Category Archives: setting

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Another map

Argrenedrin

Here is the second map of my world. It’s fairly poor quality because it’s still in pencil and my scanner isn’t great. There is one more, but that one will probably never see the light of day because it’s more of a sketch. This map is of a place I’m calling the Argrene Archipelago, also known as the country of Argrenedrin. It is the main setting for the sub-plot of War of Shadows. It’s not final, and I’ve only got a few places listed on here, but I haven’t got the sub-plot all that well mapped out. What I can say is that this part of the story will deal heavily with dragons. The inspiration here comes from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. Once I have an opportunity to revise it and make it darker, I will probably share again.

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Creepy in fantasy

Wharlock

On a bit of a lark, this weekend, I sat down with my children to watch Jim Henson’s the Labyrinth. When I was a kid, I loved that movie, and even though I haven’t seen it since I threw out my VCR, I still love it. No, the acting isn’t great, but it’s alright. David Bowie’s character is so hard-core 80’s that it would be funny, if it didn’t scare the hell out of me. Okay, it doesn’t actually scare the hell out of me, but the movie IS creepy. The whole thing. It’s not horror movie scary, it just makes you feel vaguely uncomfortable.

For the entire movie, I sat there wondering how he does that. Labyrinth isn’t even the best example of a creepy as heck fantasy by Jim Henson. The Dark Crystal comes to mind. If you didn’t think it was creepy, then you probably didn’t see it, and if you did see it, right now you’re saying Hmmmmmmm Hmmmmm in that high pitched voice. What about Jim Henson’s the Story Teller? If you’ve seen those, I’ll bet the hair on the back of your neck is already standing up. If you haven’t seen them, check them out.

That guy is the master of making fantasy feel uncomfortable. I’m not saying its a requirement that fantasy flex a little horror muscle, but in my case, it’s what the story is missing. I have written a world and a situation where a little bit of creepy would give the story the punch it needs to move it from a pretty good tale, to a damn good book. What Jim Henson does is makes the world, the setting, dark and unnerving, and the characters light and even funny. It’s a good trick because it makes the characters, even the bad guys, engaging and likable in spite of the circumstances. Unfortunately, most of the effect Jim Henson gets comes from the visuals, and so there’s not much by way of technique to lift directly. Instead, I have to figure out a way to make the setting vaguely unsettling with words.

The series that comes into my mind as having something like the ‘feel’ I’m going for is the Phillip Pullman series His Dark Materials. It was more dark than creepy, but it had its moments. I listened to this one on Audio Book a few years ago now, and so I don’t recall quite how he did it. Really though, my book is going to need to have it’s own feel, and I suppose I know what it needs to look like, but I still lack the skill to pull it off. Anyhow, this is one more thing to work on when I start the re-write, and it’s going to require a lot of research (reading). Any suggestions?

Also, I’m not done with this topic. It will be rolling around in my mind quite a lot before this is all said and done.

photo credit: Wharlock DOF via photopin (license)

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Trying to create a constructed language

After staying up far too late last night and working hard on a chapter that I’m not too sure about, I decided to take a little break today and work on one of my languages. I created it largely to provide a way to name things, and maybe also give little chunks of quotes in certain parts of the text. I think I may have gone overboard, and it’s still far from anything having enough words to really say anything useful. I call the language I’m working on today Lotath. That’s the name of the language, not the folks who speak it. For fun, I’ve translated part of quote that appears at the very beginning of my story into the language it would have been spoken in.

The quote:

It would seem the enemy has been defeated utterly, yet in my bones I feel this war is not yet over.

The quote as it would have been spoken in the formal Lotath dialect:

Teziz sukai sedira fefoilta pelfrot lë níza, joza nathaijis däinjol injol nos tukil kami olír kolth joza pellethost

Here is what it breaks down to:

Teziz [it would seem] sukai [the] sedira [enemy] fefoilta [were/have been] pelfrot [state of defeat/defeated] lë níza [to the finish/completely/utterly], joza [yet] nathoiljis [in the bones] däinjol [of mine] injol nos [I do] tukil [feel] kami [this] olír [war] kolth [is not] joza [yet] pellethost [in a state of being done/over].

It really looks like this language is just a string of random letters someone decided to call a language. However, it’s more than that. Just to point out a few elements that are probably not at all obvious, and to show it’s more than just a string of random letters stuck together:

To start, the word fefoilta comes from the root word fota (is). the prefix fe means immediate past, the infix replacement of the o in fota with oil makes it plural formal, straight plural would have that infix replacement as ai (where ai is pronounced the same as the i in island). In this example, ai doesn’t appear because it’s the formal dialect. If you look at the word nathoiljis you could replace the oil with ai, and make it a non-formal version of the same word. The application of formal/non formal depends on the context and dialect. In the common dialect of Lotath, oil would only be applied to things of specific significance. This is in the same way English speakers might add a ‘the’ in front of certain pronouns to designate uniqueness. Think: The Mountains – you hear this a lot in context. If we were to apply the Lotath rules, it might read Moilutains instead. The formal dialect would generally apply the oil all the time for plurals. In the history of this world, the formal was first, and as the language changed, the formal only came to be applied in very specific circumstances, which resulted in the usual application of the infix ai for most plural, leaving oil and a singular counterpart ol as infix modifications for specific, important things or people.

The application of possessives is demonstrated here as well. In the case of the word däinjol, we have the male possessive prefix (da) on the formal male word for I (injol). The owner of a thing, follows that object. So to say something like Dave’s bones, it would be: Thaijis dadave in Lotath. In the case of däinjol, the a and i are pronounced separately, which is why I’ve got the diaeresis above it. Otherwise, ai would be pronounced as described earlier, and indicate a plural (pronouncing it this way would probably sound like nonsense actually).

I picked a fairly poor example to demonstrate conjugation, as this language has dozens of conjugations. However, the one example I’ve got is the use of injol nos. The closest equivalent is something like ‘I do’, but can also be use in instances where English would have ‘I am’.

So, anyhow that’s a brief intro to one of my languages. I just thought I’d share it because I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s hard to really give a good idea of what I mean by a fairly fleshed out con-lang without a demonstration.