Reading about heraldry

As I've given the story a second breath, I've also made it much more historically based and much more tied to the real life version of where it takes place. I think that this will make for a much more interesting story: "young man pilots flying warship against unknown foes during the American Civil War" has a lot more punch than "boy's journey to adolescence through a guild in a Dickensian city."

So, the great thing is that learning more about the real world history of the elements that will be included in the story leads to a richer and more vibrant story. The down side is that I wind up spending hours reading about the history of alchemy from the Egyptians through to the modern age. Or reading about heraldry for an afternoon. All of which is fun, but none of it gets the story closer to finished.

For example: at the top of this post is a crop of the sleeve insignia for the US Transportation Command. In heraldry, a sea horse doesn't look like the fish, it looks like a normal horse but with a fish tail. Lots of the time the front legs will have flippers. Sometimes the mane will be a fin. In this case the sea horse has wings.

When great advances in transportation were made people always compared them to what came before. The automobile was the horseless carriage, the locomotive was the iron horse. An airship is just that: a nautical ship that sails through the air instead of the sea. A sea horse given flight. I found the Transport Command crest while I was looking for examples that would be similar to what the flying guild will use for their crest. It isn't exactly the same, but it gives you an idea.