Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 78
March 3, 2016
Don’t love your job
The apparition glows a shade of violet that human eyes were never meant to see. It reaches out a skeletal hand, ice crystals shivering from the air as it glides closer to my face, screaming.
Then it hits the tripwire and it really starts screaming.
The wire hums with a current that oscillates in precisely the right wavelength. Or the wrong one, if you happen to be an apparition. Invisible ripples propagate from it in more than just the usual three dimensions, catching the apparition as neatly as the threads of a spider’s web.
It thrashes. It screams. I flick on the floodlights and activate my knives.
Dawa enters the mausoleum just as I’m finishing up, the flayed apparition stretched out before me like the pages of translucent book, or maybe a huge and intricate butterfly pinned to a cork board. It quivers. Dawa makes a disapproving noise.
“What,” I say. “I’m working.”
“I don’t think you are,” Dawa says. “I think you’re having fun.”
This is an argument we’ve had before. Am I repairing holes in space-time, exterminating dangerous extra-dimensional animals, or torturing incorporeal people to death? I suppose we’ll never know. I grunt and turn back to my vivisection.
But this time Dawa doesn’t let it slide. He walks into my field of vision, saying, “the translation team’s made a breakthrough. The apparitions have been trying to speak to us the whole time.”
“So?” I say, “they don’t deserve it.”
Dawa ignores this. “We’re all ordered to stop work immediately while we formulate a new strategy based on what—”
I stop listening and start thinking. Inanimate higher-dimensional processes are easy for people to destroy. Dumb animals only a little harder. But things that can look like people? That can plead for mercy? If the idiots decide that what I’m doing is murder, they’ll shut me down. They’ll take away my knives.
“—are not only sentient, but sapient as well—”
The blade is still vibrating in my hand. The higher-space ripples it produces won’t do anything to a human. The glass-sharp edge, though…
“are you listening to me?” Dawa is right in front of me. The apparition floating behind him keens as if in warning.
I lunge.
March 2, 2016
Stupid stupid me
I accidentally deleted my tumblr account. Here’s the shattered remnants I’ve been able to scrape back together. It’ll be a while before it’s back to form, but it’ll get there. In the mean time, follow me?
How Dinosaurs can Fix Your Religion
There comes a time in every spec-fic writer’s life when they must take a good long at themselves and think: “is this novel I’ve written nothing but a vehicle for my made-up culture?”
You bet it is! I was working on a lost time-colony of bronze-age humans in the Late Cretaceous period for ages before I finally figured out how to work them into a novel about intercultural romance and the difference between power and strength (buy it here!) I had the whole shebang: languages, population genetics, rituals, and of course religion.
February 28, 2016
Giving characters a Mission
It was really easy to write the beginnings of Tyrannosaur Queen and World’s Other Side. Why then, was it so hard to write the beginnings of New Frontiers, Charming Lies, and Junction? Charming Lies’ beginning is STILL giving me hell two years later!
The reason? I think it’s whether or not I gave my characters a mission. At the beginning of Tyrannosaur Queen, Trals has a mission: kill the slavers. Anrea has a mission: get home. Watching them try to accomplish those missions and bounce off each other is the whole first half of the story.
So now as I embark on a new story, I’m going to give my main character a mission: hunt down a criminal. Get her baby back. Save time travel. So. Three missions. It’s going to be a wild ride.
February 26, 2016
How Dinosaurs can fix the Evolution of Flight
From Coral Moore’s Chaos and Insanity blog
When I pitched my “How Dinosaurs can fix your…” series of essays to the good people of the Codex writers’ forum, I expected (and mostly got) requests for writerly advice such as “How Dinosaurs can fix your Routine” or “How Dinosaurs can fix your Need for Speed“, but Coral just wanted to know about the evolution of flight. I’m not sure how that relates to writing, but it is pretty cool, so here goes.
The classic story of the origin of flight goes like this: dinosaur-like critter climbs trees, evolves elongated scales to catch the wind and glide, scales evolve into feathers, gliding evolves into flapping. Simple. And wrong.
February 25, 2016
Maldonia, its language and history
I was happy to find out that The Princess and the Frog is getting some attention, since it’s my second favorite Disney movie (it goes Aladdin, Princess and the Frog, Rapunzel, in case you were wondering). Anyway, I got to thinking: where is Maldonia and what language do they speak there?
Here’s what we got attested for Maldonian:
Ashidanza! (wow)
Abinaza (farewell)
Faldi Faldonza (oh my God)
De Fragee Pruto (the Frog Prince)
Also Naveen’s name is Hindi (meaning “new”? Is this true?)
(from deleted scenes)
Badini (small? First?)
Caldonza (big? Second?)
Maldaquesh (the Maldonian language)
The exclamations could literally translate to almost anything, but let’s look at “De Fragee Pruto.”
We have “de” looks like it’s derived from Latin and we have “pruto,” also from Latin (pinceps). But compared to Italian (Il principe ranocchio) and Spanish (El príncipe rana), we see a problem: it ought to be “De Pruto Fragee”. Why the reversal? Let’s assume Naveen isn’t just mispronouncing “the Frog Prince” and say instead that the Maldonian language, while it borrowed heavily from Latin vocabulary is descended from Gujarati.
Gujarati, like English, can put adjectives before nouns (it doesn’t always, but in the case of “the frog prince” it would). Also, “Frog” in Gujarati is apparently phrōga (really? I may be wrong…). There’s even a suffix -ī that turns nouns into adjectives, (vis jaṅgala, “a jungle” and Jaṅgalī, “wild”).
Now what of “Pruto”? If it’s from Latin “Princeps” it’s gone through some changes. Start with palatalization and regularization to turn Latin /prinkeps/ into Medieval Spanish /prinsepe/. Then syncope to turn that into /prnsepe/, realized by Gujarati-speakers as /purunsepe/, which collapses to /prũse/, which takes the Gujarati -o as a nominative masculine noun /prũso/. The ceceo of Castilian-speakers gives us /prũθo/, which Naveen, as a modern boy and man-of-the-people, th-stops to /prũto/ (spelled prũcio in Maldonian dictionaries).
What Naveen actually said, therefore, is “De phrogui prũcio,” pronounced /de frogi prũto/, mis-spelled by an English speaker as “De Fraggee Pruto.”
Whew.
Okay.
So that derivation constrains the (alternate) history of Maldonia. Its people speak Spanish and Gujarati, and the s>θ shift occurred in Spain in the 1600s. Which means, perhaps, more Spanish involvement (and colonization) of Portuguese territory in India during the Iberian Union (1580-1640).
In the final years of the union, Grandee of Spain Luis Méndez de Haro, favorite of King Phillip IV, happened to be touring the island when his rival for the royal ear, María de Ágreda, finally convinced Phillip to abolish the office of “favorite” and declare de Haro a traitor.
De Haro’s friends in Madrid managed to get him recognized as Marquis of Diu under Charles II, and during the War of Spanish succession, de Haro’s son crowned himself King Xavier I de Diu. This move prompted bitter acrimony from all sides, but through clever negotiation (and the distance of Diu from anywhere from which a conquest might be launched), he managed to have himself recognized as the sovereign of the Principality of Maldonia, so called because the island had been so reluctantly given (in Spanish “Isla Maldonada”).
So there. That’s where Naveen’s from.
From The Tex Files:
Okay, look. Marriage can be wonderful...
From The Tex Files:
Okay, look. Marriage can be wonderful. We know that. GETTING married is something else entirely. It’s such a special time, but so stressful, too.
Well, fret no more about your impending nuptials, friends – because today on the blog, Daniel Bensen is here to tell you how dinosaurs can fix your wedding.
Trals Scarback, war leader of the Ethlek, has an opportunity and a problem.
The opportunity is a weapon of otherworldly power that fell out of the sky.
The problem is Andrea, who claims to be a soldier from the tomorrow of tomorrows. The weapon, her powersuit, will only work for her. Plus, she has killed several of Trals’s men.
February 23, 2016
Writing Elements (of Food)
Per Melissa’s suggestion, here’s a preliminary list of writing elements (that is, distinct things you have to do over the course of writing a novel). I guess these would be Foods in our Candy/Vegetables metaphor? So in a well-balanced book you need:
Savory (Plot)
(Theme/Attraction to Reader/Internal Logic/External logic)
Sweet (Character)
(Motivation / Emotional state/ Internal Dialogue/ Expression/Character Interactions)
Starchy (World)
(Ramifications of Conceit/ Internal Consistency/ Believability)
…Presentation? (Style)
(Description of Scene/Choreography of Action/Blocking/Realism)
Would you agree with this classification? Which of these things do you enjoy writing (or reading)? Which of these things do you hate? Who’s good at these things?
How Dinosaurs Can Murder Your Darlings
From Katrina Archer’s My Murdered Darling series
Are everyone’s novels built upon the bones of dead characters and deleted scenes? I haven’t done any sort of survey, but mine certainly are. I’ll start with a cool little scene or idea that’s just so neat and nifty and I can’t wait to expand it into novel—oops, I squished it. And that scene I wrote about the shark fight! Man what a shark fight that was! Nope, doesn’t fit with the flow of the rest of the chapter. And that whole Pachycephalosaurus wrangling thing? No time. Had to go. Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen is a big, slimy, sprawling, epic that ended up a sleek little adventure story. But not without lots of carnage. Like the two whole Point-Of-View characters I had to kill off.
February 21, 2016
Eat your Yuck
There’s something I’ve been talking about with Tex and Melissa: the things we indulge in when we write versus the things we force ourselves to write because we have to. Call those your Yum and your Yuck.
My Yum is describing creatures or technologies and extrapolating what their presence would do to people (plus snappy, back-and-forth dialogue). My Yuck is characters being introspective about their emotions. Describing action and scenery are somewhere in the middle—hard work but not actually unpleasant.
Of course I need to eat my Yuck. It’s good for me. I have to practice internal dialogue and scene description because if I don’t I will write bad books. On the other hand, I can’t just force myself to do boring stuff I’m not good at all day long. (Now watch me extend the hell out of this metaphor). That’s a recipe for burnout!
(Thank you, thank you).
In Junction, I tried to maximize Yum by having lots of monsters eating people, while I stretched by describing scene. Lots of alien landscapes looking all cool and mysterious. Now, though I’m going to need to go back and add those darn emotions.
What about you? What’s your Yum? What’s your Yum?
