Fun Facts

Alright so I know I have been a little silent recently but I am still chugging away I assure you and I am so sorry that this is taking as long as it is but to kind of give you something in the interim I thought I would share with you some interesting little tid bits about the Word of the Dynasty Saga. Naturally I have taken many liberties with the setting and the world but I have done my best to keep it in the spirit of ancient Asia in terms of style and feel and part of how I did that was by adding some little things to the world.

So fact number one, the use of chopsticks. Now in the first book I mentioned the fact that they used knives along with chopsticks. Well believe it or not at one point in time most of Asia that used chopsticks also used knives but they stopped as the teaching of one man started to spread.

Confucius.

That’s right, Confucius abhorred violence and saw knives only as weapons and as such banned them from the dinner table. He also said that using only chopsticks brought one closer to the heavens and several other religious things but ultimately as his teaching spread through Asia so did the practice of not using knives.

Now since Confucius doesn’t exist in Dynasty or anyone like him they never changed the practice and thus still use knives when they eat. It’s a very small detail I know but an important one I think.

Another fun fact. Card Games. We tend to think of them as common place and probably as old as dirt but the truth is card games are actually fairly recent in human history.  Most of Europe and the Arab Nations did not have card games until the mid to late Middle Ages. China on the other hand likely invented the first card game called Leaf several hundred years before during the Tang Dynasty. Ironically about the time period that I am basing this world on. Give or take a few centuries. So I thought I would add that in to my books.

Now an interesting fact about Lymee is that she studied Shinpu Ren Karate. It was a form of martial arts that was specifically designed by Japan to fight against Chines Kung Fu. And Kung Fu was what I was basing most of this worlds army around, as apposed to Samurai and Bushido as this world is more parts China than Japan. So in some ways Lymee was literally trained in how to defeat most of her opponents in this world before ever arriving in it.

Another fun fact about Lymee is that she is a character from another book that I was writing. In that book she was still half Asain and her father was still a sailor and all that but she was actually a Police Officer whose husband was murdered by a vampire and she was in turn turned into one so she was then on a quest to find the Vampire and figure out why her husband was murdered. It would then kind of turn into a mystery of the week detective novel that was to be this kind of mix between Vampire the Masquerade, Sonja Blue and the Dresdin Files. Along the way she was to partner up with a Huntress as well as have her own Ghoul Secretary. I kind of dropped the book cause I did not know where I was going with it but when I started Dynasty I figured I could at least use the same character and backstory and save myself some time instead of creating a whole new character.