A poem: ‘Past Away’

A lost friend, a look again.
How Annie always tumbled in.
Lost beyond the Camelsphere.
Need to find that piece of luggage.

With deities in windows, staring,
We played the Harp of Stingrays.
Time stretched, we carried pills.
You, me, and Ursa Minor.

Bounce your wits off a script
Drifting through a time-split.
Demon still, being still.
Tolerate ten-thousand tempos.

Though I thought I was just bored
And it was just curious.
Bubbled up from miles gone.
I’m breaking through a breakthrough.

The necessity of fantasy

Why is fantasy getting so popular all of the sudden?

Discussing it with my wife, she made an interesting observation: Maybe the popularity of fantasy is booming because our culture was getting too saturated with reality TV?
Hm. I read somewhere the more rational the world gets, the more irrational fantasy needs to be.

Fantasy is one of the oldest forms of storytelling. We used the fantastic to attempt to explain the world when science could not. But, now that science can explain a great deal of the workings of our world, where does fantasy fit in?

We dream in fiction every night. So fiction must be important to our everyday lives, somehow. My wife jokingly said, “I don’t know anyone who dreams in non-fiction!”

I fondly look back on my early childhood, remembering what it was like to live within the constraints of my imagination without impunity. As I grew older, role-models made it clear I was expected to cast aside my childish ways. The problem with that was, any innocence I loosened my grip on could not be regained. The imagination I have left is what survived being smothered by grown-ups, and what survived the harsh sting of the real world.

A place to belong (and a whole bevy of haikus)

I’ve read that a great way to learn more about writing quickly is by joining some kind of writer’s circle or critique group. So, I’ve been looking around, and found there’s only one local group around where I live, called “Wordsmiths by Night” (named such because they all have day jobs, and gather together at night after work to write at the local coffee shops). That sounded really nice, but I guess I was hoping for a fiction-only group. Maybe even a fantasy-only group. I checked at my college and, to my dismay, they didn’t even have a writing club! Realizing how limited my options were, and not having the free time to run my own, I took my search online.

I joined writing.com and critiquecircle.com, but the upgrade-to-paid-membership schemes there were a big turn-off. Luckily, I came across a blog that mentioned Forward Motion (fmwriters.com). I was surprised I hadn’t come across it before, considering it was founded by Holly Lisle. It’s been around for more than ten years and the group is tightly knit. It houses a treasure-trove of knowledge and the people there are very friendly, patient, and willing to help writers of any skill-level. Their mission statement is basically to guide its members to a writing level suitable for being considering for publication. Despite the website’s archaic appearance, it’s one of the largest writer’s communities out there. Considering the friendly, inviting atmosphere, I’m not surprised!

They post challenges every month as writing warm-ups, and this month was haikus. I dove right into their challenge and had a lot of fun. And, as usual, critiques are welcome!

Dare I rhyme haiku,
Even though I don’t have to?
Dare to rhyme, I do.

Scratches on the wall …
In a jail cell … in a jail
Cell … in a jail cell…

To him, it was like
A morganatic union;
Left us with nothing.

Cartography! -part 2-

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.->

What time is it?

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-

Just an update:

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.

Is it okay to offend?

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not a writer should write in such a way that risks offending some of their readers. I know I’ve watched movies or read books where it seemed like the political or moral points were painfully transparent. People often say they are too preachy, trying to shove their ideals down their throats. But the secret is, almost every movie and book out there has an opinion; fiction, non-fiction, whatever - Some writers are just more skillful at disguising it with metaphor and plot than others.

Hearing opinions challenges people; forces people to think - to face things they have never faced before - to look in the mirror and finally admit “That’s me”. It’s my contention that people need to hear opinions. It is both healthy and necessary for humans to explore their opinions, state them, and try to understand why somebody else’s might differ, without losing their temper. It takes practice.

Cartography! -part 1-

---

Lately, I have been writing a lot, and I came to realize the theme for my storyline is “trust”:

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?

Prose & Poetry

*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!

Inventing the rules

If it wasn’t obvious enough from my previous post, I decided to go with a third-person perspective for my novel. Third-person seems to fit the high fantasy genre almost too well, allowing the writer to write from varying points of view, and even allowing usage of an omniscient voice if the need should ever arise. Plus, it allows the writer to portray scenarios from varying distances and degrees of emotional pitch. It is not illegal to switch into second or first-person, either (But it’s usually a bad idea to do that unless it is intrinsic to the story).

I’m sure you’ve read that audiences typically identify with the characters that populate your world on a much more intimate level than they ever could with the scenarios you create for them, but that doesn’t mean you should short-change great characters with a mediocre plot. I decided I wanted to try and create a story worthy of my characters - one that would plunge each character into the sheer heights and morbid depths of their emotions.
Masashi Kishimoto, the (then) 19 year-old creator of Naruto said in an interview that, in order to make a plot more engaging, each event must follow its own specific set of rules. If that’s the case, the characters end up having to work within those limitations coupled with their own built-in flaws, and the plot itself becomes more identifiable.

The world also has to follow such rules.
As far as I can tell, creating a world is just a declaration of different rules. The more your list grows, the more your world transforms into something tangible and organic.

When people say world building is like ‘playing God’, they aren’t kidding. If you want your people to eat flowers around a waterfall cascading from a mysterious magical pot, suspended in midair, down a gaping hole in the center of your planet, then it becomes so. For me, weilding the power of pure unbridled creation felt like unsure footing; it was hard to just declare things about my world with any certainty. But I think the trick is, you should try to make all of your rules have a sort of synergy. Each new rule must cooperate with what you’ve already declared to reinforce the atmosphere of the world you are trying to build.

Here’s a few for my world:

Prior to the finer details…

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. Since most of this 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.”

Writing without rules

Once you’ve written a little bit of what you feel will be a great story, all kinds of story elements start swimming around in your head.
And with all of those little story elements swimming around in your thoughts all the time, your brain somehow starts to automatically arrange some of them into a cohesive theme.

I found questions were echoing in my head all the time, such as:

“How did Cirellio and Aeriallas even meet?”
“What business did they have in Joun?”
“What does Aydomar look like?”
“Is there a spoken accent?”
“Does this city have a monarchy?”
“A Democracy?”
“A new form of government?”
“What kind of foods do they typically eat?”
“What would be an interesting culture for this city?”

I’m happy to say none of the other characters or locations so far have been derived. They came directly from my imagination.

Planning a plan

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.

A blank, white landscape

As you may recall, I knew that I wanted to write a high fantasy story about an anti-hero, a thief named Cirellio. And that’s about it.

So … where did I get ‘Cirellio’ in the first place?

Cirellio’s humble beginnings:
2:00 AM. In a cold basement. With friends of the more … geeky persuasion. All of us were wired on Mountain Dew, and we were crowded around coffee tables, seated in old folding chairs, only a little worried we would get too noisy and wake up J.J.’s mom. I needed to name the thief I had just rolled, and I was always picky about decisions like that. With everyone else impatiently waiting to get started, I had grown desperate enough to start rummaging through a pile of nearby Magic: The Gathering cards as a possible source for inspiration. An artist’s name caught my eye: CIRUELO. Derived from that name, the word ‘cirellio’ just … sounded like my rogue (pronounced - Sir-el-ee-oh).

So yeah … Cirellio was a thief I created for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I would love to tell you I created Cirellio out of thin air instead of on a character creation sheet, but, this, my friends, is truth. Poor Cirellio died that same night to a nasty spell called Melf’s Acid Arrow. But no matter what his humble beginnings were, I fell in love with his name and the persona I developed for him, which incubated over the following years in my mind (even though I wasn’t playing AD&D any more). He was my all-time favorite character, so I reclaimed him from the grave for this book.

Armed with only a name and profession, it seemed the only way for me to progress was to just swallow my pride and start writing. After all, I had nothing to lose, and if I didn’t ever write my stories, who would?

Getting ready to knock on my muse’s door for the first time in years was hard. My heart felt like it going to leap right out of my chest. Would my muse turn me away? I took a deep breath and created a text file simply called ‘book.txt’. A double-click later and I was staring at a blank white landscape which, with persistence, would soon be filled with my imagination.

Hmm … a blank, white landscape?

With that thought, I closed my eyes and visualized. I didn’t worry about deleting. I just let it flow, letting the keyboard mine the depths of my imagination. When the trance-like flow finally ended, I found I had written a total of 3,253 words! I had chills.

Later, I would find out this wonderful technique was something already well known in the writing world … called ‘freewriting’.

The opening paragraph of my freewrite looked like this:

Into the unknown…

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.