Two writers on worldbuilding, fantasy, and whatever else comes to mind.

Friday 22 September 2017

A thunder sent to bring / black Ariel and Azrael and Ammon on the wing: demons (religion in fantasy, III)

Furthermore, there are certain divine powers situated in the middle, in the airy space between the height of ether and the depths of earth, through which our desires and our deserts travel to the gods. These the Greeks name daemones....
Apuleius, On the God of Socrates 6

1.

Gods are not the only superhuman beings who feature in real-world religions. A whole host of lesser beings crowd the space between humans and the heavens. The ancient Greeks called these beings daemones. From this our own word "demon" derives, yet, unlike the demons of the New Testament or the saints' lives, these spirits were not unambiguously maleficent.

Fickle as the air of which they were made, the daemones were sometimes good, sometimes evil. As Apuleius, the author of the most famous ancient fantasy-story, the Metamorphosis, tells us in his theological treatise On the God of Socrates, they served as the gods' intermediaries with mankind, transmitting prophetic dreams and inspiring seers. They could even direct the lives of individual persons: each man had his guardian daemon, and the philosopher Socrates himself felt (so Plato's Apology tells us) that he was directed through life by the inspiration of his daimonion, the titular "god" of Apuleius' treatise.

The gulf between gods and men was not impermeable, therefore, and not everything that received worship was a "god" in a strict sense, that is, a good and powerful being fully removed from the corruption of the world. The gods' underlings had their place, and deserved their due, just like the emperors' subordinates, or the patrons--the bosses, or perhaps the dons, as it were--to whom the average Roman looked for support in time of need.  

Sunday 17 September 2017

The Sign of the Sibyl on sale - around 85% off

I will be holding a sale for the Kindle e-book of The Sign of the Sibyl from September 21 through September 27, inclusive, on Amazon and Amazon UK (sadly, price promotions aren't available on other international Amazon affiliates--a choice of theirs, not mine, I can assure you!)

Here's how it will work:

At 12:00 am GMT, September 21, the price will drop to 0.99 GBP on Amazon.co.uk (about 83% off).

At 12:00 am Pacific Daylight Time, September 21, the price of the e-book will drop to 0.99 USD on Amazon.com (about 87% off).

At 12:00 am, September 28 (in the respective time-zone), the book will revert to the ordinary list price of 7.49 USD/5.75 GBP. Throughout, it will remain free for subscribers to the Kindle Unlimited program, as well as to those who borrow it from their friends via the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

Saturday 16 September 2017

Above the evening star: astrology, the gods, and powers in heaven (religion in fantasy, II)

For Manasseh built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them. Also he built altars in the house of the Lord, whereof the Lord had said, In Jerusalem shall my name be for ever. And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord.
2 Chronicles 33

1.

Ancient people worshipped the stars as gods, and believed that they had control over their lives and destinies. This is something that modern people, at least in Western Europe and North America, have great difficulty understanding. They can hardly be blamed for it, of course. It is rarely easy to understand the people of a different time and place. Even when you feel a kinship of mind or feeling with an ancient person--and many who read their works do--you nevertheless stumble across things that are utterly foreign, that cut clean contrary to the ordinary intuitions of life, the common sense of your own age. The worship of the heavenly bodies is one of those things.

To the typical modern, raised (even if he never studied or understood it) on post-Classical physics and living in a city (as virtually everyone does now) where the night-time sky is almost invisible against the glare of man-made lamps, stars simply are balls of super-heated plasma and gas. The planets simply are giant rocks or balls of gas. Maybe, just maybe, they contain life, and writers and filmmakers imagine what might come to pass, if someday we did meet a person like us in mind and soul (whatever he or she or it looked like), but from outer space.

But neither stars nor planets are themselves alive. For the ancients, they were. Higher and brighter than the wet, dirty ball on which we ourselves dwell, the heavens were everlasting and unchanging, a perpetual order moving in perfect harmony with the providence that ruled the world. At once gods and the work of the supreme God, they regulated both heaven and earth, and bound man's life, character, and destiny to their dictates. To this, the science of astrology was dedicated.

Wednesday 23 August 2017

First book released!

The Sign of the Sibyl is now available in e-book and paperback formats on Amazon (including Amazon UK and other European subsidiaries). 

The process of publication is a little more drawn-out than one might anticipate from outside, and a few practical details still need to be ironed out. In particular, it will take another week or so before you can look inside the print book, but, in the meantime, the sample chapter remains available, as does the look-inside function for the e-book.

Safekeeping will take a little bit longer, but it should be up in September as anticipated. 

Saturday 5 August 2017

Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part II

While we wait for proofs, let's talk about print layout!  A manuscript is usually in 12-pt double-spaced Times New Roman with half-inch indents, on letter-sized paper with one-inch margins.  A finished novel is not.  Getting from one to the other isn't hard, exactly, but it does take work and care and patience.  I find that using styles (Normal, Heading 1, etc.) saves a lot of time.

Sunday 23 July 2017

Sample chapters

The blog has been a bit quiet this month, but we've been busy: most recently, with print layout for our novels.  We now have sample chapters!

Read the first chapter of Philipp's Sign of the Sibyl
Read the first chapter of Ella's Safekeeping

Watch the blog (or follow by email, in the right sidebar) for further progress updates; we hope to have the novels available as paperbacks and e-books in August or September.

Sunday 25 June 2017

Fish and chips: food in fantasy

Food has a history. Once you say it, it seems obvious, but most of us don't think about the fact very often. We all know the basics: potatoes come from the New World, wheat from the Old; the Aztecs ate chili peppers and chocolate and avocados, the Chinese did not, though they did have tofu. But the details get fuzzy when you look a little closer. Where are bananas from? Two-thirds of the export crop is produced in five countries: one is the Philippines, the other four are in Central or South America. Yet bananas are not a New World fruit. They were first domesticated in Southeast Asia, and almost a fifth of the world's total crop is produced in India (or was a few years ago). What about coffee? We associate it first with Turkey and the Near East (or at least I do), but it is actually native to Sub-Saharan Africa.

And that's only the plants themselves. Things get even more complicated when you look at recipes, when we have them at all (there is at least one Roman cookbook, for what it's worth). Pasta was not, perhaps, invented by the Chinese (that seems to be a fairly recent legend), but no one was eating spaghetti bolognese, back when the tomato was unknown less than five thousand miles from Bologna.

What does this have to do with writing, you wonder? Quite a lot, actually. Not everyone likes to describe food in fantasy (I've gotten through The Sign of the Sibyl without a meal more elaborate than "duck breast with rice, steamed greens, and wine"), but some go on at length. George R.R. Martin is a famous example, and there's a fair bit of food even in the Narnia books (Edmund and Turkish delight; Shasta eating butter for the first time; the three lords of Telmar at Ramandu's table).

Food, like clothing, weapons, armor, religious rituals, and government bureaucracies, can help set the feel of the fantasy story, that elusive element in world-building that lets you describe the setting and the characters and their customs in a series of swift strokes. Enough such strokes, and you have (if you're good at it) built up a picture of a whole imaginary world, or at least the parts of it that we as readers need to see. The kind of food you portray should thus fit the rest of the setting of the story, and give it the proper texture.

Sunday 4 June 2017

Clothing in Fantasy

Some writers (I am one!) like to come up with clothing for their various fantasy cultures and characters.  The typical fantasy setting, though, doesn't have sewing machines, washers, dryers, or steam irons.  How do people make and take care of clothes?  How do they use the clothes?  How do all these things affect the kinds of clothes they choose?

Thursday 1 June 2017

Never trust the news...

...when it comes to etymology, anyway. The BBC has an article on the etymologies of several words or idioms that, it alleges, developed during the First World War. I'm habitually suspicious of such articles, and looked up the words I use. They were right on camouflage, but several others are incorrect, and quite badly so. The Oxford English Dictionary is not an infallible guide, but its citations put several of these words securely before the War:

1. "Dud," said by the BBC to have originally referred to a shell that did not explode and only later to have been expanded to other malfunctioning implements, already occurs in multiple broad usages in 1908. 

2. "Binge," which they allege to be a piece of Lancashire slang spread abroad during the war, was in use in both Northamptonshire, in the mid-19th century, and Oxford, by the end of the century. Neither is near Lancashire. Worse yet, the word was already used, as a verb, by Hilaire Belloc in 1910: surely a noteworthy enough writer that we could take it as already mainstream before the War.

3. For "crummy," they give an elaborate etymology linking it to lice, which resemble crumbs. The link with "lousy" is certainly present--in 1859. If it was "coined by American infantrymen" at all, they must have been pre-Civil War regulars. One wonders if it is really an extension of "crummy" meaning "strewed with crumbs," which is already in evidence in the 18th century. 

[On a side note, "crummy" was once a term of approbation for a pleasingly plump woman. Plumpness no longer gets the praise it once did, and I doubt your wife or girlfriend is going to want to hear, "Well, my dear, that dress makes you look remarkably crummy today!"]

4. "Cushy," we are told, was borrowed from Urdu; this is true enough (though the OED suggests Persian and not Hindi influence alongside Urdu), but again, the word is already cited in the 1890s. It might have been spread to the rest of the army by British Indiamen in WW1 (who knows?), but it certainly didn't enter English then.

5. The worst of all is another word of allegedly subcontinental origin. You or I might think that "chat" was related to "chatter," but no, the BBC treats us to an elaborate explanation of how it came from picking lice ("chats," in Hindi) off one's body while kibbitzing with one's fellow soldiers. The tale has the marks of an invented etymology about it--the suggestion of an exotic origin for a word of obvious etymology, the weirdly incongruous shift from literal to metaphorical meaning. And, in fact, it is completely made up: "chat" does mean "louse," but in English cant, and as early as 1699. "Chat" in various senses close to our own (though originally more negative) appears as a verb in the mid-15th century, and as a noun in More and Shakespeare! 

In sum: never repeat such stories, unless you've checked them yourself. They're too often wrong. I only wonder where the BBC people got their information (no citations, of course: always a bad sign, but typical in journalism; this earlier article, in a BBC publication, was more accurate). Several of these appear in Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, but he notes the earlier appearances of "crummy," for example, and suggest that "dud" was merely "resuscitated" from relative obsolescence during the war. He also gives the "louse" etymology for "chat," but with no hint of the Hindi connection, and no suggestion that a connection with speaking did not exist beforehand. I'm guessing an intermediary, more popular, source. 

Saturday 27 May 2017

No longer so, Orson?

Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender's Game, has a nice series of articles on writing based on correspondence and questions from writing classes he has occasionally taught. The newest is now over ten years old, and the advice on publishing is thus out of date, but any blog-readers who are interested in writing will still find helpful the thoughts of a successful author (and, they say, an even better teacher of writing).

One of his older posts gives me pause, however. In an essay on "rhetoric and style" from 1998, Card attacks the idea, too common (in his judgment, anyway) in creative writing programs, that an author needs to develop a distinctive, individual style. That an author will have his own style is, Card says, an inevitability, but there is no point in belaboring it; rather, the author should seek to tell the story he needs to tell. By focusing on the story itself, not on the language in which it is being told, the author will arrive at real clarity, and good style, too.

Anyone who has read overwrought, self-consciously "literary" writing will know exactly what Card means, and most will probably agree with his judgment (I certainly do). However, I wonder if Card isn't overlooking something, or rather, whether the rise of self-publishing hasn't changed the advice one might want to give.

Friday 26 May 2017

Mahound is in his paradise: religion in fantasy

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

--G.K. Chesterton, Lepanto, second stanza

1.

A tourist visits Gondor at the end of the Third Age, on the eve of the War of the Ring. What does he see in its capital? More or less what Pippin does before Sauron's armies cross the Anduin: the black outer wall of the city, the lesser walls of its upper circles, houses and arches of white stone, a tall tower atop the central stone keel of the city, and, around the dead, white tree before it, the soldiers of the Tower Guard in their sable uniforms.

Now, imagine being a tourist in Rome during the reign of Nero. What would you see? Again, buildings of marble, arches, perhaps not soldiers (forbidden, in theory, within the city's sacred boundary). And what else? Statues, aqueducts, columns, and, scattered throughout the city, one other kind of building that Pippin does not: temples. From the grand edifices of the forum to the little shrines on the street-corners, Rome was a city full of gods in "a world full of gods." Minas Tirith is not.

Wednesday 24 May 2017

Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part I

Self-publishing is an easy choice if you tend to enjoy managing lots of fiddly details. That doesn't mean, however, that the process itself is easy. Here's a smattering of things I've had to research or consider so far.

Disclaimer: I am a housewife, not a lawyer, publisher, or other expert. Information in this post comes from my own experience and (possibly flawed) understanding; if you take any action based on it, I am not responsible for the results.

Friday 19 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History VI: the limitations of a genre

1.

I've read some pretty good alternate-historical stories, rigorous, "soft," and more or less fantastic. I've often felt discontented with what I read, however, for reasons on which I've not quite been able to put my finger. I suppose I can only say that the fantastic settings and plot-devices reveal two key intellectual limitations of the genre: materialism and chronological snobbery. In what is, for now, the final post on the topic, I'll try to explain what I mean.

Wednesday 17 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History V: Bats from Planet X

Unbeknownst to the Puritan pirate captain, the ring of power had fallen into the hands of the warlord of a distant planet whose name is made up entirely of phonemes in shaded areas on the International Phonetic Alphabet chart. The warlord bided his time, gathered his armies. Then one day, a cloud of fire-breathing bats descended from the sky, wreaking havoc and burning all the countryside. The warlord rubbed his hands together—or rather, the ends of his wings—as he looked down and saw the Earth burning like a little firecracker, and he sat back in his throne and laughed and laughed and laughed.

--Ella Hansen, In Enigmate, "False Ending" (revised)

Ahem. I'll let Ella explain where that little gem came from, and why, someday. Let's just say that Young Adult fantasy sometimes gets old, even for the authoress herself. What I mean to draw attention to is the paragraph's protagonist: our trusty alien warlord, whose presence in the story I apparently inspired. "Alien Space Bats" were--so the story goes--invented in a usenet discussion by a contributor who wanted to underscore just how impossible it would have been for Unternehmen Seelöwe ("Operation Sealion"), the planned German invasion of Britain in WW2, to succeed: only the intervention of extraterrestrials could have brought the Germans victory.

Monday 15 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History, part IV: Writing "hard" and "soft" alternate history

If the observations I have made in the last two posts are accurate, there is an important practical consequence for the writing of alternate history: every "hard" alternate-historical narrative is in danger of going soft. Once the timeline has diverged sufficiently from the main narrative, only authorial fiat prevents it from diverging further. Once John F. Kennedy has given the order for an all-out response to Soviet aggression off Cuba and Thomas Powers has flattened everything under Moscow's sway with the full might of the Strategic Air Command, there is no telling what the world will look like even five years later, let alone fifty.

Sunday 14 May 2017

Your Loving Aunt

When looking through old files of my writing, I rediscovered this story, first published on a now-defunct collective blog in 2008.  My novels (however the early drafts start) always end up fairly serious; my short stories almost never do.


*****

To Miss Prunella Pig, 234 Penn St.
5 June

My dearest Prunella,

How delighted I am to hear that your new house is completed! You must tell me everything about it. Have you chosen curtains for the parlour yet? There is a lovely print in a shop not far from my house: yellow with small pink roses. It would match your couch perfectly. And of course you mustn’t forget the wallpaper. Perhaps a pale yellow or pink will do best. Oh, my dear, I am so anxious to see it all. I have more things to remind you than I can write.

Saturday 13 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History, part III: Chronology and the problem of genre

When does a story set in an imaginary past stop being alternate history? As I noted in part II, alternate history stories, at least those found on the internet, tend to take an explicitly chronological form. Even when they do not, there is an assumption that the plot derives from a particular alteration in the actual events. But what if it doesn't, or if the deviation lies so far in the past that any but the most tenuous sense of irony or comparison with reality is lost? Even chronology, the most rudimentary tool of historical analysis, eventually loses its meaning. Charting one's way through time is rather like charting one's way through space: without fixed points of reference, both the writer and the navigator find themselves directionless.

Wednesday 10 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History, part II: "Hard" Alternate History

If alternate history has little to do with the writing of actual history, what makes it work? I've noticed a striking effect when reading alternate history scenarios online. As a rule, posters on the Alternate History Forum prefer timelines of varying elaborateness to traditionally organised novels or novellas. Their stories, except those that fit under the broad category of fantasy alternate history (more on this in another post), are usually organised not around the actions and psychological development of particular characters, but according to a sequential, chronological arrangement of events. Coupled with this structure is a tendency, not universal though sometimes hotly defended by purists, to make the events of the timeline deviate from a single "point of departure" (POD, in the parlance). Alternate history is thus presented, in form, as a fictitious analogue of the straightforwardly "factual" narratives of modernist historiography, albeit without the supporting structure of footnotes and sources.

Tuesday 9 May 2017

When in Doubt, Add Villains

Plots are my weak spot.  Although I have problems developing at least one fairly major character per book, the other characters work out without much effort; the dialogue goes swimmingly; and describing things vividly and efficiently is my favourite part of editing.  But it takes me a long time to find out just where it's all going.

I wish I could report that I've discovered the key to easy plotting.  Alas, I had to get help outlining the novel I'm currently writing -- even though I knew more or less everything that was going to happen!  I have, however, stumbled upon one trick that helps move the story along: add more villains.

Thoughts on Alternate History, part I: introduction

Admiral Kimmel woke in a sweat. As he blinked, the buzz of the propellers of two hundred airplanes faded from his ears. A dream. That's all it had been. A dream. It was Sunday morning, a new day in Honolulu. But still-- "Lieutenant," he called. "Send the order: put the fleet on highest alert. And call General Short. His planes need to be ready for action, at once."  So began the Raid on Pearl Harbor, and the first American naval victory over Japan in the Pacific War of 1941-1944.

For the last several years, I've lurked (and occasionally posted) on the Alternate History Forum, one of the internet's premier sites for discussion of what could have, should have, would have happened, if Husband E. Kimmel really had alerted the Pacific Fleet on the morning of December 7, 1941, if Wellington had died of malaria after the Battle of Assaye, if Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, had been hit by a stray shell at Gallipoli--if, well, you name it, and someone's probably thought of it, at least if it has to do with a famous general or politician dying before his time.

Sunday 7 May 2017

Fantasy Names

Adapted from a blog post published in 2013.

In a constructed world, characters' names should ideally come from the relevant conlangs (constructed languages).  This is especially helpful when there's a large cast of named characters from many different places: if the languages are different enough, the reader can start to feel where a character might come from, going only by his name.  (Compare the names Bilbo, Gimli, Legolas, Théoden, Ar-Pharazôn, Ghân-buri-Ghân:  One isn't going to forget quickly which one is the hobbit and which one is the elf.)

Wednesday 3 May 2017

"Vow" is also Latin: an addendum on register

In a recent re-post from her old blog, Ella gives a quotation from The Silmarillion as an example of grand, yet simple diction. She notes that Tolkien uses only a few Latinate words: "'terrible', 'mountain', 'pursue', 'vengeance', 'possession'". However, there is at least one other: "vow," which is ultimately derived, through medieval French, from the Latin votum (of much the same meaning as the English derivative, though it can also denote the thing for which a vow is offered). The reason, I imagine, why she overlooked the word is that it feels so very Anglo-Saxon: it is short, has a w (not a very Latinate letter), and has been a part of ordinary English diction for a very long time.

The Moral of the Story

In 2012, a thread on the NaNoWriMo Plot Doctoring forum asked, 'What exactly is it that makes a story worth telling in your opinion?'  One commenter of many claimed that 'fiction [doesn't need to] teach you a moral lesson or even have a moral outcome'.  To this, I replied:

When we talk about stories having morals, though, we generally mean one of two things, which in practice often overlap but are probably worth distinguishing:

1. The story shows approval of characters, actions, or situations in accordance with the demands of an ethical system (e.g., the kind people win and the mean people lose; the poor are happy and the rich are sad; the people who care deeply about things are shown favourably and the cynical people are shown unfavourably); or

2. The story illustrates a general truth about the world or human nature (e.g., slow and steady wins the race).

Tuesday 2 May 2017

Register, Part II

Adapted from a post from 2014 on the NaNoWriMo Fantasy forum, in response to a writer who requested tips for 'developing a good fantasy voice' for high fantasy.

A fantasy story of the kind that you describe will have two different categories of voice, the first of which is the speech patterns of the characters.  These should naturally vary, not only from character to character, but also by context.

Register, Part I

First posted in 2013 on the NaNoWriMo Plot Doctoring Forum, in response to a writer who wondered what would happen if he wrote in a 'casual' style except with 'somewhat archaic and uncommon' adverbs, such as 'peradventure', 'hitherto', and 'forasmuch'.

The main problem I foresee is not one of comprehension but one of register. For anyone unfamiliar with register, I will explain, as well as I can:

Register might be described as the level of formality and technicality of a piece of writing. For example, in English, 'The king hired an assassin to kill his rival' is probably medium-register. If he hired a 'hit-man' to 'bump him off', that's fairly low register; if it were the 'head of state' trying to 'eliminate his competitor', that would be slightly higher but more technical-sounding; and so forth. In other words, register is the 'feel' of a passage. It's influenced not only by vocabulary but also by sentence length and structure and word-order.

Welcome!

After months or years of saying I'd like to publish a novel someday, it's time to make it happen.  I've joined forces with another writer in the same position, and we're working towards releasing a book each this year (August or September).

We plan to use this blog for occasional progress updates as well as (hopefully less occasional!) posts on various writing topics.  The title (in case anyone wonders) comes from G. K. Chesterton's poem 'Lepanto', which begins 'White founts falling in the courts of the sun'; no special significance, it just sounded nice.