I’m at 90,000 words, and it keeps improving and slowly growing – even though I’m taking things out. The Pale Folk have become the Painted Folk, and they have gone from a race of small pacifist craftsmen to a race of tinkers, rogues, and miners. I’m changing some names from some long-held placeholder names to more of a final form, which is exciting – if not a little confusing even for myself. It’s getting closer!
Category Archives: Creativity
Hoist by my own petard?
I’m still editing, currently reviewing the Game rules. I can see where my ideas have evolved over the past few years, and I’ve not kept the Game Rules up to date with the World Book, and this is causing me more than a little heartburn at times. It is taking longer than I expected to get this all roped together, but I vow to release a very good product that is gamer-approved. The additional wait is going to be worth it, I promise.
In the process, I have streamlined the rules so that one simple chart and one simple dice roll will affect much of your fate – whether it is spell casting, melee combat, trying to get a contract from that badass mercenary leader, or just hanging onto the rope for one more round.
I have to resist the temptation to move on to the next continent (so MANY goodies waiting there) and keep grinding on what I already have.
The Lycanthropes…
…have arrived!
Check out the tab above titled “TIRRAN LYCANTHROPES” and tell me if it wets your appetite.
Sometimes there are just too many possibilities to decide what to do. This is still a rough graphic, but I think you get the idea.
Oh, for a clump of Dup cheese!
A dup? And what is this about cheese?
Dups are used as pack animals and as dairy or meat sources from Hillport to Eaglebrook.Think of something between an American bison and a rhinocerous, and that is getting close to what a dup looks like. The legs are quite stout, and the shoulders mound up behind the head. Wool hangs down in huge hunks of molding hair, which is gathered and prized in the spring to make great sweaters! These beasts are slow moving unless they are provoked. The males have horns that jut out forcefully from the skull, and they are not afraid to use them – especially in rutting season.
The tundra nomads breed dups in the far north. The dup diet is vegetarian. It’s a little bit troublesome because sometimes dups are finicky eaters when traveling, so don’t plan on them eating provisions you brought along. Also, plan on quite a large volume of food for each dup. They always like their tundra grasses though, as long as they can dig down to them through the snow. They travel better in the mountains than some pack animals, but they are much more adapted to the plains.
The shaggy coats are allowed to shed in the spring. Nomads don’t like to try to shear them, preferring to remove the shaggy wool from nettles and trees where the animals rub themselves to be rid of the heaviness before the summer heat arrives. Perhaps it is better to say the dups don’t like being sheared.
When dups are in the mating mood (early autumn), make sure you are some place else. Both sexes can be very difficult to keep under control at that time. Males will butt heads constantly until one backs down or is killed. Calves are born in the late spring, which is when the tundra is coming to life a little bit for a brief, warm summer. They are full sized and ready for mating in 2 years. The lifespan is quite long – 25 to 40 years is not uncommon.
What dup cheese might look like?
Nomads use the milk of the dup females to make a strong cheese that smells a little bit like somebody vomited. It tastes pretty good though – especially on a cold day when you’re really hungry. Dup meat is quite rich and fortifying. One animal can feed a tribe for several weeks as needed. The meat is usually boiled down until it is very tender, and seasoned with heavy dollops of garlic, herbs, and other vegetables. The meat can be a little gamey, so additional spices are usually used. It makes for a very hearty stew!
South of the Northern Rim, dup meat is treated much the same as any other meat – jerked, smoked, fried, ground or in large cubes held briefly over a flame and consumed nearly raw.
Most of the animal can be used – including the hide, bones, teeth, horns and wool. Several internal organs are also consumed by the nomads. Perhaps if you travel there they may share their recipes with you?
Why the Age of Swords?
In the continent of TIRRA, I am setting the world notes in the Age of Swords. Why did I choose that era?
The ages each have meaning. TIRRA is lacking in iron, and therefore must make do with copper, zinc, nickel, and tin and so on. Swords made of bronze may look impressive, but they really just don’t hold up very well against an armored opponent. Unless you are very good at only attacking soft spots on your opponents armor, your sword will dull and/or break eventually.
Which is why swords are reserved for unarmored opponents, and are becoming a symbol across large swaths of TIRRA as symbols of repression.
This then is the age when governments are sometimes finding advantage in slavery, and in forcibly keeping populations at fearful and oppressed. Who will win – the swords or the peasants?
TIRRA Kickoff
This blog has lain fallow for nearly a year. Creatively I was just in a place where I didn’t have anything to say – due to a lot of reasons that should probably be left unsaid.
But, yes, it’s a nice sunny warm Sunday, and I’m inside pretending I’m very far away.
I’ve dusted off a creative project that has been neglected since January 2004. In those seven years I think I’ve made great strides in both writing and graphic editing. I plan to prove it – to myself if not to anybody else.
TIRRA is a continent on a planet in some other place. I’m setting up a detailed continent for RPG gamers and fiction writers. Following the world book will be a rule book and a critter compendium of some sort. A lot of the groundwork has already been done over the years – stretching back to the 1980s! So now it’s a matter of cleaning up loose ends, fixing up a few illustrations, and finding somebody to do some book covers or something.
Ideas are welcome, but please let me post a little bit more about what’s going on before we all get too excited. In some ways this is FAR bigger than a novel, with tons more information. In other ways it’s a place for me to put creative bits that I have not found a home for elsewhere. Besides, my writing style is best at characters and setting – I never really did master the whole ‘plot’ idea – so perhaps this is down my alley.
I’m not sure how much of the sun I’ll be seeing this spring…. But don’t worry, I’m having fun.
Reorganized Workspace – or did I just divorce myself?
I’m getting a divorce from myself. Trust me, it’s a happy tale, and is the only way forward from here.
It’s along story, but I’ll try not to trigger your inner TL,DR alarms. It all boils down to a simple observation – I need a different kind of space for exploration and creativity than I do for editing / revising / publishing. When I try to write completely from a digital starting point, I end up playing games, surfing, or just staring at a blank monitor. I’ve not had a really good creative thought in my head in months, which in writer’s terms is nearly a lifetime of being stranded on a desert island with nothing to read.
For the past few ages, I’ve haunted coffeeshops, restaurants, or any place that wouldn’t kick me out. I would spread some stuff out on the table, have some java and start playing with ideas. Or I just watch people for character nuances I can use later. However, there are usually enough distractions to keep me from really zoning in on any particular ideas. When I’m wrestling with the early seeds of an idea, the fertile ground I need is a flat space where I can spread out. I’ve known this since childhood when I took over entire corners of the living room floors with papers. I end up doing charts, maps, doodles, and linking ideas in huge dashes or lines zotted bits of color. When I get enough of the idea dashed around, then I can move to a more digital format and start sculpting the words into something a little more coherent.
So how did I divorce myself?
I bought a desk at a consignment shop a few years ago (Goodwill? Maybe.) and glossed it up – a nice happy red. The Red Desk was going to be the centerpiece of my home office – the downstairs edition. For less than $50 (for desk, paint and hardware) I had a writer’s zone in the middle of everything. Sadly, it was in the way. It sucked up far too much floorspace for the amount of use it invoked. I dragged it upstairs and shoved it into a corner of my office where it quietly and patiently waited for something to do. I wanted to use it, but hey – everything is digital now, right? What can it do that my Mac can’t do? It collected the flotsam that should have been tossed.
I spent this past weekend hauling out bags of accumulated trash, painting the backside of the desk a chocolatey brown, and rotated it so that I could actually have a view out my window. It is stocked up now with forgotten colored pencils, highlighters, markers, graph paper, a small candle holder; and all of the accouterments that help me scrawl the bits that keep floating around my head into some sort of less-than-vague thoughts.
The newly purposed red desk
I still use the digital side of my office for committing the story into the inevitably larger chunks of 1s and 0s, editing, reviewing, posting, commenting, audio books and audio mixing, and publishing. The id goes over to the red desk to play, and the ego gets behind the monitor and fixes the poor beast’s grammar and improves on the ideas. There’s a dotted yellow line down the middle of the room in my mind – as clear as if I had painted one on the floor.
The great divide
Why two desks in one small room? What is the measurable benefit? Well I’ve decided the story I’m been trying to tell is really a modern/futuristic thriller, not a high fantasy slugfest, and an entire Pandora’s box of possibilities is already ajar. I have a new set of characters, a setting that is appropriately disconcerting, and the making of a plot that I can actually manage.
Getting reorganized isn’t a bitch. It is both a luxury and a requirement.
On Journaling
I’ve had a long flirtation with writing implements and papers. If I just don’t like the pen or the paper, I may as well play Solitaire because I won’t get anything significant done. Yeah, I might be able to write a little, but I might as well toss it sooner rather than later.
Also, trying to write with somebody else’s pen or a borrowed bit of paper is like wearing somebody else’s underwear or using a strange toothbrush. It just is not natural! The media has to fit the message. I can’t write a novel on a chalkboard any more than I can put a dictionary on the back of a postage stamp.
About a hundred years ago, I was working in the broadcast industry during my college years. In those days there was a news machine in the hallway (or several) with rolls of paper inside. When it was time to clear the machine and sort through the material, the paper was ripped off along a clear plastic edge and then further ripped between stories. I used to liberate the bitter ends of the rolls of paper, and I gathered them in my dorm. I taped the ends of the rolls together to make one really huge roll of paper. I hung this roll of paper on the back of my typewriter when I was feeling somewhat manic about writing, and I could go for miles (well, feet anyway) at a time without reloading my typewriter with paper. This was not the writing that would win the Pulitzer prize. This was me just exploring my own creativity or dashing out a draft for a paper due in a few hours that needed to be retyped anyway onto regular paper. I found the process to be fairly efficient compared to miles of liquid paper, retyping pages, and making rather a larger mess than I had to.
Part of my collegiate experience was keeping a journal. In those days it was a spiral bound notebook, and I had to turn it in for review by one of my writing instructors. I write quickly by hand, almost in a code, and it can be difficult to read. Yes, these journals were also crap-filled but they did help me explore my thoughts a little more slowly and methodically than dashing things out on the everlasting gobstopper roll of newsprint.
I’ve tried fountain pens, felt-tip pens, ballpoint pens of all sorts. With a few exceptions, I really don’t like pens. I fell in love with mechanical pencils instead. A mechanical pencil does not need gravity, ink, time to dry, and the carbon lines do not smear very much. Plus the eraser is a bonus.
I find that there is something in actually writing something by hand first that cements the ideas a little better for me. Plus, I find that when I’m drafting an early stage of a work, I NEED to doodle. I draw little pictures in the margins, bits of maps to explain to myself how things are oriented, and I literally connect dots between thoughts. There is no “doodle” function in Microsoft Word, in iWorks Pages, or in Open Office. I know because I’ve searched in vain. When I’m exploring an idea I don’t even really like lines on the paper because an occasional sentence may need to run down an edge, or a parenthetical thought may need to be skritched on. Yeah, skritched. Especially if I’m trying to get a bit of poetry right or a more sentimental narrative.
I’m convinced that sometimes you must slow down a little and write things by hand. Would Thomas Jefferson have been as eloquent writing the Declaration of Independence if he were constrained to 140 characters at a time? No. Instead, he had the luxury of dipping his pen every few words. This gives an added bit of time for crafting what must be said instead of just blurting out something. Perhaps today’s youth, on the other hand, are so tied into the digital world that this isn’t going to be an issue for them, and it is a conundrum for old fogies such as myself.
So, at the urging of a friend, I’ve returned to journaling. I ordered two Moleskine journals and I’m going to see how that goes. I’ve not really been on a creative streak for quite some time – both due to pressures on this side of the keyboard that keep dragging me back into reality, and a lack of anything to say. Yes, they are rather a bit expensive for doodles and thoughts, but it is also a reminder to make the time count. Wasted pages is wasted money and wasted time. Get focused! Stay focused! Keep writing!
I also find wonderfully coincidental that I find this blog entry today as I’m writing this post [via Rachelle Gardner on Twitter]. I’ll be looking for more by Christa Allen. Her post is about journaling, and she mentions Natalie Goldberg, who has gotten me out of more creativity jams than anybody else on the planet through her books. Writing Down the Bones and the Wild Mind are highly recommended – you can find them in the same volume on Amazon.
New Perspectives
Sometimes you have to step outside to change your mind about something.
Sometimes you have to take a walk.
Sometimes I have to go someplace entirely different.
Adrian Lark, founder of Mars3D.com, has created a virtual ‘flyover’ video of the martian landscape using image data collected by NASA’s HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), the most powerful camera ever sent into space.
The stunning animation shows Mars’s southwest Candor Chasma.
I had to go digging for it, but there is another thread over here describing how alien worlds might actually exist, and whether or not they may be useful in fiction descriptions. Some of it is far fetched, but some if it may be useful. If you’re on a ringed planet, did you know that the rings may alter their angle against the sun at different times of the year so that you may be in the shadow of the rings for half a year or so? This is why you don’t go sunbathing on Saturn.
