Leigh Bardugo's Blog, page 654
October 13, 2013
lightispaintingshadows:
fashion inspiration: heartrenders
"A...
fashion inspiration: heartrenders
"A Corporalki Heartrender can snatch the air from your lungs, slow your pulse until you drop into a coma, or literally crush your heart in your chest—all without ever laying a finger on you."
Doooood. I love me some Grisha couture.
October 12, 2013
That stag though. (And Winter Prayer lyrics! <3)
That stag though. (And Winter Prayer lyrics!
October 10, 2013
ironmouse:
Commission for the wonderful Kayte! In case you...
Commission for the wonderful Kayte! In case you don’t know, Kayte makes a whole bunch of the beautiful Grisha swag, on top of being just an awesome person. So here is her glorious Fabrikator self!
Sometimes it’s worth staying up til 4am when this is waiting on tumblr. Totally gorgeous and captures the awesomeness that is Kayte
ironmouse:
Grisha: Second Army Kefta Concepts...
Grisha: Second Army Kefta Concepts (+Oprichniki!)
Full-view this thang! I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally got around to putting it down on paper and finalizing designs.
A few conceptual notes if you’re interested:
Corporalki — Since they’re the Second Army favorites, their uniform is the most glamorous: longer sleeves (as you can see, I couldn’t decide on a sleeve length), longer silhouette, thigh high boots, empire waist. They can stand to have more flowing lengths since they don’t deal with tangible elements.
Etherealki — These guys handle fire, water, and wind, so I decided to go a more practical route: shorter overall length, and a much more fitted silhouette and centered waistline. Don’t want sleeves catching on fire in the middle of battle, y’know.
Materialki — I went back to the empire waist to give it an apron-like feel since they’re the engineers. The gloves are fingerless, for improved dexterity, and sleeves are long and fitted. Unlike the previous two, the Materialki uniform is quilted instead of fur-lined, since they’re less likely to be out on the field.
Oprichniki — The Darkling’s personal guard needed to be instantly terrifying but glamorous to look at, as a reflection of the Darkling himself. Hence, embroider all the things!
The Grisha Trilogy is written by Leigh Bardugo and is just chock full of amazing Russian-inspired imagery, if you want something juicy to read!
I am dead upon the ground. The details! So thoughtful and gorgeous and ohhhhhh the badassery!!!
saintcain:
Sean. O’pry. I absolutely cannot. @lbardugo
Ok, I...
Sean. O’pry. I absolutely cannot. @lbardugo
Ok, I love this shot. Perfect for Siege and Storm.
WHAT. THE. WOW.
This amazing book club read Shadow and Bone this...
WHAT. THE. WOW.
This amazing book club read Shadow and Bone this summer and when they got together to discuss, they turned it OUT. Recipes! Prizes! And a presentation! I saw some of the photos they were posting on twitter and we set up an on-the-fly skype visit. I must say, they were totally delightful.
Downloads and photos galore on the Delicious Reads site.
October 9, 2013
Hi David! Sorry for bothering again (again). A conlanging question this time: Every time you talk about creating languages you mention the process of evolving the conlang and how it gives it a more natural feel. My question is: How do you evolve your langu
This is a question that really only a book can answer. I’ll try to give you the bullet points of an executive summary of an introduction to the topic.
Languages change in three main ways:
Sound Change: The sounds of a language will evolve over time. This is why “says” sounds like it should be written “sez”.
Lexical Change: Words change meaning over time. A word like “obnoxious” originally meant “liable to be injured”. It means nothing of the kind of anymore, though.
Grammatical Change: The grammar of a language also changes over time. We now have two different future tenses (three if you count “shall”), none of which originally meant “future” (one meant “go”, the other “want”, and the other “to have to”).
I’ve listed these in, roughly, order of simplicity, when it comes to conlanging. For sound changes, there are undoubtedly a number of resources online that summarize the most common sound changes and how they work. There are also sound change appliers online that will take your input and apply sound changes you create to them. It’s worth a look.
Lexical change can be tricky. Pretty much any word is liable to be changed (i.e. it is obnoxious to change. Heh, heh…), but not all words will. It’s up to the conlanger to figure out where changes will occur and where they won’t, and what words will arise to fill the gap, if any (for example I can’t think of single word that has the old meaning of “obnoxious”. We just lost that. Now we have to explain the meaning).
Grammatical change affects mainly paradigms. For example, Latin had a way of creating adverbs from adjectives, but for some reason Romance pretty much ditched it, replacing it with a combination of “adjective+mind” (e.g. Spanish rápido = fast; rapidamente = quickly). You can see how wholesale grammatical restructuring happened from Latin to Romance with the loss of pretty much all noun case, the development of articles, and the shifting of the verbal system. In order to do this in a conlang, you basically need a more or less fleshed out older language and to apply the same types of changes (appropriate, of course, to your time depth. A language changes a lot less in 300 years than it does in 3000).
Again, this is really just scratching the surface, though. If you’d like a couple of resources, I recommend Lyle Campbell’s Historical Linguistics and Bybee et al.’s The Evolution of Grammar.
