Since it's been ~three months since this released, I thought I should probably post something looking towards the eventual release of book four, The Tablet of Destinies.  As I mentioned in the devlogs to the first two books about this one's release, before I can start rewriting book four, I have to research Babylon in the 13th century BCE.

That...uh...is not going well.

When I went to my local bookstore to look for relatively recent works about Mesopotamia in the Late Bronze Age, I found a grand total of one book on the subject of ancient Mesopotamia.  It's a general survey covering the entirety of Mesopotamian antiquity, and while it's been very interesting...it covered the period and location I need in a single paragraph.  (;_;)  Not even a very detailed paragraph, either.

I have a lead on a book that should have to be more detailed--it covers the same period, from the beginnings of Mesopotamian society through to the Hellenistic period, but it's focused exclusively on Babylonia, so it should at least give me the most crucial information I need, like whether or not the city was at war when our trio goes there, who was ruling, and whether there were any other disasters like famines or floods at that time--but it's pretty pricey, even used.  (Also the year-end-shopping-madness season has begun, so I figure I may as well wait until January to order it, so as not to risk it getting lost among all the other packages.  I doubt six-year-old books on Mesopotamian history sell very well, so it's probably not going anywhere.)

I can't really change the setting to a different Mesopotamian city, though, because a lot of what's going on is rooted in specifically Babylonian gods and mythology.  (Of course it is; while lots of cuneiform tablets have survived from all over the region, much of the actual literature from the period is Babylonian, for whatever reason.  (Much like with Athens in classical Greece, in fact.))

Once I do have that new information, the rewrite will not be easy.  This is the first time I had them really leave the Mycenaean sphere of influence, and...if there's one thing I've gotten out of the book I'm reading right now (I'm into the early Iron Age in that general survey book), it's that a lot of what I used in writing the first draft was anachronistic or just plain wrong, based on the misinformation/mistaken guesses of earlier generations of scholars.  (In my own defense, when I wrote the first draft ten years ago, I did research it, using the university library I had access to at that time, since I was working on my MA in History then.  However, the university I was attending did not put much time, effort or money into updating its history and archaeology collections in the library, and so most of the books I was consulting were in excess of ten years old at the time (most of them being a lot older than that, in fact), and that was ten years ago, so...yeah.  My research was outdated from the start, so of course it led to a cursed first draft.  (;_;)  Of course, that was the case for all my research, but it doesn't show quite as badly on the non-Mesopotamian stuff.)

I also need to research the other city they visit before Babylon, which will both be harder and easier at the same time.  Harder in that I'm not sure what city it will be (the one they visit in the current draft is extremely far out of their way because apparently I did not look at a map before picking it) but easier in that it will definitely be in Hittite-controlled lands, so I've already got more of an idea of the society they'll find there.  Also they don't stay there that long, and since it's a culture they're all used to, there's more that will go unspoken (and thus undescribed) because it's "normal" to them.

I can at least say that research for the rest of the series won't be this much of a strain.  They visit Egypt in book five, but that's easy to research, especially since I know who was ruling at the time, and there should be plenty of books covering his lengthy reign.  (Probably the hardest thing to research for book five will be the question of whether anyone outside his immediate inner circle actually knew any name for him other than his throne name, and if that means I need to use his throne name all the time, or if I can just cheat and use the name we know him by most of the time, and only use the throne name for formal situations.)  Then for book six they're back in my comfort zone, and for book seven...okay, that one might also be pretty tough to research, but it's also sort of...well...terra incognita for the characters, but also in such a way that it's...hngrgh.  It's hard for me to put my finger on what I'm trying to say.  But considering that's talking about book seven and I'm still trying to research book four, maybe I should just leave it "oh, who even cares exactly what I'm trying to say?" and move on.

Yup.  That is what I shall do.