I’ve written historical novels before, so I’m aware of the sheer amount of research that goes into choosing the correct language, let alone avoiding more obvious anachronisms. “Gulchcup”, which dates back to the 1200s, was perfect, and is descriptive enough that in context it doesn’t need an explanation. “Groggy” is originally a word that related to “grog” but has now shifted to mean tired. “Boozer” dates back to the 1600s, but sounds more modern to my ear, whereas “oferdrincere”, an Anglo-Saxon word that you can sound out as “over-drinker”, was too old. And most of the words I found weren’t old enough to fit a medieval-ish world. I needed a synonym for a drunkard-I’d already used “drunk” a paragraph of two earlier, I think, so I couldn’t use drunkard again. I wasn’t going to fry my brain with medieval currencies for what amounted to two or three mentions of a specific denomination of coin in the entire novel.īut probably my favourite word I dug up in the editing process was “gulchcup”.

Benefits of making up my own world-I can make up my own rules! Look, I get confused enough with anything pre-decimal when it comes to currency. You’re welcome! Let me tell you, there are way too many words for historical clothing out there, and a lot of them are interchangeable.īut if I thought underwear was complicated, it had nothing on currency! I initially decided I’d use an English system of currency, but in the end I gave up and just used a vaguely Roman system. I also spent way too long researching medieval underwear, and learning the difference between braies and breeches. I might start a petition to bring it back. It’s odd that fortnight persists, at least in UK English, while sennight has fallen out of use. Instead of “week” I used “sennight” which means “seven nights”. I also stole a few older words and peppered them into Anhaga. So while Min, one of my main characters, happily uses the word “ass”, he also uses the word “sweeting” as a sarcastic term of endearment. I mean, once you use the word “ass”, there’s no coming back from that, is there? So while I wouldn’t call Anhaga anachronistic exactly-it can’t be out of time if it’s not set in any real historical period-I ended up with a vaguely middle-ages world, with some definitely modern snark. Then my main character turned out to be a snarky bastard, with very modern thought processes and speech patterns, so we sort of met in the middle, mostly.

When it came to writing Anhaga, I initially had ideas of it being a high fantasy, with archaic language to match. Hi! I’m Lisa Henry, and I’m here today to tell you a little bit about my newest release, Anhaga. A warm welcome to author Lisa Henry joining us here today at Love Bytes to talk about new release “Anhaga”

Anhaga by Lisa Henry