sholio | (no subject)

It's interesting to me what's fun for different people. Like ... today, I wrote for a few hours in the morning, and then I've spent the last 10 hours or so buried in InDesign (with occasional detours over to Photoshop), first working on a freelance project I'm actually getting paid for, then working on getting Freebird reformatted for a digital edition. It's immensely fun to me. I don't mind that I spent 15 hours in front of the computer today. I don't really want to stop. However, I can imagine this being absolute boring hell for some people. (I haven't spoken to a single other human being besides Orion. I did take a walk with the dog and made from-scratch beef stew, though!)

On a completely different topic, I'm reading a book called The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, which is a lot of fun, but I was going through the chapter on city life, which was discussing fraud and shoddy business practices in city markets (spoiled grain concealed by handfuls of fresh grain, fraudulent measuring tools, iron baked into loaves of bread to increase its weight, etc) and the merchant guilds' policing of such things .... which obviously sent my brain straight to Peter Burke, Medieval Market Fraud Inspector. PLEASE, someone tell me I'm much too busy to write this.

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Peter Burke, Medieval Market Fraud Inspector.

That would be epic.

Right??? :D

I'm going to be really sad if you're too busy to write that. :P

Then again, I'm also kinda holding out for the Guardian Angel Peter prequel where he deals with Roman bread fraud. Or at least the sequel where he tells Neal and Elizabeth about his life as a bread fraud inspector.

I'm pretty sure your bread fraud idea is what made my brain jump to Peter the Market Inspector. (Seriously, do not get angel!Peter started on bread fraud.)

I can't tell you you're too busy, but I can tell you that doing anything with Mediaeval Market Fraud Inspector anyone would end up dealing with a lot of institutionalized violence: the punishments for those frauds were all things like pillorying (in its original form having your ear nailed to a board so that you had to rip it off to get free) and being put in the stocks (we call this "stress positions" these days, and when done by anyone but the CIA it's considered torture), cutting off fingers and so on, all of them meant to either permanently mark (with a scar, such as the pillory) or subject to public identification the fraudster, so that people would know in future.

I have no idea if that's an issue for you, of course, but I do know that when it comes down to it a lot of people don't find writing the real casual brutality of the Mediaeval period all that fun. >.>

Oh yeah, I know. (Apparently the penalty for selling spoiled meat, according to the book, was to be put in the stocks and then have your stock of rotten meat burned underneath you -- fun!) On the other hand, I think right now my internal setting WRT this particular idea is more on the "ridiculous AU whee" than the "meticulously researched and realistic" end of things; I know the medieval period was pretty awful, but I'm also not sure whether I want to deal with, say, leprosy and intestinal parasites in my funtimes AU, either. >_>