NaNoWriMo Journal

NaNoWriMo 13: Covers

I need a cover.  Actually, I need two covers.  It would be nice to have something other than the default on this journal, and when I’m a little farther along, I’ll throw something together, if one of the more visually oriented folks doesn’t send one my way.

Much more, though, I need a cover for The First Jumper.  I’ll eventually want to put the revised version of this up on Amazon, CreateSpace, and elsewhere.  This first draft, though, I plan to keep up on Wattpad for now, along with this journal, as an experiment in novel creation.  

I need an attractive cover for The First Jumper to put up on Wattpad, but I also will need (eventually) an attractive cover design for the full-wrap cover on CreateSpace, so POD books in trade format (what this will probably be) will come out looking well.  I expect to pay for that one to be professionally done.

But, should anyone feel inspired to create a design for the book, I would love to use something more attractive than the ugly default cover.  Please message me, if you do.

A note about the sociology of the ice-age tribes.  I don’t have any hard evidence on this, but I am comforted by the thought that no one else does, either.  We have very little physical evidence.  The weather at the edge of an ice age would be very erratic, hence the reference to a three-year winter.

Life would have been extremely harsh, and survival brutally darwinian.  I suspect this is when humans really developed complex rules of interaction and language, because only by more and more sophisticated levels of cooperation could we have survived at all.  Small family groups probably survived in caves, but they mostly would have wandered, following the food.  

Harsh winters would have killed off the men much faster than the women, because the women would not, generally, have borne children, and their higher fat levels would help them survive better.  Men would still have to go out and hunt in the bitter temperatures, where there were far fewer animals, much greater physical peril from the elements, and what animals they did find tended to be larger and more dangerous (like mammoths.)  

So after a series of extremely harsh winters, including one that lasted three years, the tribes all have many more women than men, and social customs have built up that allow them to survive and get along.  Ignoring those rules means death, so the rules would be harsh, and harshly enforced.

I suspect that much of our customs for mate selection developed during this period, when we were forced into very tight living groups by the cold winters, and lived nomadic existences.  Women get to choose, but only sometimes.  Men can fight over women, but only sometimes.   Rules are building that protect the idea of marriage, and yet those rules still don’t work perfectly today.  At the time of this story, they probably were very practical, and did not exist so much as rules as customs.

Women were just as intelligent as men, but I suspect the fact that most of the men spent most of their time away from the women meant that the male/female stratification that exists today also started then.  The women talked with the women, as they were gathering berries or firewood, caring for babies, or making baskets or water skins.  The men talked with the men, as they were hunting and facing other tribes or animals.

The work that the women were doing probably required less direct cooperation, so they did more social interaction, developing much better language skills than the men.  They needed those language skills for indirect cooperation, to help each other stay healthy and care for their children, passing along knowledge passed down from woman to woman through the ages.

The work that the men were doing required a great deal of direct cooperation, as those who could not focus on their tasks at hand died immediately, and only functioning teams survived.

So, just possibly, the greater general social language and general cooperative skills of women, and the greater task-oriented cooperatives skills of men, date from this period.

It’s just speculation, and I’m no anthropologist.  But that is what I’m thinking here, and that is what is behind the confusion Willow is experiencing.  The urgency of choice in that society would have been far more brutal than today, when most pregnancies probably did not survive to term, and most babies did not survive to adulthood.  Don’t choose, and your choice will be taken away.  

You are welcome to disagree, and I may be completely wrong about this speculation, but I want the thinking that is behind the story development to be clear.

Another piece of it is the importance of the shaman, or medicine man.  This person (who might, in some cases, be a woman) would not be a warrior, would probably not go with the hunting parties, and would probably not have the multiple-wife opportunities that warriors would have. On the other hand, Little Bear is probably not the only offspring of Raccoon running around the tribe, and the shaman would live longer.

This part of the story is taking place in the summer.  Winters are still very harsh--six months long, or more--and erratic, but summer is a glorious time, to fatten up as quickly as possible.  Sorry, ladies, but I think there were very few ice-age size 2 survivors.

More later, but I’ve run out of time for today.  15,000 words so far.

Brian Groover
Frederick, Maryland
Wednesday, 5 November 2014