Posted by nightphoenix on Apr 17, 2012 in
Process Whenever I listen to Writing Excuses and they talk about making magic systems and worlds from mundane ideas…my brain interprets this as a challenge. So when they said in passing, “you could totally make a city or a world or a magic system centered around book-binding”…well, I bit.
My first inclination was to approach this from a D&D perspective, because magic in that world is cast through words and spell books. One could easily make “bookbinding” a literal thing, where you are actually magically binding a force or spell into a book.
In a completely unrelated conversation, when something I was about to say just vanished from my head (don’tcha hate that??)…I wondered aloud where all those thoughts go. Maybe there is an Aether of Lost Thoughts, where all Lost Thoughts go when they disappear from your head. Maybe this Aether is “hungry”, and at times will actually steal thoughts away before you can think them?
And then I thought, what if you could pluck these lost thoughts out of said Aether, and say, bind them into books?
But somehow you’d have to do this without actually thinking the thoughts, because…well, it’s not a Lost Thought anymore if someone thinks it, is it? Plus, maybe Lost Thoughts are also those thoughts that people push away because they’re too disturbing or awful or messed up to contemplate…like what you’d really like to do to that annoying relative or what sort of damage that really sharp knife could cause…stuff that kind of half passes through your head just before you mentally slap yourself. Those could be pretty dark. Spending too much time letting those kinds of Lost Thoughts pass through your head could drive you insane.
So perhaps the purpose of book binding is to get those thoughts out of the Aether without harming anyone in the process.
Then I liked the idea of drawing out Lost Thoughts with music. Perhaps there could be two classes of book-binding magical practitioners: Minders and Binders. Minders would be the ones trained to “listen” to the Aether, locate troublesome thoughts, and draw them out. Binders would be in charge of setting down onto paper what the Minders draw out. At first I thought about making a sort of music language, but that got too complicated. I think perhaps what the Binders would be doing is drawing, maybe something like Celtic knot work, complex patterns, fractals, etc. And because every Minder and every Binder is different, the music used to call and the drawings used to capture any given Thought will be wildly different, even if the Thoughts themselves were similar.
This gives the added advantage of these books not being “readable”, in the traditional sense. Random Villain X isn’t going to be able to come along and read a whole bunch of dark, dangerous thoughts out of these books…at least not easily.
Unless Random Villain X is a Minder. I imagine some Minders would eventually figure out not only how to draw out Lost Thoughts, but how to channel them into spells. And perhaps Binders can do other things…like transcribing a speech onto paper in such a way that the speaker and audience would both forget what they’ve just said and heard. Or changing memories by writing them down.
Perhaps a rivalry has built up between Minders and Binders over the years, despite the fact that they need each other in order to keep the Aether safe. That could be a starting background conflict for a story.
I have several story snippets that could be combined with this to make a story…but that’s a process that could take some time.
Tags: brainstorming, ideas, musings
Posted by nightphoenix on Mar 23, 2012 in
Output,
Process When I first started the Visions bestiary, I basically scoured my D&D Monster Manual and online sources, looking for interesting mythological creatures, and dumped them in more or less as they were. I had always planned to go through and “tweak” the critters, making them unique to the world…and I did that with some of them.
But not all. So I went through, looked at the terrain each creature inhabited, and looked at which race lived there. I figured that, in a lot of cases, the name a certain race gave to a certain animal that lived in their home territory would be the name that stuck. In all other cases, the common language used by all the races would give the name. Vision’s “trade language” is Arader (the weasel/otter race), because the Arader are natural exploders and traders, and it was they who made the initial contact with various places, animals, and people.
(Their language is English, stripped as much as possible of words borrowed from other languages. Because any given word in any given tongue is, at its core, a description of what it represents. We call a rat a rat because the word “rat”…or rather the word “rat” evolved from, represented a gnawing sound and that’s what rats do. Native Americans have descriptive sounding names because they’ve been translated from their own tongue to English.)
I had already decided what culture and language each race would borrow from, way back when I was naming the lakes and mountains and cities. So for each creature, I looked up what it most closely resembled in the language of the race who would have named it. For example, the Feya’s tongue sounds a lot like French, so creatures in their homeland would have very French sounding names. (I discovered, in this process, that the Feya are excessively fond of seafood. Who knew? 
Then I started “wearing the edges” off the names, paring them down in ways I imagined common use and exposure to different tongues would do. Sometimes I would end up rearranging the word so that it spelled the way I was instinctively pronouncing it. (For example: “yabbyervotzk”. Which is “jabberwock”, transliterated into Russian. I was mentally pronouncing it “yabber-ya-votzk” until I noticed the spelling, and decided I liked my pronunciation better. So now it’s “yabberyvotzk”). Sometimes I’d end up abandoning the native word and going with the familiar name. I didn’t want to fall into the fantasy “calling a rabbit a ‘shmearp’ simply because that sounds cooler than plain ‘rabbit’” trap. This process will continue as I work on the game.
Last week, I was thinking about the ecology of Avatar (Cameron’s version, not Airbender), and remembering how I admired the overall sense of unity that existed on that world. (Except the Na’vi, but that’s a whole different gripe…) Because what I needed for Amphiptere’s Vision was a particular trait or evolutionary connection. Partially to unify the world and partially to help fix the “shmearp” problem. What’s unique about this world?
First thing that came to mind was dragons. Well duh, most fantasy worlds have dragons, usually of the Western, winged variety. But no one ever seems to think about how unlikely such an animal is, evolutionarily speaking. A six-limbed reptile, where two of those limbs basically grow out of its back as wings? On worlds where most other creatures sport the typical two legs, two arms symmetry? Dragons in fantasy literature are like the Na’vi of Avatar. I look at the rest of the ecosystem and wonder: how in the hell did this aberration evolve, and why hasn’t anyone else noticed how weird it is?
(Dragons created by some kind of separate, magical or supernatural process, of course, are a different matter. But this is rarely explicitly the case).
So, one unique feature of the Visions world is the existence of creatures that evolved with two legs, two arms, and two wings, arranged just so. And I remembered that dragons weren’t the only six limbed creature I’d dumped into my bestiary. I had griffins. Hippogriffs. Chimeras. A four-armed ape/yeti creature. A four-winged bird, originally stolen from D&D, I think. Two of my races have wings that sprout from the back.
I Googled “dragon skeleton”, and found something interesting. About half of the depictions showed the dragon having essentially two separate sets of shoulder blades: one set for the forearms, one set a little higher up for the wings. But the other half used a sort of combination scapula, one that could accommodate both arms and wings. I liked that one better. What if every single creature in the world (except insects and octopi and the like) had such a bone inside them? What if they all had six limbs?
I modeled a combination scapula with clay so I could really get a sense of how this thing would work. Interestingly enough, I found that if I flipped the scapula upside down, I had something that could support a four-armed creature like my ape-yeti, where the lower set of arms appears to poke out of the ribcage. If I included this special shoulder blade in every creature, I would have my uniting factor…and the creativity could come from deciding how those six limbs would manifest.
I’ve also been taking each creature and picking several different animals to use as models…because then I can say with confidence that my shmearp is not just a rabbit, but rabbit + wasp, with a little squirrel thrown in (to use a made-up example). And variety makes it easier to incorporate two extra limbs. Eventually I’ll organize these drawings and notes into a D&D-like Monster Manual, although I plan to lay it out like a field guide. Maybe Spiderwick style.
Tags: Amphiptere's Vision, brainstorming, ideas
Posted by nightphoenix on Feb 29, 2012 in
Output Slogging my way through Promises. There was a week where I was hitting around 1,000 words a day, but things have slowed down as I’ve been having to do a combination of rethinking, re-plotting, and worldbuilding.
The political situation on Caosgi, the world Saeli and Co. are currently on, has always been the most difficult and complex bit of the overall story. I’ve rethought it from the ground up at least three or four times, and in this last rewrite alone I’ve added and tweaked a number of things. Read more…
Tags: brainstorming, editing and revisions, Shades, worldbuilding
Posted by nightphoenix on Sep 17, 2011 in
Novels,
Output,
Process Seriously.
Here’s the situation. Saeli, Raphel, Mora, and Kaladan are on a world that is, due to a series of unfortunate events involving three jealous goddesses, one naive god, and a very angry angelic…well, doomed. Said goddesses created an extremely infectious disease that eventually rendered every single female on the planet unable to bear children. The last generation has reached their mid-50s or so, and they’ve essentially lost hope.
Enter Saeli and Mora, two young women of childbearing age who, due to their not being born on Dheu, are immune to this disease. You can see how this might interest certain parties. The two women get kidnapped, and are currently trapped in a cave surrounded by twenty or so men who are so desperate to not be the last generation that they’re willing to rape female strangers and force them to live out their lives on Dheu bearing children.
Saeli and Mora are both trained in the art of using their qi to do all sorts of extraordinary things, like fire and ice and wind and teleportation spells. None of the men who have captured them have any such power. (Although half of them are what they call “spirit walkers”. They can essentially thrust their spirits out of their bodies and travel about the “spirit realm”, where they receive guidance from the angelics who live there. This is, of course, of no practical use whatsoever against someone who can lob a fireball at them).
The first obvious question: how did a couple of magically inclined characters get captured by a bunch of non-magically inclined characters in the first place? Read more…
Tags: brainstorming, magic, Mora, Saeli, Shades, worldbuilding
Posted by nightphoenix on May 27, 2011 in
Books,
Input,
Process I just finished the Winds of the Forelands series by David B. Coe, and as fantasy epics go, it was pretty good. It’s rare that I pick up a series at random and have it be unique enough to hold my interest. Although it had many of the classic tropes of epics, they were combined and re-imagined in such ways that I couldn’t sit there and say “Ah, so it’s this kind of magic system”, etc. Read more…
Tags: authors, books, brainstorming, goals
Posted by nightphoenix on Mar 21, 2011 in
Process Actually, this post is about dreams. Specifically, the small and sometimes nonsensical details that dreams create.
Many of my story ideas come from dreams. Usually two or three dreams that have been fleshed out, expanded upon, and changed where needed to make a coherent plot. Most often, the main element a dream will leave me with is a mood. How does this story feel? What emotions does it evoke? The more detailed dreams will provide me with several characters and maybe even some plot elements, but that mood is what I take the most time in analyzing and writing down.
But often, my dreams aren’t coherent enough, detailed enough, or removed enough from life to really use. What I call “story dreams” actually happen only once or twice a month, if that. Dreams where I wake up and say, “Man, that would make a great story!” and I rush to write it down. Such were the beginnings of Dragon Singer, Briar Rose, Dreamcatcher, Mask of Eldarmarch…the list goes on. Honestly, if they happened any more frequently, either I’d need to be a much faster writer, or my queue would be much, much longer (than it already is).
However, even the fuzzy, wacky dreams can yield ideas in the form of details. Details of life, of people, of feeling; stuff that sort of passes you by when you’re awake. Sometimes things like that are easier to notice in dreams because they occur bigger than normal, stranger than normal, or simply out of context.
For example, I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately relating to the nuclear problems they are having in Japan right now. Radioactive stuff and refugee type themes. Radiation frightens me. You can’t see it, hear it, smell it, or feel it, and you don’t sense anything off if it’s hitting you. Plus, nothing but distance can shield you it. And it kills in a rather painful, horrible way. That’s up there with velociraptors and tiny dark spaces on Nightphoenix’s DoNotWant list.
The latest in this dream series involved me taking care of a bunch of hairless rabbits who’d been exposed, and then trying and failing to stop some overlord from taking over a small imaginary country. (Yes, even in the dream, it was imaginary. And yet, its loss was terrible. Hard to explain.) I was traveling with the refugees, and this monarch of a neighboring friendly nation was giving the refugee children little bags full of tiny toys and candy. Specifically, red apple-spice candy. There was a moment where I was watching the line of sad refugees shuffle along past me, and all around was this miasma of sweet spicy apple-y scent on the air. For some reason, it was that smell and everything it represented that really made it sad for me. That’s what really stayed with me when I woke up.
That’s what good details do. They call attention to what’s really important in a scene in a subtle, in-world way. They meld all those abstract, powerful emotions into an object, a texture, a moment, something tangible the audience can take away with them. “That was a great love story” isn’t nearly as powerful as “I bawled my eyes out when he handed her that ring”. They might not remember anything else about the story, but they’ll remember the ring and the feelings associated with it. Think about the Phantom of the Opera’s rose with a black ribbon, or Joker’s joker playing card. Significant details often become symbols, reoccurring themes that crop up again and again in a story. (And any details mentioned when describing a room, or object, or person, ought to be significant: ie, if the protagonist always wears a blue headband, that should play some later role in the story…if only to identify or mark her).
So, today, I am reminded to mine my dreams for details missed in the waking world. Like hairless rabbits. And apple-spice candy.
Tags: brainstorming, dreams, ideas
Posted by nightphoenix on Sep 25, 2010 in
Novels,
Output One of the many things that The Way of Kings made me think about was the ecology of fantasy worlds. That was the one aspect of James Cameron’s Avatar that flat-out impressed me: how thought out Pandora was as a functioning ecology. Everything in that world, plants and animals alike, looked uniquely Pandoran (except, incidentally, the Na’vi, but that’s another rant…). It was all beautiful, but everything also had a purpose. The Way of Kings is also like that: everything revolves around the highstorms.
Saeli’s world lacks that. Verre is both like and unlike Earth, but I really haven’t given much thought to those differences. Dheu is a bit more detailed, but Dheu is actually even more Earthlike than Verre so it’s kind of a moot point. Caosgi has the most detail, but that’s because it’s significantly different. (Different is actually easier to worldbuild.)
Read more…
Tags: brainstorming, Shades, worldbuilding
Posted by nightphoenix on Sep 15, 2010 in
Novels,
Output,
Process …from Tennessee, that is. Went on a trip with Eli and my mom to her property up there. It was fun and relaxing, except for the part when we almost hit a deer. That was kind of scary. No internet or cell phone service up there, so I’ve been a bit out of touch these last couple of days. This is kind of a long post. Update, and (another) new idea.
Read more…
Tags: brainstorming, ideas, Shades, Windwaker, worldbuilding
Posted by Mistress of Feathers on Aug 10, 2010 in
Books,
News,
Novels,
Output I read The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau in one day, almost in a single sitting. My husband got kind of boggle-eyed when I told him that, and yeah, I guess that’s a bit quick, even for me. I mean, it usually takes me at least a whole day, maybe two, to plow through a several hundred page book. It was quite a satisfying read…I’ve seen the movie, probably a year ago now, and it was pretty faithful to the book. That sort of conciseness, common to the young adult genre in particular, is something I admire when I see it and something I need to do more. I have a tendency to write epically.
Right now I’m working on Inkheart, another book that I’ve seen the movie of. Pretty good so far.
I have a ridiculous weakness for M&Ms. In case the blog itself doesn’t give that away.
You might notice that I’ve tweaked the sidebar a little bit. That picture (and yes, that is me) is one the hubby took while we were in North Carolina. It was a nice foggy day, which made for some very neat photo opportunities. I also finally figured out how to eliminate the search thingy at the top. I never liked it there. I’ll probably put it somewhere else in the sidebar, so the blog is still easily searchable.
I’ve been thinking about the logistics of the coup Raphel is planning for the city of Aschera. Read more…
Tags: books, brainstorming, reviews, Shades, worldbuilding
Posted by nightphoenix on Apr 6, 2010 in
Novels,
Output,
Process Well, it has been a ridiculously long white since I’ve updated here, but I guess maybe I can blame Easter. And Eli being sick…and me being sick…and, and…oh well. The visit to family for Easter went well; Eli got to play with family that doesn’t get to see him that often, and Jon and I got to relax a bit. On Saturday afternoon, I took a small nap…which of course, is an almost guaranteed way for me to have strange dreams.
This one was about vampires. Well, sort of.
Read more…
Tags: brainstorming, characters, ideas, vampires
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