scribblemyname: (gone reading)

Lexember Word for the Day:

shdah • [ ʃdaʎ̥˔ ] • information gathered from informants or primary sources
noun
Language: Akachenti


Good Articles I Read:


Weekend Plans


  • canon review for Yuletide fic


  • finish ordering collection for pygmymuse and geckoholic (this might be miraculous to finish)


  • finish articles due


  • sleep. A lot.



Bless you all! :hugs:

scribblemyname: (teacup)

Conlanging

Started cracking the code of my old script for Kalyeshur / Vas'hehr. I've figured out about five or six glyphs.

Lexember Word for the Day

tonga • / to ŋa / • letter or glyph in a writing system
noun without finalized declension forms, so I can't offer example sentences or constructions at this time
Language: Akachenti


Work

Possible breakthrough on a testing issue that we'd deferred for major feature development/rework/refactoring and here! A lead that may result in a fix without having to wait for the pre-Easter development cycle.

Tonight more smoke testing. I may be up all night, considering the last deploy.


Reading

Good Articles I Read:

It's Thursday, so it's time to go read the Business Rusch.

Books I Want:


  • Women of Futures Past: Classic Stories, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - I mean, look at that cover, it's gorgeous! And I adore women and girls in my science fiction. 'Nuff said.
    Meet the Women of Futures Past: from Grand Master Andre Norton and the beloved Anne McCaffrey to some of the most popular SF writers today, such as Lois McMaster Bujold and CJ Cherryh. The most influential writers of multiple generations are found in these pages, delivering lost classics and foundational touchstones that shaped the field.

    You'll find Northwest Smith, C.L. Moore’s famous smuggler who predates (and maybe inspired) Han Solo by four decades. Read Leigh Brackett’s fiction and see why George Lucas chose her to write The Empire Strikes Back. Adventure tales, post‑apocalyptic visions, space opera, aliens‑among‑us, time travel—these women have delivered all this and more, some of the best science fiction ever written!




Writing

Didn't have a lot of actual time for that today, but I got a poem done anyway. Not a very good one, but it exists.

Strait

There's the fast way,
then there's the easy way,
the last way we did,
and the right way.

There's the quality way
and the quantity way,
the way things are done,
and the right way.

I've worked hard and fast,
I've worked smarter, not harder,
what we've always done,
and non-starters.

I've tried all the methods
and done all the tests:
when all's said and done,
the right way is best.

And a somewhat better haiku

if joy comes with morn
then still as snow, I will wait
through ungentle night

scribblemyname: (gambit: movieverse)

I find an interesting thing about the languages I choose to use in my stories. Not unreasonably, I often prefer to use languages I’ve already started, but for some reason, it still surprises me when I do it. I used to create a language at the drop of a hat, and sometimes I still see one starting to sketch itself out, but at the same time, I find myself more and more reaching for old bones and stretching them into new shapes.

In Splintered Gates, I pulled two sigil names straight from ancient (in my personal real time, that is) Senetari Shuril, a very old version of Vas’hehr, the secondary language of Vardin (I think they have four or five main languages they tend to use). Well, almost straight.

Ditraka is pulled straight from Senetari Shuril and means essentially, speaker of truth, caller out of truth, doer of truth, etc. The verb can vary as it’s a partial construction, something common to the language but not to any other language of mine. “Di” is often rendered “out of” in the sense given above, e.g. caller out of truth. “Traka” is literally “truth.”

Cyvahdo is a mixture. “Ahdo” I made up as “rider” on the spot, but “cyv” means “sky” and was one of the first vocabulary words I had.

Why do I find this so particularly interesting? Besides the fact that I’m overly self-analytical, I mean. Because the more I write, the more the bones of my worlds are starting to bleed. I can see why some authors have a hard time not repeating themselves.

I’m not too worried yet, but it is something I have to keep an eye on. Oddly enough, this also only really became an issue when Kingdoms and Thorn cropped up. There was no way to stop the bleed with Vardin because they were born from literally the same bones, the same story, the same premise, the same characters. I just played it out several different ways and picked Vardin to write. Then K&T happened and there was the second major branch. Then Splintered Gates happened and I can keep it separate, more easily than the rest actually, but I hit the third major branch. It’s only safe to write because I split out the other reusable part of the branch into the Alliance storyworld instead. It reduces the room for bleed. A bit.

I find all this very interesting from this perspective: five years ago, I wouldn’t have tolerated it.

When we were kids, I made a fine art of hiding the origins of my characters and stories in bending certain key details, burying others, and mixing and matching far disparate fandoms. I rarely fanfic crossovers, but if you could see inside my mind, you’d see that most of my original fiction is incredibly crossed over. There’s a fine tradition for this in literature.

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.”

― Stephen Wright

I steal from many, even myself. My stories and poems reference other literary pieces, sometimes rather obliquely. I homage and recreate and interrogate and adapt and decry and protest in the form of another piece of fiction, and then to top it all off, I do my level best to hide most of it so thoroughly that no one will ever figure out my layered upon layered secrets.

In short, I find this strange but interesting. It’s a habit of childhood, and only now am I beginning to be okay with bleed and small revelations. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad or indifferent, but it’s interesting.

Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.

Profile

scribblemyname: (Default)
scribblemyname

July 2024

S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
1415 1617181920
21222324252627
28293031   

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 13th, 2025 01:48 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios