u/ComradeBehrund

Stationary pots can be covered in clay or fabric, but I'm more curious about the sort of containers that a person might carry around with them where you need a strong seal. I know bison bladders, waterskins, and gourds were common ways to store liquid in the past, but how would they have been sealed to contain the liquid? Cork is the obvious choice today, but those trees have a fairly limited range, just around the Mediterranean, but bison bladders were common among plains peoples in North America so they must've been using something else.

Are there more widespread trees which might be chosen? Are there other materials that would make a good stopper besides wood?

I don't have a good intuition for horror but I'm playing around with it. I've noticed in almost all horror that I've read that the story or novel begins with a super normal scene, at least a pretty sizeable opening before introducing anything freaky. Even thinking back to Poe, Mary Shelly, and Lovecraft that I read so many years ago, they usually started off with maybe a hint of things to come ("boy am I fucked, some freaky shit sure happened to me but I gotta tell you how I got here first"). My gut intuition as a new writer would tell me to open with a little bit of unsettling stuff (a chance for some basic characterization and setting the tone), then some calm stuff to introduce the plot and characters more generally, then start building up for the real spooky stuff.

One story I worked on started with ritual defleshing of a human head(a thing some prehistoric Europeans used to do), a very disturbing to the reader but solemn and not overly emotional scene, its a normal thing for the character to be doing, no one's really spooked out, it's like carving up an animal. The story I'm working on now I'm tempted to open with the reading of animal entrails, but reflecting on what I've read so far, this seems like the wrong direction to go in. Instead, jump right in with pretty calm, but interesting, scene to build the character and setup the plot, then maybe flash back to the reading of entrails to start building tension before moving on with the plot.

I can think of a lot of horror stories and books that have pretty decent chunks of calm scenes in between more expressive ones, the tension really drops out of it for a while but comes back stronger when the author gets back into the action because they've built up the stakes without really pulling at the tension. I don't see that happening with opening scenes though.

Is my intuition to start with a spooky scene just a new-writerism, I want to open my action book with an action scene sort of thing? Does any tension built up in the opening scene not really hit as hard because stakes haven't been established yet? Do some writers actually start with scenes like this and I just haven't come across them yet?

I'm outlining a story involving a dragon monster thing tearing itself apart with lots of blood and viscera as its corrupted and transformed into some sort of weird undead demon thing. The protagonist goes into its den, finds blood, then viscera, then more blood, then it finds the spooky evil version of the monster (and then, I haven't decided yet, possibly has his own evisceration transformation). A part of me wants the dragon's blood to be blue in order to show that it is different from normal red-blooded animals. The original dragon is kind of divine, blue blood might sort of show that it's something distinct from most other animals while also having that nod towards blue-blooded animals in real life. But I also feel like blue blood might kind of undermine the horror or finding it all fucked up, compared to its den being painted a dark red with normal blood.

Xenomorphs have green blood, but that's not really used in order to build suspense besides just being an environmental hazard. Blue blood feels like something I want to do for me-reasons rather than for maximum spooky reasons which I feel like I should be aiming for, if anything, I worry that it might just seem more distracting than evoking a sense of dread. It's a short story and seeing the carnage remains of the transformation is the main source of dread before things reach a climax so I don't really want to undermine its impact.

What do you think?

I remember reading somewhere, maybe Debt by David Graeber, that marriage and childrearing tends to occur at a younger age for women/girls in settled or agricultural societies (can't remember which) than in unsettled or hunter-fisher-forager societies. Is there some truth to this pattern? Obviously it will depend from society to society --I know it can be very young in some agricultural societies but I'm not familiar with how that compares to unsettled peoples. Is there any evidence of what age people would become mothers in prehistory? Are there more recent comparisons to use between settled and unsettled peoples?