Monday, April 7, 2014

The Joys of Researching: Armenia, LibGuides, RPGs, and Persian music!

Enjoy this little quickie, y’all! I've been in a pensive mood lately thanks to a few random, slightly forced into circumstances that I am not complaining over.

I cannot tell you how much fun it is to research. Most people think, "Oh gracious in a pastry! You are just running into dead-ends, starting over, and looking at stuff that doesn't even help! And it's boring!"

Nein. What was that saying? "It's not the destination, but the journey that is most rewarding."

So I have a few topics as of late that requires further investigation. For my LibGuide, I am working on building a resource site as an introduction to Persian/Sufi poets. I will post it when I'm done at the end of the semester. Through that process I have been teaching myself how to use databases that are available to me through the University of Alabama. At Ringling (where I got my BFA) and my current library, we have none. So on my search for finding videos that “sing” the poems, I came across this guy, Homayoun Shajarian. Oh my goodness, talk about a voice that gives you goosebumps! He sings classical Persian and surprisingly he sings from all of the poets minus Omar Khayyam (we’ll the man was a scientist first, so…).

Here is his newest song, singing Simin Bebahani’s poem “Why did you leave me?”.


Then thanks to a friend, I got dragged into a game using the Savage World base and the Victoria RPG setting. At first I wasn’t sure I had the mental state to actually pull this off since my characters from my book are demanding a lot of my time, and my school projects are draining. Nope, this was exactly what I needed. I haven’t played Dungeons and Dragons in a year, so I need a game. Our DM (dungeon master), a history teacher, to me makes the perfect guy to run this kind of setting (1880s – late Victorian era). He has been exceptionally flexible in me using D&D 3.5 rules for my character’s dog. And in trying to find digital version of the 3.5 rules for my character’s dog, I ran into a music group AGAIN that I overlooked the first time. How could I? Modern 80’s music! Oh yeah!

Futurecop!  (love the unicorn logo!) This should be the kind of music playing on the radio!


So, the research for my character’s background begins like most of my characters that I write about, but this guy, really makes me feel thankful for all that research I did for my Georgian character in my book. This guy is Armenian, and I am delved into his role as deacon in the Armenian Apostolic Church which was as foreign to me as eating monkey brains. By the time I got as far as I am now, I learned a lot about this country’s history and I am thoroughly impressed at how they’ve isolated their language and their religion. I did not know Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity, nor did I know that scientists study the language because it is so unique and it shares almost no resemblance to it's neighboring countries's languages. I found some wacky things along the way when researching names, but overall, it has been a fun experience, which is making me write a novelette for his background.

I’m sure the DM won’t mind. :P

Happy writing!