Fantasist's Scroll

It is by Caffeina alone
that I set my mind in motion.
By the Beans of Java,
my thoughts aquire speed.
The hands aquire the shakes,
the shakes become a warning.
It is by Caffeina alone
that I set my mind in motion…
– Javacrucian chant, attributed to Isaac Bonewits

“Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be.” -George R.R. Martin

Names have always fascinated me. The name of a foreign country can inspire awe or curiosity. A person’s name can determine how they are percieved by the world. Or, if they’re a character in a book, how the reader reacts to the person. Names can provide inspiration or inspire fear. The mere mention of Dracula or Frankenstein conjures an immediate image for most people.
Often times, when I need a bit of inspiration, I look to names. The name of a character might inspire a story. The title of a visting dignitary or scholar might suggest a plot or setting. But, where to come up with such ideas? Well, the encylopedia is a good place to start. I remember as a kid all the articles there that fueled so many flights of fancy and journeys of the imagination. But, that limits us to the real world. What if we’d like to go way beyond the known or ordinary? Well, there’s always fantasy literature and science-fiction encylopedias. But, for something newer and more original, try The Page of Name Generators. Here you’ll find a name generator for every occasion. And, it’s also the inspiration for my own Story Generator. Enjoy it! And let your creative mind run wild!!

Does it really exist?

It seems like the wrong category to put with this title, but it really fits. I have several half-baked ideas for stories, but they’re all set in fictional worlds filled with people and places that don’t have names. Why don’t they have names? Because, I want to make their names new, original and not quite like anything that already exists. I want to, at least partially, dislocate the reader from their usual preconceptions about fantasy literature. So, I invented a continent that is in the Southern hemisphere. That inverts the standard Euro-centric notions of hot and cold, not to mention civilization and barbarism. But, that’s still not enough. So, names…
I want names that sound like they come from an asiatic land of some kind, but not one that can be easily identified. Not quite China or Japan, or even India, but close to all three. Now, I could just use names from each of those cultures and sort of mash them around to get something “new”, but that seems too much like cheating. The alternative I came up with, though, is so much harder: a set of invented languages. In fact, a whole set of interrelated and interdependant created languages. Yes, yes, “just like Tolkien”. Except, of course, I’m not a linguist and I don’t know Welsh.
And, therein lies the rub, I am, in fact, not a linguist. I don’t know hardly a thing about linguistic rules for sound change or grammar or morphology or phonology. Frankly, the whole process is so intimidating that I’m just about at a loss for where to begin. I tried using several different language creation programs, but they never quite produced good enough results. Close, but not quite as good as a natural language. I tried using software that just created words from source data of various kinds, but that fell short, too. The words came out okay, but how should I use them? How should they be related? Eventually, I stopped trying to make a whole language and focused only on enough words to make some meaningfull names. But, even that seemed to get bogged down in the manipulation of the software and data, ultimately producing no results.
So, in a way, I’ve come full circle. I’m back to simply not knowing how to start. I’ve been reading the various e-mail lists for ConLanging and come to the conclusion that a hybrid method might suit me. Generating series of words to choose from, but determining my own relationship between them, if any. And, I can use a spreadsheet to track them all. Or, perhaps, a simple database. But, of course, that puts the work back on me.
Now, I have to figure out how to be creative and original. I have to hear the language and the names people call each other in my head. I have to not only see the destinations that my characters are headed toward, but what they’re named on a map.
Can it be done? Yes. Can I do it? Maybe.

What is it about dragons?

Last week, I watched a really mediocre movie on the SciFi channel called “Dragon Fighter“. It wasn’t that the acting was bad because I expected that. I mean, an action adventure movie about dragons being brought back to life? And the dragons breathe fire? No, I wasn’t expecting Lawrence Olivier. But, I was hoping that the dragons would be good. Alas, they weren’t.

First of all, the dragons were huge. I mean, these things were the size of a Lear jet. Now, that is a really, really big predator. Which means, it needs a lot to eat, right? But, they never really showed how this thing ate. It just kept snacking on scrawny, little humans. Not once did these things go for a nice, juicy cow or even a goat. Nope, ate exculsively humans that were shooting at it, in fact. Go figure. If my lunch were shooting at me, I’d start a new diet!
Then, there was the fact that it breathed actual fire. Okay, that’s not so bad, but they never explained it at all! They never even tried!! It was just “Oh, it’s a dragon, so it breathes fire. Everyone knows that!” What a joke! At least Reign of Fire did better than that!
And, also, there was the way the darn thing looked. The effects were just horrid. It didn’t even look like a good rubber suit, much less like a lizard. At least Godzilla has some kitsch value! I could have forgiven all the rest if the effects had been any good.

Why is it, I wondered while watching this lackluster film, that dragons are always so huge? I mean, think about it, a 425 pound lion is going to make a mess of the average person. Imagine a 500 pound lizard with acidic, poisonous drool that can fly. Even if it was land-bound, that could tear apart a pre-gunpowder civilization. The komodo dragon is a nasty enough beast, and it’s real!
This is what I was talking about in my entries about building a more realistic monster. These dragons weren’t even close to real and, frankly, I’m much more frightened by the real komodo dragons!

So, now I guess I’ll have to write a story about more realistic dragons. But, I can’t duplicate what Anne Mcaffrey did with Pern. I’m not sure how I’l do that, yet, but at least I know what not to do now!
Well, off to work!

Background ideas and a contest.

First, the contest. It’s the Clarke-Bradbury Science Fiction Competition. This is a “hard science” competition in the spirit of Clarke and his invention of the communications satellite years before such a thing was actually created and used. These folks are looking for innovative technology and ways that technology might change the world. Not quite normal fantasist fare, but hey, a writing contest is a writing contest.

Now, to the stuff that intrigues me more. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Pepys was a prolific journaler who not only recorded his own interesting life, but also discussed events of the day. This website, http://www.pepysdiary.com/, presents his nine-volume journal in a contemporary format; a blog. This is great inspiration for my own experimental fiction idea of creating a journal of a fiction character via a blog. Way, way, cool.
The creator of the blog, Phil Gyford, was interviewed by the BBC in an article titled “Why I turned the Pepys Diary into a Web Log“. It’s a fairly interesting read and a great introduction to who Pepys was and why he matters. Way, cool, again.
It’s nice to know that great minds think alike, but it does kind of stink to realize that my idea isn’t quite as original as I had thought.

Build a better monster and the victims will beat a path to your door.

Well, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but you get the idea. There was a show on Animal Planet of all things that really got me thinking about this. It was called The Future is Wild and it was all about ways that present day animals may evolve in the future. Some of them were pretty far out, but still, they were pretty reasonable. The animal world is full of surprises and quirks, so some really odd things are not only possible but already happening! Of course, they were talking about “real” animals and not fantasy creatures, but, still I think it’s important to pay pretty close attention to the “little details” when I’m building a fantasy monster. Whether it’s a dragon, an ogre, or a demon, they still have to be believable, consistent, and reasonable, after a fashion.
In short, they have to follow the Rules, whatever those rules may be. For something that’s more or less natural like an ogre or a dragon, they have to follow certain so-called natural laws. They eat, which means they hunt and/or gather. Because they eat, they excrete as well. They sleep and mate, which means they need a lair of somekind. Sure, dragons may violate what some of us preceive to be laws of aerodynamics if they fly, though there is some debate on that, but otherwise, they need to act like really big animals.
For instance, since they’re big, they need to eat a lot. That means that they’ll be carnivores. They’ll have to get the most “bang for their buck”, as it were, so they’ll eat meat. Meat provides the most calories for volume. And I figure it takes a lot of calories to fly and breathe fire. But, they may also be omnivores. After all, something that needs that many calories can’t be too picky about what it eats! It just has to get fuel any which way it can. So, its eating habits will determine its hunting habits. Or, even if it has hunting habits at all.
But, what an animal eats can also determine what their mating habits are like. How’s that, you wonder? Well, if an animal needs a lot of food, it needs a pretty big territory and not much competition. So, members of its own species tend to get run off as unwanted competition, including members of the opposite sex. Unless, of course, it hunts in packs. Let’s say our dragon is a loner. What does that mean to its reproductive cycle?
Well, I’d imagine that the poor female gets to lay eggs and possibly tend them. Sort of like what Bakker suspects many species of dinosaur did. But, they could be more like aligators, who lay their eggs and then abandon them to fend for themselves. Aligators mate once a year, according to Jeff Corwin of Animal Planet, and then spend the rest of the year in competition for food. Pretty brutal, but that’s perfect for our monster. The more brutal the monster, the more heroic the dragonslayer.
From those little suppositions and speculations, we can really flesh out a pretty good and believable dragon. But, it all comes from following Mother Nature’s rules. And, of course, doing our homework. Gotta’ know what those rules are if we’re going to follow them. So, stop watching the latest Evil Dead movie and flip over to National Geographic or Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel and see what’s happening in the animal world. You’ll thank yourself in the long run.

Keep a lookout for a follow up article on creating more “realistic” demons.
Until then, keep writing!

What is MICE? Well, it’s an idea that Orson Scott Card talked about in his book How To Write Science-Fiction and Fantasy. So, what does it stand for? MICE stands for Milieu, Idea, Character or Event, and it describes the four basic kinds of stories that occur in speculative fiction. Let’s break them down!

Milieu stories are about the world the author has created. They’re all about exploration and seeing wonders. What matters is the journey through the world of wonders. Card gave the examples of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Clavell’s Shogun. What matters in both cases are what the main character sees and experiences and, to a certain degree, how that changes them. Remember, this story’s main focus is the world in which the characters exist. Other things are secondary to exploring that world. If you’ve built a really detailed world from the ground up and want to show it off, this may be the kind of story you want to tell.

Idea stories focus on a particular concept or question that the main character wants to solve. Notice, it’s about the main character, not the author. As an author you may have an idea that you want to get across or explore, but if you use the Idea story to do that, you have to make your characters care about the idea. A prime example would be the murder-mystery, where the main character is a detective trying to solve the question of “Who killed Mr. Body?” Characterization is not as important in Idea stories as it is in other kinds of stories. What matters is the Idea, or puzzle, to be solved. If you’re writing this kind of story, you might read up on mystery writing, as well as fantasy and sci-fi.

Character stories are about just that: the characters. But, more than that, character stories are also about the changes the characters go through during the course of the story. Putting an interesting character under some kind of pressure and watching them react can be both challenging and rewarding. These kinds of stories can generate some really touching tales. Coming of age stories fall under this category, but so do mid-life crisis stories. Think Death of a Salesman or, for a fantasy example, Lawrence Watt-Evans’ With a Single Spell. Remember, the Character story is about character. By that I mean that the story is driven by the characters and how they grow and change. A character must change in some way during the course of a Character story.

Event stories are about some great and earth-shattering event. They quite often include Character stories or Idea stories as sub-plots. These stories are about a big event of some kind that changes the world. The story, then, is about what happens leading up to the event, or how the world changes after the event. A science-fiction example is the “Wild Cards” series of shared world books edited by George R.R. Martin. In those stories, the Event was the release of a micro-organism that changes a significant number of the population into super-powered beings. Another example might be The Day After, which is a movie about what might happen after World War III.

So, in a nutshell, any good speculative fiction story should fit into one of these categories. If you’re writing a story and can’t figure out where it fits, you might need to re-think how you’re telling the story.

Until next time, keep writing!

Okay, so I’ve got writer’s block.

It’s not a crime. It’s more like a disease. An insidious, creeping disease that steals my creativity and locks me away in a horrible nightmare of sad, soggy prose. My problem isn’t that I don’t have ideas galore for stories. And, it’s not that they aren’t original and interesting. The problem is, when I go to put them on paper, they sound different than they did in my head. There’s something missing. I have no idea what it could be, because I write basically like I speak. It flows naturally and easily, but when I read it, it sounds flat and dull in my inner ear.
Maybe it’s because I’m trying to write fantasy stories in a world that I haven’t fleshed out enough. Maybe I’m not seeing my characters and world clearly enough. I’ll be damned if I know. If I did, I would be writing fiction right now, not this blog. In fact, I started making entries here in the hopes that it would get my creative muse flowing and let me get back to the stories. So far, that hasn’t really worked out, but hope springs eternal.

While trying to smash my writer’s block, I’ve been reading. I’ve been reading history. Mainly Chinese and Japanese history. Those “Daily Life In…” kind of books. It’s really interesting for me, a Westerner, to see how advanced those ancient civilizations really were. Ancient China was far, far more advanced in many ways than Europe during the same time period. Sometimes, I sit and try to puzzle out just what happened and how we, the West, got the technological edge over Asia. It’s a strange, convoluted thing. And, ripe with story ideas.
The other subject I’ve been reading is writing. That is, I’ve just finished re-reading Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science-Fiction and Fantasy. In fact, I’ll probably do an entry tomorrow about the MICE “rule”. It’s fairly usefull for speculative fiction authors. It helps keep persepctive.
And, finally, I’ve been reading fiction in between the non-fiction. Mainly, I’ve been re-reading Lawrence Watt-Evan’s Ethshar series. They’re really nice books that deal with normal, everyday problems in a fantastic setting, but they don’t get too nasty. I mean, they’re realistic, but I wouldn’t hesitate to reccomend them to my 10-year-old daughter.

So, until the next time, keep writing!