Posts Tagged ‘meta’

Today, boys and girls, I’m here to talk to you about drugs.

–wait, don’t hit the X. I said talk, not lecture. This is a blog about fiction! C’mon.

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to define ‘drug’ as any ingestible substance with physiological and/or psychological effects. Medicine, alcohol, and marijuana all fall under the drug heading here.

Almost every single person has an opinion about at least one drug. Drug A should be illegal, or Drug B should be legalized. Doing or distributing Drug C should put someone on death row, while doing or distributing Drug D should be considered saint’s work. Drug E should be used carefully; Drug F can be used willy-nilly. Drug G isn’t all that bad, but Drug H is hardcore. People who do Drug I are just looking to relax, but people who do Drug J are dangerous addicts. It’s socially acceptable to partake of Drug K at an event, but someone imbibing Drug L in public should get arrested. Drug M should always be done around people to be safe, while Drug N should only be done alone. Keep Drug O in the house, but Drug P can go on the streets, and Drug Q can even be done in the car without anyone dying.

You get my point.

Nearly every human culture has found a way to make alcohol, medicine, and narcotics. There’s a rich and fascinating history on drug production and use. My question to you is not a moral one, but a creative one: How do fictional cultures treat drugs? Not only fictional human cultures, but humanoid and non-human ones as well?

Is drug use so honed a science that the entire culture takes a variety of drugs for their every need, every day? Is drug use so horrifying a concept – loss of self-control a phobia – that the culture won’t even use medicine when it’s desperately needed? Which drugs are acceptable, and in what ways? Which drugs are unacceptable, and how is illegal use of them treated? What’s considered medicinal, and what’s considered recreational? Are drugs used for religious or spiritual purposes? Does military training include developing a high tolerance to certain common drugs, or even poisons?

How do the people in your stories deal with drugs? Get creative! Even human cultures have vastly different relationships with and opinions of mind-altering substances. You can drive home the alienness of a culture or race very easily by tweaking the place drugs have in that society.

Image Credit: Royalty Free Images.

I’ve been mindspewing creature-designing and worldbuilding ideas in preparation for writing Oh, The Inhumanity!, and I think I feel the tiny little flicker of a would-be rant guttering in my chest.

See, I have a pet peeve. Non-humans should be non-humans. In science fiction and fantasy alike, most of your non-humans are what I would consider humanoids – symmetrical bipedal races with human-parallel physiology and psychology. Some different clothing, a bit taller or shorter (or skinnier or wider – hi, elves and dwarves), pointy ears, colorful skin, and an accented version of the common tongue, and voilà! You have a humanoid. We, as human readers, can relate to the humanity of the race and its individuals, while (hopefully) appreciating the differences in body and culture.

That’s fine, that’s cool. That’s a distinct class of non-humans that are purposefully similar to humans for very understandable reasons. They’re the easiest to work with in fiction and most relatable for our audience.

When a book introduces a giant quadrupedal predator who still thinks like a civilized, social human, I get my hackles up. C’mon, guys. They aren’t human. Give them a difference. Let’s broaden our minds, shall we?

Imagine, if you will, a human being born with a set of animal behaviors and instincts. This is still a human in body and will be raised as a human, in human society, but its base instincts are some animal instead of evolved monkey. This person – we’ll call him Bob – is inherently, innately, undeniably inhuman. If he’s a tiger, he’s going to have to balance social tendencies from his human rearing with completely antisocial tendencies from being a lone predator. There will be immutable qualities in the core of his psyche that are not human.

Imagine, if you will, a humanoid born into a human society. Even if she’s raised as a human, she’s going to have different base instincts and behavioral tendencies, as well as some moderately different physiological needs, depending on her specific race. Even though she will be effectively multicultural, she won’t lose her innate inhumanity that is her birthright as a non-human. She’ll likely experience internal (and possibly external) conflict over her adopted culture and her instinctual heritage.

Now, imagine a humanoid culture in its infancy. This species is now at the apex of their physical evolution and progressing into civilization and probably technology. For the sake of this example, say they have never met humans – they’re in a secluded land, or on a different planet. They don’t have our monkey instincts; they have their own. How differently would they develop, even if they have human-parallel bodies and neurological structures, when their core is unshakably inhuman?

Do I really need to ask you to imagine how different a non-humanoid race would be from us?

A Korat is not human. They do not have opposable thumbs; they do not stand on two legs. They have fur, claws, sharp teeth, and a predator’s set of movement-oriented senses. A human can gaze into a sunset and marvel at the incredible masterpiece of color and light; a Korat will look at a sunset and notice far less of the stationary detail. A human will see a blur of dull color in the underbrush and wonder if he imagined it; a Korat will watch a rabbit run and be able to count its strides out of the corner of his eye without even focusing. A human has different social needs than a Korat, different emotional and instinctual reactions to pain and fear and anger and sadness, and different ways of expressing himself. A human may react to danger with noisy aggression or cowering fear, while a Korat may react to the same situation by becoming completely still, alert, and poised to move – without any emotional investment.

Even when I find inhuman non-humans in fiction, I often find cases of human-envy. We are humans, so it’s natural that we’re human-centric. But Korats don’t pine for opposable thumbs or a bipedal gait. Korats don’t wish they were technologically advanced. In fact, Korats are Korat-centric – surprise! – and have a lot of racial pride. They like how their species is, and they don’t feel any inclination to become less like a Korat and more like anything else.

Humanoids certainly have a strong place in fiction, but I’d love to see more non-humanoids take a shining role with their differences and, yes, their incomprehensible alienness.

Have you ever created a non-human race that was truly inhuman? If not, why?

I have a veritable history with NaNoWriMo. I began participating in 2003 and, with one exception, have won every year since.

In 2003, I had written only one novel before; it was The Dark Wars, an unfinished Young Adult story about the most memorable and violent time in Lavana’s history. It spanned five spiral-bound notebooks – yes, I had written the entire thing by hand. But, in 2003, I was a fast typist, and my NaNovel was done on computer. It was entitled Seeker, a story about two gay boys in college trying to find themselves and finding each other instead. (Shh. It wasn’t a real romance, I swear.) While I got 50,000 words on the story, the plot arc was far from complete. This would set the norm for all NaNovels to come.

In 2004, I wrote Outcast, my first Korat-only novel. I got 80% finished with the story arc by the time I crossed the 50k finish line, which was the closest I’d come to completing an entire novel in my life. I even skipped ahead and wrote the ending scene (which, sadly, I later lost). Outcast followed the story of a lone striped female as she never stopped running for her life, even when she encountered three people who actually didn’t want to kill her.

In 2005, I wrote The Panthera Walkers: Peace as part of a Panthera Walkers trilogy (the second book, might I add – the first and third unwritten). Set in Ykinde, TPW:P chronicled the story of the growing Walker tribe and their aid in trying to establish peace between Lupos and Avans – trying to end the Elderwar – and how nothing is ever as black-and-white as it seems. I had a lot of trouble that year and took a major plot detour, then had to write feverishly to catch up and cross the finish line – at something like seven minutes ’til midnight on the last day. It was nuts.

In 2006, I failed. I did participate, and scanning back over my personal journal for November, I wrote that I’d gotten 21k on something. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was, so I’m inclined to think it was a bunch of false starts and half-baked stories. My only excuse was that two great friends of mine were visiting for two weeks from Britain, and I was out and about with them almost every day they were here. (Sure, I was working full-time, too, but I’d been working every November except for 2003 – and in 2004, I was taking a few college classes as well as holding a job!)

In 2007, the miracle that was The Demon-God of Jubagh came to pass. By the time November rolled around, I’d already finished Book One; that year’s NaNoWriMo saw Book Two and half of Book Three completed before the 30th, and the rest of Book Three finished before the December holidays. I’ve already discussed TDGoJ previously on here (see the above link), but let me tell you – this was the first (and so far only) time I’d truly, totally, 100% finished a novel. I was gleeful.

In 2008, last year, I struggled to pick a direction for the first week or so. I first veered towards an anthology of myths and stories of Redwood, sidifir oerri, ageless mother of the Koratian race. I thought I could do two novels in one month, since I was on part-time at work and would never have that much free time ever again, so I tried to do a story about animetals on Ryarna in that world’s equivalent of the Wild West. Both petered out within days, and then – thanks in large part to some brainfodder and a great friend being a sounding board – I got inspired to do Into Fang Wood. I flew past the finish line, half-crazed and gibbering from the chaos of trying to wrangle that story in a month. (Later, of course, I found out how big it wanted to be, and I quailed, and then I began outlining…)

In 2009, this year, I have something very fun planned. The incredibly tentative working title is The Ghost In The Machine. (Asimov, I salute you, sir.) Set in the Gurhai universe, it will feature three corata, shapeshifting mammalian predators, who find themselves on Ryarna by chance or by fate. They encounter an impossible thing: a feral, instinct-smart herd of motorcycle-like wheeled vehicles that are, apparently, bound to and powered by animal ghosts. It’s illegal to fuse a ghost to anything but an animetal shell, however, and these wheelers are meant for personal transportation alone – not animation. Not only do the corata have to survive the largely-without-fleshy-animals desert, they have to figure out how to survive increasingly restless, doggedly stubborn aniwheelers.

It’s going to be so much fun.

Fellow WriMos, what are you planning for this lovely November?

And that’s putting it lightly. The work week was stressful and rather long, involving a 12-hour day and a 9.5-hour day among other days of normal length, and the rest of my time was spent out of the house – J’s kids got over the swine flu fairly quickly, thanks to the awesomeness of their mama, so I’ve been hanging out with them and their oh-my-gods-I’m-not-sick-anymore-HOORAY gleeful energy.

Needless to say, I fell behind on my blog posts. (I confess, I’m being moderately sinful and back-dating some posts to fill the gaps. Given the size of my readership at the moment, it’s not too annoying… Right, guys? Right? Um, guys…)

I don’t know about you, but when I fall behind, the build-up of inertia makes it hard to get going again. I had a lot of time yesterday to write, but I didn’t do more than login to my Wordpress admin panel and stare at my drafts blankly. I couldn’t get any mojo up, couldn’t think of what I wanted to say that would be worth reading. Today was shaping up in much the same boggy manner.

So, I went back and reread old writing posts and recent stories.

I smiled. I laughed. I nitpicked my sentence construction, word choice, and the flow of the paragraphs. I remembered the elation of writing stories I love with characters I love in places I love – and the feeling of accomplishment when I finished a section or a whole story.

Then I came back here, clicked on “Add New Post,” and started typing.

Now, granted, I still have two posts to make up. But I have a writing voice in me again, and ideas for topics, and at least two more hours before I have to wake J up to venture out into the wild desert yonder. I’m feelin’ the muse, and I’m happy.

How do you get back in the saddle again after stabling your creativity for too long?

And I don’t want to hear one word of protest from you, O reader! This is completely, totally, 100% your fault!

You see, I tried. I tried so hard. I started planning it out and everything! Then I realized, well, maybe I should add this other bit… and these parts… and man… these would be too long to be easily-digestible blogsnacks and…

…and I wound up realizing I’d have to write a book.

What do you mean, what am I talking about? (Yes, I know that’s not exactly what you said – but this is a professional blog, and we’re not gonna use any damn vulgarity here! –oh, whoops.)

I’m talking about Oh, The Inhumanity!, a miniseries I had planned to cover my approach to designing realistic, awesome, non-human intelligent races for fantasy, science fiction, or anything else. As you’ve seen with my Korats, I’ve got a sordid love affair with the decidedly non-humanoid sapients in fiction; I’ve been critterbuilding for over a decade now (wow, really?), and I wanted to share my methods, tricks, and insights with you. There may be plenty of worldbuilding resources out there, but not nearly as much when it comes to sapients who aren’t a direct offshoot of humans (like Klingons, dwarves, etc).

I got as far as an increasingly-detailed 14-post outline before I realized it wouldn’t work. If I’m doing this at all, I’m doing it well, and I owe you, my readers, nothing less than a stand-alone comprehensive resource. I couldn’t just talk about building a culture, a history, and a functional non-human physiology – I had to incorporate the world in which your species lives, the language that it speaks. Being just one person, I might miss something, so I thought of coercing persuading my fellow geofictionists to contribute some of their tips and tricks…

And, well, to be honest, the thing’s better off as a free ebook than an ever-lengthening series of too-long blog posts.

It will be epic! Consider the incredibly-tentative release date to be January 15th, 2010.

My humble request of you, dear readers, is that you share any resources you have that I haven’t already found in this post. I’m writing this ebook for you, and I want it to be spectacular, so I’ll need all the research I can find!

Shikin haramitsu daikomyo.
Dai kipt ese psh daes esh e dai lun byst te kA dayo d’ft.

Know what they mean?

The first is a real Japanese phrase meaning, very roughly, “every encounter holds the possibility for enlightenment.” The second is Kalash, a language I’m designing to be the common tongue of dozens of sentient races on Lavana. It means, very roughly, “I would be well but for the circumstances around me.”

I mentioned conlangs, or constructed languages, in my last post about worldbuilding. I am most assuredly a fan of language in general, and I can’t resist the concept of creating my own language – with vocabulary influenced by the speaker’s culture and a range of sounds determined by the shape of the speaker’s usually-inhuman mouth. I’m also a great fan of privacy and have made a few cyphers (or conalphs – constructed alphabets, consistently trading one letter for another) for use when I don’t want anyone but the recipient to read what I’m writing.

Singing a cypher-encrypted song is also rather fun. Especially when the cypher in question changes the syllable pattern.

My first cypher was Khraenian, a one-way cypher made as the primary language of Khraen, a planet I co-designed with my sister, E. A one-way cypher is a little more difficult to manage than a two-way, at least as far as memorization is concerned – for example, going from English to Khraenian, B becomes D, but D becomes K, and K becomes T, and T becomes R. In other words, B = D, but D =/= B. Slightly bogged down by this bulkier method of cyphering, I created Kommu (aka Dannu) as the epitome of simplicity. It’s a two-way cypher: D = T and T = D. It has a prettier sound in general, doesn’t change the syllable count as often, and sounds good when spoken or sung aloud. Besides, you can make language translators with two-way cyphers very easily.

Conlangs, however, are not cyphers. Conlangs have syntax, grammar, punctuation, a written script/alphabet, vocabulary, and often a set of sounds that the human mouth may not be able to pronounce correctly or at all. You can develop a conlang in relatively little time if all you need are a handful of words with a consistent look and sound for judicious use by your story’s non-humans, or you can spend a lifetime creating a real-size language with history, dialects, a writing system, and a mathematic system that isn’t base 10.

Myself, I tend to dabble in both extremes. Kalash currently consists of a handful of phrases and words, very little sense of alien syntax, and the growing idea that it’s a pidgin tongue drawing from three or four main roots of other, as-of-yet undesigned, fictional languages spoken by a few Lavanian species. On the other hand, Uhjayi is the native tongue of the inlanlu tahori with a syllabic root system, a written phonetic script, and a syntax considerably different from that of English. Uhjayi is undergoing major revamping currently, but I’ll happily showcase it more thoroughly in the future, when it’s ready for prying eyes other than my own to ogle it.

What about you? Have you ever messed with strange alphabets, cyphers, or even conlangs – either for pleasure or for storytelling?

You know what? It’s a mite difficult to post every other day when you’re sleep-deprived and heavily medicated for pain.

Just sayin’.

I’m debating on starting a series of worldbuilding creature development posts, using one of my own species as an example. The pros on this are the resource it would create for you, my reader, and the fun I’d get to have in exploring Olashi history and culture; the con is how inconclusive and patchwork it might be. To mitigate the con, I began doing a little bit of research on worldbuilding and discovered that my methodry is actually geofiction. Wikipedia describes it as “a hobby where people design imaginary cities, countries or entire worlds, including placenames, culture, social and political structures and even constructed languages (conlangs), primarily for personal enjoyment.” (You and I will talk about conlangs later, I promise.)

In my leisurely digging, I found several excellent worldbuilding resources to share with you, but most of these seem to assume that you’re working with a human or humanoid race. I haven’t found much talk about methane-breathers or wholly underwater sapients, except as monsters or figures of myth. Perhaps a little miniseries exploring how to go about expanding and deepening the culture and developmental history of your non-human race would be useful after all, eh?

While I continue my research and possibly begin outlining such a series of posts, have some worthwhile worldbuilding resources.

• Worldbuiling on Wikipedia – A standard, fairly thorough explanation of what worldbuilding is and how to do it.

• Fantasy World-Building Questions by Patricia C. Wrede – A good series of questions to ask yourself during the worldbuilding process, including a few about sapient culture development.
• 30 Days of Worldbuilding – A great miniseries from a NaNoWriMo enthusiast with thirty days of fifteen-minute exercises to broaden your world. The same author also produced the Magical World Builder’s Guide.
• Science Fiction Worldbuilding – A slightly sparse guide to building up a believable scifi setting.
• Worldbuilding Links – An immense directory of world-building resources for your perusal. I haven’t even had time to see them all yet!
• World Builder Projects – A well-organized list of worldbuilding resources, including forums, names, languages, and general guides.
• Fantasy Worldbuilding Resources – The biggest resource I’ve found yet. The page scrolls forever and has links to a multitude of useful sites, books, and images.
• Physical Geography – If you want to make a geographically-realistic world, check out this online resource on geography and make your world with real rules in mind.

I find designing worlds and their inhabitants – flora, fauna, and sapients all – to be the most enjoyable part of writing. What do you think about worldbuilding? Do you use any kind of tools to help you design, like a map generator, or do you go at it freestyle? Feel free to share links to resources on world-building or any aspect thereof!

Last night, I asked J to give me ideas for blog posts. He mentioned a few stories he wants me to write, which I pointed out were not quite what I wanted. (I mean, a herd of ghost-powered, steampunk, feral motorcycles in the desert? Yeeeah. I’m not letting that one go. But he likes reminding me himself – especially since it was his idea.)

He eventually proposed that I write about drawing inspiration from the people and situations in life. I joked that he just wanted me to write about him.

He has a valid point, though. I’ve always drawn a lot of inspiration from those around me and the experiences I live through. (The ones I don’t live through probably make better stories, but rigor mortis makes typing rather difficult…) And while I chase the story’s tail to find its face, talking plot points and characters out with someone helps me avoid tripping over my feet and catapulting into a steaming pile of drivel. More than once, I’ve not had a clue where the story was going, and discussing my friends’ reactions to what they’d read so far helped steer me onto the right trail.

In fact, I’m not entirely sure how The Demon-God of Jubagh would have ended if I hadn’t been chewing the fat with a certain British gentleman.

(You know, you don’t often see ‘chewing the fat’ in the same sentence with ‘British gentleman’. Mixing regional phrases is fun, kids.)

Life inspires me. People inspire me. Situations and circumstances inspire me. Media – other fiction – inspires me. Everything I think, see, hear, smell, touch, taste, say, and do inspires me. It’s not necessarily a constant stream of vivid and original ideas, but flashes and new angles can strike at any time with varying frequency. For me, storytelling is a form of communication, of taking what I’ve lived and presenting it in a new format so that other people can, in some way, live it too. I’m driven to write because the story needs told and shared.

What inspires you?

(Spoiler: The title is facetious.)

It has been an … interesting week. I’ve been engaged in a job-hunt, which resulted in one great interview on Friday and one to come next week; I attended an ice cream social at J’s daughter’s school with her mama and some friends; I removed and replaced the front wheel on my motorcycle; and I went through and studied six ranks (of ten) in martial arts with the home study DVDs and manual I have, in hopeful preparation of returning to class Monday evening and kicking a– um, of doing much better for the review. (I’ve also been practicing my run-on sentences – can you tell?)

…you’ll note the lack of writing and worldbuilding progress in there. At least I’ve stayed on track with the blog – my plan is a post every other day. This may change in the near future to be a more post-on-certain-weekdays sort of schedule, but for now, every other day is a great goal. Oh, and yes, there will be short stories / flash fiction posted on some of those days. Some old, some new, all under 1500 words or so.

Which leads me, in a meandering path, to today’s topic: methodology. With all this talk about writing, how do I… well… write?

I’ve noticed two particular trends among writers. The first is to write intellectually: have an idea, explore the idea, expand it, write an outline, fix the obvious plot flaws, and then begin writing the first draft. The second is to write emotionally: have an idea, then grab its hand and run screaming out the door with it waving behind you like a captured flag. Intellectual writing, or organized writing, is a very measured and controlled process; emotional writing, or haphazard writing, is a very intuitive and spontaneous process that involves very little pre-planning and precious little deliberate direction.

Me, I’m a haphazard writer. I am capable of doing things in a more organized fashion, but I’ve never felt like an architect – I’m more of a channel. If I hit something good, it feels like the story is flowing through me, rather than being born and shaped in me. I’m just the frantically-typing pair of hands and proof-reading pair of eyes that lets the story be seen and heard by other folks. When I run with a concept and it doesn’t work, I find myself wondering what I had to be smoking to think I could manage to make something out of what turned out to be nothing.

But when it does work, the angels are caterwauling and the goblins are jigging as all the pieces fall into place, galvanized by some unseen and miraculous force that knows how everything works out in the end– and I sit, breathless and amazed, at what just poured into and out of me.

(And then, well, there’s editing, and fixing plot holes, and revising, and all of the oh-so-fun revision process– but that happens no matter how you write.)

So, my fellow storytellers – how do you write?

The above is the front cover my first and so far only self-published novel, The Demon-God of Jubagh. It’s the first book of the first trilogy, whose rough draft is finished; the second trilogy is The Renegades of Jubagh and is about halfway done. Both trilogies (and any future installments) belong to the Jubagh series, set in the Gurhai universe.

The Demon-God of Jubagh (which I will often abbreviate as TDGoJ) was begun as a pre-NaNoWriMo novel in 2007. I wrote a one-line summary that sounded like fun, expanded it to a short paragraph, and set out with the intent to write a little bit of the story every day. (I’m terrible at doing anything that regularly, so it was an exercise in self-discipline as much as creativity.)

In a dark universe, in an era of instability and fluctuations of chaos, a [black mage] helps an [exiled paladin] stop the indigenous population of [an Earth-like world] from summoning [an evil god], with the assistance of [a tribal native].

This is a sword-and-sorcery/scifi with an emphasis on reversing stereotypes. The story is about a black mage, an exiled paladin, and a tribal native. It starts in an outpost in a demon-haunted land. The story begins with a heated conversation and climaxes with a tragedy. The critical element of the story is a death. A conflict between those who use magic and those who don’t plays a major role in the story.

Credit Where Credit’s Due: The formats of the one-liner and the paragraph are taken from Seventh Sanctum’s action film and story generators, respectively.

One month later, I’d finished the first book of the trilogy. November was at hand, so I flung myself into NaNoWriMo with enthusiasm and wrote the second book and part of the third. By mid-December, I’d finished the entire trilogy, and my mind was reeling. This was the first major project I’d ever finished. I had done zero worldbuilding or brainstorming or plot-weaving in advance. I’d just written an entire trilogy, a total of roughly one hundred thousand words, by the seat of my pants.

I took a breather, fairly burned out by writing so much in ten weeks, then began the next trilogy, The Renegades of Jubagh (TRoJ). It followed the same three main characters that rose to stardom in TDGoJ; I got halfway through the second book of three before burning out again.

I’ve spent my time since then fleshing out the mechanics of the Gurhai universe, its people, and its worlds (check out the starmap!). There are exactly 100 sapients and 100 worlds in the universe; it is finite and measurable by anyone with a good intersun ship. The Jubagh series is segregated into books named after the planets on which they’re set – Book One: Jubagh, Book Two: Sivef, and Book Three: Gurhai for The Demon-God of Jubagh, and Book One: Thurmenyan, Book Two: Ryarna, and Book Three: Ztar for The Renegades of Jubagh.

As I was up to my elbows in fresh mud and creatures, I realized that there was a prequel skulking in the shadows. Book Zero, Enmity, deals with how the aforementioned black mage (Rai Gerring) and exiled paladin (Brandon Styhan) met – and all the chaos that ensued when two men from fatally opposed factions didn’t immediately kill each other. Now my goal is to finish worldbuilding, then start writing the rough draft of Enmity, whose outline is already written and saved.

While Into Fang Wood is going to take the foremost burner, I’ll be continuing work on the Gurhai ‘verse and its worldbuilding in preparation for starting Enmity after IFW is finished and in revisions. Personally, I tend to do best when I have more than one project to play with, so that when I burn out on one, I can switch to the other. How do you manage and mitigate writer’s burn-out? Do you enjoy having multiple irons in the fire, or do you prefer to concentrate on one thing at a time?