The Plan for 2020 : Venice

Hello, just a note to explain what’s happening next year.

I’m almost done with my Scillonian material, and so I put up a poll on Paetreon for the focus of my next set of readings. People chose Venice, so next year, we’ll start gathering together material for sagas set there.

I’ve had a little fiction piece I’ve been toying with for a year or so, set in Venice, and I’m going to steal the few good ideas from that. In older posts I’ve called it “Serenissima”, and may reuse that title. I’ve hinted on the Atlas Forums that it involves the Master of Games, who is a powerful faerie, mentioned in a single line in the canonical books. He claims to be the what’s left of Founder Tytalus, but faeries claim all sorts of things.

We are going to tie into this the works of Straparola, who arguably wrote down the first collection of faerie stories, and he did it in Venice. This is a contested idea in the folklore community, but it does give us a chance to look at the question of why faerie stories from, say, the Grimms are so different to faerie stories from, for example, the Metamorphoses. We’ll also tie in the Pentamerone by Basile and Italo Calvino’s comparatively recent collection. It’s still in copyright, but we used Invisible Cities for Covenants, so it seems lovely to bring him back in here as an inspiration.

In other news I’ve pulled all of the forthcoming episodes on Kunz’s “Curious Lore of Precious Stones”. I think I can still use the material, but I need to break it down into single stones, talk about where they are mined, and give more plot hooks for each. The compendia of stones in the last few epsiodes seem a bit raw to me.

At the moment 11 episodes are loaded on timers in Libsyn. Four of these are Don Roriguez stories and two are paens to great women, who might as well be faeries, by Teasdale. The remaining five are all short poems which describe monsters (a revisit of Sabrina of the Severin, a swarm of Infernal rats, scrumping pixies and an urbane, faerie thief)