Reddit reviews The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

That sounds awesome! I'm currently building a world for a book. And something like this seems super helpful. Do you think it's the same as this one, even though the cover isn't quite the same? https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Medieval Cities had specialized shops for almost everything. A city with actual walls would have freemen who were chandlers, butchers, leatherworkers, smiths, etc. with their own shops, typically with their family living in the second story of the building.

Market towns (pop a few hundred) are much more likely to have the everything is sold at the market vibe. But usually only twice a week or something. You probably would be entirely unable to find serious armor there.

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368722301&sr=8-1&keywords=time+travelers+guide+to+medieval+england

this book gives you a great background to extrapolate from real history to get a realistic fantasy setting

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

I loved Witcher 3. You might be interested in this: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

For the medieval period, I found The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England very interesting. Definitely more of a popular book than hard-core history, though.

I'm currently reading this and it's obvious that GRRM has done a great deal of research of this era before putting pen to paper. From the social structures to living conditions, hygiene, rural vs urban living, wars, laws and plagues.

https://smile.amazon.com/Wars-Roses-Alison-Weir/dp/0345404335

https://smile.amazon.com/Princes-Tower-Alison-Weir/dp/0345391780

https://smile.amazon.com/Reluctant-Queen-Story-Queens-England-ebook/dp/B000VSW7TI

https://smile.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Ian Mortimer has a series of Time Traveler’s Guides to X

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/

Possibly one of those?

This book and it's series of books will tell you most you want to know, from what colors you couldn't wear or what kind of birds you were not allowed to eat. Great detail and fun read.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

The book I read.

PART II

BUT there are problems with your prose too

There are times where you really do TELL us stuff that you should not.

>We had no idea of the horrors that lay ahead, only that the world we left was not alone. Someone had made a life here, someone not of our land, so it stood to reason that there were more of them out there and a new land that perhaps we could call home.


This is a bad TELL. Don’t let us know there is more horrors. Let us discover them as the narrator does.

Don’t tell us that people made a life here. SHOW us that they did.

> the scene was a thousand times more unsettling than before

This almost made me puke. This is terrible. DO NOT SAY SOMETHING WAS 1000X MORE UNSETTLING. Show us this. It is that simple. SHOW us why it was unsettling. Describe the scene, and let us revel in the quiet horror that you paint.

> I understood then that he was never a coward, but that he simply could not bear the sight of more death. Ironically, his exile brought him in contact with more death than we ever saw at home.


A thousand times NO. You CANNOT tell someone the point of the story. You MUST trust your reader to figure it out. If you do, then your ending will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

At other times, you use ineffective language:

> and cities buzzed like beehives,

This really tells us nothing. It really doesn’t. HOW do they buzz? What are the people doing (or what does the narrator imagine they are doing) that they are buzzing?

OK, on the whole there is middling-to-bad prose, with moments of just absolute mind-boggling brilliance. If you can practice your prose and get it all up the point of the first 4 paragraphs, you will dazzle all those who read your stuff.

You are a LONG-ASS way from this. But the fact is that you can do it. You have done it. You just need to train your writing so that you do it all the time.

So, get to it.

WORLD BUILDING/CONSISTENCY

There are a LOT of problems here. You don’t really lay out a accurate view of the black death. You have the characters describe artifacts that they have never encountered – using words that are commonly used by people familiar with these artifacts. You have them know things about the world they cannot (e.g. like which houses are better built, when they have never seen houses like it).

This is a major problem – but it is an EASY problem to solve

First, decide when you think this occurred. THEN, read a 2-6 books each on the periods of time – both in the Americas and Europe. This will give you a sense of what is reasonable to expect in the Europe setting and what the native Americans would be used to seeing (and not seeing).

If you want to go for the middle ages, I suggest the following (for Europe): The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. I have no good suggestions for the Americas.

Again, as written the world you have is not good enough to be credible, but this is readily solved via some research.

So, get to it.

CONCLUSIONS

I don’t say this often (ever?). You have the beginnings of an amazing story. Your strongest asset is your moments of amazing prose, and the fact that you have already established compelling characters with so little. If you expand this, while maintaining what is good and correcting what is bad, you will have quite a story. But there is much work to be done. You need a more fleshed out plot. You need more -- and more active -- characters, and you need a more believable story. NONE of these are problems that cannot be solved.

So…Get to it. :)

It can be dangerous to go alone. Take this!

There's this, albeit a different time period: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/1439112908/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=BKTCY0V8K7XD&coliid=I1B9AZ44XS0SEO

and also this fun desktop background: http://i.imgur.com/zXFY5.jpg

edit: of course a dozen people have already posted this - what was I thinking?

Hi!

My name is Ed McDonald and I'm a fantasy author. My debut is going to be released across 6 languages in 2017/18, so I have some insights on this. I am looking forward to Blackwing being published so that I don't have to write this as a disclaimer all the time :D. I'm also speaking on a panel about getting published in fantasy at the London Book Fair in March.

Firstly, read fantasy. All the fantasy. But it's more important to read the things that are currently being published than it is the classics. You won't learn much from Tolkien these days, times have changed since LOTR. Instead, if it's epic fantasy you want to write, then you need to read Rothfuss, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Lawrence and Lynch. They are the big sellers for epic. If you want to write YA stuff then read YA stuff. This is not just because those writers are great, but because it will teach you the market trends.

Next though, reading outside the genre is great, but only to find books that you enjoy so that you can cut them apart. My guilty pleasure? Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. They frequently have glaring plot holes or don't make sense, and are full of deus ex machina resolutions or just "and then Jack blew his head off" finales, but the pace and the simplicity keeps me turning the page. And from that, I learned that I much prefer a Reacher novel to trudging through 5 pages of world building at a time, so when I write fantasy, I write fast paced thrillers which is what then sold Blackwing around the world. I wouldn't have gained that style without reading outside the genre.

Finally, I guess I'm cheating because I have some degrees in history, but if you're writing historically inspired settings, you ought to be reading some history. Don't try to plough through dry academic texts if you aren't a historian though - I'm an academic and even I find those dry as sand. Get the popular stuff, even kid's history, just to try to soak up the feel of the period. The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England is essential for those that want to gain a quick overview.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486802982&sr=1-1&keywords=the+time+traveller%27s+guide+to+medieval+england

I write a blog that mainly focuses on assisting aspiring authors such as yourself and you may find some of it helpful.

https://edmcdonaldwriting.com/2017/01/25/you-are-not-george-rr-martin-how-to-get-published-in-the-grimdark-era-of-fantasy/

> Think of a medieval market where people met at a specific place at a specific time to directly exchange goods

they didn't. They used coins. Minted in silver, roughly 230 pennies to the pound.

>Is this a market?

Yes because they had buyers, sellers, and price tags.

>Is a system of semi-formal gift exchange a market in some sense?

no, it's a gift exchange. Push, not pull. In general:

give someone a gift, you're typically not obligated to reciprocate.

In a white elephant multi-person rotation exchange, everyone must throw one gift into the pot in order to participate. No this isn't a market.

>I think your definition is perfectly reasonable btw, it just seems more like a personal rubric.

It is; that's why I'm trying to see who can poke holes on it. I got it from a Science Paper involving non-humans (mice). So it's an objective standpoint for something not familiar with those price tags (mice).

Well it was over so many years and there is so much to it I'd rather you tell me what you are most interested in and I can go into detail there.

However the main highlights I can think of are:

1. Read a lot of fantasy novels, this way you get many ideas for settings, villains, political issues, plots adventures, etc.
   
2. Read some history. Knowing what religion, politics, food, roads, culture and language was back then can make you change some details that give any setting a whole new dimension. The fact some kings might have a ban on books, a city is closed out due to plague, a muddy road causing a delay and trade collapse, a tradesman leaving his 7-year-old kid in the stables permanently to learn a new trade, a guild of thieves can dominate a town, a country where the farmers speak one language and the city folk another and most don't understand each other...all that can immerse the players into another era, it's not just them cosplaying in their minds and playing swords. Any book by Sansom is enough or for more detail get The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: for $10 on kindle to become an expert in 3 weeks.
   
3. Have a list of names per culture per gender: eastern, dwarven, northern, barbarian, european, african, etc. Looking them up on internet and having them on your phone/tablet/laptop can make you create rich NPC's on the spot. You can do the same with food, dress and household items. Having "someone" bring two beers is not the same as old Rosangela bringing stew and mulled wine in a wooden eating bowl and clay cup and putting it on a ffreutur (long table in welsh).
   
4. Learn the different types of government found in a medieval setting: absolute monarchy, feudal monarchy, empire, principality, theocracy, clan, republic, etc. Also learn the names of military ranks because it's common for players to get into trouble which will require escalating up the chain and it's shallow to call it "the guy in charge of the boss of the guard".
   
5. Finally create some disputes based on historical wars. Turkey vs greece, France vs. England, Dutch colonizers versus scattered tribes, crusaders versus sarracens, vikings versus world, spaniards versus aztecs. Now change the names of the actors (Vikings to Derrenfolk, English to Topinians, Spaniards to Salcedos) and then change races (you can swap whites and blacks for a twist on english or dutch versus african tribes), replace human gods with fantasy gods, give the clerics some power and add some holy relics.
   
6. Remember that the medieval world was forged by religion, war and trade. The rest is working to serve these three pillars.
   
   Internet makes it so much easier, when I started I'd spend months researching into Aztecs, now it would take me less than a week to find out all the basics to get the game going.

AmazonSmile Link: The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

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Surprisingly, not true. Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Linen undergarments were surprisingly good at absorbing sweat and oil, so as long as *those* were clean (changed and washed frequently) people didn't stink like you would expect. Further since the common knowledge at the time was that disease could be caused by 'miasma' or bad air it was important not to stink.

Medieval cleanliness standards were different from today, not nonexistant.

I'm not an expert, but I believe books were relatively rare things during this time period. Also, an extensive library during that time might seem quite small by today's standards. Only the well to do, universities, and monasteries would have significant libraries. The vast majority of people didn't own a book, not even a Bible or religious text. I'm basing this half-baked answer off of what I recall from Ian Mortimers's book http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Didn't have a reason to. I'm on summer break between second and third year of a phd program, but I am fairly sure that I want to leave the program, so I'm now devoting my time toward job hunting online.

Also, none of my friends called me about hanging out last night, and I go to the gym six days a week but yesterday was my day off. Had enough groceries to get by. Net result is me shuffling between my room, kitchen, bathroom, and living room exclusively.

I spent my time yesterday looking for jobs, but mainly getting distracted by stupid shit on the internet. I read some of a book I've started recently, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Also smoked a little weed, but as of today I am quitting until I find a job or a dissertation topic. I am also a month into the /r/nofap challenge, so porn and jerking it was not an option.

Come now, that's too sweet of you. And yeah, I myself am imprisoned by my books too. I dread the ideas of moving due to the sheer amount of books I have. I thought I was done with it since I bought a kindle 5 years ago but I threw it away after half a year 'cause I could not be without my hardcover books. And sometimes I feel like putting a good book under my pillow or on my night stand makes me feel closer to the book itself. Now if only I can read everything that I own is another problem...

Those are some solid suggestions. I definitely would love to devour...I mean read and appreciate them someday. I have to finish House of Leaves first. Goddamn it's exhausting to read that book but also quite rewarding. I also just ordered The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Was thinking about either medieval time or the growth of the Silk Road and ended up with medieval time.

We are such book worms, aren't we? I'd feel so bad if I end up with someone who doesn't like books 'cause I would be so boring and reading all the time.

I don't know the answers to your specific questions, but I found Ian Mortimer's "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" to be an enjoyable read which addresses the lives of ordinary people. Check it out: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Probably a lot more detail than you're asking for, but this is a great, easy to read book on what medieval europe was actually like to live in.