Genre: just-past-modern fantastic realism meets cyberpunk paranormal romance
Characters: College-age layabout who is handsome and clever, generally quite lucky
Woman a few years older, in Shadowrun she’d be a runner, possibly a street shaman.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1034977.html. You can comment here or there.
I got my mom learning-to-knit for Christmas – 2 sets of needles, 4 skeins of yarn, and this pattern, because it involves:
* only knit stitches, no purl
* color changes
* increases
* decreases
(Mom & Dad have a long long flight to New Zealand ahead of them in January; I thought she’d best be prepared).
Of course, if I’m going to go drive up to Rochester & show my mom how to knit, I probably ought to have knitted in the last year or two, no? And it’s been a while.
I might do another kerchief, like this or this. Don’t need a hat, maybe I’ll work on the Shahin Wristies I’ve been thinking about for 100 years.
Maybe I’ll just dump all my yarn on the living room floor and see what jumps out. What do you think?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1034545.html. You can comment here or there.
So shutsumon has asked me to take part in Languary in January:
Get the phonology, phonotactics and basic grammar of a new language started
So, two things:
1) who wants to join us?
2) what am I gonna start a language for?
..(2a) I DO have an urban fantasy/cyberpunk setting on the back burner that I’ve been considering…
..(2b) There’s always Old Tongue from Addergoole, but that’s a nightmare
..(2c) What else?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1034372.html. You can comment here or there.
Let it Shine, Let it Shine, Let it Shine
I already have the word for shine! It’s -lar
(I did the beginning of a series of conlang exercises here
And a lamp is Tezhet; the lamp shines – Tezhet alaraak.
But before there were lamps there were candles: dapairdie /da ‘pīr dē/, from pair, light, -do, to give, da-, a thing that does.
and ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inventrix asked for Cons.
iekiekyent is a known fact, a part of existence.
telnyent: truth-known, i.e, “the sky is blue.”
Kelnyent is the sort of truth that you’re pretty sure about
So a confidence game is a turning the truth sideways.
To turn sideways is gazh; to turn something else sideways is ragazh.
You end up with Kelneyt ragazh, a turning-sideways of your perceptions.
And, like con, this gets shortened to kelryag, a con.
Above list reproduced here – http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=40026
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1034221.html. You can comment here or there.
after inventrix‘s Let’s Pretend, which is after my A Change in Routine.
When Leo walked into Cya’s front yard carrying her Kept over his shoulder, she found that she wasn’t surprised, and that she was more than a little relieved.
It wouldn’t be enough, of course. Apollo was the most stubborn, ridiculous, arrogant man she had had the misfortune to deal with…
…since Leo and Howard were that age, a thought she was doing her best to suppress, especially considering how Leo’s fierce smile vanished when he caught her looking at him.
He set her Kept down on her porch as Cya opened her door and deftly avoided the angry punch Apollo attempted to throw.
“I see you’ve met Professor Inazuma. Come in.” She made it an invitation for Leo and an order for Apollo. “Leo, I see you’ve met my new Kept. I hope he wasn’t too difficult.”
“He wasn’t difficult at all!” Leo was having fun, a smile flashing onto his face before he remembered he was supposed to be feeling bad. “Ah, we got in a bit of a fight…”
“You kicked his ass, you mean.” She watched Apollo’s face; she didn’t need to watch Leo’s to know what was going across it. He’d be hang-dog for a moment, and then proud of himself again.
Apollo was warring with something simpler: pride and fear. He’d noticed, then, how much stronger, how much more skilled than him Leo was. Good. “Are you just going to let him manhandle your Kept like that?” He spat out the word Kept. He always did. But the end of the sentence was more like a plea. “Or–“
“We were playing a bit of Let’s Pretend.” The pride was clear in Leo’s voice, and the anger and fear were sparking in Apollo’s face again.
“You were playing! I was–“
“You were saying you could handle yourself.” She could hear the sharp smile in Leo’s voice. “If I’d been a slaver, you’d be in chains by now.”
It was hardly a fair challenge. They had great-grandchildren older than this boy.
Slavers wouldn’t be fair, either.
“Leo was cy’Luca, too, Apollo, back when we were kids. A lot of kids have been, through the years, if you do the math.” She kept her eyes on him. “One or two in every Cohort… One or two cy’Fridmar, too, and they’re just as vicious in a fight, more likely to cheat, and more likely to turn evil. Never mind the cy’Sakamoto; nobody knows which way they’ll go. And most of the cy’Doug would rather kill you than look at you.”
“I get it!” He flung his arms upward violently. “Yeah, sure, there’s lots of assholes out there. But I’m good, okay? This jackass got the jump on me, that’s all.”
He didn’t believe it, or Cya would have been more harsh with him. Instead, she raised her eyebrows and waited for the moment where he shifted from foot to foot and dropped his arms and his gaze.
She glanced back at Leo, wondering if he remembered when he was that young and stupid. Time enough for that conversation later.
“By the time I’m done with you, it will be a lot harder for anyone to get the drop on you. And step one is realizing that somebody can and will.”
And, because he was her Kept and this one, damnit, she could protect, she kept going. “In the meantime, this is my city. If anyone other than Leo here attacks you, you tell them that you Belong to me. If that doesn’t stop them, you can feel free to tell anyone who can hear you that you’re mine. For this year, at least, that ought to keep you safe.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1033777.html. You can comment here or there.
The Calenyena love color, really, really love color. Everything about their world is bright and colorful.
Here are just a few color words:
I have already kat, red, len, orange, and paato, yellow.
gomol, from the old gom, means green. It is speculated the the -ol brings it closer to the Bitrani word for green, miagermo
Tien, from the old teetaanzhun, sky-like, is blue, a broad term encompassing most shades, as are kat and gomol.
And just because we only had it tucked into another word -liz means “brightly rainbow-colored.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1033705.html. You can comment here or there.
Okay, I’ve been cheating nicely by going to dictionary entries for words that sound the same as my morphemes and that was working fine… except that I can’t think of any palatalized consonants to look up to get the sounds like dyaik in odyaikaar. Help?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1033435.html. You can comment here or there.
She was, above all else, tired.
The rain was coming down again. It seemed like it always rained, these days. The monarch sipped her tea and stared out at the yard, where the ravens were dancing in the downpour. The ravens had always danced there. Soon, her son would visit, and she would have to have a long-postponed conversation with him. She found herself exhausted at the very thought.
It was the reduction that did it. When her children had ruled over the planet and her empire had stretched over continents, she had never felt tired. When the world itself had been much smaller and she’d had only her little island to rule over, she’d never felt tired.
She stood, although the form she was wearing now protested. She had not gotten this old in a very long time. It suited, however; the aging body’s exhaustion matched the tiredness she felt. She felt the rain in her joints and in her soul, and it never stopped raining.
It had been bright and shiny when she was young, shiny and small.
The world had grown, and she had grown with it; her empire had grown, and she had stretched herself over the planet, sending out children, sending out bits of herself to the New World, to India, to Africa, to Australia. Very little of that had come back; she found herself small again, small and old in a huge and juvenile world.
The monarch paced. This was the fortieth form she’d worn as Monarch, and the transitions grew harder every time. More people knew her with this face than had ever known any of her other faces – perhaps more people could recognize this face, this Elizabeth, than had known all of her other monarch faces together. Not just her face, but Charles’ face and mannerisms, and William’s and Harry’s.
She allowed herself a small smile. Leadership changes you. Thus they had been saying for centuries. People would notice that the new King shifted uneasily under the mantle of leadership. They would notice he seemed different – more somber, perhaps, or older. They would make up a story that suited.
The Queen chuckled to herself. There had been the time where they’d said she was a body-snatching demon, and tried to burn her at the stake. That had been awkward, to say the least. It had taken some fast talking and serious footwork to get out of that with a viable heir left to become.
And now… and now… Now she was laying plans and readying herself to move on to a new face, and the rain would not stop coming down. Something was wrong, seriously wrong.
“This is my country, damnit.” The Monarch punched her own leg, sensible frock and varicose veins be damned. “This is mine.” She raised her voice to shout for her secretary. “Anna! Anna, get in here.” The rain had been falling for three weeks straight. It was no more natural than the Monarch’s endless reign was. “We’re going to save my country.” Again.
