This week in Andalusada blogging: 8/25/2012

For the last two weeks I'd sadly neglected The Andalusada Scrapbook. I stood convicted, enough so that this week I resolved to do better. The question is... what was there to write about?

• Well, first things first there was beer. I'm still writing about it, still cleaning it up, but it was so long in coming that it needed to be posted before I forgot about it.
• The next thing to go up was a glossary of the Scottish New World. It's something that R. and I had been derping about extensively, on and off, for the last week or so; and while this isn't exactly a blog post the way the others are, it was an infodump that merited posting. Not least because it introduced things like Scotland-Norway.
• One of the things that's bugged me about the history of Scotland-Norway was the tangle of religious politics that resulted from trying a Catholic-*Protestant dynastic union. Last week, in a Barnes & Noble book I'd never read before (and haven't read since, because I'm not gonna pay for it), I discovered that the medieval Scottish church was awesomely corrupt. The same night I posted my Scottish New World glossary, the dots connected, and I gushed my thoughts to Engel about this. They were posted on Wednesday, as "The rise and fall of the Ryal Kirk."
• Up to this point, most of the nations I've posted on ABC have been ones that don't exist IRL, and so need some introducing. What I haven't done much is write about the pasts of nations, especially the Great Powers. So on Thursday, for want of better thoughts to write, I introduced the first writeup of a nation in an era: the ubiquitous, regularly-mentioned Dystopian Catholic France. Watch your tongue.

The same forces that got me writing also got me editing a bit - most notably making sure that dystopian Catholic France's pull reached to as many places as the Sodality. But there was also some editing above and beyond that:

• Up to this point, I'd assumed (wrongly) that Scotland's religious history was more or less convergent with IRL. Now that Scotland-Norway's dysfunctional religious history has been set in stone, the rest of the blog needed to acknowledge that. Güntheritism was edited to include a short history of the Ryal Kirk; the Gonzalan Rite was tweaked to mention that Norway went Gonzalan in response to Scottish rot; and even the long-neglected Blackfriars Bible had a sentence or two added to address that it was written in response to the vernacular Scottish Bibles that were then becoming available.
• The Gonzalan Rite itself was significantly expanded on, actually, because what's important about it isn't so much the petty theological details as its political significance within the Güntherite tradition.
• At this point, all of the nations I've written have been more or less written into the new standard format. Which is progress I haven't thought to do before.

There are still things to write about - lots of them, in fact; cotton and the work week are just the two newest of them - but that's for another week. Ladies and gentlemen, this week's writing on Andalusada is done.