Fantasist's Scroll

I’m writing this in response to the person who e-mailed me asking for instructions on how to use my Conlang Word Maker.

Now, without any intended smarmy-ness, I really thought it was self-explanatory, but, then again, when I wrote this webapp, I was steeped in conlanging. Also, it was based on another program called LangMaker by Jeffrey Henning, which a lot of people had been using at the time. And, duh, I wrote the app, so of course it seemed obvious to me how to use it!
So, in an effort to make things clearer, here are some more detailed instructions.

First, let’s define a few terms. Please note that these may not be how things are defined in a good, clear, linguistics sense, but, rather, how I thought of them when I wrote this program. Also, keep in mind that this was all inspired by an article in the now defunct Dragon Magazine about how to create a simple language for your Advanced Dungeons and Dragons campaign by Clyde Heaton titled Even Orcish Is Logical. Yes, that means it’s far older than even the third edition. And, yes, many conlangers my age deride this article as being linguistically inaccurate. But, I say “Phooey” on all that. That article is what got me interested in conlanging, so it did its job.
Now, keeping that in mind, go look at the page, then come back. (If you click the link, it will open the Conlang Word Maker in a new tab or window.) Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Okay, so the first column you saw was labeled Word Patterns/Formulas. Underneath that was a series of apparently nonsensical strings of capital letters, like “CV” and “CVCC” and so on. The next two columns are labeled Vowels (V) and Consonants(C) respectively. Those are what will fill in on the formulas, replacing the “V” with a randomly chosen letter from the Vowels(V) column and replacing the “C” with a randomly chosen letter from the Consonants(C) column. So far, so good, right? At this point, you actually have just about enough to generate the words for you language. All you need to do is choose which vowels and consonants you want to use in making your words and how you want those to be arranged. In fact, if you want to keep it simple, just use those three columns and leave everything else blank. Then, when you hit the generate word list button, the app will use those simple settings to generate a list of words.
If you look closely at the default data in those columns, though, you’ll see that you can also use multiple letters, like “sh” and “ch”, for consonants. You can do the same, like I’ve done with the “ee” and “oo” for vowels.
Please note that it’s important to keep the formulas in upper case and the letters you want to use in your language in lower case.

Now, you’ll notice several other columns, one of which I’ve also filled in. The column labeled “T” variable has both more complicated syllables, made up of consonants and vowels, and some formulas. In the default formulas that I started the web app with, you’ll notice that several of the formulas include a variable T, as in TVC and CVT and so on. In those formulas, the T variable is replaced by the syllables listed in the “T” variable column.
Okay, so far, so good, right? Well, the columns starting with T all have what I think of as an “advanced” feature. If you put a simple formula into them, it will treat the results of that formula as a syllable. So, you’ll notice that I have several CV and VC formulas in there. When the web app hits those, it will treat them first as standard formulas, making a word or syllable from the consonants (C) and vowels(V) randomly, before using it like a “T” variable in the formulas found in the first column, labeled Word Patterns/Formulas. It sounds more complicated than it is.
Again, though, this only works for columns starting T and beyond.

So, the trick is to choose letters and syllables that combine in ways which sound like you want your language to sound. Also, you’ll need to create all the other rules for your language, like sentence structure and verb conjugation and the like. So, I guess I lied a little in the title since you do have to do most of the heavy lifting yourself.
In any case, I hopefully have answered the e-mailed question. The real thing to do though is just play with it and see what happens!

By all rights, this blog should be dead.

Frankly, the entire website is so old and out of date and willfully not maintained that I’m surprised there’s any traffic to it.  But, there is.  And with any large volume of people, there are always those who take advantage and push free resources beyond their intended use.  Well, that’s just what happened here.

One of the many things I originally did with this site was dabble in conlangs, or CONstructed LANGuages.  Toward that end, I created or modified several Perl scripts to help me generate words that sounded authentic and consistent according to some linguistic rules.  When I was doing this, very few people were yet.  Now, there are many, many more people who offer language generation programs and scripts, but I think I was one of the first people to have free, interactive web pages that would let the neophyte conlanger generate or manipulate their language.  In fact, I’m not sure how many there are even today.  Hopefully, there are a lot more who can take the burden of people ramming quite literally gigabytes worth of data through their free resource.  I hope they have their own server, though, since when people did that here, it crashed the server I was on.  Yeah, that’s right, people ran so much data through my little programs that it crashed the server.  In spite of me asking them not to do it, then building in some fairly significant limitations on how much data could be sent to the script at once, a small percentage of the users, who I have come to think of as abusers, still managed to crash my webhost’s server.

So, sadly, my conlang scripts are starting to go off-line.  One bye one, like fading stars, they’re being pummeled off the internet by people who never appreciated them, apparently.
But, what really makes me sad is that so many people who did NOT abuse them, but used my little scripts to enhance and improve their writing or leasure time won’t be able to use them all any more.  Those innocent bystanders will simply have to do without because of the greed of a few pushy, obnoxious people who had to test the limits of the system.

So, to those of you who played nice and were friendly and enjoyed my little conlang scripts, I’m sorry.  I’m sorry, but now when they start to cause problems for my provider, I’ll have to take them off-line, one by one.
I hope you enjoyed them half as much as I did while they were here.

Titles come easily to me.

Maybe it has something to do with the way I was introduced to creative writing back in the Fifth Grade, but titles have always been easy for me. Our teacher used to put up titles on the board and we had to write stories that were based on that title. So, I often find myself starting with titles long before I have any real story. Sometimes, I just sit and toss out titles for projects I know I’ll never have the time, energy or motivation to produce, just because the titles can be fun.
Here are a few examples you can steal for your own work:

Carpet Bagger: The Adventures of a Damn Yankee in the Deep South
Flashbacks to a War I Never Fought: A Divorce Memoir
Amber Waves: American History seen through a bottle
Hack: A Writing Life
Hot Wired: Erotic Tales of Cyberspace
Dangerous Curves: A Scholastic Romance
The Wizard in Blue Jeans
The Man with a Limp

So, now you’ve got titles, what’s your excuse for not writing?

I’m always looking for new twists on old themes.

And, frankly, the whole “alternate Earth” thing is a very old theme. But, I have to admit, it’s one that I can’t get away from in my own head. One of the alternate Earths that I contemplate on a regular basis is an inverted Earth. An Earth with its North and South poles swapped. I guess it’s an idea that grabbed me when my mother told me that people think at some point in the future, the magnetic core of Earth is going to, well, flip and send all our compasses out of whack, among other things.
Well, apparently, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated by this. Chris Wayan explores it all quite fully on a page titled Welcome to Turnovia.

Check it out.

I don’t want to give away the ending, but lets just say that the greedy Esperantists with their evil plans for world domination and the abolishment of true artistic conlanging get their just deserts.

Okay, seriously, I doubt that the creator of Conlang: The Movie is still looking for comments as this is pretty old. Like this post, which sat languishing in my queue on this blog, it’s more than a year old now. Still, if you’re a conlang enthusiast, it’s worth seeing the little movie.

Oh, and you may be wondering why I’m posting a year old movie on this blog. Well, because it’s slowly grinding to a halt. I’m just not that focused on writing fantasy any more and, frankly, my time is being spent elsewhere. I may eventually redo or update this entire site, but not until after I have cleared my own personal creative queue of projects and that is probably going to take some time. However, there are a few old posts here that I always intended to clean up and share, so that’s what I’ll be doing. After I run out of those posts, however, I’m going to just pop up a note letting anyone who stumbles across this site that it’s gone dormant. In case it’s not obvious.

So, until then, enjoy!

Today is William Gibson’s Birthday!

For those of you who have been hiding under a rock for the past twenty years, or have been freshly cloned, William Gibson is the primary progenitor of the cyberpunk movement. He’s generally credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and popularizing a somewhat more realistic, if somewhat bleak, view of the future.
He also ran away to Canada in 1968 to avoid the draft. Which is the only bad thing I can say about him. I otherwise admire his work and thought processes. Certainly his literature is beyond compare. I admire his work very much and occasionally will reread some of his short stories, just to capture the feel of his prose.

Anyway, celebrate his birthday with a little science-fiction in thanks for what he’s done for the genre.

Today is the birthday of novelist and critic Anthony Burgess

He was born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England on this day in 1917. Though he had written several novels early in his career, none of them were particularly successful. His career took a different turn, however, when, in 1959, he began to suffer from severe headaches and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctor told him he only had one year to live. The diagnosis turned out to be incorrect. However, Burgess wrote five novels in that following year, the year he believed to be his last.

Though he wrote and edited a large body of work, including a fair selection of non-fiction, he’s best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, which is perhaps most famous for the slang language he invented specifically for that work, called Nadsat.

Today is the birthday of Kurt Cobain.

The singer-songwriter who essentially founded the “grunge” music movement, was born in Hoquiam, Washington on this day in 1967. He started from humble beginnings, working a job as a school janitor, but he started playing in local rock bands. He spent most of this time living at various friends’ houses and on the street, even occasionally sleeping under a bridge. In 1989, he and his bandmates saved up six hundred dollars to record their first album, Bleach, under the name Nirvana. The boys signed to a major label in 1991 for their next album, Nevermind, and Cobain was shocked when it sold more than 10 million copies.

He became internationally famous almost overnight, but Cobain hated being famous. He developed a heroin addiction that got worse and worse, and on April 5th of 1994 he committed suicide at his home in Seattle.