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The Thirteenth Hour Podcast #523: Thirteenth Hour Sequel Writing Update 2 – Research on Logan and Aurora’s House
Today's episode is a follow up on last week's episode on the geography of Logan and Aurora's island; today I wanted to share some of the resources I used that helped both inspire and inform how I wrote about the house they constructed for themselves.
While I had a number of ideas of how they might make their house (i.e. partially underground) from fiction (books like My Side of the Mountain, The Sign of the Beaver, The Hobbit, and On Walden Pond had provided inspiration), the first time I stumbled upon someone actually doing something like this was Dan Price, who wrote a little book appropriately called My Tiny House. I think he'd written an article in a magazine I used to sometimes write for called The Backwoodsman describing how he created an 80 sq ft circular home underground. Fascinated, I bought the hand drawn book, read it, and filed it away as evidence that a human actually could probably make something like I'd envisioned in my mind. If you go to this page, you can find a link to a ~30 min documentary made about Dan Price and his tiny house. As you can see in the film, he actually made numerous structures that all blend in his surroundings allowing him a bit more space and from the looks of it, a pretty good quality of life.
I next stumbled on a Sami structure called a goahti, which is kind of like a teepee found in parts of Scandanavia. It has a wooden skeleton that is then covered with fabric or earth/grass. I thought they were perfect examples of a real life Logan and Aurora house since I'd imagined at least part of their home (the roof especially) being covered in grass/plants so it blended in with their forested surroundings.
Probably around 12-13 years ago, I found a book on tiny houses in a bookstore called Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter. I'd never heard of this architectural movement before but was delighted to find that it had a lot of the ideas that I described above. Here are a few examples of structures that looked like the sorts of things two people could reasonably do with hand tools and a lot of persistence (and good weather):
In the same book, there are some pictures of tree houses that are similar to the structures I imagined the half elves described last week might live in.
This next book, called Tree Houses, has more pictures of similar structures.
All in all, these resources have been very helpful in figuring out how I wanted to write about little day to day aspects of Logan and Aurora's living situation. Though not the central portion of the story, it is a beloved place that they made with their own hands and
Published on 4 days, 15 hours ago