P D Ball’s Story Newsletter No. 5 + April sales
Apr 01, 2023 12:13 am
P D Ball’s Story Newsletter No. 5
Hello! I hope this email finds you well. Perhaps chocolate and ice-cream well!
Contents:
Book 4 is done: I’m working on Book 5
Some editing fun
Behind the Scenes: Age of marriage, age of first menarche
Book Promotions! There’s a great April book promotion I was lucky enough to join, so the link is here. And a couple other ones. Worth checking out – 99 cent books!
Progress Update
No real progress update other than that I’m working on Book 5. If you’ve read Book 4, then you know basically all Cayce’s plans went awry. So, she’s having a rough go of it. If you’re desperate for spoilers, send me an email at pdballwrites@gmail.com and they will be yours.
Book 5 will be the conclusion for the series unless the story beats me up and demands otherwise. Cayce can be mean that way.
I have gone back and re-edited the entire series and released them as paperbacks. If you have a digital copy and Amazon hasn’t fixed the errors, send me an email and I’ll sort it for you as best I can.
Book 4 is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYF9PJXQ
Some editing fun:
My favorite editing error is the following. I ended up with this gem because I had to delete some text and move other text around. Readers, unfortunately, didn’t see it. This happened back in Book 3, where Brin is telling Cayce to get security dogs:
“About that, Brin.” I looked up from my cup, having thought it over, “it’s not a good idea. I don’t want to blast any puppies. I can’t always control it.”
“But that’s part of the fun, Cayce!”
So, that had to go. Didn’t want Brin turning into a psychopath.
By far, the most common spelling error I make is using the word “waive” instead of “wave.” The second most common, at least in Book 1, was mistaking “past” for “passed.” Very sorry for these! In Book 4, I embarrassingly made “their/they’re” and “your/you’re” and even one ultra-embarrassing, “to/too” mistake. UGH. I swear these mistakes are not because of inebriation.
The word that tripped me up the most – and this is totally a fault of my Canadian heritage plus American education – is the word for the height of building floors. In UK English, it’s “storey.” But in American English, it’s “story.” So, when I wrote it, looking at “story,” I just felt that it was off. Changed it to “storey,” and later discovered the etymology problem here.
I was born and raised in Canada, did my undergraduate education there, then moved abroad. My post-graduate work was in Japan and America and both nations preferentially use American English spelling. As you can imagine, the dictionary in my head is a mess.
I’m sure I irk people from the UK and USA alike!
Last – super shout out to some amazing person who flagged 33 errors in Book 3! I didn’t even know you could do that in Kindle, but apparently you can. And that person is awesome.
Re: the editing errors. There’s a story here, unfortunately. I downloaded a program – Calibre – that makes epub copies, so I could read them in ebook format. Annoyingly, Calibre copies the document you’re working on, then substitutes the new copy without telling you. That made me do all the corrections on the new copy, unknowingly save it to the Calibre folder, then upload my old, uncorrected copy.
I’m still using Calibre, after much cursing and frothing at the mouth, but carefully and with no small amount of distrust.
Behind the Scenes: young marriage
In the Cayce books, various people are trying to marry her off, various people are trying to marry her. She’s fifteen, so young by our standards. But, in the medieval ages, even into the Renaissance and beyond, the Catholic Church deemed young teens to be of cognitive ability to understand the concept of marriage. Medieval marriages could be arranged for children as young as 7-years-old, but the consent of those children had to wait until they were 12, for girls, and 14, for boys. Where wealth and privilege were on the line – nobility and wealthy families – marriages were arranged for their children at this age.
In the books, Cayce is told that consummating marriage could wait until she’s older. I based this on historical precedent – it was actually the case for the majority of young marriages. A couple of examples:
King Jaume I of Aragon was 14 when he married 19-year-old Princess Leonor of Castile. The couple waited until Aragon was 15 until they consummated the marriage because, Aragon writes, he wasn’t capable until then (he produced an extensive autobiography).
12-year-old Matilda of England (Eleanor of Aquitaine's daughter) married Henry the Lion of Saxony. She wasn’t pregnant until four years later, and then almost yearly for a time.
There are good reasons for postponing pregnancy. To put it succinctly, it’s dangerous for underdeveloped girls to give birth. And medieval people acknowledged this, noting that women in their 20s are much more likely to survive their first births than girls in their early teens. And that’s not even acknowledging the psychological factors that we future people would consider.
In the books, Cayce is very close to the age where consummation would be expected – she’s nearly 16. “Almost 16!” But, I went with 19 for a couple reasons. First, I can’t imagine Cayce would be happy with anyone telling her, “You’re good to go at 16, woohoo!” Second, well, I’m not trying to put off the readers I’d like to have, nor get in trouble with retailers. So, 19 it was.
Additionally, and this is probably something most of us don’t think about, but first menarche began later in one’s life in the medieval era. When Joan of Arc lived, average age of menarche was 15 plus or minus 2 years. Joan was said to have “never bloodied the sheets” by her English captors. She was 19 at that time, which is only 2 standard deviations outside of the average (so, about 5% of the population). Given that she was a peasant girl and trained in combat, wore heavy army, rode horses, it’s likely that that was accurate.
200 years after Joan was born, average age of first menarche dropped to 13 plus/minus 2 years and it’s currently 11, plus/minus 2 years. The likely reasons for this decrease include consistent calories during development, decreased exposure to disease and decreased parasite load, plus industrial pollution (a lot of such pollution are hormone agonists and antagonists and affect developing bodies).
During the medieval age, food variety was low, calorie availability low for peasants, disease and parasite burden high. These all impact the developing body, leading to shorter stature, greater percentages of death before 5 years of age, and later onset of puberty, and probably delayed development overall.
All of this means that most people would have realized that while child marriage might be necessary in terms of securing wealth, titles and land, consummation of marriage should be delayed.
If you want to read more about age of marriage and age of consummation of marriage, here are some short summaries by historians:
Age of betrothed, consent to marriage:
Consummation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/400vr9/comment/cyqk4qh/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pafst/comment/cw4w6vb/
Abstracts discussing age of first menarche:
^ please note that this paper puts the age of first menarche at 17.5-18 years at the end of the eighteenth century!
This next one writes that early humans of 100 000 years ago began menarche between the ages of 7-13, so comparable with today. However, it incorrectly claims early menarche was a trade-off because of lowered life expectancies. That’s inaccurate. Early humans had high mortality rates for children under 5, but life expectancy rates between 60-70 for people who survived to 20.
Probably early age of first menarche is because early humans had low disease loads, great variety and availability of food. Their skeletal remains are quite tall, some reaching 6’8,” and they were incredibly strong. The decrease in age of first menarche happens after agriculture and sedentary living, which decreased food variety, increased bacterial and viral disease loads, and parasite load.
Uhm, I haven’t really talked about myself much, but I am an anthropologist and used to teach human evolution in university.
Group Promotions!
This sale is from April 1st to 3rd, includes my first two books. It's a promotion for self-published authors:
https://promotions.narratess.com/
These sales are for the entire month of April:
The EPIC Spring Sale (bookfunnel.com)
Fairy Tales & Myths Retold (storyoriginapp.com)
Magic Adventures For Sale (storyoriginapp.com)
April Books (storyoriginapp.com)
And this one is for Kindle Unlimited. If you have that subscription, these books are available for download! But alas, no image:
Hopping Goodreads (Kindle Unlimted Reads) (bookfunnel.com)