I have discovered a serious aversion to talking about my WIPs in public. An unfinished story feels flayed to me; it’s gauche to display it with all its tendons and drippy bits hanging out.

Hang on, I’m going to go tweet that line to fulfill my ‘engaging with social media’ quota.

Okay, done. Yay, I remembered to poke my head out of my hole. Most of my writing time is spent toiling away in Word documents. Other people possess the gift of showcasing their nascent ideas. I am becoming okay with not envying this.

So basically, I haven’t been able to make myself blog about my most active WIP because I’d rather just work on that WIP (YA, queer, contemporary, features siblings, about half done at 38k).

Instead, I’m going to talk about objects.

Today is my 30th birthday and a Sunday. Because I live in a small midwestern city without much going on besides covid, I celebrated yesterday, when stuff was actually open. Because, again, small midwestern city, ‘celebrating’ looked like visiting an antique fair. Which served to make me feel quite young; I think the median age was 70.

I further failed to fit in because I was toddling around with the idea of finding an old wooden child’s stool for the kitchen or a beat-up end table to refinish. And this was the kind of antique fair where it turned out to all be collector’s items: jewelry, oil paintings, crystal, gilt work, pearls, china, silver, vases, etc. A thousand dead grandmothers’ worth of finery hoping for a buyer who will pay several hundred bucks to beautify their shelves.

That was never going to be me. But I found something interesting:

This weird lantern dealie. I failed to get a picture at the antique fair, but there were dozens far prettier than this: intricate flowers and birds painted over rainbows of colored glass on silver legs. Some lanterns echoed the shape of Fabergé eggs. One notable version was a miniature, moon-shaped bassinet in emerald, complete with silver wheels and a tiny, hanging fork at the apex. (Priced at $950!)

The fork was a key clue (most sets had tongs, as does the one pictured). These lanterns were actually pickle castors, which a genial salesman patiently explained to us. They were of course status symbols, used as centerpieces on dining tables during the Victorian era, more than a century ago.

Changing times, technology, and tastes: an object that once advertised status became unrecognizable to laypeople. I’ve watched TV shows and read books set in the Victorian era. I still was totally unfamiliar. When it comes to modern technology, obsolescence is a no-brainer. I haven’t seen a VCR since the 90s, I donated my last CD years ago, and my MP3 player is sitting in a box under a layer of dust, rolled up in a broken cord. But there are many more simple, everyday objects that no longer have use. And those objects can still communicate a lot about their owners.

This is something I want to see more creativity with in fantasy. We are all bored to death of generic western medieval settings. We’ve seen pitchforks, swords, staves, suits of armor, torches, carriages, and crowns. Wealth is communicated by gold and velvet, poverty by mud and sackcloth. This even holds true regardless of what ‘time period’ a story may be set in. But there are a thousand other angles to take. A world feels richer when it’s populated and textured, and objects as well as characters can serve in those roles. Going forward, I want to devote more thought to the objects I put into a character’s hands, and what I can communicate about the world and their life through those choices.