Archive | June 2012
State of the Giraffes
There will be a mini-Giraffe Call this month, but it shall not be until late – June 25th.
It will be on any one setting; what would you like?
Exceptions – not Aunt Family nor Addergoole, which are the most recently done and next to be done, respectively.
The July Mini-Giraffe Call shall be Addergoole Summer Camp on July 14th; this will kick off 52 days to 52 stories, a lead-up to my new serial, beginning on September 4th.
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Where has all the Blogging Gone?
I have been remiss in blogging lately! If you have noticed the camp-nano posts, you can easily see one reason why – I am trying hard to get 50K done by the 20th (the 21st is our 10-year wedding anniversary).
The other reason? Summer!
This weekend I finally got a portion of the garden put in – planted 7 tomato plants in 3 varieties, 7 hot pepper plants in 4 varieties (6 of 2 more to plant), basil in 2 varieties, sage, oregano, and beans. I weeded the carrot patch (apologies to Anne Bishop readers) and laid down weed cloth over the squash (well, around them), too.
And I got another coat of poly on the dresser and started painting it!
In terms of nano, I’m looking to get most of the first semester of Addergoole Year 9 completed: the series will cover, in 52 weeks, one year of the Addergoole school through the eyes of the twenty-some members of the Ninth Cohort.
Also: We got two new kittens. Their names are Oligarchy and Theocracy and they are 12 weeks old and beautiful.
And a link: Finally, a Home where you can enjoy the Post-apoc.
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Addergoole Style Guide
![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rix_scaedu raised a question in alpha-reading the upcoming Addergoole-Year-9, and I never did answer it well in the original series – “should it be crew, or Crew?”
I’m going to stretch that out to – what things should I capitalize?
* Each word in a Working?
* the word Working?
* Bond? This one I hesitate on, because it looks to me too much like the Blood Bond in White Wolf.
Things that I know are always cap:
* Keeping, Kept (not sure on Owning, Owned), Belonging.
* Law
* references to a position as per the Law – Mentor, Student, Mother, Child (but only in that context)
I seem to have settled on capitalizing Daeva, Mara, Grigori.
Urg!
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Protected: Addergoole Year Nine: Noam
Thank you!
Whoever has contributed to my Paid Dreamwidth account, please step forward to collect your words!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/352006.html. You can comment here or there.
25,000 words!
I have reached 25,000 words on my Nano-in-June “novel,” the first “semester” of Addergoole Year Nine!!
Halfway there <3
Icon by Merit Badger, who you should totally check out
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/351983.html. You can comment here or there.
Faries in the Church
For flofx‘s commissioned prompt, a continuation of
⛪
“There are fairies in your church.”
Bishop Macnamilla was of an older school of thought, practically antediluvian. Most of the time, Father Nehemiah avoided conflict by avoiding the Ninth Street house where the Bishop kept his residence. The Father’s church was new, and not entirely conventional, and not near Ninth Street, and the Bishop’s body as well as his mind were old, and did not move easily.
But someone had said something, the Father was certain. The jowls on the Bishop were shaking in the way the once-fat man only did when he had been being yelled at by a parishioner who Didn’t Like Something. Probably not one of Nehemiah’s regulars. But sometimes the gossips from the other churches liked to stop in and visit.
“There are fairies.” Sometimes he could get away with just agreeing with the Bishop until he went away. “Margaret and LaKeisha are in there now. They’ve been helping Mrs. Bao with the cleaning, as it’s almost Easter time.”
“You have fairies in your church services, Father Nehemiah.”
He wasn’t going to be able to dance around this. “Better than having them standing outside the gates, glaring.”
“Do you know what happens when you allow – INVITE the fair folk into consecrated ground?” He was bellowing, or trying to. He must have been an impressive man before the long waste of age started eating him away.
“I’ve heard the stories. Mrs. Bao told me some of them. The kirkevaren told me others – and the fairies told me another set.”
“Ruin and ruination is what you get. Sin and sinners. Filth and the filthy.” The Bishop shook his head. “It leads to nothing but badness.”
“And blood?” Nehemiah drew himself up. He was tall, taller than the Bishop’s shrunken form by nearly a foot. “I know why there were no fairies in the church before, sir.”
“There are no FAIRIES in the church,” the Bishop shouted the word as if it were an obscenity, “because to allow them into out sanctified ground taints not only the ground but the entire city.”
Father Nehemiah was boggled enough by this to lose the edge of his anger, although he did remain standing straight, staring down at the top of the Bishop’s head. “You are aware, sir, that you live in the densest population of fae in the country, correct? The city is teeming with fairies.”
“The city is rotten with them. The elders did not listen to me. They were squeamish.” The older man’s voice finally dropped. “No. It was me. I was squeamish. I knew what needed to be done, and I could not do it. I failed my superiors. I killed them, Nehemiah, I killed those fairies you have heard of. I spilled their blood in the name of the city and its sanctity. I scrubbed the floors with the blood. I blessed the altars with it. But, in the end, I could not do what needed to be done.”
He didn’t have to ask, although he wished that he did. He’d already heard enough to put the rest together.
“You killed them before you buried them, you mean.” It hadn’t been meant to be another lamb under the church at all. “You blessed their deaths, instead of leaving them to roam.”
“I could have saved us all. I could have protected us all from what’s in the wind. But they look human, Nehemiah. They look human. And that was my undoing.”
Addergoole Year Nine Character Profile: Kheper
Addergoole Year Nine won the reader poll for “Next Year’s serial;” the story proper will begin the first full week of September.
In the meantime, please enjoy the third of twenty-something character profiles: Kheper.
Kheper
b. March 15, 1987
Kheper is fiery, stubborn, strong, and hardworking, a handsome dark-haired man with a resemblance to Disney’s Aladdin. His Change involves chitin armor, beetle wings, and claws, as well as scarab horns.
His mother, Tanith, is an Egyptian student-visa to the US. Her Name translates to Brings the Pain and her Change is draconic, with arm-wings that are long and fluttery and head-spikes that are quite intimidating. She is iridescent orange in color, at least in her scales and wings.
She was a studious, serious student and matured into a strong, serious woman who demands the very best of everyone around her.
His father, Jibril, is a far-older Arabic immigrant to the United States. He has a similar change to his son, an insect Change with chitin armor that resembles small plates of jointed armor, with a set of horns resembling an ancient samuri helmet. He takes his responsibilities seriously, but that is about all he takes seriously. His Name translates to Withstands.
Jibril was held against his will by a female Nedetakaei Hunter for some time immediately before joining Regine’s project, resulting in
Spoiler
[collapse]
Kheper is not the first child either provided to the project, but when conceiving him, they fell in love and were married soon afterwards. They have two other children, who will come to the school in later years.
Kheper was raised by both parents, in an affluent Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. He grew up with his mother pressuring him to strive to the highest summits he could reach, his father driving home the importance of responsibility, and both expecting him to, perhaps, be a bit more adult than he was ready for.
He simultaneously rebelled against this mindset and took it in, becoming a studious boy in some classes and an absolute goof-off in others, dependant on his respect, or lack therof, for the teacher and, to a lesser extent, the season.
He likes sun, and likes to be outdoors during the summer months quite a bit. He spends more time than is good for his studies playing hooky as soon as the weather warms up, and takes winter with more than a little bit of grumbling.
When he decides someone is “his person,” nothing short of a complete and utter betrayal will change his mind.
He has expensive tastes, and already knows good wine and good food. His parents did manage to instill that at an early age.
Physical, he is a slight, tall young man. He’s 5’7” as he enters Addergoole and will gain another three inches in his first year, another inch each year afterwards. He isn’t prone to athletic activities that put on muscle, although he was learning skateboarding and brings his ‘board to school with him.
He has black hair that he keeps shaggy and shoulder-length because it offends his mother, chocolate brown eyes, and slightly-too-shaggy eyebrows. His skin starts out a deep brown, summer-sun baked.
Because his mother told him he was coming to an exclusive prep school, his wardrobe consists primarily of prep-school clothes: polo shirts, button-downs, khakis. He even has two shirts with the Addergoole crest on them. He prefers light colored clothing, and almost everything he owns fits in that category. If dressing “down,” he wears tailored jeans and fitted T-shirts.
Math and history are his least-good classes, because he didn’t get along with those teachers back home. Science is his best.
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Draconic – or this really isn’t how you should do a fantasy language – A Guest Post
becka_sutton is a fellow webserial author and friend. She has a new book out, Land of Myth, the first book in her Dragon Wars saga.
We share an interest in constructed languages, and today she is going to tell us about Draconic, a language from Dragon Wars.
Draconic – or this really isn’t how you should do a fantasy language (not even one that’s just for naming)
When I started writing The Dragon Wars Saga I had to do some world-building. It was interesting because while I’m not the first (and won’t be the last) writer to create a fantastical rather than hard fantasy world there was precious little advice on the web about how to do the former. I really had to go it alone. One of my previous guest blogs over at Feral Intensity discusses this.
I also needed a naming language – Draconic, which is the formal language of the Dragons in the series. I really didn’t have the faintest about conlanging and I kind of just winged it. This probably wasn’t the best idea, but there you go.
It was lucky because it’s just a naming language – even dragons only use draconic formally – so I didn’t need to work out the grammar in any great detail. But looking back I perhaps should have made a phonetics and phonotactics table. When I need a new draconic name I don’t have a table of permissible sounds and combinations which means I have to work out if the word I’m thinking of sounds right by saying it and comparing it to other names and words. Fortunately I have a pretty good grasp of the phonotactics in my head so it hasn’t been much of a problem.
I did run into phonotactics problems a couple of times. One of the dragon ranks/honorifics alra/alran did not pluralise nicely – which I didn’t realise until I tried to do it. Alri is just wrong (pluralising Ala rather than Alra) and Alrri would indicate trilling the r twice as long. But natural languages are full of such bumps so I resolved it by having a vowel insert in such situations to give Alrari.
Here’s some other facts about draconic:
• Draconic is rich is approximants – r,l and y especially. The r’s are trilled and the l’s very liquid. They also use stops a lot though not so much they make the language sound closed.
• The language is gendered – -a = female, -an = male, -ri is plural, plural can be used where gender is unknown but more usually they use female in that case. There is also -te which refers to abstracts and neutrals. Example words (miri – chief or ruler) – miria, mirian, miriri for people, miriate – everything that falls under the rulership of a particular miria. Worlds are always referred in the feminine – Taloa (Earth), Talonyka (The Speaker’s World), Kithra (The world of the Kithreiri).
If I had to give any advice to someone making a fantasy naming language for the first time it would be to at least work out all possible sounds and the way they can fit together before you start. It’ll save you pain later.
Becka Sutton is a self-described crazy cat lady, but she’s not very good at it: while she is crazy she only has one cat. She was born in Britain in 1972 and has lived there her entire life. In her early teens she started scrawling fantasy stories in exercise books her mother bought her to stop her scribbling in her school books. She hasn’t stopped writing since, and she credits writing as the outlet that allowed her to recover from the nervous breakdown she had after her parents died.
Her other interests include reading, listening to music, attempting to draw, growing her own vegetables and looking after the aforementioned Pumpkin cat.
No, you can’t read the novel she scrawled as a teen – she burned it long ago because it was awful.
Read Dragon Wars; buy Land of Myth
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