May Brings Change

Starting this month I'm working on a project that will hopefully have me writing considerably more than I have been, and will hopefully have considerably more people reading it too.

I'm posting a Hearthstead novel in weekly portions. Maybe bi-monthly. Still haven't decided that part.

I'm not starting this week and maybe not next week. It depends on how much buffer I've got going by then. But I wanted to let everyone know that it's happening, and that as of today all my writing energies, when I focus them, are honed in on this one project until I get it going reliably. I've got plans. Like accompanying artwork, branches into games and music, and a whole lot of story I think deserves to be somewhere other than just the heads of two cousins.

Here's some stuff I don't know yet that I need to sort out before this actually starts happening:

Venue:  This novel needs an internet home, and it's not going to be this blog. I have one spot in mind, but I'm trying to decide if I need a new URL and if I shouldn't fork over the money for a nice little niche of the web all its own. A brand new website means a good deal of page design and that's quite a bit of work, but the reason I'm puzzling about this now is I'm not sure about moving home sites if this gets more successful further down the line. If any of my readers know for sure I won't be nipping this bud by starting on a free, bloggy website, maybe you could ease my worries on this?

Timing:  When exactly I'm going to start posting is some rancid calculus of everything else I've mentioned so far confinded by the logarithmic curve of my writing pace, which is probably more up in the air than all that. There's also the question I mentioned above of whether posts will be weekly, every two weeks, one great bull of a post a month, or intermittent depending on creator patterns. My first thought is weekly, but... :

Other Content: Like I said, I'd like this to be more than just words I splatter all over the internet. Hearthstead was birthed as a stick figure comic in a notebook with a healthy dose of legos and roleplaying, so I want the full-on commencement of Hearthstead storytelling to be similarly multidisciplinary. I am unfortunately not a polymath so I'll likely be looking to bring in others to help fill in whatever content it is we'll be doing. At the very least there'll be pictures, and at the very least my cousin Nate, whose brainchild Hearthstead is as much as it is mine, will be participating, be it with visual art, mix tracks, or as a sounding board to make sure I'm bringing 100% Hearthstead with every post. I know that visual artwork is often as time-consuming and labor-intensive as writing (I'm sure many artists would consider writing lazy by comparison), so I'd be remiss if I declared a definite density of artwork-to-written-post without a certainty of how all that's working.

All that stuff hanging in the firmament aside, I'm posting this blog for one primary reason: because I really want to do this, and I want everyone to know that I'm dead-set on giving it its fair shot. This isn't a half-baked novella I push for a week and leave behind. I have plans for at least four "seasons" of this thing, and that's gonna take tremendous time and effort and hopefully be a boatload of fun. Hope you're along for the ride.

I'll leave you with this little teaser. The working title I have for this project, or at least its first phase? Forging the Shade.

Peace.

Swords and Symbolism

You wanna talk about swords? I wanna talk about swords.

So I have this tendency when I'm trying to focus on a task to picture a figure drawing a sword. Picture isn't the best word, since it's often accompanied by an imagined rasp of steel. Now admittedly there's probably a more sound/disturbing psychological explanation for this association that I've made since my childhood, but pondering the oddity myself I find the most interesting reason is because to me swords are symbols of agency.

Now let's define what I mean by agency, since it's kind of a meaning-loaded word. An agent, in semantic terms, is the person who performs the primary action in a statement. In "He pushed the woman out the window," "He" is the agent. So in story and philosophy terms someone with agency has acting power in a situation. What this comes down to in discussions of agency is "who makes and executes meaningful or impact choices?"

Agency is one of the prime values of contemporary Western culture. Its dearth is what makes so many of us disgruntled about our dead end jobs (or lack thereof) and the pursuit of it is much of the good that motivates most movements of civil rights and social justice. I won't get into the wormcan I just shook there, but I wanted to note: agency, independence, self-fulfillment, all these are valued pretty highly by our society.

So why would a sword symbolize agency, the power to act? I'd say it's because a sword is a tool, and by our very nature humans use tools as an extension of themselves. There are many more tools that people use that can stand as symbols of our agency, but the sword is iconic.

As a weapon, a tool for harming and killing other living creatures, the sword is simple and effective. It has a long cutting edge that can sever the bonds between sinews and sometimes bone. This martial association changes the tone of the symbol the sword represents. It's not just a tool for mundane agency. This is a war-tool, and that means the will behind the weapon is serious.

But this whole culture grew up around the sword, and I would wager what most people think of when dwelling on swords is swordfights. Now the stereotypical swordfight, the ones from legends and myths, aren't one-stroke encounters so much as full-on dances where the climax of the performance is the fatal injury of one of the combatants. It all stems around a game of skill, defending yourself while creating and exploiting openings in your opponent's assault.

I'd assume that this style of confrontation evolved from the more brutal initial displays, but I think there's a strong parallel extant here. The duel is a commonly recognized analog of the content of two wills, two minds, two forces, two agents with opposing lines of action. Of course the same is true of wrestling, any many other contests, but the sword's popularity today stems from the idea of it at the heart of that contest of will. And I think, then, that a sword has come by association to stand for a person's manifested agency.

That would explain why the appeal of the magic sword is so strong for many. It's a visual manifestation of powerful agency, and the thought of gaining enough agency to overcome the obstacles in your life is very, very appealing. Or at least it is for me.

I suppose you might be wondering why any of this speculation matters. For me it's a relief to have an explanation for myself why I might be so fixated on an outdated piece of weaponry. But if swords have this sort of symbolic weight in more pysches than my own, then it might also explain part of why swords figure so largely in escapist fantasy, and what the source of the cool factor is for putting swords in the hands of futuristic warriors.

I've been picking at this post on and off for weeks now. I think I'll just post it.

By the way, I've been chewing on advice offered by a friend, and it's possible I might start a new blog that dwells primarily on fantasy (as opposed to largely personal musings) and even submit a novel chapter-by-chapter.
I'll keep you posted, by which I mean I won't blog here again for like three months.

Skyrim

I spent the bulk of this Monday slaughtering bandits, discovering new magic, and resurrecting my housecarl from the dead using eldritch commands against the universe.

Yeah, I got Skyrim because it was on sale and. Well you van do all that stuff. It is no longer Monday, so I shall do what I said I would. However, I did post a video of me apologizing as per parameters, but not on my blog. It's still just on YouTube as of yet. I plan to fix that, probably around the time I craft another silly couplet to sorry you with.

Skyrim as a game captures my attention primarily by the form of its progression. You go anywhere (within Skyrim) at a pace set by you, and you choose how to deal with the situations as they arise.

Shortly after the game was released (at nearly two years old, this game is practically a dinosaur) I watched a video of someone playing a pacifist khajiit. He used mostly illusion spells to dissuade things that wanted to kill him. I've discovered first hand that the calm spell is remarkably effective at convincing even raging spriggan that you're nothing to be bothered about. It is humorous to hear a calmed bandit complain gently about being magicked, too.

I hear often that the main story of Skyrim is rather lackluster. I can't defend or attack the stance, because the majority of my 70 odd hours of Skyrim have been repeatedly starting New characters on friends' copies of the game. Now that I am playing my own game, I find myself struggling to reach High Hrothgar between distracting forts full of bandits, flooded out prisons haunted by ghosts, and caves crawling with falmer and black spitting death beetles.

Not that Ragh, my high-elf who fights with orcish weapons and any spell whose tome he can flip through, feels very strongly compelled to heed the summons of a bunch of old nord guys on top of a mountain. Sure, there was the weird thing with the dragon, but I'm not sure he much cares.

That's another draw in the format of Elder Scrolls games. You always start as a prisoner, and there could be any number of reasons you decide for this. Or you could not care.

But that pacifist khajiit? Probably picked up for theft in a case of racial profiling. My high-elf? I think he was thrown in chains by the Thalmor because he killed a few too many people.

Then there's the lore. After what twenty years? There's enough of it there that the writers hardly have to try. I think they do though. The series is old enough they don't have to justify having elves in their games, which I think is either starting to be a thing or will be soon.

Speaking of elves, I would like to stop and note out elf tropes are subverted in these games. The Thalmor are imperialist pigs. Wood elves are cannibals. And honestly these guys aren't pretty. They're strange looking. The faces are stretched. The eyes are too big and too oddly shaped. And with the game advances that have been made I daresay it's not just bad graphics anymore. Elves are sort of subtly hideous by design, I think. I know few people play high elves. With their arrogance it's easier to develop racist thoughts against their golden skin, impossibly high foreheads, and magical prowess. No one wants to be that. They'd rather be social pariah oddballs like the cat-like khajiit.

Can wr also talk about how orcs and dwarves are, by their high names, implicitly forms of elf? Like the falmer are? That's a lot of elf variation.

That's not getting into the daedra and their realms, the vascillations in the pantheon, or any number of tiny things that fill in the lore. It's a rich world, and for the most part Bethesda just lets you run around wrecking it.

I don't think I need to tell you anything else to demonstrate why these games are so widely appealing despite their many flaws. For myself, I think the game is almost improved by failures on the part of the creators when they open the game to modifications that include virtually anything people can imagine.

Because it gets you thinking "this could have been better. I could have done this better.

"I will do this better.

"Once I finish this quest."

Heroic Apology and Virol vs Doctor part 2

Well this post is at some point going to contain an embedding of the video I have on my phone but can't figure out how to post from mobile. So while I'm waiting on that I figure I'll do that other thing I said I would do.
First, a text version of the apology:
It came out late and wasn't even done
My next apology should use a pun

Edit: here's the video

Now. When I left off Virol and the Doctor were both established as being very old and very clever. Smart fogeys. They also both happen to appear young. Or at least not nearly as old as they really are.
This could look bad, but there are several reasons no one is going to make a stink about it.
The first reason is that it is highly unlikely than Virol will ever be a character known to more than one hundred people and so there will be no exposure. The second, tiny reason is that I came up with him long before I had ever encountered Doctor Who.
That second ties into the third reason, which is the one I'm aiming this week's blog for. Most people are aware that two people can think of one creative idea separately and without influencing each other. It's a fairly common occurrence as coincidences go. This is because of archetypes, symbols embedded in our cultural makeup. The Doctor is himself made up of a few archetypes sort of spliced together.
One of these is the wise elder. There's a reason that one exists. Old people have seen more than you have, and it's good stuff to know about (not always pleasant mind you). There are some characters that take this archetype straighter than Virol or the Doctor. Gandalf and Merlin are prime examples. These elders are both wise and powerful, and just a little eccentric.
What the Doctor adds to this is the old-as-dirt pipe dream of eternal youth. Of course in his early incarnations he appeared as an old man, but in this day and age he's young and active. There's also a bit of rebirth thematics to it since he gets a new face every time he regenerates from death/near-death. These are key features of his character but don't get quite as much play as the central tenets (almost wrote Tennants there) I introduced him with.
Virol also plays into the ideas of the wise elder and eternal. Like the Doctor, he also has a jocular facade covering a much darker center. However, Virol never changes his face, and he has to live in cycles of youth and decrepit old age, prolonged over centuries.
It might also be good to note that Virol, like the Doctor, is close to the last of his kind. The difference there is he knows there are more out there somewhere, where the Doctor believes there are none. It is also pretty explicitly not much of a hang-up for Virol. He has lived most of his millennium-long life in this state. The Doctor, in the New series, recently cam into his bereavement. He hides it well considering, but you know.
One of the larger differences between the characters is that the Doctor is from science fiction, and Virol is entrenched deeply in fantasy. He's closer to a snarky well-dressed Merlin than to the Doctor.
The other important difference is that Virol is no time traveler. His power doesn't come from a space ship. It's just him for the most part. And the stuff he knows.
At this point it's pretty easy to see how different the characters are, but without the full context it looks a little sketch. But maybe it shouldn't. The Eternally Young but Ancient Wiseguy serves a certain purpose. The idea fascinates people. Of course the Doctor is the more well known and better executed, but I made Virol because I thought it would be interesting to see him interact with the rest of the world my cousin and I created.
I think that's enough for now. Talk to you on Monday with something else.

Virol and the Doctor part 1

So for my first(ish) post back  I wanted to talk about character archetypes. I had an idea in mind and it was just waiting for me to write it. Then I spent the weekend visiting family because my niece was born and Monday I squandered in typical first world internetian behavior. So. There's gonna be a poetry video. Also, I might post a more truncated post before Monday officially ends if I can.

So about character archetypes, I am going to be talking about two circumstantially similar characters. This may be an exercise I have performed before but it's happening nevertheless.

The more recognizable character is of course the Doctor of Doctor Who.   The other is a man called Virol, my own creation whose public existence only perpetuates in my self-published novella Ashes of Silver.

For those people who aren't familiar with the Doctor (and they do exist) there are two basic aspects of his character you need to know about him. One, that he is very clever. Two, that he is very old. It gets more complicated than that obviously, but that is a boiling down of things that make the Doctor the Doctor, more so than his face for sure.

Just so happens these are the two same important things to know about Virol. That he is both brilliant and ancient.

Now that I've established that I have to go. Next half goes up tomorrow or else very soon.

Pax.

Good Writing: Efficiency part 2

I didn't discuss everything I wanted to in my last post concerning efficiency. There's one aspect of the quality that's fairly universal in writing, and that's word economy.

It's generally considered better writing to describe a concept or other subject in as few words as possible. Of course if you take this too far you can wind up being too vague to communicate anything. A description of the universe and its workings could be "there's stuff," but that does very little to establish anything of importance about the realm of our experience. This doesn't diminish the tedium of an exhaustive list of traits the observable universe possesses. That may be useful for science, but not for an answer.

I don't have the confidence to provide you with what I think a good description of everything looks like.

I suspect I should provide some good examples of the merit of word economy. Take poetry. Especially today, with the prevalence of free verse, there is an emphasis on making every single word in the poem belong and carry as much weight as possible. The conventions of English grammar are loosened in this pursuit. Incidentally I find this to be part of the reason many people find poetry inaccessible. It is language abstracted, reduced and elevated by a presentation much unlike what you experience in spoken word or in prose.

But word economy applies to prose just as well. The word "that" is often extraneous, and can be omitted from many sentences without any sacrifice in meaning. Word processors and writing professors alike discourage the use of phrases that take more words to say the same thing as "like" or "but."

I guess what we're striving for is an utterance that comes as close as possible to meaning what it says. That's not to imply it says what it means. Buried meaning, that can be read into the diction or syntax or tone of what is written, is of high value in today's writing environment. It's probably why literature studies in school stress a search for symbolism in works. It is an effective way to encourage deeper reading, which is valued because of reasons I won't get into in this blog post.

Honestly word economy can be as hairy as any other aspect of efficiency. Fantasy descriptions can be florid with adjectives and compound sentences and adverbs, and plenty of people love it that way. I return to my question that ended the last blog post: is their preference indicative of a lack of culture via delight in archaic and "inferior" means of discourse?

I would say that aesthetics play a large part in the value placed on words, and there is a great deal of differing opinion over what is valued aesthetically and to what degree.

Just be careful when you're writing, because if it takes too ling to say what it's saying then people will tl;dr you right in the face.

Fantasy and the Weird

You know, for a shy person who doesn't like to step on toes, it's really hard to just be like, "Hey, I'm gonna go disappear and do productive things for a while.  Don't bug me."  Especially in a house that doesn't really have a separate place for me to work.

I need to not complain.  Don't complain.  So I'm just observing.  And trying to think of a way to do what I need to do.

Homestuck continues to be a thing.  A crazy thing.  It and Adventure Time are my cartoony indulgences.  Legend of Korra is not an indulgence.  It is a necessity.

I think one of the coolest ideas for creating a world is to play with video game motifs.  It's something that Homestuck does, and most video games (obviously).  There are quite a few other stories that I can't think of at the moment, and plenty of webcomics that don't have an overarching  plot, all of which mess around with video game (and other pop culture) motifs in building the world of their story.  Scott Pilgrim is another good example of this.

Themed worlds are definitely easier to create than wholly new ones.  And "wholly new ones" are probably impossible.  But what I mean is it's easier to say, "This story is set in the Prohibition Era U.S." and present a world that a lot of people will recognize.  It's not as easy to develop the epic sweeps of the history of Arda.  Honestly, one of the most interesting aspects of the Inheritance Cycle was Paolini's experiment in world-building.  He used a lot of the trappings of stereotypical fantasy (men, elves, dwarves, and dragons) but he worked hard to make it his own.

Honestly, and it's taken me a while to realize this about myself, I prefer my worlds a little weirder.  Doctor Who's version of reality is very engaging partly because it doesn't take itself seriously.  Worlds you can laugh in make the moments of sorrow that much more poignant.  Which reminds me of Up.  Goodness, that movie is brilliant.  I won't even get started on that, though.  The Avatar world (again, the Asian-themed cartoon world and not the giant-blue-tentacle-people world) has hilarious things like platypus-bears and the recurring tragedy of a man and his cabbages, but their existence only heightens the feeling when we learn about an important piece of Iroh's past, or see a pair of brothers doomed by the upbringing their father gave them.

And Homestuck is definitely weird.  It's like Hussie dropped in the Weird-brew teabag and just left it there in the piping water until the ratio of Weird to water made the tea into a non-Newtonian fluid.  Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey Weird tea.  That's what Homestuck is.

And that's why I love it.

Now, some people can't take that seriously.  The irony of that statement is fully intentional, yes.  What I mean is that some people lose all their disbelief suspension and miss out on the ride because it's just too weird.  But I was never nearly normal enough to get along with people who like their world always straight vanilla.  Sometimes you just need to have some bacon ice-cream and get over it.

There's a smaller version of a dragonfly, and some wise guy/gal named it the damselfly.  That's an official thing.  That's the kind of world we live in.  We name bugs after medieval mythology.

There's a beetle out there somewhere that, as far as I know, can haul around a banana that's way bigger than it is.  Ants can lift things 100 times their weight.  If fleas were human-sized, they could jump football fields.  In the depths of our ocean, the wildlife glows, and the invertebrates down there are more mind-blowing to watch than a model of a four-dimensional object.

Our world flipped the lid off the can of weird before we came up with the semantic concept that weird corresponds too.  Also, we're capable of exploring semantic concepts that could never occur, and live in those mental spaces fairly comfortably without going entirely insane.  Most of the time.  There was never a Zeus, God of the Sky, man, but we sure as heck know about the stuff he did.

I guess what this Weird tangent was about is that we all need to settle down and non sequitur all over everything once in a while.  It's more honest.

Also, people like me need to drag our heads down out of the clouds every so often and do some manual labor so we can know this world we're living in isn't just made out of semantic space just because that's how we can (kind of) comprehend it.  There's stuff to it.  And it happens.  It keeps hapening.  You gotta eat something that's alive (or once was) in order to live.  Dog my cats, but that kinda sucks, doesn't it?  All it takes is a gulp of something suitably not air to cut off our respiration, and we go out like a light.

 I'm gonna stop there before I get too morbid.  I guess that's the kind of stuff I think about, and I bring it all back to stories because I'm wired that way.  This was all another defense of fantasy as a storytelling medium, I guess.  Or something.  I don't even know.

I'm still thinking about that deep sea jellyfish.

Excerpts From Ashes of Silver

As I said in my update to the previous post, I'm going to release some excerpts from my book to give a taste of the sorts of things contained in Ashes of Silver.  Don't worry, none of these are particularly spoilery (they're from early on in the book).  Enjoy!

Excerpt 1:

‘They call this place Hearthstead.  I was once a stranger to these lands.  

I came during one of the worse summers of dragonwaste,  when  the  dragons  prey  on  the  people because the beasts’ only threats are too few and too disinterested  in  human  troubles  to  bother  cleaning  up their mess.'

--

Excerpt 2:

Someone rapped the door and pushed it open before Xlynx could finish painting the Rune.  The intruder stepped in while taking a deep draw at a pint of beer, one hand pocketed in his waistcoat.  He grinned the whole while, eyes glittering.  Virol.

“Is there something you need,” Xlynx droned, “or are you pestering?”

Virol’s grin smoldered into a smirk.  “Pestering, as always.”

Xlynx narrowed his eyes.  “As that is the case, get out.  I am occupied.”

The layabout didn’t leave.  “I’d love to play historian,” he said.  “Whenever I try it, though, I just end up rambling.”

“I shall be amused later.  Leave.”

In a flash, Virol’s smile faded.  Sometimes it would leave his mouth, but Xlynx had never seen it leave his eyes.  Despite himself, Xlynx set his brush aside.

“I’ve come,” Virol said, “to tell you I’ve bought you some time.”

“Time?” Xlynx said.

Virol said, “Time to untangle snags and gather lost sheep.”

Xlynx smacked his desk.  “You come in here while I am working, telling me you’ve bought me time to count SHEEP!”

Virol chuckled, and just like that the smile was back.  He pulled at his beer.  “I thought you liked cryptic, green-eyes.”

Xlynx stood, casting a small spell which rolled his stone chair back to become part of the wall again.  He started to step around his desk, contemplating how to repay the insult.

“Oh good, you are listening,” Virol said, unmoved.  “But, since I have to spell it out for you.”

He took his hand out of his pocket and held it palm up.  An image of a man in black wielding a pair of knives appeared.  Xlynx stifled his surprise at the spell.  It was a devilishly complicated syntax.  None of the mages in Hearthstead should know of this spell, let alone be capable of it, and never say this perpetually-drinking jester.  But then, Virol always had a surprise up his sleeve.  That was how he’d gotten into the guild in the first place.

The man was familiar to Xlynx.  Marlom.  The Shade.  The Smith.  The inner war of Dark Fire and Blank magic.  

The image flickered, and suddenly it was Hinder.  Xlynx had not seen that man since the Terrus hunt.  A suit of armor walked beside him.  Another flicker.  Aera.  One more—Sahl.

“You’ve only got one of them beside you,” Virol said.  “They have united before, however briefly, and they need to again.  But now you’re all after the same thing.  Rest.

“You cannot rest, Xlynx.  The world outside Hearthstead still moves.  It’s time to stop treating your guild like a desk job.”

Xlynx glared at Virol, but Virol just glared right back.  “Who do you think you are?”

Virol stuffed his hand back into his pocket.  “Far too old, and not nearly old enough.”

--

Excerpt 3:

'For lifetimes, the Empire battered at our gates in the Umbral Valley.  The Ebon sat in safety, laughing at the Endless while our warriors frustrated their might.  We were reviled for this.  

Our darker skin colors, our ever-green eyes, and our bone-white hair were all demonized.  

Every new generation of Ebon saw a more ferocious generation of Endless pounding at our door.  It only made us mock them more.  For their short-sightedness.  For their apish rage.  

The siege of our homeland ended when the drakes came.  In this time of war no drakes, Elemental or otherwise, resided on Hearthstead.  They had their own land across the sea.  According to some accounts, the Elemental Drakes fled their lands because they were hounded by the other drakes of that homeland—drakes that made the Elementals seem unimposing.  Regardless, many Elemental Drakes migrated to Hearthstead and took up residence in the Endless Empire.  It was enough of a distraction for the Endless to lessen their assault on our border.  The Elemental Drakes began to work out a partnership with the Empire that may have proved mutually beneficial.

The  partnership  was  short-lived.   The  Elemental Drakes   were   followed   by   their   cousins   the   dragons.   The  Hydra  dragged  dragons  into  the  sea, the   Dracon   summoned   terrible   storms,   and   the Salamanders  wrestled  them  to  the  ground,  but  there were   too   many.    I   do   not   know   how   many   is   too  many,  but  the  accounts  I  have  read  indicate  the sky was darkened by their numbers, and part of the scarcity of Elemental Drakes today is because of those lost trying to prevent the dragons from reaching the Endless Empire.

You may begin to detect a pattern here.  I made a point of the might of the Endless to give the arrival of the dragons proper context.  The Elemental Drakes fought their desperate battle because the Empire had no hope for survival.

One dragon in particular, Anbraax, led the swarm.  They call him the Demon.  He bested several Grand Drakes in combat to reach the Prolonged capital Vahalla.  While fending off Alacrit the Grand Dracon and Vulcan the Grand Salamander, Anbraax unleashed his fiery breath on the city.  It melted to the ground with most of the Prolonged in existence trapped inside.  They died.

Whenever you hear the curse, “Anbraax’s breath,” be sure to remember that.

By then the Empire was already shattered.  Half of it was gone.  Those Prolonged who survived the pyroclast of Vahalla were scattered to the winds.  Anbraax did not settle with Vahalla.  He flew to Magmell and would have repeated his catastrophe there at the Persistent capital if Atlas had not emerged from beneath the earth at just theright moment.  The Grand Wyrm sheltered Magmell from the blast.  His hide was burned into the earth, but the Persistent capital survived, albeit buried beneath the drake who became a living mountain.

Anbraax was brought down then, by the spells of a mage named Marduk and the earth-shattering rage of Atlas’ mate, Tempus.  Tempus ate Anbraax’s carcass, and the dragons scattered without their leader.  

The damage was done, though.  Atlas was irrevocably crippled.  Tempus curled up beside him and has not moved since.  They are a mountain range now.  Vulcan’s mate was killed in the fighting, and the Grand Wyverns were also grievously injured.  The empire that besieged my people for centuries was crushed in two days’ time.

And where were the Ebon when this occurred?  We used our vast arcane knowledge to hide ourselves.  Not a single Ebon warrior lost his life to dragons.  You should know, too, that my people felt vindicated in this.

There is a reason I no longer live in the Umbral Valley.

If there is a day the name Hearthstead took on its bitter irony, it was that day, when one great city was melted into scrap and another was buried beneath its savior.’

Does It Appeal to You?

What's the appeal of world-building?  You want an honest answer?  The cool factor.  If you're experiencing a world and you're like "awesome!" then that world was probably built successfully.  You end up with concepts like balefire and firebending and spice that allows people to fold space and a world where all humans have a sixth sense for magic.

You have Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with whole histories behind them.

Some of my college friends and I spent some time inventing interesting races and detailing their histories with cultural/technological development.  That was really fun, to have a badger-people and bat-people threatening war on a race of ostrich-people because the ostriches had enslaved some badgers and bats.  Then a biology major joined us with octopus-people who communicated primarily by bioluminescence (if I remember correctly).

Epitomy of awesome.

I believe I've mentioned another benefit of world-building.  The kind of story you tell is directly linked to the kind of world you build—as evinced by the importance of diction/word choice to the building of your world.  The sweeping epic that is the Lord of the Rings tells a story of ugly war and the struggles of the small and the simple against the perpetrators of the war.  And if you missed this part, the Hobbits and the Elves and the Dwarves all lose in the end, and Man is the ultimate winner. For now.

The story of the Wheel of Time series is all bound up in the cyclic nature of time in that universe.  Time is a spinning wheel, and people are the threads of the tapestry it weaves.  That's an actual metaphor pulled straight out of the series, and balefire burns people out of existence throughout time.  Then there are Ta'veren, who unconscious weave the lives of those around them to their own purposes.

So you can world-build to explore world-possibilities other than the one we live in (as Wheel of Time does) or you can use it to talk about the world in metaphorical terms (as the Lord of the Rings does, and despite Tolkien's own aspersions toward allegory).  I mention the word "allegory" in that parenthesis, but I'm not saying the Lord of the Rings is actually an allegory.  For one thing, you don't have an allegory unless the author intends it (argue against that all you want, but I believe it to be true) and is skilled enough to accomplish it.  LOTR has allegorical elements, which comes with the trappings of fantasy.  There are metaphorical (or archetypical) parallels to the world we know and live in couched in the adventures of Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn.  The reason I am not ashamed to love fantasy is because I believe it allows us to look at parallels to our own lives in a different context and think about them in ways I think are more honest than we otherwise can.

I'm not saying everything in fantasy has to be black and white, good and evil.  Look at the Harry Potter series or at Gollum and you have some good case studies for morally complex storytelling in fantasy.  I'm saying there's more room for stylization, and good stylization can sometimes be more real than reality (Up, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc. anyone?).

Do you know how much insane detail goes into the worlds of Pixar movies like Toy Story?  Those movies make you believe, for a time, that toys are alive, and in the process say something important about the value of children (and the value they give to the things they love).  That's what's "literary" about world-building.  When done (and presented) well, it can make a story concept work that would be crippled without it.

So yeah, that's why I like fantasy, guys.  Now go read A Wizard of Earthsea if you haven't already.

More Notes on Diction and a Bit of Pontificating

Here I am at the inn, having a little downtime between rehearsal and the bachelor's party tonight.  To be honest I'm a little distracted.  There's stuff happening and it's been a busy and chaotic day so far.

I gave a lesson about diction/word choice, but I should clarify that the two things are not equal.  Diction is all about "how" you say things (a difficult conveyance for writing) and so overlaps with word choice.  That's why I used them fairly interchangeably in my last blog post.

I mentioned that I don't write much contemporary fiction.  That's because I'm not comfortable with my knowledge of how real-world people actually talk.  I don't think I quite have my finger on the pulse of the down-to-earth and the down-and-out, nor can I spin out realistically elitist phrases like I think I should if I'm going to portray the melting pot (or garden salad, if you prefer that metaphor) of diversity that is the modern world.  I'm not spot on with rhetoric and jargon used by different political camps or even the nuances of dialect differences between a popular jock and a band geek in high school.

Some of this is just me selling myself short.  I'm afraid to try, to be honest.  There's higher stakes in writing contemporary fiction, because if you paint an inaccurate picture, people get offended (for the wrong reasons) or confused, or both.  There's also my lacking sense of tact, in that if I get talking too much about what's going on in the real world all my innate prejudices and beliefs all get born out pretty quickly, and I don't even tend to believe in all the things I have guttural reactions to.

For these reasons I've largely relegated myself to the abstracted spaces of fantasy and poetry, where I can create the whole universe and the reader has to learn from me what the words mean—what the world means.  In some ways it's lazy, and it's for that reason that I hope to do more contemporary fiction writing, but so far my fear of research and mistakes has kept me from accomplishing that.

I'm also much more versed in what makes good fantasy good than the ethereal, academia-defined notions (hey look, prejudices!) of what makes good "literary" fiction.  So what I strive for is literary fantasy, which leads me to harken back towards Tolkien, Lewis, White, Graham, LeGuin, and others rather than try to pull the popular (and perhaps less substantive) work of Salvatore, Jordan, Brooks, and Martin.  Yes, I included A Song of Ice and Fire and The Wheel of Time under "less substantive" despite their being epics long enough to kill their writers before they're finished. Arguably, these extensive come from the very fact that these works are popular, but just realize I'm not knocking these guys.  I just want to do something a little different.

I aspire to write fantasy that gets put in the mainstream literary canon.  Yeah, that's a big order to fill.  To do that, I have to be twice as good as someone writing ordinary literary work, because I have to catch the eye of the mainstream audience (incidentally not the majority of readers) from my spot out in left field.  People used to do this all the time.  In my estimation some of the best writers in the last century wrote speculative fiction (fantasy or sci-fi).  Now, some of my fellow recent batch of degree-ified writers may strongly disagree with me.  But they can continue to call fantasy useless and crap and I'll continue to call Hemingway a twit who offed himself because he was too arrogant to age and die with dignity.

So yeah, there's stuff.  By the way, phrases like that one I just used are an instance of diction.  I do it because I want to relate to people, and because I like irony.  I'm a writer, and some say a rather eloquent one, but I know when you just need to relate on a vague level and not get into the boring details with people.  Sometimes I let myself go (like this blog post for example) but that's because I feel comfortable and appreciated.  And yes, I miscalculate.  My own sister checks out on me when I start talking about the fascinating etymologies of words.

I'm a language nerd.  I realize this.  No, I don't need help.  Thanks for trying.

Hearthstead, by the way, isn't one of my more "literary" attempts at fantasy fiction.  It's a bit of a superhero story wrapped in a fantasy shell, which I think makes it super awesome.  Of course, it's also not going to be intentionally subpar writing because of that.  But its themes are a little less esoteric, maybe, than "The Fairies' Game" that I wrote this spring.  Honestly I like it better.  It goes places.  To find out where it goes, of course, you'll have to read it.

Patience, young grasshopper.  Come with time, it will.  Yes, I'm aware that may have been excruciating.  Just move on with me.

By the way, the novel that I hope will be available by the end of this month is called "Ashes of Silver."  I put it in quotes because it's not published yet.  As always, I'll talk more about the book when the time is right.  Yes, I can't shut up about it.  It's my first freaking book ever that's going to come out, and I have a blog where I say whatever I want.  Of course I'm going to gush.  A little bit.  Around the finger I've got plugged in the dam for your sake.

I think that's all I have to say today.  As I said yesterday, circumstances may prevent me from blogging tomorrow, but we'll see how it goes.  Hope your weekend's chugging along nicely.

For now, though?  -shrugs-

(seriously need to think of a better ending thing)

Fantasy and My Process

Late this morning I finished (the first draft of) the novel I've been working on for Writer's Workshop.  In case you've missed a few blogs, I've been kinda pumped about it.

Part of what that means is I suddenly have a lot more time on my hands.  Time enough, maybe, to talk about what the novel is just a little bit.

It evolved out of an idea I had to bring together elements from the Iliad and Arthurian legend.  Somewhere along the line Germanic folklore came in and kind of took over.  I can't give too much away, but I will give you the basic premise:

A village in a recently annexed nation has virtually all of its women stolen away in one night.  The townspeople are bereft, but only a handful band together to seek out and rescue them.  These are the main characters of the story, which follows them on their endeavors to bring their women home.  Their adversaries, however, are not who they expect.

That's the general idea, but it gets built upon pretty heavily.  It's not a particularly long book, especially for being fantasy, but there's a lot that goes on.

I tend to write organically, building on what I've already established to create subtleties and a natural progression towards the end of a story.  Part of the struggle I run into is that I can go on and on before I get to an ending I feel is right for a story, but for the most part I think it helps me avoid endings that seem contrived.

It's too early for me to tell how this story has turned out.  A few people will read it and give me their feedback, which will help, but I won't really have a feeling I can trust about it until a few months from now when I read it over with fresh eyes.

Why am I talking about all this?  I think, mostly, because the process of writing excites me like very little else does.  I am passionate about telling stories in this way, and I want to share that passion with others.  If you could really care less about writing, I apologize for what might seem like a waste of time.

If you're a writer or an avid reader of fantasy and you want to "beta test" the story I just finished writing, get a hold of me and we'll see what we can arrange.  I can feel that my writing style has changed recently, and I'm curious as to how because I can't see it clearly for myself.

Right, that's enough time spent rambling about the esoteric.  Talk to you tomorrow.

Ciao.

Is This Even Really a Webcomic?

Can't talk. Too busy reading(?) Homestuck. It's fantastic. Only downsides are the occasional vulgarity and foul language. Short of that, it's just sheer excellence. I've been quietly nerding out over it all day.

It's both the way the world builds slowly in intensity and the way the author plays around with the narrative that hook me. I can't really explain it now that I'm smack dab in the middle. Well actually, I think I can explain it in two words:

Liminal fantasy. You see, liminal fantasy is when there is the realm of the fantastic and the realm of the mundane, and these two realms bleed into each other throughout the story. Like all good fantasies, Homestuck isn't really hard and fast on the liminal line. There's the fact that it's cartoony to begin with, then there's the whole super complex thing with captchaloguing (I don't think I spelled that right) that's there from before things start getting intrusion-of-the-fantastic all up in there. But I think it's really well done for a comic(?) hosted on a site called MSpaintadventures.

So yeah, that's enough talking about it, now it's time to get back to reading.