Fantasist's Scroll

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Ah, if only Lovecraft could live on in that eternal life beyond death. But, alas, he cannot and we have only his tremendous body of work to keep us company. Never the less, knowing that it is his birthday, I feel compeled to mention it.

Also, the Vancouver Gaming Guild is celebrating H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday with a convention! So, if you’re in the area, why not check it out?

There are many ways to test one’s constructed language.
There’s the infamous Babel Text, as suggested by Jeffery Henning. There are other religious texts that might be used, like the Lord’s Prayer or the Sermon on the Mount. There’s translating a “folk tale”. I’ve even seen the suggestion put forward to translate dinner menus, street signs, and adverstisments. I, myself, have suggested that, perhaps, creating a phrasebook might be the thing. All of these methods should highlight any flaw or under-developed section of your conlang. When translating, we find holes and errors and things we simply haven’t thought through yet. But, another “test” occurred to me yesterday…
I was talking to my dog in German, telling her “Du bist ein gutes Hund! Du bist ein hübsch Hund!” and watched her get all happy and wiggly. Then, it hit me. “Can you talk to your dog in your conlang?” Of course, it works for any pet, but you get the idea. So, from now on, if I work on a constructed language, I must be able to talk to my dog in it, or it’s just not good enough.
Harumph!

Today!
If you don’t know who J. K. Rowling is, well, you certainly haven’t been paying attention. She is, in short, the creator of Harry Potter and crew. As a divorced, single mother struggling to scrape by on public assistance, aka “the Dole”, in the UK, she wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone which she sold astonishingly quickly for a first time author. The book went on to become a wonderfully popular hit with adults and kids alike. At the same time she wrote the first book, she plotted out the rest of the series and started drafts of those books as well. Each year after that first release a new book in the series has come out, for a total of six, so far, with the seventh on it’s way.
I know many people who dislike the books for their simplicity or how they handle magic or any of a number of reasons, but, as far as I’m concerned, anything that can get so many kids reading books again, instead of suckling at the glass teat, is okay with me.
And, yes, I just recently finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but you can find a review at my other site, and I eagerly await the seventh, and last, installation of this series.
I was resistant at first, but once I started reading these books, I was hooked. I hope Ms. Rowling will keep writing after the series is done. She’s a good one, even if she does write kids books!
Happy Birthday, Ms. Rowling!

This is cute!
While looking for water gardening resources, or an old t-shirt that I can only half remember, or something, I found a fifth grade class’ creative writing assignment called The Island Project. The project was for the kids to imagine themselves stranded on an island and to describe the island on which they found themselves. Many of them also drew maps of their island. The project is from 1995-96, but, somehow, is still up on the web. It’s fun, actually.
And, not a bad way to get some creative juices flowing for a story setting, either. I have often gotten ideas for things to write by drawing maps first. So do Orson Scott Card and Holly Lisle, both successful writers, so it’s not just a fluke or a gimmick. It’s also a bit of fun.
So, if you’re stuck for something to write about, why not draw a map? Or, heck, if you’re not too full of yourself, why not just do the same exercise that the fifth-graders did? You might just be surprised at the results!

Today is Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s birthday.
He was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. Hemingway snuck off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. Just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.
After his parents got tired of him hanging around, he started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, including Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in cafés, but he wrote every day.

His first collection of short stories, In Our Time, came out in 1925 and the following year, his first big success, Sun Also Rises. Three years later, Farewell To Arms came out. By the 1930s, he was one of the best-known writers alive. He developed cancer and, in true “Hemingway hero” fashion, killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. But, by then, he was one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

Here’s a little inspiration from The Writer’s Almanac.
Of course, most of us have heard about the release of the newest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the fact that J. K. Rowling made a huge amount of money the first day the book started selling. But, today that, in 1954, the first part of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy came out, The Fellowship of the Ring. It was the sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which came out in 1937. Tolkien had written The Hobbit for his own amusement and didn’t expect it to sell well. But, the Hobbit sold well, partly because C.S. Lewis gave it a big review when it came out. And so Tolkien’s publisher asked for a sequel.
Tolkien spent the next 17 years working on The Lord of the Rings. And, since he was a professor at Oxford, he had to write in his spare time, usually at night. His book became increasingly more complicated and, with the outbreak of World War II, he began to write in parallels to current events of the day. Middle-Earth’s enemies were in the East, just like England’s enemies during the War. Eventually, he complicated charts to keep track of everything and his son, Christopher, drew a very detailed map of Middle-Earth.
Finally, in the fall of 1949, he finished his manuscript. He typed the final copy himself sitting on a bed in his attic, typewriter on his lap, tapping it out with two fingers. It turned out to be more than a half million words long, and the publisher agreed to bring it out in three volumes. The first came out on this day in 1954. The publisher printed just 3,500 copies, but it turned out to be incredibly popular. It went into a second printing in just six weeks. Today more than 30 million copies have been sold around the world.
And, according to legend, it all started with stories to flesh out a people and history for some of the languages that Tolkien was developing. Rowling may be the latest “hot ticket”, but Tolkien’s been around for a long enough to withstand the test of time. She may or may not, only time will tell, but, either way, I thought the parallel success stories were interesting. I hope it provides inspiration to young writers out there debating about making the attempt. Not everyone succeeds the way these two authors did, but, if you work hard enough and dedicate yourself enough to your craft, you might just be next.

Today is the birthday of Robert Heinlein.
Mr. Heinlein was born on this day in 1907 in Butler, Missouri. He wrote numerous novels and collections of short stories. He is best known for his novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, about a boy born during the first manned mission to Mars. It’s filled with values from the 60’s, including free love, new religions and “different” views on marriage. It was quite ground-breaking in its day and can still be startling to our modern, but still quite Puritanical, society. Heinlein called his books “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction” because he liked to emphasized the idea that he was writing about things that could, possibly, come true. He tried to stick to only the scientific laws that we knew and their reasonable extrapolation. I think that’s why his work stands the test of time.
So, go read some of his work today, in celebration of his birthday.

Well, I finished Airtight Willie & Me this weekend. It was actually a fairly good book. Though, as I got further into it, I was a little surprised to see that it was actually a series of not really related stories. The book takes its title from the first story, which is about a scam artist getting out of jail and being scammed himself by his partner. The O. Henry-like irony is actually quite sophisticated. Well, considering the source. Seriously, it’s a little strange considering my normal reading, but that’s why I chose that book. It’s a look at life from a perspective that I will, hopefully, never see or truly understand. It’s different. It’s a change. And, obviously, based on the length of time it took me to read it, not a very long book, either. I got interested in this book thanks to IceT and an interview he did on MTV. He talked about Iceberg Slim, the author, and how reading his books had inspired Ice to rap. It sounded cool, so… Anyway, it was an interesting change of pace and one I can reccomend, as long as you keep in mind what it is you’re reading.
Currently, I’m reading Plot for about the third or fourth time. I go back to this book, and others in this series, when I have trouble writing. So, I read it every few years when I try to start writing again after a long hiatus. That’s where I’m at right now, ergo, I’m re-reading selected writing books to try and get jump-started back into a writer’s mind. We’ll see how we do in the coming months. Writing books are actually one of the few things that I’m likely to read more than once. I have so much to read that it’s very unusual for me to go back and re-read anything at all these days.
After that, though, I’ll be reading Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. The description interests me because a fictional language is at the heart of the story and I’ve long had a fascination for invented languages. The story centers on a man who has written an “epic poem” about a kingdom that doesn’t seem to exist, but that he’s created in such detail that he has a language for it. It’s a little strange, and not at all how I think of Nabokov, so, I’m looking forward to it.