a man in a phenotypically female body, and the stereotype of trans men as small, violent, hypersexual, criminal women has a persistent, if somewhat obscure, history in the genres that form this one's parentage. Butcher may have had either, both, or neither of these ideas consciously in mind, and I don't think it matters which). Sexual violence is, as they say, an extension of violence, not of sex, but I have no idea whether we're meant to take it that way here, or whether this is meant to queer code Kravos, to suggest that he's into Harry? Of course, a minute ago Nightmare Lydia was like, seductively running her hands over her breasts, so it's possible this is more about doing weird things to Lydia's body and Harry's just, y'know, there. It may be that the point of Kravos Nightmare Lydia grinding on Harry is to make things uncomfortable enough that the reader notices how inherently violatory this possession is. That's important, because there hasn't been time anywhere in here for Lydia to become someone we actually know. She was sketchy, at the beginning, an unknown quantity whose motives were suspect, and she's spent most of the book off-screen, unconscious, or both. This version of her is as real to us as whoever she actually is, if not more so, because we're given to suspect the non-possessed Lydia we've seen is at least partly a performance, so we may need a little extra help to catch that Kravos is using a whole other living person's body for his own twisted ends, and that's incredibly fucked up. That was pointed out explicitly, too, earlier in this chapter, but sometimes you have to both say something out loud and make it weird to make sure everyone's on the same page. 

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Nightmare Lydia then starts strangling Harry, which is honestly much less uncomfortable. I do want to
note here that given the strength she displayed earlier, Harry should not have functioning trachea after this. Your breathe-y bits aren't really...supposed to be compressed to a sufficient extent that you can't inhale, and it only takes about two additional pounds of pressure to go from completely occluding the trachea to doing them a potentially serious injury. She makes a remark about him dying without figuring it out, so of course it is at this point, while being strangled to death, that Harry starts to figure it out. He remembers how agitated everyone at SI was, including about Kravos's journal, and how Susan was excited about something but said she couldn't tell him what yet, and asked him to confirm Kravos's name. He works out, at long fucking last, that Kravos deliberately killed himself in the midst of all the turbulence in the border between worlds, creating an extraordinarily powerful ghost. The reader doesn't get this information quite yet, we're just told that he knows it, and that it's going to avail in precisely fuck all since he's about to die. 

Thomas, for the second time in about five minutes, saves Harry's life, although this time at less risk and detriment to himself. He begins to feed on...I'm not actually sure - Lydia, probably, since I don't think a ghost has whatever exactly it is the White Court eat, but Kravos is definitely along for the ride, trapped in Lydia's body as it succumbs to Thomas's inhuman powers of seduction. This is definitely foreshadowing for what happens to Dresden later - in the interests of not having to put content warnings on more than one post, I will discuss the specific quote that makes the parallel obvious when we get there, rather than doing it here. While Thomas keeps Nightmare Lydia busy, Harry gets the exorcism going again, and this time, with the right Name, he's able to banish Kravos's spirit. This doesn't necessarily mean he won't cause any more problems for anyone, but it gets him out of their faces for the moment, and Harry seems reasonably confident that it will keep him from possessing Lydia, specifically, ever again. Harry checks in with Michael, who's pretty sure he's got broken ribs, but then has to tell Thomas to stop making out with Lydia, who isn't fully conscious but is still responding to his feeding on her. Thomas does not make a great argument here - he could point out that he's got broken ribs too and given another few minutes to feed he could be fully back in fighting shape, but instead says something about how she's probably just grateful. Harry carries the point, and Thomas, looking less dented than he did after smashing into the fireplace, goes to find some clothes. 

Harry and Michael discuss the nature of the White Court, how they can feed on different emotions but always induce lust to get close to them. Harry notes that their powers appear to affect the body directly, given that it worked on Lydia's body even when she wasn't the one controlling it, which suggests either ambient magic or something chemical, like pheromones. I believe over time the weight of evidence favors the ambient magic theory, but I don't think anyone ever quite comes out and says. 

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Thomas comes back, wearing some of Harry's jogging clothes. On the scale of inconsistencies that matter, this one isn't, but I was fairly certain Harry didn't actually take up running as a hobby until either between this book and Summer Knight or Summer Knight and Death Masks, so I'm not really sure why he has jogging clothes at this point. Maybe one of the times he resolved to get in shape over the past couple of books, he got as far as getting appropriate clothes for it but then never actually got underway with doing it. That can happen. Harry fills Thomas and Michael in on what he's figured out about Kravos and his plan. He doesn't articulate a specific idea of how Bianca and Mavra fit in, but since Bianca has it out for Harry and Mavra has it out for Michael, and both of those things have already been established, that could account for it and doesn't really need to be said again. He's reasonably confident that he can take the Nightmare, now that he actually knows what he's dealing with. Thomas asks if Harry got hit in the head while he wasn't looking (he uh, he did, yeah) and reminds him that there are guards with machine guns. Michael makes the kind of unwarranted, but in this case accurate, assumption that Harry has a plan, and asks him to elaborate on it, largely disregarding Thomas's suggestion that they disguise themselves as caterers and sneak in. 

Rather than devoting page space to explaining something we're about to see anyway, the scene breaks, picking back up as Our Heroes step into the Nevernever. From the upper floor, the reflection of Harry's apartment looks nearly the same as it does in real life, albeit cleaner and brighter. Obviously, if they'd started from the basement, they would have had a very different experience. It's got a small infestation of little spirit beings that apparently hang out and feed on the energy that spills over from the mortal side. They've got Bob with them, to find them the shortest route to Bianca's place. As Bob explains, it's not exactly the "shortest" in the conventional sense since places in the Nevernever are linked by ideas rather than geography, but the principle stands, although there's some concern that they may not be able to open a gate back out until the sun goes down. Notably, I don't think that issue ever comes up again, but in fairness I don't think Harry makes any other plans that involving making transit through the Nevernever while severely magically drained. They go out onto a street that looks like a stage set of the real Chicago, down into a tunnel that I assume is a reflection of the undercity, and then back out onto a hill with a ring of dolmens, tombs made of two or more big rocks supporting a slab of flat stone. Harry immediately recognizes this as part of Faerie, which is a very bad problem, since both Lea and Mab are gonna be somewhere in there, putting Harry and Bob both in danger. Bob says there was no way to get anywhere through the Nevernever without passing through part of Faerie. The concepts of the Summer and Winter courts are very briefly and vaguely introduced here, with Bob describing them as the Disney version and the wicked witch version, and Harry identifying the former as Summer. Bob has just pointed them in the direction of a covered bridge that should take them out of Faerie when Thomas points out that this place is obviously maintained, or the grass would be over their knees, and everyone gets a bad feeling. They haven't even had a chance to start moving yet when they hear a hunting horn. Thomas and Michael both make it to the bridge before Harry does, and Harry notes that Michael beat him there with 20 years on him and a broken rib, and that he has to work out more, putting Michael's age at around 47, and establishing that Harry has not, in fact, starting regularly exercising yet. 

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Inches from the bridge, Lea gets a lariat around Harry's neck. Lariat, for those interested, is a strict synonym for the less fantasy-sounding "lasso", from the Spanish la reata. She pulls him off his feet, leaving him lying on the ground and being strangled (again), although he manages to get the rope off. Give the amount of damage he took from Nightmare Lydia, that had to have hurt like hell, and it's too his credit that he keeps it together as much as he does. Lea herself comes into view a moment later, on night-black steed (that's a direct quote - someone bother me if I don't follow up on it when we talk about the next chapter). She's surrounded by her hellhounds, and says that now they can finally conclude their bargain. 

I feel like every chapter in this book has contrived to end with some new, cliff-hanger-y peril. Hopefully, it won't take me quite so long to write about this next one. Remember that if you want more regular updates, the best thing you can do to make that happen is use the button at the top of the page to become a Patron. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

2024-2025 Eeveeyear Goals

It wasn't until I directly compared the two spreadsheets that I realized I didn't, at least in relative terms, actually do worse this year than last. It hasn't felt like it was going well, and my wrap-up post from a year ago talked about being under 50%, without, apparently, mentioning that one goal actually came in under 25%. That goals was New Cards, which was set absurdly high, but still. The goal I did worst on this year still came in at 29.22%, so I suppose that's something. I'm also not sure I have a lot of useful insights this year, but we'll see what we can come up with. 

Core Goals

This is a blog about books and writing. I am, in some ways, a person about books and writing. I'm still hoping to eventually make, if not a living, at least, y'know, money as a novelist. So the goals that directly support that do feel more important than the ones that don't, that are here to give more strictly recreational activities a place in my life, or to shore up areas where I struggle with being a corporeal being. This also includes the goals that have been with us the longest, and that means we get to do graphs. 

I wrote fewer words of fiction this year than last year. I don't like that. I really wanted there to be continuous improvement on that one.  Apparently, I also wrote fewer words, by a substantially wider margin, last year than the year before that. Regression line indicates the trend is still basically upwards, which is something, I suppose. I wish I felt like I understood what happened here, why I haven't been able to keep up the 2021-2022 numbers. I thought last year was just the move, which took a lot out of me mentally, emotionally, and chronologically, but I didn't move this year. I don't know, maybe I'm still recovering, but I'm hoping to fiddle with the knobs some this year and see if we can't get back to a more respectable output level. I know part of the thing is some of my freelance work straight up getting harder, but I can't really do anything about that, so we'll have to see what else we can adjust. 

I read exactly as many books this year as I did the one before, 50, which is, y'know, that's almost a book a week, it's respectable, but it's not what I hoped for, nor is it really enough to sustain the level of creative output for which I'm aiming. I think part of the problem, for this and the writing, might just be that living with so many other people makes it harder to really put in the time on these essentially solitary activities. I don't like being unsociable when there's social to be had (I am perhaps the only extroverted writer in existence, and this has its downsides), and there is a lot more social to be had now than there was where I lived previously. I do think I've figured out how to stop game manuals from slowing me down, but I only figured it out part way through this year. Tracking pages of game reading, directly, rather than only counting them when I finish, means I can make some progress without bringing everything else to a halt, and that I'm not forced to choose between slogging through a game I'm no longer interested in and sacrificing the progress I've made so far.

We're dropping handwritten pages, as I said we might. One of my two most active fiction projects, I write exclusively on my phone, and the other primarily on the computer, so it's not doing much to facilitate progress in that area anymore, and needing to work on paper has at this point unambiguously become a deterrent to actually working on blog posts. On the subject of which, I wrote one (1) more blog post this year than last, 17 instead of 16. We're gonna get back to regular output, okay? We are. 

Most of these goals, and the ones that attend upon them, have at this point, of necessity, been pinned. That is to say, rather than setting them via the usual formula, which would result in unacceptably low targets from which it would likely take years to recover, I set them directly, based on what I hope to accomplish or, where fiction writing is concerned, what I think will set an appropriate scale for what I hope to accomplish. I put blog posts at 50+1d10 and got 57 again. This naturally puts the blog reading goal at 570+1d10, in this case, 576. Similarly, the goal for fiction writing remains 60,000 words, so the target for reading must be 60,000+1d100 pages, in this case 60033. Book reading goal is 111 this year - I did it as 100+2d6, so we'll see how that goes. I'm honestly sort of expecting the book target to naturally land where it needs to be now that I've got the goal for pages read set in a reasonable way that supports my goals. This was the worst year on record for rereading, which again I think might be related to spending more time actually talking to other people, an activity notoriously difficult to reconcile with listening to audiobooks. This, too, has been set manually, at 81 (75+1d10). I'll see where I can get with remembering to put on an audiobook any time I'm doing something compatible with it and not currently caught up on rereads (if I am, I should put on a podcast). The reading and writing time goals are not pinned, but they are intertwined. Rather than letting each one develop separately, and then aiming for 125% of prior year average, I calculate as though I were doing that and then average those, so the goals are the same every year even if I didn't accomplish the same amount. This year, it's 1007 hours each, which is a hair over 3 hours a day.

Fanfiction, nonfiction, and short fiction aren't really core, but they're the other reading and writing things, so here we are. I'm continuing to let nonfiction writing do what it's gonna do, for the most part - I do have a couple longer-form nonfiction projects where the additional pressure to get things done might be helpful, but it's as much to check whether, when I'm not writing a lot of fiction, it's because I'm writing a lot of nonfiction. And it supports good length on blog posts, especially in the absence of tracking handwritten pages. We've also added a nonfiction reading goal, currently set at an almost totally arbitrary 928 pages, which is in the same kind of "see how it goes" space from which the originally nonfiction target of 15,000 words arose. I'm hoping to discover if there's a relationship between how much nonfiction I read and how much nonfiction I can write, as there seems to be for fiction and blog posts. Of course, blog posts are part of nonfiction, so one of the things we'll learn this year is my level of patience for using the print function to check the page count on the blog posts I read. Separating fanfiction and short fiction reading largely accomplished what I wanted it to, even if I didn't do as much of either as I'd have liked. I have discovered something of an issue with longform fics-in-progress, because I don't like to count them until they're actually done and I've read the whole thing, but that means quite a lot of reading might not get counted in the year in which it occurs, and also what if they never get finished. Depending upon how this year goes, I may end up counting them as fic read when I get caught up, and potentially subsequently counting each chapter as an additional fic read (since a complete 100 word drabble also counts as a fic, this isn't unreasonable), and only counting it as a book read once either the whole thing is done or I have reason to believe it never will be, but we're gonna give it another year first. Fanfiction writing, measured by chapters posted, went pretty well, I think, and while I didn't hit the goal, the one of the coming year will be higher, which is...not the case for quite a few of my goals. I've gotten kind of into translating pop music from the aughties into the Old Tongue from Wheel of Time - if that becomes enough of a Thing, I may have to make it a separate goal, as the translations take less time, and use a different skill set, from most prose fiction writing.

Non-core goals

The overhead projector that I used for most of my video gaming and some of my tv watching broke this spring, which kinda put a cramp in my style in those areas. We're mostly up and running with using the living room tv instead, but we can't use that for the more difficult stuff in Hollow Knight because the switch controllers lag a little, and so does the connection between the switch and the tv. Nature of the physical space, and not a lot to be done about it except hope that increased efforts to make money will make it possible for us to repair the projector sometime this year. Time spent playing tabletop games (and, to a lesser extent sewing) was lower than it might have been because my GM's summer hiatus was both delayed and extended due to circumstances beyond either of our control. And that's as much as I think we need to say about how none of this is my fault, yeah?

I don't think we need to get into every single goal here. You can see the numbers for yourselves. Webcomics was one of only two goals I actually hit this year, and to be honest I have no real idea how that happened. Learning python is going very slowly, although I'm working on a dice calculator for my partner's ttrpg system, which at least gives me a project to learn on. I was also able to get in a lot of extra Skills at the last minute because one of my freelance projects required me to learn R. I was told that R is "statistics software" like SPSS (which I also don't know how to use, to be clear). It is not. It's an entire damn programming language, in which I am now marginally competent. There's even a chance this will help me with the statistical operations I need to learn to perform in Python. This year I will probably also install RPGmaker and start playing around with that, and maybe with some tools for Pokemon romhacks. I wish I'd managed to listen to more podcasts, but we're just gonna see if Trying Harder works for that. 

I think I've got the TCGOs targets about right now. They're gonna move some every year, of course, but what happened this year feels reasonable, manageable, and like it's keeping the place this thoroughly unproductive activity holds in my life both open and contained, which is what it was supposed to do. Music, on the other hand... Part of the issue with this one was the social thing, that it's hard to do something that benefits from headphones while interacting with other people, but also, listening to new music is harder when there's a bookkeeping element involved. I'm gonna keep it as a goal for this year, but after that we're going to evaluate whether it's doing more good than harm. Walking was straight up undercounted because I'm still using Pokemon Go to track distance, and it had an update that disconnected the function to count walking when the app wasn't open and it took me a while to notice, but I have also been walking less. Duolingo is the only non-core goal that got pinned - I made very little progress this year, and I don't want to risk letting the situation get worse. I am also looking for a different language learning app with a similar structure, as I'd really prefer not to support their AI nonsense, but most of the ones I tried are expensive, are bad, or don't have Russian as a language option. 

I got fewer little administrative tasks accomplished this year than I would have liked, but as a goal it is basically working how it's supposed to. The only difficulty is that it interacts a little oddly with Dracula Daily, and even in that area it's more of a blessing than a hindrance, if only because it prompts me to check my email more often than I otherwise might. 

New Goals

We already talked, back up in the discussion of core goals, about the addition of nonfiction reading. The only other thing I'm really adding this year is goals for cleaning and organizing my living space. Progress units for cleaning include: putting away a load of something (laundry, dishes), returning five objects that are not part of a load to their permanent homes, putting an object in its permanent home for the first time, retiring a temporary container (e.g. a cardboard box), and setting up a new permanent container. There's also a time goal to go with them. I have no idea whether either number was set in a good place, but there's no real way to find out except to give it a try and hope for the best. 

Potential goals that were considered and discarded for this year are TCGO wins, about which I didn't feel confident in setting even a tentative target, and which in any case are not really sufficiently under my control, and working with the dog, which I do want to do more but is a little fiddly and contingent, and about which again I had no real idea where to set such a goal, or even what a reasonable non-time unit might look like. Either of these might be considered for future years if I can get my head around them a little better. 

I don't feel like I really have any useful insights about my progress this year, anything you might be able to apply to your own work or even your understanding of mine, for whatever that may be worth to you. It didn't go well, but it did go. And I finished Ghani and started on its sequal, Kozatin, so there's that. Next post will be more Dresden Files, and it's gonna have to be soon if I want to stay on track. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 31

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I am fascinated by the way this book is playing with addiction. There's no central throughline, at least not that I've been able to identify so far, but almost this collage of ideas and images about it, putting all these pieces out to see what they look like together. Harry's asleep for a long time. It's pain that wakes him up, the burns at first, then the cuts, the scrapes and bruises. As soon as he's conscious, he remembers what happened the night before, what he did, and realizes, as he wasn't in any state to do at the time, that he almost certainly killed some of the human teenagers the vampires were feeding upon in his conflagration. He drags himself out of bed, narrowly makes it to the bathroom in time to vomit, and starts guilt spiraling. By the time Michael comes in, he's progressed from crying on the bathroom floor to crying in the shower. I can't speak for anyone else who's had substance use issues, but I know I felt personally attacked by this scene. As I said, this moment doesn't feel directly connected to Justine's connection with Thomas, or Harry's reaction to vampire venom, or Lydia's present dependence on amphetamines to protect herself from the Nightmare, or Bianca's inability to accept responsibility for Paula's death (caused by desperate need, by a loss of control, by Paula's own addiction to the venom), or Mort's alcoholism, or the introduction of the only smoker in the series whose habit is not meant to code him as morally dissolute, but it sure is in the same book as all of them. He reflects on how you can't do anything with magic that you don't basically believe in, that you don't believe on some level is a good and okay thing to do - I feel like this came up in one of the first two books, but it might not have, and it's certainly the first time it's been mentioned in this one. I'm not actually sure it applies the way he's applying it here; you can't do anything with magic that you don't believe in, sure, but he straight up forgot those kids were there, and while that's, y'know, horrible (although see previous posts re: drugged, concussed, exhausted), I don't think magic's inability to do something you don't believe is right prevents unintended consequences that you wouldn't have wanted.

Michael physically picks Harry up, dries him off, and puts a bathrobe on him. He called the fire department after extracting Harry and Lydia, and they pulled out eleven bodies, at least some of them nonhuman, and twelve living humans. The rest are unaccounted for, and at least some of them may have been cremated by the heat of the fire, a prospect which Harry finds appropriately disturbing. He's talking somewhat incoherently about how he was so stupid, it wasn't worth it... Michael tries to reassure him by pointing out that they killed a lot of vampires too, but that doesn't do anything to break the cycle of self-recrimination. When Harry finally pulls himself together a little, Michael starts filling him in. He was asleep for over a day, but Michael didn't want to take him to a hospital when the vampires are almost certainly looking for him. Murphy is in the hospital now - she's still asleep, and the police have been pulled off the investigation entirely. Susan, Justine, and Amoracchius all remain unaccounted for. Charity's recovering, but the new baby is getting weaker and the doctors can't figure out what's wrong. Michael called, but hasn't been to see them - he's been staying with Harry and Lydia to make sure they're safe. 

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Lydia's on the couch, asleep. Apparently Michael only got her settled down about half an hour ago, which has the fascinating implication that, since he's been here since he brought Harry back, and that was over a day ago, he's just been kind of...hanging out with Lydia for the past almost 24 hours? Was it awkward? Did they talk at all? If so, about what? Honestly I feel like there's a short story to be written here, or at least a fanfic. Michael also finally reveals to the reader where he and Harry know her from, that she was one of the kids hanging around with Kravos. Harry, who has now progressed to the 'unsteadily getting a glass of water' stage, says there will be consequences for what he did. Michael asks whether he's talking about the Rule of Three, which Harry has previously expressed he doesn't believe in that. Harry says he doesn't, that it's too tidy, too much like the world being fair and just, but tha there are consequences for what you do with magic. He quotes Proverbs here, which surprises Michael a little. I still don't think I can make sense of what parts of the Bible Harry does and doesn't know. He knows Proverbs, and the Psalms (Old Testament), but not Noah's Arc (also Old Testament), or the Parable of the Talents, which is in the New Testament (Matthew 25:14-30 and Luke 19:11-37). We don't know one way or another if he understood the John 3:16 reference from a few chapters ago. As an aside, Harry initially goes for a can of coke, then puts it back in favor of the water, unsure whether his stomach is up to the soda. This is mildly interesting, inasmuch as coke is conventionally held to be good for an upset stomach. 

Michael says he has to go, that his family needs him, now that Harry's awake and presumably able to look after himself and Lydia. He feels bad about it, despite Harry's efforts to assure Michael that it's okay, that looking after his family is the right and reasonable thing to do. Part of it is, Michael isn't sure he'd be making the same choice if he hadn't lost the Sword, isn't sure what he'd want to do, isn't sure what he should want to do. Normal human instinct is gonna point him towards being with his family, trying to look after them, even though there isn't much concrete action he can take to help with the recovery from a difficult labor, or a medically unexplained failure to thrive. If nothing else, he can provide care and reassurance for his six other kids rather than leaving them with Father Forthill or their grandparents. His duty as a Knight says he should be here, with Harry, protecting Lydia, gearing up for the next round in the struggle against things that go bump in the night. He might feel less reflexively drawn to that, just at present, but in addition to its being a holy calling, he likes the work. The previous chapter was at some pains to emphasize that. He thinks losing the Sword might have been a sign that he's meant to give up being a Knight, and he both wants that to be the case and doesn't, so he's getting a double dose of guilt, because wishing to be released from a holy calling feels unworthy, weak, but what kind of person doesn't want a change of circumstances that will let them spend more time with, be better positioned to take care of, the people they love? Harry loses the thread of what Michael's saying because something occurs to him, or tries to. All he can articulate is that something about the situation feels off. Michael isn't sure what he means.

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Before Michael can leave, there's a knock and the door, forceful and uncoordinated. On the very reasonable assumption that this is the attack by the Red Court they've been expecting, Michael grabs a hot poker and takes up position near the fireplace, and Harry pulls the door open without actually putting himself in front of it, causing their visitor to stumble into the room. It's Thomas, dressed in street clothes and carrying a plastic rifle case. Harry smacks him around a little, and then Michael stands on him and puts the hot poker up close to his face. He's bleeding where Harry split his lip, giving us our first look at the pink, pearlescent blood of the White Court. Thomas wants them to listen to him, but only narrowly convinces them not to kill him on the spot, on the basis that they have a common interest. He claims that he was going to double cross Bianca as soon as he'd gotten Justine back and was out from under direct observation, only of course Bianca double crossed him first. More importantly, from the perspective of Our Heroes, Bianca still has both Susan and Justine. They're still alive the last time he checked, and he wants to work together to get them back, which is a nice, clean, self-interested motive we can all believe in. Michael says he can tell Thomas is a liar just by standing near him, which is honestly fascinating and not, so far as I can recall, ever followed up on. Thomas readily agrees, but swears by, among other things, his own "stunning good looks" that he's not lying in this instance. On the surface, this sounds kind of facetious and very, very Thomas, but let's remember that this is the book where the consequences, for a wizard, of swearing by their power and breaking their word were introduced. Thomas is a White Court Vampire. And we see, in Blood Rites, that he would not look like this without his vampiric nature. His stunning good looks are his power, part of it, and a crucial aspect of his ability to do things like feed upon humans. Swearing by that isn't a small thing, nor nearly as facetious as it sounds. Harry, however, doesn't consider any of this, and tells Michael to kill him. At which point Thomas straight up begs, offering to do or pay whatever's necessary to convince them. This gets Harry to take a proper look at Thomas, to finally notice that he's scared, exhausted, desperate. He tells Michael to let Thomas get up, and Thomas directs him to open the rifle case, saying it contains a "down payment" for their help. Harry does, exercising appropriate caution. Apparently, Thomas was able to retrieve Amoracchius. I feel like he could have lead with that? Michael legit cries a little, and, once he's made sure the Sword is undamaged, tells God, and then Harry, that he understands now that he isn't meant to retire yet, that there's still work to be done. 

Thomas gives them all the information he has. The manor house wasn't destroyed - most of it is still fine, after the fire. The unaccounted-for human kids are there, and Thomas thinks they're turning some of them into new vampires, to make up their losses. He saw Mavra leave with two of them - she's getting out of town. Susan and Justine are being kept somewhere in the house, but he doesn't know where. And Bianca has hired additional security: humans with machine guns. Since Thomas doesn't know the layout of the house, Harry plans to wake Lydia up and ask her if she knows anything about where Susan and Justine are, since she's been inside more of the house than they have, and may additionally have some insights to offer from her prophetic gifts. Michael says he doesn't think she's slept in days, which causes Harry to realize, about 15 seconds too late, what's suspicious about her presence and their escape. She's possessed by the Nightmare, and figuring that out does Harry absolutely no good as she physically picks him up and throws him at the fireplace. 

This will probably be the last Dresden Files post of the 2023-2024 Eeveeyear. In a few days, we'll talk about what I accomplished, and didn't this year, and what's coming in the next one. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 30

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This chapter opens with a description of how in history books and the like tend to present battles as these very orderly things with neat formations acting as cohesive units, and how that's an illusion and real battle is messy and chaotic, how no diagram can convey the noise, the terror, etc. There's some unpacking to do here. Battles are always loud and scary, obviously, and it's true that the blocks-and-arrows diagrams that you apparently see in history lectures (due to a series of hilarious mishaps, I have successfully avoided attending a conventional history class of any kind, and my classes on labor history, Pacific Northwest History, and the counterculture fashions of the 1960s and '70s did not spend a great deal of time on battles, nor, now that I think of it, did they have anything immediately recognizable as textbooks. I did take a world history class, but it was a survey course and didn't get into enough detail about any single conflict for this kind of analysis, and the assigned reading was all primary sources in translation.) do not really convey this. However, in the kind of battles in which formations are likely to feature in the first place, it is not actually natural or inevitable for them to fall apart into a confused melee - especially if you're winning, formations tend to hold together, and the usefulness of the people in them is often contingent on their doing so. Also though, absolutely none of that applies here. We've got five people, one and a half of them noncombatants, with wildly divergent cultural backgrounds, only two of whom have any prior experience fighting together, all of whom variously mistrust most of the others, with wildly mismatched weapons and fighting styles and absolutely no time to prepare. Formations are out of the question on almost every possible level. (They do all speak the same language). They're also in a really, really bad position. 

Thomas does a little show and tell about opening the blood reservoir in the Reds' bellies in order to take them down, which is great information for Harry but almost fatally distracts Michael. Kyle briefly appears with a gun, but Harry uses the sword cane as a channel for a magnetism spell and gets it away from him. I believe this is the first time we see Harry do the magnet thing. Michael creates an opening, which Susan and Justine reinforce by hitting one vampire who tries to advance out of the line with holy water, incapacitating it. Thomas says they need to take out Bianca, which is reasonable in premise, but if she's not actually between them and their objectives (get Lydia, get out) probably isn't worth the extra time and effort. This portion of the fight also makes a point to showcase Thomas's physical capabilities - lifting a vampire straight off the ground while it's biting his arm, swatting a thrown knife out of the air with his sword. I'm not actually sure there comes a point in this book where we need to know about that, but it's a reasonably smooth establishment. 

Up on the dais, Mavra was distracted enough by all the blood that she hasn't gotten around to killing Lydia yet, a stroke of luck that, under the circumstances, I think can very reasonably be attributed to divine intervention. Harry gets Michael's attention, and uses the magnet spell again, dragging Amoracchius, and Mavra, when she refuses to let go of it, into the courtyard below, breaking at least several of the vampire bones in the process, although this doesn't stop her from physically jumping straight back up onto it. (Like, from the side, she doesn't use the steps). Michael does the dagger cross thing again, directly opposing Mavra's weird shadow magic, giving Harry time to check for Bianca and, when he doesn't find her, grab Lydia. Michael is apparently having a great time, but the rest of the team is fairing less well down in the courtyard. Faith magic doesn't work as well on the Red Court as it does on the Black, so Susan isn't able to keep them at bay with a cross. She does managing to take one out by vaporizing a jar of holy water on a spotlight, and then shooting the newly skinless vampire several times in the blood reservoir. 

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And then Bianca grabs Justine, and licks her, down the side of her neck, incapacitating her with venom. Bianca calls checkmate, but Harry disagrees, pointing out, in essence, that he and his allies shouldn't have been able to accomplish what they already have, not against her entire assembled court, and so it probably isn't a great idea to count on a reasonable assessment of what else they're capable of. He throws in a bit about how vampires can live forever, and do they really want to risk that, and seems to get somewhere in demoralizing them. So Bianca turns her attention to Thomas, offering to let him leave, with Justine, uncontested, if he "gives" Harry, Michael, and Susan to her. Thomas, in what will be the first of many demonstrations that he does not always think very clearly where Justine is concerned, agrees, and pushes Susan into the crowd of vampires. Bianca barely takes another second to gloat before betraying Thomas, telling Kyle and Mavra to kill him. 

And Harry...snaps. He actually blacks out for a second while he's calling his magic up. I honestly don't know if that's related to how drained he is, and how much he's abruptly trying to do, or purely an emotional thing. And then he sets absolutely everything on fire. He also stops his own heart. I had to go back over this bit a couple times, because I initially didn't take "I felt my heart clench in my chest and stop beating." to indicate more than a momentary disruption, but no. I think this conflagration may actually constitute a death curse. Michael starts trying to drag Harry and Lydia out of there, but Harry's actively dying and the air is now full of smoke. Michael directly asks God to show them a way out, and it looks like his prayers are answered - the smoke parts, just for them. Harry collapses, and Michael finally realizes that he doesn't have a heartbeat and stops to do CPR. So we're gonna add "had a heart attack, basically" to the list of things Harry is dealing with for what remains of the book. By some metrics, he was dead for a little bit there. Michael gets his heart going again, and they follow the extremely obvious tube of clear air towards the exit. There's a figure at the other end who really looks like they might be an angel. Harry asks where Susan is, and Michael says he'll go back for her. At the far end of their escape route is Lea, not an angel, and this one's actually harder to easily class as divine intervention than Mavra's critical distraction. Harry and Michael naturally assume they're in for a fight that they absolutely do not have the wherewithal to win, but Lea basically shoos them out, explaining that she wants Harry whole and alive and useful, not drained and battered. Michael leaves Harry and Lydia in the truck and tries to go back for Susan. He returns, without her, but Harry is by this point far too out of it to say anything. Michael starts the car, and Harry falls unconscious. 

Sorry for the short post. This one is mostly action, which doesn't usually give me a lot to work with in terms of analysis. I'm gonna try to get another Dresden post, and maybe something else, up before the end of September, but like, no promises. As always, if you want to increase the ratio of time I spend making blog posts to time I spend doing other things, feel free to become a Patron. The button's up at the top. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

I Learned Something

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Remember how like two years ago I said I don't like changing targets mid-year? And then a year after that, I changed the way I counted progress on one of my goals, so that I wouldn't have to change it, because there had been a calculation error? Well, this year, I'm changing two goals, six weeks from the end of the tracking period. 

A lot of writers talk about needing to read in order to write. Most will talk about this in terms of the benefits of learning technique, or, more cynically and less productively, keeping track of market trends. A few talk about how writing without reading is like trying to only exhale without ever inhaling. That's a pretty good metaphor. A couple years back I redid the way I calculate my reading and writing time goals to make them always equal, and that was a pretty important step. But over the past couple of years, I've discovered two other significant correlations. I can only write about as many words of fiction a year as I read pages of fiction, and I can only write about 10% as many blog posts as I read. By the time most of you see this, the targets on the progress bars will have changed, but by that metric, my goals for reading books and blogs this year were barely and less than half of what was necessary, respectively, to actually accomplish what I meant to in terms of writing those things. The original targets were 32357 pages read, and 223 blog posts, if you want to run the numbers yourself, and apparently at some point I tried to fix this with a smaller adjustment because my spreadsheet shows a target of 35357 pages read instead. 

I seriously considered just leaving the goals as they were until the end of September, and talking about this when I created new goals for 2024-2025, but honestly, that's too long to be behind and kind of needlessly struggling on some of the most important, most visible, work I do. I'm still gonna be behind. There's more catchup to do, on both the reading necessary to do my work and the actual doing of it, to accomplish in like six weeks. But part of what we do around here is learning in public, and I don't think any of you were watching my progress so closely that your lives will be seriously disrupted by this change. To avoid common factor issues, I'm starting from the basic formulae indicated by the new information, and adding a d100 and d10 respectively, so the new goals will be 60,099 pages read, and 577 blog posts read. We'll see how it goes I guess. 

Next post will be Dresden Files. It might take me a little longer to get to The Very Next Post, but I promise in the long run this change will benefit the quality and speed of updates around here.

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 29

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Harry reflects on the various types of fear a person can experience. These are associated with metals in a
vaguely alchemical way, albeit from the perspective of someone who thinks "alchemy" is a fancy word for potion making and has never seriously studied the art. The galvanizing fear that spurs you to action is silver, the fear that builds up in you at night, when you're alone and made the mistake of trusting how you feel about your life after 9 p.m. is leaden, and the fear Harry's currently experiencing, tight, anticipatory, unbearable, is coppery. Usually, when Harry is scared, the next thing that happens is he gets angry, but that's..not happening here. Maybe it's the missing chunk of his soul, maybe the situation is just to damn spooky, but anger has failed to materialize. He does, however, have a sword cane, which he characterizes as "real steel" rather than the kind that comes from men's magazine, a rather puzzling claim since I'm nearly certain those are made of steel too. Like, I know he means it's sharp, sturdy, and properly weighted so that it's actually usable as a weapon, but "real steel" and "made in the late Victorian Era" don't actually convey that. They probably had shoddily made, largely decorative, sword canes in 1889 too. Since anger has failed him, he looks to reason next. He's got a whole thing here about fear coming from ignorance and reason being how we reach knowledge. But there's also the much less abstract thing where engaging your think brain will tend to make the panicky lizard calm down and shut up. 

So he starts going through the facts of the case. Someone, presumably Mavra since it's her magic on the barbed wire spells, got the ghosts stirred up, which made the barrier go wibbly and let the Nightmare through. The Nightmare has it out for Harry, Michael, and the people they're close to. The Nightmare didn't come after them once the sun came down. Also they're surrounded by monsters. This is when we get Harry's second Plan Realization. He thinks Bianca is pulling a Vlad Tepesh - invite all her personal enemies over for a party and then kill. He specifically claims that Vlad burned the building down, but I have not been able to find any sources confirming that Vlad Dracula ever did any such thing, although with the state of search engines these days, it's possible I missed something. Certainly I have heard the "Invited his enemies for dinner and then burned the building down" story attributed to more than one historical figure over the years, and certainly, Vlad Tepesh is said to have killed (more precisely, impaled) over 200 of the boyars of Tîrgovişte following an Easter celebration at Poenari in1457, shortly after he took the throne of Wallachia for the second time (of three - Dracula sensationalism notwithstanding, this guy's history is legitimately kinda wild), and in 1462, the harbor town (now a small city) of Brǎila was burned to the ground by Mehmed the Conqueror, following a series of frustrating defeats against Vlad. Like, "invite all your personal enemies over for dinner and then burn the building down" sounds not only like something Vlad the Impaler would have done, but like something any number of his contemporaries would have done, I just can't confirm that any of them actually did. Nor can I confirm that either Dresden's conception of Bianca's plan or her actual plan were informed by the "Red Wedding" portrayed in George R. R. Martin's A Storm of Swords, as it came out some 10 months before Grave Peril, putting any influence of the former on the latter in the awkward zone of "Possible if Jim Butcher really liked it and his publishers were willing to accept revisions, plausible if he had an advance review copy and got the book early". 

Harry explains his theory to Michael and Susan, and of necessity to Thomas and Justine since they're also standing there. He also clarifies that Bianca would have to get him to break the rules of hospitality first, just killing everyone here, or even everyone she dislikes, would open her up to retribution from every enemy faction she involved, and the mistrust of every ally she has, which means she probably has a plan for forcing them to do that, and their best bet is obviously to get out of there before she can put it into action. Unfortunately, the only exit not blocked by Red Court vampires is instead blocked by Mavra. Michael thinks that without the Sword, he can take two, maybe three of them on himself - enough to possibly get Harry and Susan out, but not to get himself out with them. He's...disturbingly enthusiastic about this idea, and claims it's his job to protect people from things like the Red Court. Which may be true in broad terms, but it is not his job to protect people from the consequences of their own stupid decisions, on account of that whole Free Will thing. Justine, who's a regular human and has neither much choice in where she goes nor much idea what's going on around her most of the time, might be covered by his mandate, and it's actually possible that Thomas, who was sent here by his father, would be as well, but Harry and Susan both came to this thing voluntarily, in full knowledge of the danger involved. But of course that's not really the point. What Michael's actually expressing here is suicidal ideation. He lost the Sword, and while that was obviously Harry's fault, Michael doesn't see it that way. His wife and newborn son are in serious medical danger, and the doctors think he abuses Charity. He hasn't gotten much sleep the past couple days. He's probably getting a cold, with the amount of running around in the wet he did night before last. (I think it was night before last). So yeah, dying righteously to protect other people probably sounds pretty good right about now. Harry picks up on this pretty much immediately, but because he and Michael are both cisgender men, rather than saying something like "Are you doing okay?" he calls Michael's plan stupid and tells him to "ease off the martyr throttle".

Further planning is interrupted by Bianca's announcement that it's time to distribute gifts to the guests. She
also namedrops the Lords of Outer Night in the closing of her speech, the first time they've been referenced. The first one called up is Ferrovax, to whom she gives a small cask of gold. At least, I assume it's gold, since he's a dragon - technically all we're told is that it's "something that sparkled and shone".

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When they bow to each other before he leaves the dias, she dips her head a fraction lower than his, which is interesting, although I have no real idea what to make of it. Thomas is next up, and asks Harry to stand with Justine while he's talking to Bianca. Justine takes the opportunity to tell Harry that the Red Court hate Thomas, and Lord Raith was the one invited, but sent Thomas, lowest and least regarded of the White Court, as an insult. She characterizes Thomas as Lord Raith's "bastard", which is technically true - he and Maggie were never married - but doesn't really get at the relevant issues. So either Justine doesn't have the whole picture, she's deliberately simplifying to avoid having to explain the whole messy situation in the limited time they have to talk, or Jim Butcher's ideas about how the Raith household works aren't fully cooked yet. Apparently Bianca wanted Justine to be hers, presumably as an employee of the Velvet Room, but Thomas got her first, which also creates personal animosity between him and Bianca. Justine sort of implies that she blames herself for this, or at least lets Harry think that. He makes gestures in the direction of trying to rescue her from Thomas, but she shuts that down and asks instead that he take them with him when they make their escape. And if he doesn't agree to that, she'll try to get on Bianca's good side by telling her that Harry is planning to escape, and that she heard him talking about killing her, although the latter is not true. She also points out that if she and Thomas don't make it out, Bianca will almost certainly capture her and force her to do sex work. Harry says he won't let that happen to her, but that he's not willing to help Thomas, and asks why she cares, given that he's not human and is literally eating her life force. She points out that he's also a person and hasn't done anything to hurt Harry. He agrees, because he basically has no choice, it's the right thing to do, and also Justine smells nice. Thomas returns with a single one-way ticket to Hawaii and the deed to a condo there. When Harry informs him that they're all going to escape together, he apologizes and says he asked Justine not to get Harry involved. 

And then it's Harry's turn.  Nearly the first thing he does, once they're close enough to talk, is ask Bianca how she plans to kill him. Bianca instead explains why she's going to kill him, presenting an extremely skewed version of events in which Dresden provoked her, extracted her cooperation through threats, and drove her into the frenzied state in which she killed Paula. (Who is, notably, in this scene and this scene only, actually called Paula, despite being referred to as Rachel both before and after this point). What actually happened was that she attacked Dresden in the first 90 seconds of their conversation, taking his saying he wanted to talk about Jennifer Stanton as the final proof that, as she already suspected, he killed her. He only threatened her in response to her threatening him, and only laid out the consequences of her killing him - he didn't coerce her giving him the information he wanted. And what provoked her bloodlust was the bleeding from a scratch she gave him in that initial attack. She also tries to blame him for the destruction she's about to cause, because her desire for revenge was what motivated her to amass the power and allies necessary to carry out her Evil Plan. He lays out what he currently thinks that is, and she says if that's what he thinks happened, he's in for an unpleasant surprise. Then she shows him the headstone. Here lies Harry Dresden. He died doing the right thing. She says it comes with a plot in Graceland "near to dear little Inez". The wording there makes it sound like she's not just giving him a sense of the location, but I genuinely have no idea what she's talking about. It's either implied or established in Ghost Story that Mab was using Inez as an avatar to communicate with Harry while he's ghosty and she's busy, but I don't think we ever get a clear picture of who, or what, Inez is when she's not being used by Mab that way, much less what significance Bianca might attach to putting Harry, or his remains, in close proximity to her. Harry tries to do like Mavra just did to him, challenging Bianca to make the first move. She refuses, naturally, but makes it clear that when Harry does do something to break hospitality, she's not just going to kill him, she's going to kill Thomas, Justine, Michael, and Susan too. This also includes, and I cannot stress this enough, the third explanation of the rules of hospitality in this chapter. Gonna assume this was an issue of things being written or edited out of order. It's a small thing, but she calls him Harry here; he says not to, only his friends call him Harry, and she accepts the correction, addressing him as Mister Dresden immediately afterwards. I wouldn't call it out at all, except that it sits in notable contrast to the other times he's done the "My friends call me Harry" thing. Marcone accepted it, but made a show of it, almost condescendingly - he was making a point of being polite, showing that he can be reasonable, that he wants to work with Harry. Nicodemus engages with the implicit power play more directly, insisting that if he's going to call Harry "Dresden", Harry should call him "Archleone". Bianca...just accepts it. Apparently without thinking, since if she'd considered it even a little, I don't think she'd have made the concession just like that. This is not inexplicable - she's extremely new to having the kind of power necessary to challenge Harry, and she showed deference to Ferrovax as well, but that's kind of the thing - we're being shown a character in transition, in the middle of an active, perceptible character arc. And that's not usually something you do with a character you're going to kill this book unless you're trying to make them sympathetic.

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Michael asks Harry how it went, but Harry waves him off so he can think, try to figure out what exactly Bianca is going to do. Lea goes up, and receives what we later learn was the cursed dagger, although all we learn here is that it's something in a small, black case. Being fae, Lea must give a gift of equal value in return, and she gives Bianca Amoracchius. Everyone takes a second to appreciate it, and then Bianca calls Mavra to the dias. It's at this point that Harry figures out what Bianca was planning, but we get to see it play out as Bianca offer Mavra the sword, and Lydia, cleaned up since the last time Harry saw her, but drugged and restrained. At which point Michael also figures it out. Right here, right now, under these circumstances, the sword can be unmade, if Mavra uses it to kill an innocent. At some point I would like please to see the definition of "innocent" used by the forces that govern these things, given that Lydia has, among other things, voluntarily consorted with demons, or at least with Kravos, but if it just counts anyone under 21 as innocent by default regardless of anything they've done, that would be pretty fair. Now, unmaking one of the Swords is not, in all cases, an irreversible proposition, and Michael might know that, given that he wasn't terribly surprised by what happened with Fidelaccius. On the other hand, that's the sword of faith, and might be subject to different rules, and also, as we learn in I think Proven Guilty, the other two Swords have been reforged at some point in the past, maybe more than once, but Amoracchius hasn't, and that might matter. So might standing by and letting it happen, as compared to its being unmade by accident in a moment of passion. I think I brought this up a few chapters back, but how the hell was this orchestrated? Lea doesn't voluntarily work with the Red Court, any more than like, Nicodemus would. She stands to gain nothing, that I can see, from helping force Harry into this situation. Bianca must have known Lea was planning to give her the sword, but it also can't have been her original idea, because she invited Harry before Lea even got it. I guess she was hoping that just trying to kill Lydia would be enough to force Dresden to act? That's...a substantially weaker plan, not least because Mavra, who has no personal beef with Harry, wouldn't necessarily have been inclined to kill her right then and there if not for the opportunity it offered. She would have done it to force Michael's involvement, maybe, but neither she nor Bianca had any way of knowing Harry would bring him, and other parts of this plan seem to have been contingent on Susan's attendance. And yeah, okay, there's some solid evidence for Susan having been magically compelled to sneak into the party, and with Murphy taken off the board almost first thing, it's unlikely that Harry would have brought anyone other than Michael. But how on earth did they plan on getting the sword? There's no way Lea was in on the initial planning here.

Michael says they have to stop her. Thomas says it's one girl's life, and the sword, balanced against all of them. Harry takes perhaps 1.5 whole seconds to think about it, long enough for Michael get his knives out and prepare to go in alone, before he pulls the blade out of his sword cane. Thomas, who absolutely doesn't want to be here, draws his sword as well. Given that Harry's own description of his ability with a sword is that "among people who know more than nothing, I don't rate well", and that Thomas, while supernaturally strong and agile, is also scrupulously effort averse and probably hasn't gotten in a lot of practice, making Michael by far the most accomplished swordsman among the three of them, I feel like someone should maybe...trade weapons with him? Although I'm still kinda uncertain why he didn't bring one of his nonmagical backup broadswords. Were they all in the van, and he didn't feel like going back to the grocery store parking lot to grab one? Anyway, they form up and get ready to fight just a truly unreasonable amount of vampires. 

I'll try to be a little faster on the next post, I promise. Among other things, we're closer than it looks to the end of the "year" as I measure these things on my spreadsheet, and I'll have to pick up the pace if I don't want to end up even more behind than I did last year. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Herbal Medicine for Fantasy Writers Part 1 - Making It Up (Kind Of)

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Sometimes, you're writing a pre-industrial or non-industrial setting, and you need a character to get, and
be treated for, a condition that can be diagnosed and treated in the here and now, but wasn't known, or wasn't treatable, in the technologically equivalent real-world time period. Maybe there's no magical healing in your world, maybe it's not accessible to the character right now (or their condition is chronic and it's just not available consistently), or maybe it doesn't work for this particular thing. In any case, you know what you need to do: treat it with Herbs. 

However, this can get kind of tricky, as the nature of conditions that were not treatable until the advent of modern medicine is that there probably isn't a well-established and effective herbal remedy. What's more, you don't always want to just invent a plant out of whole cloth, and if you repurpose a real plant, there's a solid chance that someone will Notice. So here's what you do. Please note that this is going to involve a lot of Wikipedia, and if you don't like having a bunch of tabs open, you may want to use a separate window. 

1. Look up current medications for the condition you're trying to treat - Wikipedia will probably have a good list, but feel free to look elsewhere as well. The first thing you're gonna do is look at the Wikipedia page for each medication, and do two things - first, note the mechanism of action. This will usually be expressed as Something Something Inhibitor, Something Something Agonist, or Something Something Antagonist, although the specifics will vary. 

2. Read their pages to see if they have any known natural sources. Let's say your character is a recovering alcoholic, and either support groups don't exist or you have Things To Say about medication assisted treatment. We're gonna skip issues of withdrawal for now, that's a different medication process. For the post-detox treatment of alcoholism, there are basically thee medications: acamprosate, naltrexone, and disulfiram. Disulfiram is an easy one here - its wikipedia page straight up lists the other substances that do what it does, and one of them is coprine, which naturally occurs in inky cap mushrooms. (To a sufficient extent that another name for the mushroom is Tippler's Bane). Unfortunately, what it does is make alcohol violently, rather than mildly, toxic. Unless there are no other options, or the healer providing treatment believe that addiction is a character flaw and wants to punish our alcoholic as much as he wants to help, this is probably not what we want to go with. (Although there are other situations where we might. For example, if the character is a known drunk, and will need at some point to prove that she was sober when some particular thing occurred, being able to say "I take stuff that makes me extremely and immediately ill if I drink, so since I wasn't obviously, debilitatingly sick, you can be sure I wasn't drunk." might be very helpful.) 

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3. With the mechanisms of action in hand, start finding out what else does what they do. You may be able to find a list of Something Something Antagonists, but more likely you'll need to follow the name of the Something Something Receptor, scroll down to Ligands, and then find Antagonists. Naltrexone is a competitive opioid receptor antagonist, or a weak partial opioid receptor agonist. Acamprosate is a Mystery, but currently believed to be an NMDA receptor antagonist and positive allosteric modulator of GABA-a receptors. It's okay if you don't know what those words mean - I'm not actually sure on the last one. There are a quite a few opioid receptor antagonists, but following all of them down, plus a google search for "naturally occurring opioid receptor antagonists" doesn't point us to any plants or fungi with this effect, even after we spell "occurring" correctly on the third try. It looks like naltrexone is off the table, although it and most drugs like it are derived from opioids, so if you have alchemists or something like them and a willingness to fake it beyond the scope of this post, you may have options. Let's try acamprosate. There are a lot of NMDA receptor antagonists, and they come in flavors, but we can immediately narrow our search a little by finding acamprosate on the list of "uncompetitive channel blockers". (I must stress, again, it's okay if you don't know what that means). PCP is apparently on this list. It's synthetic, but it's also an old drug with a complex history so we'll bookmark that for further investigation. Agmatine is apparently present in fermented foods, so we'll bookmark that as well. Argiotoxin is certainly naturally occuring - it comes from orb-weavers, an incredibly common class of spider found just about everywhere, many of which are not dangerous to humans. I have no idea if the amount of argiotoxin produced by a normal spider bite would do anything here, but if you already have giant spiders, again, options. Ethanol is on this list, and is of course naturally occurring, but rather defeats the purpose here. Magnesium?! Just...magnesium. If managing this with food feels like an option, maybe we can consider this in combination with agmatine. A search for "naturally occurring nmda receptor antagonists" (not in quotes) retrieves an article listing several herbs used in Chinese traditional medicine, and describes how they operate. Unfortunately, they use more descriptive terms than "competitive agonist" and "uncompetitive channel blocker", so now we are going to need to know what those words mean. Wikipedia says that "uncompetitive antagonists block binding to a site within the ion channel" an includes a helpful little diagram, so let's see how that lines up. It sounds like that could be the same thing as "block NMDA-induced current", and one of the things listed as doing that (and nothing else) is an antitussive, a cough supressant, of which there are several (mostly DXM and its relatives) on our list of uncompetitive channel blockers. This sounds very plausible. Folium ginko is the dried leaf of Ginko biloba - finally, a plant! So for our NMDA receptor antagonist, we can use foods rich in agmatine and magnesium, a great deal of orb weaver venom, or ginko leaf tea. Or some combination thereof. 

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4. Technically this should be part of step 3, but that's gotten unconscionably long, so we'll have a separate step for finding our positive allosteric modulator of GABA-a receptors. If we go to the wikipedia page for the GABA-a receptor, and scroll down past a lot of words I don't know, we'll find a description of its ligands, with examples for each type, and there's a decent number of positive allosteric modulators. Just skimming this list, you might actually see some words you do recognize, including ethanol, niacin, theanine, and menthol, as well as some drugs you might know, like barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and zolpidem. Because we appear to have a lot of good options, we're going to start by just checking the ones we can't immediately identify as synthetic drugs. We have options here. Honkiolol and magnolol both come from magnolia bark and seed cones, biacalin comes from skullcap, kavalactones come from kava and shell ginger, niacin is a B vitamin (it's in food), theanine comes from green tea, valerenic acid comes from valerian, and menthol comes from mint. 

5. Make your choices. This is where you have to turn your writer brain back on. Unless you're just describing how something would, theoretically, be treated, for atmosphere, the exact regimen you settle on is going to be informed by the individual you're treating, and her circumstances, and may not represent the entire space of what's available. This particular example is a lot easier if your story is set in Asia or somewhere with a similar biome, because the best confirmed food source of agmatine is doenjang, a traditional Korean fermented soybean paste, and ginko, magnolia, green tea, shell ginger, and one kind of skullcap are all also from Asia. In a European setting, or Europe with the serial numbers filed off, we will have a harder time finding good sources of agmatine (although most fish, meat, and cheese has some), and the word "ginko" may be immersion breaking (although see below), although valerian or concentrated mint are perfectly reasonable sources for our GABA-a modulator, and we can source magnesium from peas, beans, greens, or flaxseed. Obviously, if trade exists, we may be able to work around this, but that's a decision dependent on other factors. So let's say our alcoholic is in a Vaguely European setting. She's getting some dietary intervention. Peas, meat, and fish are all good sources of niacin, peas will add magnesium and the animal products some amount of agmatine. This is great, because she hates peas - conflict! We'll also give her the ink cap mushrooms, less because they're really going to help her than because it makes her partner feel better. We'll use a powder that can go in her tea, rather than making her eat them, though. We can give her valerian for the GABA, maybe with corn mint (we'll make an extract using vinegar). But it's very hard to do without that ginko, especially when we don't have a really good agmatine source. Dextromethorphan, a (hopefully) similar NMDA receptor antagonist, has a half-life of four hours, so that's how often she'll need to drink the tea.

6. Fix the names. Look, there's no particular reason ginko couldn't grow in Europe, it just doesn't, without humans bringing it there. Corn mint, on the other hand, does grow in Europe, but people get distracted by the word "corn". Since you've likely been to the wikipedia pages for both plants at least three times by this point in the process, you probably got this already, but look at alternate names. No one knows what a "maidenhair tree" is, so if you say that's in the tea, it won't be distracting to the casual reader, and the reader who looks things up will be able to follow your reasoning. Corn mint is also called "field mint" or "wild mint", and you can take your pick depending on which has the feel you want. 

7. Explaining and describing. This tea. Is going to taste. Terrible. It's gonna smell like a minty mouse cage. It's gonna be bitter, sour, unsettlingly sweet, and disturbingly thick (because of the mushroom powder), taste subtly but unmistakably like dirt, and burn a little going down. Obviously whether our alcoholic resents this, tolerates it with grim resignation, or thinks it's what she deserves is gonna be down to her characterization. If we don't want tea here, we could make a vinegar based tincture with the herbs (still awful, but you can get it over with faster), and mix the mushroom powder in with the peas she's going to be eating with every meal. Chances are no one in your setting knows what an NMDA receptor is, so we could describe her treatment as being meant to balance her humors, or keep her mind level, or as sort of doing a little of what alcohol does, depending on what a setting-appropriate understanding of medicine looks like here, and what kind of tone you're going for. Since food as part of medical care is more normal than not most times and most places, you probably won't run into any trouble there. 

To be absolutely clear, I can't say for sure if this would work. Medication assisted treatment for alcoholism is a newish thing, newer even than for opiates, and there's a reason we use real drugs instead of herbs. But this isn't really about medical accuracy. Taking this approach will produce results that don't sound wrong, and that will show weirdos like me who google every named medicinal herb in a fantasy series that you did your research.