Fantasist’s Scroll

Background ideas and a contest.

First, the contest. It’s the Clarke-Bradbury Science Fiction Competition. This is a “hard science” competition in the spirit of Clarke and his invention of the communications satellite years before such a thing was actually created and used. These folks are looking for innovative technology and ways that technology might change the world. Not quite normal fantasist fare, but hey, a writing contest is a writing contest.

Now, to the stuff that intrigues me more. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Pepys was a prolific journaler who not only recorded his own interesting life, but also discussed events of the day. This website, http://www.pepysdiary.com/, presents his nine-volume journal in a contemporary format; a blog. This is great inspiration for my own experimental fiction idea of creating a journal of a fiction character via a blog. Way, way, cool.
The creator of the blog, Phil Gyford, was interviewed by the BBC in an article titled “Why I turned the Pepys Diary into a Web Log“. It’s a fairly interesting read and a great introduction to who Pepys was and why he matters. Way, cool, again.
It’s nice to know that great minds think alike, but it does kind of stink to realize that my idea isn’t quite as original as I had thought.

Today is the birthday of one of the greatest diarists in the English language, Samuel Pepys.

He was, born in London on this day in 1633 to a tailor and a washerwoman. However, thanks to an upper-class cousin who helped him get into good schools and got him government jobs, Pepys managed to work his way up from his humble beginings at a time when it was almost impossible to do so in England.

Pepys began his diary in 1659, a diary he would keep for almost ten years. No one knows what inspired him to start it, though it wasn’t unusual for well-educated men at the time to keep a diary. He was also a well-known collector, collecting such varied things as ship models, scientific instruments, portraits, ballads, money and women.  In fact, some critics see his diary as an attempt to collect his whole experience of the world.

What made him unique, however, was that, as far as we know, Pepys was the first Englishman to fill his diary with descriptions of his most personal and ordinary experiences: his aches and pains, what he liked to eat, going to the bathroom, his marital love life, and his extramarital affairs, graphic details that novelists wouldn’t start incorporating into their work for more than two hundred years.

An on-line version of his diary is available for viewing at PepysDiary.com.