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Mood update (depressed!); resuming CR study; data fields for book genome project.
Mostly for my own records: my mood has been particularly bad as of late. For the last week or so, I've been plagued by a resurgence of the usual problems. Depression, the cloudy sort that leads to constant fatigue and very little productivity. Anxiety, very generalized and very obsessive, which leads to quite severe insomnia—I sleep at strange hours (usually midday) only for an hour or two at a time, or else I sleep all day long, up to 16 hours a day. I've also had some problem with back pain, throbbing with some severe tightness, more generalized than lower back this time. Also, if my ears don't stop bothering me (they have been plugged up without end for the last week now) I may be forced to remove them. The result has been a very unproductive, very depressed girl, lately. I've been reading a lot, writing infrequently, and been living in a haze of sleeping oblivion or else sleepless gray, sparked only by moments of sheer panic. Yay fun. Here's to hoping that it passes soon.
Moods aside, not all is lost. For one, I'm slowly resuming some of my CR religion studies. I've been hesitant to say as much because I hate falling through on the things that I announce publicly, which I did with exactly this announcement about a year ago. I am, unfortunately, much more of a flaky person than I intent to be. The depression and anxiety get to me, laying waste the very best laid plans. I get overwhelmed, I have a breakdown, I give up, and then I'm too ashamed to try again. But here I am, trying again—because I miss it, and because it is important enough to me to try again. So I'm (re)reading The Tain and The Mabinogion, to get started, as well as the Scottish-specific books that I bought last year (The Gaelic Otherworld, Carmina Gadelica, and The Silver Bough), to get my groundings. I plan to look into ogham a bit more this time, for want of a divinational practice. My greatest fear is changing book knowledge into life practice—building rituals, devotionals, and altars. The process of moving from theory to action has never been my strength. I hate doing things unless I am certain that I shall do them well—and there's no way to know that, with religion, especially with a reconstrutionist faith where so much of the wheel has to be reinvented. The thought scares me silly, but I shall try to press on anyhow.
If none of this is making sense to you, some background into may be useful. Last year, I began a study and practice of Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism, specifically focusing on (the highlands of) Scotland. CR tries to reconstruct pre-Christian pagan Celtic faith, taking into account how it would change in the modern world (read: we do not collect the heads of our enemies). For more information, feel free to check out the CR FAQ (which was my first introduction and is an amazing resource) and my LJ tag on the topic, which will take you back through my studies last year. Also feel free to check out![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
cr_r, the LJ community closely affiliated with the people that run/wrote the FAQ above.
And now having said as much, I shall proceed to worry myself silly about the doing of it all. Gah. But do wish me luck. This is as important to me as it is utterly mystifying and terrifying.
For another—in other "not all is lost" news—I've come up with a starting place for that book genome project I was contemplating earlier. This starting place is basically the relevant information to input into the program so that it could churn out useful results. In other words: the genes that make up the genome of the book. I tried to select information that would provide useful results: books with similar characters, settings, styles, genres, publishing dates, ratings/intended audience, and key characteristics, all in a simple fill-in-the-blanks schematic that would be easy to put into a database and simple enough to categorize.
The format I'm looking as follows (with an example filled out, see the book review of Season of the Witch for more information):
With this system mocked up, what comes next is implementing it. I plan to make an table (Excel, probably) and start categorizing any books that I can think of, and am sufficiently familiar with (read recently or read many times) to assign genre and keywords too. After I build up a big enough database, I can start searching it and seeing if I can con the boy into mocking up a system for it—and see if it's any good. I have four books labeled so far. So... that's a start? Ask me again in a few months if this brainchild should have been aborted or not.
The other tiny bit of good news is that I have book reviews (three, including Lane Robins's Maledicte, a title which I plan to repeat until I drill it into every readers brain and convince them all to check it out) and BPAL (a bottle and another half-dozen imps) on the way. The reviews are getting written about now, and the BPAL is in shipping and should be here any day now. Yay.
(I should totally have a tag that reads "one more tag" for posts when I write a short novel and cover enough topics for a dozen tags... just to drive the point home, yanno.)
Moods aside, not all is lost. For one, I'm slowly resuming some of my CR religion studies. I've been hesitant to say as much because I hate falling through on the things that I announce publicly, which I did with exactly this announcement about a year ago. I am, unfortunately, much more of a flaky person than I intent to be. The depression and anxiety get to me, laying waste the very best laid plans. I get overwhelmed, I have a breakdown, I give up, and then I'm too ashamed to try again. But here I am, trying again—because I miss it, and because it is important enough to me to try again. So I'm (re)reading The Tain and The Mabinogion, to get started, as well as the Scottish-specific books that I bought last year (The Gaelic Otherworld, Carmina Gadelica, and The Silver Bough), to get my groundings. I plan to look into ogham a bit more this time, for want of a divinational practice. My greatest fear is changing book knowledge into life practice—building rituals, devotionals, and altars. The process of moving from theory to action has never been my strength. I hate doing things unless I am certain that I shall do them well—and there's no way to know that, with religion, especially with a reconstrutionist faith where so much of the wheel has to be reinvented. The thought scares me silly, but I shall try to press on anyhow.
If none of this is making sense to you, some background into may be useful. Last year, I began a study and practice of Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism, specifically focusing on (the highlands of) Scotland. CR tries to reconstruct pre-Christian pagan Celtic faith, taking into account how it would change in the modern world (read: we do not collect the heads of our enemies). For more information, feel free to check out the CR FAQ (which was my first introduction and is an amazing resource) and my LJ tag on the topic, which will take you back through my studies last year. Also feel free to check out
cr_r, the LJ community closely affiliated with the people that run/wrote the FAQ above.And now having said as much, I shall proceed to worry myself silly about the doing of it all. Gah. But do wish me luck. This is as important to me as it is utterly mystifying and terrifying.
For another—in other "not all is lost" news—I've come up with a starting place for that book genome project I was contemplating earlier. This starting place is basically the relevant information to input into the program so that it could churn out useful results. In other words: the genes that make up the genome of the book. I tried to select information that would provide useful results: books with similar characters, settings, styles, genres, publishing dates, ratings/intended audience, and key characteristics, all in a simple fill-in-the-blanks schematic that would be easy to put into a database and simple enough to categorize.
The format I'm looking as follows (with an example filled out, see the book review of Season of the Witch for more information):
Season of the Witch, Natasha MostertBut there's still a major bug to be worked out: what the categories are, how many to have, and how to structure them. This is particularity relevant for genre, setting, and keywords. With genre, it probably comes down to creating a finite hierarchical list. For example, urban fantasy would be on the list, as a subgenre of fantasy, as a subgenre of nonfiction (which is implied, as I have absolutely zero intent of dealing with non-fiction at all). When setting is selected, the most accurate subgenre(s) will be selected, and the parent categories will be taken into (weighted) account when the genome spits back results. A set list of genres will make labeling easier and make the system function better by providing more (and more accurate) results. Keywords are not as easy. These are incredibly important—if I'm looking for more books like Season of the Witch, I'm probably far more interested in finding something with alchemy in it than I am in another 30-some male protagonist. As a result, these keywords need to be diverse and specific—enough that I can find another book on alchemy, not just magic, and that a book on prophecy can turn up appropriate results too—but they have to have some order to them, or the results are useless. What the author calls remote viewing may be too minor a term—is psychics better? Will the categorizers (me!) forget what term they went with before and therefore invalidate the search process? I think keywords are probably the trickiest and the most important part—after all, they are what makes the Amazon system start to float ... and then sink like a stone.
Published: Dutton, 2007
Length: 400 pages
Genre: Paranormal, Urban Fantasy, Romance
Narration: Third person limited
Protagonist(s): Male, 30s
Audience: Adult
Setting: Real world, modern England, urban
Keywords: Alchemy, witchcraft, psychics
With this system mocked up, what comes next is implementing it. I plan to make an table (Excel, probably) and start categorizing any books that I can think of, and am sufficiently familiar with (read recently or read many times) to assign genre and keywords too. After I build up a big enough database, I can start searching it and seeing if I can con the boy into mocking up a system for it—and see if it's any good. I have four books labeled so far. So... that's a start? Ask me again in a few months if this brainchild should have been aborted or not.
The other tiny bit of good news is that I have book reviews (three, including Lane Robins's Maledicte, a title which I plan to repeat until I drill it into every readers brain and convince them all to check it out) and BPAL (a bottle and another half-dozen imps) on the way. The reviews are getting written about now, and the BPAL is in shipping and should be here any day now. Yay.
(I should totally have a tag that reads "one more tag" for posts when I write a short novel and cover enough topics for a dozen tags... just to drive the point home, yanno.)