The Desert Mermaid

Been thinking lately about changing up the identity of my Global Friends doll, María.


Pictured: María

See, while her personality's always been pretty set, (I mean, lookit that cute face! It's easy to see her personality!) finding a good background for her has been somewhat more difficult. I've settled for a while on Belizean, but it never really got me motiviated enough to flesh out her background.

And then, completely out of nowhere I realized that one of my offshoot OGYAFEland* stories basically had her in it and I hadn't noticed. Replete with big sister (more on her some other time) and storyline and culture and everything.

It's kind of awesome.

Only problem is that I kinda feel bad switching her around so much. I catch myself wondering if that gets confusing for a doll, or if they just roll with it. I suppose it's really a question of whether the owner of the doll finds it confusing, but you know what I mean.

Anyway. I'm sort of excited to have an OGYAFEland doll to play with, so I think that will be the plan. She's going to have pretty much the same personality, too, so that will make things pretty simple.


*OGYAFE = Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic.

Hey guys! Got a worldbuilding question for you.

So while the Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic languishes in despair of finding an agent, it's mostly ready to be looked at--probably it could use an editor to point out things I've missed, but I've got it pretty polished. But I can't resist making a few tweaks while I wait, and there's one tweak that isn't so important for the actual book, but for the world.

The OGYAFE is portal fiction because, hey, I like portal fiction, but I'm trying to make OGYAFEland as independent as possible anyway. I want there to be a balance between their world and ours--some things are better there, others here. This extends to people, cultures, technology, and ecology and geography and so forth.

But one thing that's pretty darn fun about OGYAFEland is the dragons.

I really like the idea of dragons as a biological clade--not just a species. Not even a few varieties of intelligent creatures, like in the Dragonology books or similar pretend field guides. I'm thinking of them as but a whole dang taxonomic group distinct from reptiles, birds, and mammals--and with as much diversity, because dragons have been speciating just like all the other animals have. In OGYAFEland, dragons (with the exception of one notable species) are as commonplace, and as varied, as birds.

Which got me wondering.

Should OGYAFEland even HAVE birds?

I admit to going back and forth on this. It wouldn't take much to change it around in the story--a couple of place names would have to be changed, and one character's feathers (don't ask) would have to be specified to look like "dragonfeathers" (a modified scale that many dragon species have evolved--which is more or less how feathers work anyway), but that shouldn't be hard. And I like that our world would then have a biological clade completely foreign to OGYAFEland. Plus, while I'm not going for a one-to-one correlation between bird and dragon species, it's really fun to have them fill similar ecological niches that have the displaced characters from our world trying to make analogies and referring to "chickendragons" and "hawkdragons" and "hummingdragons" and "penguindragons."

But ... to be honest, I'd sort of miss birds.

I guess the whole idea is to have something be better in our world. But I wanted some other input. What do you guys think?

I mentioned before that I wanted the OGYAFE to have Untrue Religions, because as far as I'm concerned that's how religions are in our world work. What I didn't expect was how much fun I'd be having.

Here in The Real World, I have to admit that carrying on about nonsense like ghosts and spirits and psychics and astral planing and horoscoping drives me NUTS. "You know that's bullshit, right?" is the only thing I can think of to say. And I don't actually say it; it's just all I can think of to say, so instead I just stay quiet and then later go slam my head against something.

And yet here in this world I have characters who are totally, and rather hilariously casually, invested in astrology and animism and superstition,* which has about as much basis in the reality of their world as it does in ours, and I am having a BLAST. The setting is sorta-kinda mid-20th-Century in terms of technology, so you get people who are earnestly arguing about what a site's spirits will think of a new skyscraper being built on their turf, or including demon appeasement intheir car maintenance routines, or considering the most auspicious position of the stars when closing business deals, or--well, the entire tangential story I've got loudly playing in my head right now is based on a controversy about modernizing and exploiting spirits--and I love it. Here in our hospital a chapel strikes me as silly; in their world I LOVE that there's a little spirit shrine in every room.

... Then again, I do think they are being silly in the other world; I am just more tolerant of it. And I am fascinated with silly beliefs in both worlds, but around here it's more train-wreckish. Maybe I don't mind so much in OGYAFEland because they're fictional, and thus no real people get hurt when they believe in nonsense. Or maybe I should take a lesson from my own response to my characters, and try to treat real people who carry on about bullshit with more enjoyment than annoyance.

But it is still bullshit.


*But not, they will stress, in gods. That would be ridiculous.

So I posted that last entry with the intent of adding a synopsis later that would actually catch people's interest,* but then life and other such inconveniences got in the way. And for some reason a bunch of you want to read it even without the synopsis. Y'all are weird.

Anyway, at this point mostly I'm looking for people to read it and say "Yes, sir, that's a book, all right!" and maybe point out whether any parts are wildly incoherent or fantastically stupid or whatever. And to provide myself with the illusion of control I figured I'd start with a smallish number of readers, selected through the precise and complex process of rolling some dice. So after I give it one last proof,** a few of you ought to start getting notes from me.

And yes, as I figure things out I'll probably want more readers. So keep an eye out.

For now, though, don't worry. You haven't really missed any car chases. Those'll be in Book 2.


*Magic mountain lions! Sarcastic old sprites who live in lighthouses! Dragons that taste of chicken! Librarians! World-saving ghosts! Shoes that can turn your world into Super Mario Galaxy! Car chases!

**I write by hand and then type everything up on a capricious keyboard. I go through and try to proof things, but after a while I stop being able to see the typos, and have to put the thing aside for a few days before I can spot them again. I am sure I've missed a few …

Oh, terrific. With geniuses like these, it’s going to be a real party to try to sell the OGYAFE. The only white characters in there are a librarian and a cat.

I feel it is important to point and laugh at bigoted dumbasses. When people behave ridiculously, I think they deserve to be ridiculed. Dumb bastardry has to be shown for what it is.

I admit, I have not even bothered to read The Hunger Games. I just don’t DO dystopia. I like to read about worlds that may not be perfect, but which are at least places I wouldn’t mind hanging out in. But I am glad it’s so well-liked, because from what I understand, it’s a pretty good YA franchise.* So hey, good job, Hunger Games! And don’t let the racists get you down.


*Although even bad franchises may spawn awesome things. You can’t tell me the world isn’t a better place now that Growing Up Cullen exists.

So I’ve got some core vocabulary for the proto-language I’ve been working on—I’ve been referring to it as Protogyafe, since it’s the ancestor of the language they’ll speak in my Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic. Now I’m moving on to the sound changes to make daughter languages, something I’ve never done with much seriousness before.

Although I’m not sure how “serious” this is, what with the way one of the daughter languages is based on the sounds of stereotpyical caveman talk, which was inspired by the one of the latest episodes of my latest cartoon obsession.* Now I want to try to make languages that sound like other stereotypical fake dialects—maybe go revisit my old Galactic Common language, which was supposed to sound comic-book alien while still being viable. Or maybe I can run Cavetalk through a few more sound changes and make Tazmanian Devil-ese, because that would be hilarious.

Of course, I am doing this as a naming language for the book I’m ALMOST DONE WITH OMG working on. But as always, I’m also getting wonderfully sidetracked. I love writing.


*Yes, “Tri-Stone Area” from, you guessed it, Phineas and Ferb. Oh, god, I could not stop laughing. But one of the things that amused me the most was not really cartoony: the cave talk was more or less thought-out. Yeah, it was a cipher of Caveman English, but it was a pretty consistent one—they actually did seem to have a little glossary of word substitutions, and given how many lines in that show are running gags, it wasn't hard to figure it out.

Hey, guys, another interview meme! Meant to jump start me back into life and writing and stuff!

You can comment and I might give you questions, although given my track record with that it may be a while or never before I actually do. Uh, sorry about that. I am trying …

Anyway! beccastareyes asked me some questions!

1. I don't remember if I've asked this before, but why did you go to Africa?

Short answer: because I was studying Swahili.

Longer answer: lots of reasons. I have always been an anthropology nerd, and so I really wanted to take a look at any place that was not familiar to me—I wanted to get some perspective on human culture, mine and others’. Plus, it would be an adventure.*

I could really have gone anywhere, but I had picked up a book on Kiswahili a few years earlier, and in doing so I learned a bit about the history and culture of the Swahili people. It was fascinating enough that it seemed like a cool place to start.

2. Favorite conlang or conculture project. Or just rambling on whether you can separate the two, or if conlanging is an aspect of conculturing.

I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED. HOW LONG DO YOU HAVE?

I’ve got a few right now:

( Unicorn Riders! )

( Big Fluffy Aliens! )

Third, I’m working on the OGYAFEland cultures. On the one side you get the humans of the kingdom Polara, whose society I hope is believable and unique from any cultures here in our world (not to mention the annals of fantasy). On the other you get the sprites, who are shamelessly utopian, because god dammit I don’t care if it’s not fashionable, I am the writer and I get to make a world where things went right.

Highlights from the human side of things are a sense of style like the bastard child of French Renaissance and Streamline Moderne, verb phrase place names (“Roses Climbing”; “Sparks Fall on the Mountain”; “Lion’s Roar Drowning”), a casual animistic belief system with cultural heroes but no gods, a lunisolar calendar, interjections like “Skulls and Shrooms!”, a complex gender spectrum based on beliefs about blood, magic as a high-education trade like medicine or law, and patchwork pants. On the sprite side, you get energy efficience, love of the arts, large cities twined with woodland and meadows, no school, and, naturally, socialism.

3. Is Tamora Pierce worth reading as a grown-up? I read three of the Alanna books as a kid, but it was near the end of my 'sneak into the kids books to grab things' phase. Now, of course, there's Amazon and used books.

YES. (As mentioned on her blog, neither of us is ashamed of the kids’ section—I never was, and she got over it. I truly believe that some of the best writing can be found in juvie and YA sections.)

4. What's the best thing about living in Utah? Given I've spent all of a couple of hours there, enlighten me.

That you can forget about your laundry and leave it in the washing machine overnight and it won’t grow mildew.

Okay, real answer: How orange it is! In Salt Lake you theoretically get all four seasons, which means a lovely bit of variety, but I especially like the aspens and scrubby oaks turning colors in the fall. They make a lovely swishy noise when the wind blows through them, and the air smells GREAT, all crisp and dry and a little bit like leaf and dirt.

Dig:


And in the south, there’s the orange of red rock, in strange and wonderful buttes and arches and basins. It also smells great there—a soporific combination of sun, iron, and sage.


You can almost smell it now!



Oh, and there were dinosaurs.

5. Your LJ says to ask you about your mermaid collection, so a fellow ocean fan is asking.

I’ll be damned! Somebody found the “Things to ask me about” bit!

I’ve always loved mermaids, ever since I was three years old and saw Disney’s The Little Mermaid and loved it.*** I like the variations on merfolk in history and the aesthetic, and—you should know me by now—working out how they could actually live underwater has always appealed to me. (I have worked out several “species” of merfolk; one of my favorites is a fully mammalian species that stole quite a bit from the adaptations of dolphins. Merfolk with blubber!)

So I sort of wound up collecting various mermaid figures and pictures, just because I thought they were interesting. (It started, once again, with Disney: the first mermaid in my collection was a Happy Meal toy Ariel I got soon after seeing the movie.) I’ve built up a sizeable pile of mermaids!



Sadly, this is the best picture I have of them right now; they’re in storage pending my getting a house with some room to display them. But once it comes out, I’ll even have a few more to add to the mix, including that one crazy clay sculpture of a skelemermaid I got for Xmas one year. So yeah, it’s still growing!


*There was also a little bit of defiance there; people all worried about the whole chronic-depression-dependent-on-pills thing, and I wanted to prove that it wouldn’t hold me back.

**I have books like these for many concultures. I call them my hitchhiker’s guides.

***Not so much love for the original Hans Christian Andersen story. Have you read it? It is LOONY. It’s some kind of codependent psychodrama and has a whole lot of weird theology about whether or not mermaids can acquire an immortal soul. Kind of like an early version of Teen Supernatural Romance.

Hey, nerds!

Help me out here, because Google and the library catalog both look at me like I’m some sort of nut when I say I want resources on creating maps for made-up worlds. I am a nut, of course, but dammit, I know there are answers out there for nuts like me, because I have countless fantasy books with detailed maps in their fronts and also a lot of RP-ing friends who spend their weekends barging around such worlds. The resources must exist, because not every nerd is willing to reinvent the wheel.*

But god help me if I can find any of these resources, so I turn to you, you nerds. Where can I find good books/sites/software on creating maps of worlds that are not Earth?

I’m counting on you, internet! Don’t let me down!


*Yes, a lot of us are, but dammit this is the FUTURE and you would think we of all people would be willing to share pointless knowledge like this on the internet.

agenttrojie had a meme going a few days ago: What Fictional Character Are You Most Like? I like open-ended memes!

My answer? No doubt. I am Bilbo Baggins.

Evidence:

-We are both mostly content to be invisible
-But we periodically get wanderlust,
-And go off on crazy adventures.
-On these adventures, we are resourceful when we have to be.
-Although we complain about it a lot.
-Both of us have a certain natural immunity to things that others can get addicted to—the Ring for him, alcohol and such for me.
-Not that we’re entirely immune! And we are not exactly virtuous. We do not always do the right thing, but we try.
-We both love soup food.
-We both like to write.
-Both of us are short, round, curly brunet(te), and hairy

Pretty much covers it, no?

A timely question, because I’m feeling rather hobbity lately—watchin’ Lord of the Rings again, trying to find a good fantasy saga. (Anybody got a recommendation?)

Both of these are a result of something that happens at times: my own little headhobbits are getting noisy as part of my brain’s decision to have ALL THE GOOD IDEAS EVER. When this happens, it’s impossible to get them to line up in an orderly fashion. All I can do is alternate between furious scribbling in flurries of ink and paper and pixels, and wandering around in a daze while the hobbitses, wizards, pirates, shapeshifters, sprites, final bosses,* dragons, arhods,** snowy-riders, licensers, and trolls all carry on madly in my head. This is making me even more absentminded than usual. It is hard to hear you jerks over all these jerks.

Being creative is hard, yo.

But damn, it’s also fun. This is one of the best parts of being a writer. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bit more typing up I can get done before I go to sleep.


*I have awesome final bosses going. Y’all will just about fall down when you get to the OGYAFE’s final boss.

**I’m mostly in a fantasy mood in this manic phase, but my big fluffy aliens get to join the fun because they’re big damn fans of CAPSLOCK FANTASY SAGAS in their own right. Someday I’ll write one of their sagas, but for now they do seem to be liking the Lord of the Rings.

The problem with insomnia is, of course, the lack of sleep and the resulting bleak outlook on life and of course the health issues, but hey: sometimes while tossing and turning and hating the universe, you have REALLY AWESOME IDEAS.

Take me, for example. I just figured out how to finish the OGYAFE.

Granted, that's four books away, but goddamn I had to jump up and write down the epic climax at six in the morning. It's not like I was sleeping, anyway.

I am working on the OGYAFE because this past couple of weeks I've been so sick of Doctors! I can't even look at it. But it has just occurred to me that I'm one episode of editing away from having a REAL MANUSCRIPT OMG, and I think I'm dragging my feet because once I get that done I'll have to actually submit it for publishing, and that is scary. I just have to remember two things about it:

1. Dude, wait, that was the whole idea, and
2. IF I FINISH EDITING IT I CAN GET RID OF IT FOR A WHILE AND WORK ON THE OGYAFE GUILT-FREE.

So! Back to the writings--just as soon as I get some sleep. Goddamn, sleep. What a glorious idea ...