Barbara Friend Ish's Blog, page 2

That’s Not Even a Real Word! How I invent languages for my fiction

This week in the continuing (and penetrating) discussion of The Shadow of the Sun on her Week Two readalong post, nrlymrtl posed me this question:

You have used language throughout the book as a way to sew culture clash, create bonding, and swear creatively. How did you go about building the various languages into your story?

The master of the invented language, of course, was J.R.R. Tolkien. I am not fit to dust his dictionaries. But even for those of us whose artistic talent & impulses don’t run towards inventing languages, the development of language is a useful tool for fantasy & SF. Languages both arise from and reflect cultures: words and phrases so commonplace we don’t even hear them are profound indicators of our culture’s assumptions and norms. And the etymology and linguistic underpinnings of a language tell the story of where a culture comes from, what other cultures it has encountered, and what its problems and conflicts are.

You just made that up,

didn’t you?

Nope. A couple examples to get you started thinking about this:

Gender assumptions:

In English, we say “men and women”; where gender is mixed or uncertain, we use male words to cover all the unknowns. When we speak of both, we speak of males first–except when we’re being self-consciously courteous, as in “Ladies and gentlemen”, which embodies reasoning too convoluted to get into here. These habits reflect entrenched patriarchy. In The Heart of Darkness, the sequl to The Shadow of the Sun, some of the point-of-view characters I’m writing come from a matriarchal society. Maleness is not their linguistic default. The choices I make when my matriarchal characters speak about mixed or indefinite gender tell a story about their assumptions: right down to the fact that where my human characters say “priestess” to apply to a member of the Danaan clergy, the Danaan characters say “priest”. Because in their culture all priests are women, so there is no need to specify gender.

Swearing and Insults:

How we swear, what is considered profane or taboo, bespeaks our religious and moral norms. Americans, who as a group tend towards religious fundamentalism and puritanism to a much greater extent than some other cultures, find great shock value in blasphemy against Christian religions, sex, and bodily functions. How we insult others speaks to what our culture values and abhors. Because we tend to be very narrow-minded about sex lives that are in any way different from our own (see also: fundamentalism and puritanism), Americans can be heard using “gay” as an insult.

In other cultures, notably pagan cultures in which magic is mixed in with the religion, there is frequently a strong taboo against speaking the nmes of gods aloud, particularly in the presence of nonbelievers: because the names of the gods confer power. It may also be considered inappropriate to use the names of gods outside the context of prayer and magic, whether in the presence of nonbelievers or not. (That’s a tradition that carries over in modern Christianity as well, at least in the U.S.) I’ve made some use of both of those taboos in The Shadow of the Sun: my Beallan (human) characters, both of whom are deeply religious, rarely speak the names of their gods outside the context of religion, and certainly never in front of the Danaan, who have their own gods; and the Danaan, who believe themselves to be in a collective state of disgrace before their great goddess, no longer invoke her name outside the context of prayer. It’s the lesser goddesses and the great goddess’s consort with whom they feel themselves sufficiently close to swear by their names.

But as nrlymrtl notes, swearing is a bonding activity. People love swearing, and in swearing together we relieve the tension both of whatever made us want to mouth off and of the transgression of swearing itself. Learning one another’s swear words is a moment of cross-cultural bonding, a means of building bridges between our cultures. Kumbaya, baby. We see that in The Shadow of the Sun, too, in the moment when the Danaan mock Ellion because he is unable to pronounce one of the sounds common to their language and he turns around and challenges them to swear in his–and then they all laugh at the results.

So where did you get

those crazy words?

If you’ve been reading along lately, you will be unsurprised to learn that I stole. A lot. To reinforce the cohesiveness of the cultures I had built on a basis of ancient Irish myth as history, I drew heavily on ancient Irish and Gaelic languages and naming traditions, with a bit of Iberian thrown in for development of the Essuvian names and words. Where I could, I lifted words whole; where the word I wanted either didn’t exist or was too hard for someone with my VERY meager command of those languages to track down, I started with the etymological roots of those words in that end of the human language genome and built new ones. I also drew on ancient Greek and Egyptian sources for words that are, in the context of my tale, of yet more ancient vintage. In the course of developing the traders’ culture in The Heart of Darkness I stole from Basque and Romani language and naming traditions. And the ubiquitous profanity fouzh, which Ellion can’t get through an entire page without, was invented out of whole cloth: I wanted something evocative of the “f-bomb”, as it is delicately styled, which would be satisfying in the English-speaking mouth but wouldn’t require me to litter the pages with something that makes a significant percentage of readers flinch, not to mention bringing our cultural norms into an entirely different culture.

I love playing with language, maybe even more than I enjoy playing with the rest of reality. And I adore taking apart the components of our culture, looking at them, and putting them back together in entertaining/disturbing ways. It helps me think, and I hope it gives readers the opportunity to think some thoughts they would not have otherwise. It was probably inevitable that I write speculative fiction.

Place as Character: Using Worldbuilding to Develop Story

In her Part 1 post for the Shadow of the Sun Read-Along, Amy of Just Book Reading asked me a question about how I imagine the world I’m writing:

I ‘see’ this world very clearly in my head. In fact, I tend to read in pictures, active imagination and all that, when reading fantasy. When you’re writing, what do you picture and how do you keep the world so vivid? There is a map at the beginning of the book as well. Do you use maps to picture the world?

====

Warning: Geek Content

If you’re not into serious worldbuilding geekery, this might be good time to look elsewhere. Here is a picture of my cats.

====

The Map is Not the Territory.

But it is part of the story.

Maps are one of my most important tools for imagining a story world. I use a mapping program called Campaign Cartographer, which was originally designed for role-playing games. The maps I create become essential not only to the development of the world but also the development of the story.

Campaign Cartographer doesn’t build pretty maps, at least not for people who aren’t equipped to really tweak the program (read: amateurs like me). But what it does, brilliantly, is provide “real” data about the map’s territory. Once the map is built, the distances and potential routes between story locations are set—which keeps me honest, and requires the characters to deal with real obstacles. In order to facilitate the plot I’m planning, frex, I may want to have it take two days for a character to get someplace—but the truth of the world as constructed may be different. This tension helps to drive the development of the story, because it takes me out of what comes easily into stuff that makes me engage my “A-game”. It also helps to keep things feeling “real”.

Maps as Story

I’m also having a lot of fun with maps as a storytelling tool. I have the rare privilege of working with the artist Ari Warner on the maps for my books. He takes my amateurish, just-the-facts maps and develop them into maps that help tell the story of the world. Each of his maps is an exercise in worldbuilding: the glorious maps that grace The Shadow of the Sun are designed with the conceit that they have been developed by professional cartographers. Within the context of the story, each of the maps the reader sees comes from a particular collection: a couple of different royal libraries, and the collection of the Harpist Gorsedd in Ilnemedon. The inaccuracies in the maps represent misconceptions, misunderstandings, and confusions on the parts of the people who assembled the data–and those errors feed back into the story in the form of misunderstandings with which the characters who rely on them are walking around.

In the forthcoming The Heart of Darkness, the sequel to The Shadow of the Sun, Ari has outdone himself: we’re creating a new series of maps that originate with the kharr, the rebels in the war that encompasses both these volumes. He’s using a completely different style for these maps, one that reflects their less exalted and more practical origins. And the ways the kharr maps contradict the loyalist maps developed for the first volume carry part of the story as well.

Another tool I use in developing worlds is theft.

That seems to be a theme around here lately.

I stole elements of a lot of places in developing my story world. The geography of the Danaan sacred isle of Ilunmore came out of the legendary geography of Atlantis. The Ruillin Basin has its origins in the Bay of Fundy and surrounding waterways, right down to the shameless theft of the reversing falls on the St. John River, which became “Bormo’s Well” in The Shadow of the Sun. I used Mt. St. Michel in France twice: the island of Aballo is one part Mt. St. Michel, one part Bru na Boinne in Ireland, situated on Half Moon Bay in California. And the tidal accessibility of Mt. St. Michel became part of daily life for the island of Bealingas.

Theft committed in the name of worldbuilding can’t stop at window-dressing and yield a world that feels real. If stealing these places brought a wealth of details to the world that help to create the experience of a real place, that real feeling can only be maintained by following the facts of the places borrowed wherever they may lead. The tides on the Ruillin Basin with which the characters in my world must contend arose from the interaction of the true facts of the Bay of Fundy with the influence of my world’s extra moon. It created bizarre obstacles to travel in that region which in turn drove the development of an arcane “technology”, windcallers: wizards specially trained to harness winds and weather for the purpose of making it possible to sail in otherwise unnavigable waters. And those obstacles to travel fed back into the action of the novel.

But I am getting ahead of myself, for a post intended to accompany the first seven chapters of the novel. And the extra moon and all the baggage it brings to the party are a topic for another day.

/geekery

Place as Character: Using Worldlbuilding to Develop Story

In her Part 1 post for the Shadow of the Sun Read-Along, Amy of Just Book Reading asked me a question about how I imagine the world I’m writing:

I ‘see’ this world very clearly in my head. In fact, I tend to read in pictures, active imagination and all that, when reading fantasy. When you’re writing, what do you picture and how do you keep the world so vivid? There is a map at the beginning of the book as well. Do you use maps to picture the world?

====

Warning: Geek Content

If you’re not into serious worldbuilding geekery, this might be  good time to look elsewhere. Here is a picture of my cats.

====

The Map is Not the Territory.

But it is part of the story.

Maps are one of my most important tools for imagining a story world. I use a mapping program called Campaign Cartographer, which was originally designed for role-playing games. The maps I create become essential not only to the development of the world but also the development of the story.

Campaign Cartographer doesn’t build pretty maps, at least not for people who aren’t equipped to really tweak the program (read: amateurs like me). But what it does, brilliantly, is provide “real” data about the map’s territory. Once the map is built, the distances and potential routes between story locations are set—which keeps me honest, and requires the characters to deal with real obstacles. In order to facilitate the plot I’m planning, frex, I may want to have it take two days for a character to get someplace—but the truth of the world as constructed may be different. This tension helps to drive the development of the story, because it takes me out of what comes easily into stuff that makes me engage my “A-game”. It also helps to keep things feeling “real”.

Maps as Story

I’m also having a lot of fun with maps as a storytelling tool. I have the rare privilege of working with the artist Ari Warner on the maps for my books. He takes my amateurish, just-the-facts maps and develop them into maps that help tell the story of the world. Each of his maps is an exercise in worldbuilding: the glorious maps that grace The Shadow of the Sun are designed with the conceit that they have been developed by professional cartographers. Within the context of the story, each of the maps the reader sees comes from a particular collection: a couple of different royal libraries, and the collection of the Harpist Gorsedd in Ilnemedon. The inaccuracies in the maps represent misconceptions, misunderstandings, and confusions on the parts of the people who assembled the data–and those errors feed back into the story in the form of misunderstandings with which the characters who rely on them are walking around.

In the forthcoming The Heart of Darkness, the sequel to The Shadow of the Sun, Ari has outdone himself: we’re creating a new series of maps that originate with the kharr, the rebels in the war that encompasses both these volumes. He’s using a completely different style for these maps, one that reflects their less exalted and more practical origins. And the ways the kharr maps contradict the loyalist maps developed for the first volume carry part of the story as well.

Another tool I use in developing worlds is theft.

That seems to be a theme around here lately.

I stole elements of a lot of places in developing my story world. The geography of the Danaan sacred isle of Ilunmore came out of the legendary geography of Atlantis. The Ruillin Basin has its origins in the Bay of Fundy and surrounding waterways, right down to the shameless theft of the reversing falls on the St. John River, which became “Bormo’s Well” in The Shadow of the Sun. I used Mt. St. Michel in France twice: the island of Aballo is one part Mt. St. Michel, one part Bru na Boinne in Ireland, situated on Half Moon Bay in California. And the tidal accessibility of Mt. St. Michel became part of daily life for the island of Bealingas.

Theft committed in the name of worldbuilding can’t stop at window-dressing and yield a world that feels real. If stealing these places brought a wealth of details to the world that help to create the experience of a real place, that real feeling can only be maintained by following the facts of the places borrowed wherever they may lead. The tides on the Ruillin Basin with which the characters in my world must contend arose from the interaction of the true facts of the Bay of Fundy with the influence of my world’s extra moon. It created bizarre obstacles to travel in that region which in turn drove the development of an arcane “technology”, windcallers: wizards specially trained to harness winds and weather for the purpose of making it possible to sail in otherwise unnavigable waters. And those obstacles to travel fed back into the action of the novel.

But I am getting ahead of myself, for a post intended to accompany the first seven chapters of the novel. And the extra moon and all the baggage it brings to the party are a topic for another day.

/geekery

All the Myths I Stole

Cú Chulainn in battle, from T. W. Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race, 1911; illustration by Joseph Christian Leyendecker

In this week’s installment of the Shadow of the Sun Read-Along, nrlymrtl posed me this question:

The ancient Irish myth of Cuchulain is woven into the ancient history of this book. Are there other, specific myths that you pulled from in creating this work?

The short version of the answer is that I stole all of Irish mythology, and then went rooting around in the rest of the human mythology tradition for additional toys.

The Irish Myths

As nrlymrtl observes, I snagged Cuchulainn* from the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the greatest of the ancient Irish myths. But once I got there, I didn’t stop with him. Cuchulainn is only one small part of that sweeping epic, and I am also using the overarching war in which Cuchulainn is a late entry: notably the story of Fergus.

I also pilfered the Conquest of the Sons of Mil, in which human men conquered Ireland. This is one of my favorite parts of the Irish myth-set, especially for the wonderful wizard Amergin–who, remarkably, I have not (yet!) co-opted to my tale. From this myth came the tale of the goddess Eriu, who in my story is the founder of Letitia’s ancestral line.

Not content with those thefts, I moved on to the First and Second Battles of Maige Tuireadh, which are two of the wars of conquest of ancient Ireland. In the First Battle, the Tuatha De Danaan  conquered Ireland, wresting it from the control of the Fir Bolg. In the Second, the Danaan, having fallen under the oppression of the Fomorians, fought to free themselves. From these tales came the tale of the many-talented hero Lugh of the Long Arm and that of the great healer Dian Cecht, whose magical cauldron could bring the dead back to life. His “technology” is the basis of the Basghilae, the undead warriors in The Shadow of the Sun. And Lugh’s unstoppable Spear, the Gae Assail, became the great treasure of Fiana.

But of course I didn’t stop there. By now you will recognize that I am an intellectual kleptomaniac. I started thinking bigger: I moved on to

The Atlantis Myth

If you dig deeply into the myths of the Tuatha De Danaan and Atlantis, eventually you will begin to notice certain overlaps. The names of the Danaan realms, for example: my Fiana/Finias, Faill/Failias, and Muir/Morias are lifted straight out of that area of overlap. The nation of Banbagor should properly have been named Gor for correct correspondence with the original myth, but early readers noted that the seeming reference to the Conan stories was a distraction, so I wedded that name to the name of the goddess Banba of Irish myth.

Likewise Hy-Breasail: this is one of the multitude of names of Atlantis in ancient myth, and I stole shamelessly from sources attempting to locate that place.

The Gods

Oh, I stole gods. The Irish/Celtic ones are easy to spot, notably Dana, Beal and Esus. But you can’t swing a dead cat in my story world without bumping up against a god or something named for a deity, and many of them are pilfered from elsewhere: notably just about every body of water, which follow the Celtic tradition of naming them for goddesses that supposedly inhabit them. But it wasn’t just Irish/Celtic gods I stole. I had my way with the Germanic and Greek pantheons and some of their myths as well.

The Afterlife

I stole not one but two of these myth-sets: the Irish, including the paradisal House of Donn; and the Greek, albeit with considerable embellishment. Of the veritable buffet of after-life options in the novel, most of it began, er, life elsewhere.

*

Why did I steal all these things so brazenly? Now that you see the framework of the amusement park ride I have created, what does it mean?

Those questions are left as an exercise for the reader.

*Did you notice I spelled it differently than nrlymrtl did? Neither of us is exactly right, as far as I can tell. There seems to be a lot of variation in people’s attempts to render the old Irish as English. I’ve been typing it that way for too long to stop now, which only means I had my formative experience of him with a different source than nrlymrtl.

The Shadow of the Sun Read-Along

Beginning today, out in the wild places of the interwebs, a group of intrepid book bloggers is beginning an experiment so crazy it just might work: a Read-Along, or group reading, of The Shadow of the Sun.

This escapade is part of a planned series of read-alongs of Mercury Retrograde Press books, and I am delighted and humbled by their interest in our work–and unreasonably excited about the planned conversations. Participating bloggers include:

A Dab of Darkness

Coffee, Cookies, and Chili Peppers

Just Book Reading

Little Red Reviewer

What is a read-along, you ask? And how can I play? In short, a read-along is a sort of online book club that operates primarily on the blogs of people interested in participating. They seem to be most fun if you have a blog of your own on which to post your thoughts, but a good time can still be had by stopping in to participating blogs and joining in the conversations there. More detailed information on the Mercury Retrograde read-along series is available here.

There will be a list of links to the various posts in the read-along available on the Mercury Retrograde site, here, and we’re going to try to keep up with the read-along and all its various links as it evolves. It should be noted that this is the first read-along most of us have been party to, and we’re feeling our way through it. But if we come up with a better way of keeping interested readers informed, that information will be posted on the same page as well. So that page is probably the place to check in.

This particular read-along is being led by nrlymrtl, host of the Dab of Darkness blog. Here is the

Planned Read-Along Schedule

April 1st: Chapters 1-7

April 8th: Chapters 8-15

April 15th: Chapters 16-21

April 22nd: Chapters 22-28

April 29th: Chapters 29-END

Don’t have a copy of the book? Not to worry. For the duration of the Read-Along, you can download your free eBook here.

nrlymrtl is a master of spinning interesting questions–and she’s instituted the extra-juicy addition of a question specifically directed at me in each of her weekly lists. This should be a great conversation. See you around the blogs!

Mischief 2.0

That’s right, this blog has a new name. It is only one aspect of a wild wave of changes rolling through around here. Stay tuned.

Panel Schedule for RavenCon

I’ve got my final panel schedule for RavenCon, and it’s packed full of cool conversations and events. If you’re not familiar with RavenCon, you should be: it’s one of the best cons on the East Coast, and it’s on my can’t-miss list. This year’s con will be held April 5-7, at the Holiday Inn Koger Center near Richmond, VA (as usual). Here’s a taste of what I’ll be doing:

Friday 4 PM–Another Galactic Empire

Why not republics, democracies and confederacies? Why do we assume that the future government is going to be some autocracy from the past? Is the Galactic Empire more romantic or just easier to write?

Friday 5 PM–Books Without Borders
Discussion of the various ways of publishing available today. Which is right for the beginning writer? And which should an author with publishing credits under his/her belt choose?
Saturday 1 PM–Potions, Poisons and Plots:

Inventive ways to kill a character

How to use science to get rid of those pesky protagonists.

Saturday 4 PM–Social Media for the Introvert

How to promote yourself and your work when you’re hopelessly shy and introverted.

Saturday 6 PM–Launch Party for Fires of the Desert by Leona Wisoker

Party! Book Four in the Children of the Desert series. Free food, coffee, tea, and door prizes!

Sunday 10 AM–Cross-Media Collaboration

Writers working with musicians working with artists working with builders working with filmmakers.

Sunday 11 AM–Naming Names, Titling Titles

Character names and story titles, what makes them memorable? What makes them work for the character or story? When they’re bad, what went wrong? How do you create a good one?

“A taste”, I say, because the panels are only half the fun of a convention. I’ll also be hanging out with friends old and new, listening to other panels, and generally having a blast. This year I’ll be part of a veritable Mercury Retrograde squad: Rachael Murasaki Ish, Jonah Knight, and Leona Wisoker will also be in attendance, as will our Mistress of eBook, Antimatter ePress founder Elizabeth Campbell. I hope you can join us there.

How To Sync Your iPad With Scrivener

Reblogged from Michael J Holley - Writer:

I've been sat like a lemon waiting for Scrivener to come out with an iPad app. This was going to change the world, so I waited. However, it turns out that I was waiting in vain because I can already add/edit my document on the iPad and then just sync it across. Ooh... fancy.

It's dead easy and if you don't believe me then just take a  look at…

Read more… 216 more words

You're welcome.

Sending us mail? Better hold off.

In a maneuver no one saw coming, the mailing center to which our USPS mail and packages are delivered quite suddenly shut its doors last week. This being the electronic age, we don’t stop by to pick up the mail daily; our first indication something was wrong came when UPS deliveries we were expecting started bouncing. At this point we have no knowledge of what might be locked away behind that closed door.

So, if you sent us something via USPS, UPS or Fedex recently, be advised that we have not received it. We’re working on getting our hands on those things, but it turns out there are layers of legal nonsense involved at this point. In the meantime, we’re shopping for a new mailing center, but we don’t have an address yet.

Email continues to work, thank goodness. All the email addresses you might need are on the site, here.

Cross-cultural amusement

As Rach and I begin gearing up for next week’s trip to Marscon, Mark is making plans to break the monotony of our absence with a visit to his mother. They’re planning a menu of traditional Eastern European favorites. Mark returns from at least the third phone discussion of this extravaganza with this announcement:

My mother wants tongue.

He finds this conversation humorous because his mother has gone the extra mile in consideration: enjoining him not to get the aforementioned delicacy until Rach and I are safely away. “I’m sure Barbara doesn’t want to look at that in the refrigerator.”

Now, for the record, I’ve had tongue. Let’s just say I have texture issues with it and leave it at that.

But that’s not what has stopped me cold this afternoon. I just can’t get past the horrifying image.

My mother wants tongue.

Mark rolls his eyes.

“From a COW,” he says.

That doesn’t make it better.