Now, this would be a grave of a contemporary of Reveka. This fellow died in 1521.
Though I honestly took a picture of this marker because it was of a unicorn with a sword through its neck. It is to my great despair that I will not know without some serious research what that is all about, and even then, may never know.
Also: Lion holding sword!
Grave of Petrus Lupinus, died 1597… almost 100 years after The Princess Curse takes place, so perhaps a contemporary of Reveka’s grandchildren, were she to have any. (Didina’s grandchildren, then?)
The next one is a hundred years after that, but I rather like it because you can see that it was once painted–which was the case for most statuary of the past.
Outer gate, inner courtyard leading to house, in the city. This door is pretty much right off this street:
The outer gate of the house exists in the city, too. I like this one. The mess of wires above the doors is frightening (see below for more messy wires), but I enjoy how the missing carvings to the left of the door have been filled in with green paint to match the carvings on the right. I didn’t notice that when I took the picture; I was focused on the pretty green door instead.
From this picture, wiring issues aside, those little tiny turrets are adorable. I absolutely love them!
I think one of the more important things about traveling to Romania was discovering that, in many ways, it wasn’t all that different of a landscape than the one I grew up with. It’s not exactly like Michigan, but it’s not unlike Michigan, either–but with regard to where I grew up, it’s much more like North Carolina. This could be the identical twin of a little stream I used to play around when I was a kid.
There is a sort of Generic Western Europe in a lot of fantasy literature. When you get a sense of True Place that comes through the text, it’s a gift. The mountains in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles really felt right to me when I was growing up; visiting Wales many years later and going into a Welsh mine (and thereby up and then under a Welsh mountain), I appreciated Alexander’s gift of conveying the True Place in those books. Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel books evoke France reasonably well, though I had already been to France by the time I read them, so I can’t say for sure how much is the reader’s 50% there. In conveying True Place, I think we want to be able to write something that people can recognize when they visit later; I think that’s how you know it’s been done properly.
That said, I read almost all the Guy Gavriel Kay stuff that I have prior to going to France, and yeah, he does the south of France as True Place really, really well, but it’s tinted with Guy Gavriel Kay glasses. I recognized it, but it was nonetheless not my south of France.
Ultimately, in writing The Princess Curse, I am not entirely sure how good of a job I did evoking Romania. I know what I wanted to do; I also feel that I fell far, far short. Part of that was the limitation of not being able to write a 300,000-word book (nor wanting to). Part of that was also, I’m sure, skill. After all, it is a wide, wide gap in knowing what kind of emotion you want to evoke, and being able to do so.
One way Romania is different than either North Carolina and Michigan: we don’t get moss like this. This is Pacific Northwest kinds of moss. Only, it’s not everywhere in Romania like it is in the Northwest. So, in this regard? Romania is pretty much just like Romania, I guess.
Categories: Travel · Writing
Tagged: pictures, romania, setting, writing
A funny little bridge. It’s maybe a foot wide, but that would be a generous estimation.
Another angle:
From a distance:
So, this would be a commonplace sort of little footbridge in Reveka’s world. It’s so hard to describe something like this and make it a commonplace object at the same time. Since I had to (for pacing reasons) take out the bits where Reveka spent any real time outside of the castle in the wider world beyond, that dilemma was taken out of my hands entirely, but still, to know these things exist in Reveka’s world would be great for establishing setting. It’s a charming little bridge!
I had read very early on in my research about how Romanian houses have an outer gate surrounding the house and outbuildings, so that there are always two doors to pass through to get inside. (The gate door and the house door.) The more wealthy you were, the more elaborately carved would be your gate.
This proved to be information that never got used in the published version of the book–I think I mentioned there is a whole sequence of Reveka getting lost in the woods that is nearly gone from the published version, but I was very stuck on it in all my early drafts.
Early draft for my agent, wherein Reveka gets lost and ends up at Otilia’s parents’ house:
Instead of leading me to the smithy, as I expected, he brought me around to the mill. The gate to the small courtyard had been carved charmingly with sheaves of wheat and apples, and the courtyard’s kitchen garden was divided from the dye garden and medicinal garden with narrow wooden walkways. A pretty older woman with her hair tied back in a kerchief answered the door. “Jonic, what have we here?” She had a sweet, round voice, as though she’d just swallowed cake and a bit of it was still stuck in her throat.
Categories: Books! · Travel
Tagged: outtakes, pictures, romania
A thatch-roofed cottage (at the open air ethnographic museum, Sibiu, Transylvania)
