Time flies when you’re doing home improvement projects. Real life does take precedence over the book—especially when a baby is on its way—but I’ve gotten some additional editing done.

Also, I’ve got another annotation up, this time for dedications and acknowledgements (And I revised the Maps section because I didn’t like the way it read before).

Just an update…

In my personal life, some good news. I just found out that our baby will be of the male variety, due date is still Jan 10th.

I’ve decided on a title for the NaNoWriMo project I’d like to do this year. It will be The Tragedy of Larimosa.

I’ve still been editing Five Rings every day and am quite excited about how it’s turning out. Some of my close friends have been reading the results of my work, so I’ve been trying to have one or two chapters edited to official ‘Doesn’t Suck’ status by Wednesday of each week.

I’m going to try to put up new annotations each Wednesday, too. But we’ll see how far that goes. …

Here’s the three annotations for Five Rings thus far:

I picked up a 3-ring binder (with subject dividers and paper) which has become an invaluable tool as I edit.

The subjects I have inside->

Language:

For different sayings, language patterns, and full-blown languages.

Religion:

To keep track of the cultures and sayings associated with each religion.

Calendar:

To keep track of the date, timelines, open threads, celebrations, etc.

Chapters:

Where I keep track of the goals and changes I make as I edit each chapter.

Maps:

As I edit, every new location gets a quick hand-drawn map to be sure I’ve got everything straight.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It’s making keeping track of everything much easier; the binder sits open in my lap as a reference as I type.

Can you think of any other subject I overlooked that I can stick in the binder?

I have all the scenes mapped out for Five Rings. But before I do the same for Web of Hearts, I think I’ll try writing from the ‘beginning of the book’ to the ‘beginning of the middle’. So basically, from the prologue to…

<recap>
BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE
~~~This is the point of the story where it stops being introduction and the MC is out in the world.~~~
</recap>

Now I’ve got a bunch of text files that look like this->

Read the rest of this entry »

Izzit the last day of world-building month, already?

I guess I’ve been taking this past week easy. Oh well…

Then today will be all about random worldbuilding topics.

Milkfin: The most common freshwater fish. Looks like a black and white koi. (see? random! lol)

Okay, let’s try this a different way.

A chain reaction. Like a game of dominoes! I’ll start by explaining something, and if I mention something new in there, I’ll go on to explain that, too. Let’s see how far that gets me before I run out of new terms in my explanations or get sick of it.  :P

What to start with? Hm… How about the ancient rules? Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Donna for pointing out a really cool tongue-in-cheek fantasy novel survey.
If you are writing a fantasy novel, you might find it fun to at least give it a read through.

(The Filmmaker’s Exam is equally amusing, btw.)

I guess you are supposed to be able to answer ‘No’ to every question, or abandon your project forever. LOL.

One of my nobler goals while deciding on the plot of Five Rings was to avoid or attempt to reinvent most of the common clichés out there, hoping to breathe new life into a largely unoriginal genre.

Let’s see how I did: Read the rest of this entry »

• historical use of divination
• modern use of divination

Because most of this is stuff I’ve already touched on, I’m going to take this section on in one fell swoop.

I guess the most important thing to know is there are plenty of ‘fortune tellers’ in Lura just as there are many nameless people out there who claim to be awakened mystics.

(The nameless are people who pretty much live off of others on the major city streets ((homeless)). In Lura, if you fail to make a name for yourself by the time you are an adult, you lose your name - as decided by the Naming Committee.)

Reading the night sky is a dying art — most of the stars are mapped (though anomalies are still considered good/bad omens).

Astronomists are primarily concerned with how the five rings react with each other, how and from where apparitions manifest, and just exactly what it is that the seven rays users see and experience in the fourth ring.

Divining rods work, but intuition is usually inaccurate. Seven rays mystics know that one of the three barriers in the fourth ring is ‘Time’. Humans can only hope to see a little bit ahead of the barrier of ‘present time’. Most animals can see much farther into the future (For instance, when a killer tidal wave is going to roll in on a shoreline, the animals ‘know’ about it hours/days ahead of time and leave the area early). Some demons and gods can also see into the future, according to Lurian beliefs. So human prophecy is very rare, and usually vague or way off from the truth.

Prev: Moving on… | Next: Not a meme! Also not worldbuilding…

For me, this whole process was exciting! Seeing your imagination come to life - turning the world in your head into something more tangible - it felt like a sneak-peek into what it might be like for an author to hold their bound, published book for the first time.

So begins the map-making tutorial!

Mapping out a fantasy world:

Step 1: Unceremoniously draw a map on some scrap paper. I drew mine in a spiral notebook. Author Holly Lisle does this, only she recommends you do this step with a pen. That way, any mistakes cannot be erased. The argument being ‘mistakes’ can become good world history or back-story, such as a sudden unnatural right angled jut in your river could have been man-made: Maybe the nobles redirected the water away from the poorer cities. Or maybe the poor people channeled the water away from the nobles! Maybe a tear in the paper could become a rift to another dimension. Maybe a coffee ring could become a land that has been cursed for centuries. Well, you get the idea. I was more concerned with approximate placements for cities, so I drew arrows with some paths some of my characters have taken. I also liberally X’d out parts I didn’t like.->

Step 2: Re-draw your map on similar paper based on what you learned. Try to make it a rough draft of your final product (try to make it look natural). A pencil and an eraser is highly recommended at this point.->

Step 3: Draw the outlines of your landmass(es) as large as you can on good sketchbook paper. I selected paper about the same size as my scanner bed, and drew on it using a mechanical pencil.->

Step 4: Draw terrain. Try to draw it lightly - preferrably lighter than the outline of the landmass(es). In fact, you may want to use a lighter-toned pencil entirely.
With my terrain I tried for an overhead 3-D effect, but simple upside-down V’s for mountains work just as well. Snaking lines coming off of mountains still work for rivers, and speckled dots still make great deserts.->

Really, at this point, you can just label your cities, maybe color it with colored pencils. The rest of the steps are going to be more about trying to make this map looking nice using digital rendering.

Step 5: Scan it at 200 DPI (or higher) and save it as a good, non-lossy format. I chose PNG, but BMP would have been another good choice.
JPG is an example of a lossy format: good for saving pictures to view later, but bad for pictures you want to work with digitally.
Whenever I have a drawing that is too big to scan, I take a photo of it with a 7.2 Megapixel digital camera and crop it - seems to work just as well.

Step 6: Open the file into your favorite image editing program. Some great ones out there are OpenCanvas, Adobe Photoshop, and The Gimp. I loaded mine into Adobe Photoshop CS2. There are actual map-making programs out there that use vectors, such as AutoREALM. Frankly, I wasn’t very impressed with them. At first, the fractal edges look impressive, but the end effect is a map that doesn’t look very organic.

Step 7: I’m going to assume you are using Adobe Photoshop or know your way around whichever program you are using at this point. Go to image->adjustments->brightness/contrast. Bring your brightness level to about -50 and your contrast level to about +50. You should start to notice your mechanical pencil lines will look more like they were done with an ink pen! Another great effect you get: the paper’s imperfections become magnified, giving it more of an old map look.->

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Yesterday, I heard an old man say something that got me thinking. It made me realize I had been taking something very dear to me for granted: I typically don’t care what time it is.

We’ve all seen it before, or been a part of it; a group of people so enveloped in some kind of project, they end up completely losing track of time. You might be the first to notice and speak up, saying, “Hey guys. You realize ten o’clock passed by twenty minutes ago, right?”

And, after regaining their grasp on reality, one of them might say, “Crap! Glad you said something. My wife was going to make me sleep on the couch if I came home late one more time this week.”

There are many people out there, always stuck on the outside of this phenomenon looking in. They can’t imagine what it’s like to simply not care about the time.

Most of the time, I feel care-free. And with a healthy dose of stern-handed guidance every once in a while, my life stays on track (thank goodness for my wife), all so I can keep loving, keep doing what I love, and keep sharing my love for life with others. I’ve transformed escapism into an outlet for communication to the world. :)

Even if moments where time doesn’t seem to matter are commonplace for you, they typically become the best moments of your life, especially in retrospect. Those moments should definitely be recognized and treasured before they are gone. Fortunately, writers get in that lovely trance-like state every time they write!

After that train of thought, I happily wrote for … a long time … and enjoyed it while it lasted.

P.S.: I got the Wacom board in the mail the other day, and the map-making progress is moving ahead, full-throttle!

Prev: Just an update: | Next: Cartography! -part 2-

I wanted to post an overview of what I’m planning in the near-future, because I’m getting antsy (!) and I feel like typing a casual, yet somewhat pertinent post.

Through negotiations with my lovely wife, a Wacom board is officially on its way and
should arrive some time this weekend! I will finally be able to do the finishing
touches on my map and post the (long overdue) map-making tutorial.

Afterwards, I think I will go into designing a timeline, talk about the concept of
‘five rings’, talk about how I go about creating key scenes (and bridging those scenes
together), and then go into what I’ve discovered works well with the editing
process.

At some point, I figure I’ll start up an official wordcount and start adding characters and
cities to those empty webpages (on that right side, over there->) as I go. I may do
illustrations for some characters and make more maps, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

To truly believe in something greater than yourself, do you have to surrender to trust?
How can you trust what you see?
How can you ever trust in what you don’t see?
How far can you trust someone you think you know so well?
How much trust is needed for a relationship to work?
Giving yourself an honest look, how much can you be trusted?

My storyline attempts to analyze all of these questions and carefully explore the possible answers.
I get excited just thinking about it!
~
Also, I wanted to share a few interesting techniques I’ve read lately involving freewriting…
When you don’t know what to freewrite, it may sound crazy, but you can freewrite about ‘not being able to freewrite’.
Another thing you can do is listen to a song that brings out your emotions, then try to transpose those emotions into words.
I’ve given both techniques a try - they are great ways to break writer’s block.
~
Thirdly, I wanted to show you some of what I’ve done with my map-making endeavor so far.

Some things I’ve taken into consideration (and they helped my story make more sense, too!):
1. The average person can travel on foot 10-20 miles per day - At least, they can in a culture where travelling on foot is normal.
2. A highly experienced traveller can even travel 70 miles in 24 hours, but cannot do it without feeling very exhausted afterward.
3. On horseback, a traveller can go 40 miles easily, 50 normally (with consideration for food, water, rest, etc), 60 is hard on the horse and cannot be done consecutively for long.
4. A horse-drawn wagon can travel 20 miles per day.
5. A mule-drawn wagon = Also 20 miles per day.
6. Ox-drawn wagon = 12 miles per day.
7. English Flying coaches = 100 miles per day.
8. Pony Express riders travelled up to 200 miles per day.
9. Viking Longboats could travel 100 miles per day, all other ships were slower.

For obvious reasons, it’s probably a good idea to know roughly how long it should take for your characters to traverse your map. If a horse can travel x miles in a day if it is pushed, skipping camp for y consecutive days, those are things that will come in handy for positioning cities. It wouldn’t make much sense to place a reclusive, hidden village a day’s ride away from one of the biggest cities in the world (unless it was hidden very well).

And, while not necessary, it definitely helps to know a bit about physical science and the geological time scale ~ how wind behaves ~ how volcanoes form at certain shorelines ~ or what happens after an iceberg melts.

I drew a rough map with paths that my characters travel and the miles they travelled to each destination in a spiral notebook. Then I went ahead and drew out the way I would like the main continent (tentatively called Aerthai) to look. I really wanted to get a Wacom tablet to draw the details on my map (I’m still negotiating with my better half on getting one), but I figured out a way to do it with just a mechanical pencil, a sheet of fairly heavy paper from a sketch book, and a scanner.

As an experiment, I loaded it up in Adobe Photoshop CS2 to see what kind of cool things I could do with it.
I came up with this:

Now I’m going to go back to my original map and draw in a compass, terrain features, and locations before rendering the map. I think it might turn out pretty cool! I’ll go ahead and post the entire step-by-step process next time.

Prev: Prose and Poetry | Next: Is it okay to offend?

*ahem* Since it’s taking longer than I thought getting around to finishing my cartography project, and since I’m falling behind on my C++ coding, and since nobody has really lambasted my writing as of yet (No news is good news?), I figured I would do something completely random (to take a rest from cursed coding).

So … I was looking at one of the paragraphs I had freewritten, and I got to thinking, “Hey! This might make a snazzy poem!”

The victim:

A warm wind resting over a bay stirred from its slumber. With a graceful certainty, it drifted across the world, offering passage to clouds … scents … seeds … sailing vessels - Suddenly, it collided with colder winds and soared into the stratosphere. Over time, it descended until, finally, it settled upon a glade. Through the countless walls of ivy and oaks, it emerged upon a field of surging wild flowers which, as they swayed like ocean tides, revealed a young girl barely as tall.

The result:

‘Nymph of the Glade’

A warm summer wind
Resting over a bay
Stirred from its slumber;
Awakened to play;

With graceful certainty,
Yet, uncertain terms,
Offered passage to clouds,
Scents, seeds, ships, and birds.

Sailed it, o’er the world
With no concept of time
When, colliding with cool winds,
It climbed and it climbed.

And, entering stratos;
Felt it, cold and strayed
Until, decades later,
Fell upon a glade,

Where-past towering oaks,
And beyond ivy walls,
Flowers surged to reveal
A girl, barely as tall.

Being that I hadn’t written a poem in over a decade, I thought it turned out pretty good! :)
In the original paragraph, I wasn’t even writing about a dryad (wood-nymph), but … the ‘magic’ of poetry turned the girl into one, anyway.
As usual, critiques are welcomed with open arms here for both poetry and prose.

Well … I guess that means it’s time to get back to coding. And then hopefully more map-making!

prev: Inventing the rules | next: Cartography!

This is one of the four chapters I mentioned in my previous post. I had written this before I started to iron out a decent timeline with proper motives and villains. I just thought I would post this, since it might give you a better feel for my writing style. I’ve also shared this with a few friends. Since the general situation will be largely unchanged in the final product, critiques are definitely most welcome. (For that matter, critiques are always welcome here.)

Matar had flown long enough. He just … somehow … knew he had. He changed his wing pattern to ‘Up, Down, and Close‘. When he broke free of the clouds, he could clearly see every detail of the dense city buildings, even in the dying light. He didn’t think of it as ‘Shiira’. In his head, it was more like, ‘Lonely Circled Group with Even Layers‘.

~ ~ ~

Whenever Shanung was doing someone else’s job, he usually paced. Back and forth he went; the wood beneath his feet creaking with each step. High above the city, the wind would occasionally gust. So, to break up the monotony, he would lean against any of several support beams, stemmed from the surrounding parapets, and rap his aki pipe against the iron rail guard, making a distinct ‘dinging’ sound until the embers stirred up inside. If he timed it just right, he would get to watch the wind catch a few of the embers so they could ‘dance’, glowing and twirling over the cityscape. Peering over the edge of the tower, he noticed the Shiirati were finally flocking south in droves. Turning to Marrow, he spoke loudly in his rough, leathery voice. “I know this is boring, but you’ll need to wake up, boy.”

Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time since I was fifteen years old, I had written something!!! It had been thirteen long years, and it felt good to be back.

Reading authoritative books from cover-to-cover on stuff like writing and technique was really just a way of convincing myself I was serious about learning to write a novel. Yet, as I moved on, those very books were becoming more and more obsolete. They found themselves being pushed farther and farther away until they were clearly out of arm’s reach. In their place? Lots of novels.

After all was said and done, I felt they had served their purpose well:

1. They made published writers seem far more ‘human’ to me; their world more accessible.

2. Information on finding agents and publishers: very interesting! It would have taken me ages to learn all that stuff on my own. For example, I would have still not heard of the Writer’s Market.

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So… What’s next?
Next is coming up with an idea for a ’story worth telling’.
How is that done?
Unfortunately, that’s a tough question. Books on authoring get rather abstract at this point. In fact, things don’t really get back to what I would call … a ’step-by-step’ approach again until they finally start talking about finding an agent. That’s well after your transcript is already 100% finished.

So, take a deep breath. Here is where we step into the scary unknown.

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