Magical Words

I was asked recently, by an unpublished writer, the seemingly innocent and easy question, “How do I go about creating a fantasy language?” That got me to thinking, which my hubby would say is a very dangerous thing. 

When a writer starts from scratch for a language, they have to know a bit about the world they are creating.  Okay, they have to have to have the world down pat.  Language has to come near or at the end of the world creation.  Here’s why.

In English, we have only a few words for frozen precipitation, and a lot of them contain the same words: Sleet, freezing rain, snow, ice, hail, snowflakes, and uh…frozen precipitation, which is where I got started on this.  The Inuit’s have many more. Why? Because their survival depends on an exact wording for the different kinds of frozen precipitation. So in creating a language, I have to know about the survival requirements of my world.

If I am creating a desert world, there will different names for the different winds, the rare seasonal rains, the names of clothing for sun protection, wind protection, traveling.  The names for predators and the weapons that kill them.  There will names for things that grow there, on this alien world, that may not grow here. Foods that can last in the desert heat, grow on little water.

I remember the first time I heard of breadfruit, a fruit that tastes like bread, I suppose, and I wondered why call it breadfruit?  The people there have no grains…but the Europeans who “discovered” the land had grain, so they named the fruit what they chose, not what the native peoples called it. Bread was a survival food.

For language, I have to know about the sexual interaction between the sexes.  If this is an alien world, then there may be three or four sexes.  There may be a totally different manner of procreation.

I have to know the conflict of the plot line too, of course. So for me, the language would come last.  And frankly, to keep readers from getting lost, I’d use English in different ways, with different syntax, rather than create a language.  Remember the Jedi warrior, the little green guy? “Lost to you, Luke Skywalker, is hope.” English with different organization of phrases and words is more effective offtimes, than starting from scratch.

But then, in my fantasy worlds, I always just used an alternate reality earth, which makes it so much easier. Lazy? Probably.  How about you guys? Have you tried the new language thing? How did it work? Faith Hunter   

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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Last week I received comments back from a short story editor who is interested in buying story of mine.  He likes the piece, but feels that it still needs a bit of work before it’s ready to go in his publication.  Yesterday I received the first 200 manuscript pages of my next book, book II in my Blood of the Southlands trilogy, back from my editor at Tor.  He likes what I’ve done with the book and is excited about where I’m taking the series, but he’d scrawled comments all over the pages — things he thinks I should consider changing or expanding or cutting.

When people talk to me about the process of writing a book, they tend to focus on the initial creative act, the writing of that first draft.  When they ask about the editing process, they tend to think in terms of typos and changes in syntax. Too often, it seems to me, discussions of novel writing ignore the revision stage.  I believe that some of the most important work I do on any book, and certainly the most valuable contributions my editor makes to that finished product, come in this part of the process.

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Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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Happy birthday to David B Coe! He’s taking today off to celebrate his 29th birthday (no, really, he’s 29! Would I lie to you? ) And he gets cake, which makes any day a party!

I work in a middle school library. Middle schoolers are fascinating beasts - not children, not adults, they flail about in a loose-limbed fashion, trying to figure out what the next step will be. Tears and fights are instantaneously begun, and end just as quickly. Most of them love to read, but many of them pretend they’re much too grown-up for that, and come in here to check out books with the secretive nature of a spy in a dime novel. They’ll toss the chosen book toward me and immediately turn away, so that anyone who happens to glance inside the library will think they’re only standing around near the desk.

And they say the craziest things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to chew the inside of my lip to keep from laughing. My favorite happened a couple of weeks ago. In anticipation of Mad Kestrel’s release, I’d printed some paper bookmarks with my book cover and synopsis. Students were oohing and ahing over them. One boy read the bookmark carefully, and the following conversation ensued:

Him: You wrote this book?

Me: Yes, I did.

Him: Have you read it yet?

For a second, I didn’t know how to respond. Of course, I’d read it, silly boy. Hadn’t I? I read it while I was writing it, and I read it again during both big rewrites. I read it while it was printing for the twentieth time. But now I think I want to read it again. Because now it’s a book. Maybe it sounds different now that all the pages are bound and there’s a cover around it. I’ll read it and see if what I tried to do succeeded.

Out of the mouths of babes…

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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I discovered several years ago now that many people see pictures in their heads. When they read, when they listen to music, when they’re told stories, they get pictures in their heads.

I do not get pictures in my head. Not when I’m reading, not when I’m writing, not when I listen to music. I had *no idea* that people did. It was a stagger-worthy shock when I realized that Fantasia was based on the idea that people *saw stories in their heads* when they listened to all that music.

*No one* in my immediate family had any idea people did. Dad said he’d have taught many classes differently if he’d known that. I remembered a drama class visualization exercise where we were supposed to visualize we were lying on a white beach with the blue sky above, and palm trees and all that sort of thing, and it bent my brain to think that probably two thirds of the people in the class were *actually seeing that*.

They say to succeed at sports, you have to visualize the win. I had no idea they meant literally. Sure, I can talk myself through it, but actually *see* it? Buh. No.

This clarified something that had been puzzling me for years, when I learned it. There’s a scene in EMILY CLIMBS, the second book of the Emily of New Moon series by L.M. Montgomery, in which Emily is talking to a man whose son has died. The man can’t remember what the boy looks like, because he isn’t like other people, and can’t bring images to mind.

My entire life, I had always thought that was a weird little scene. I mean, not like I spent nights awake because it actively bothered me, but it always bugged me a little. Like, what did that mean, bringing images to mind? Like people *did* that or something? *snort* (There is another, similar, scene in one of the Feynman books in which he and several other, y’know, like, nuclear scientists, are discussing how to best keep time in one’s head, and he said something about, after they’d all sat around seeing how *they* did it, that the most accurate time-keepers were the ones who saw a clock counting down in their minds. And I thought, buh? Like you could *see* a clock ticking the seconds off? It was only after this conversation came up with friends that I realized that in fact most people can.)

My husband was astounded, because my writing makes clear pictures in his head, and he couldn’t imagine how I did that if *I* wasn’t seeing pictures in my head.

The answer is by working really, really hard.

Behind the cut is a scene from URBAN SHAMAN, my first published novel, and further commentary on this visualization thing.

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Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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It’s Monday!!! I have to blog. Blog blog blog….gotta blog. What am I gonna blog about….???? Got lots of things to chat about but little that relates to being a writer except as it all applies to research and writing what you know and how to survive life as a writer. Thinking and keying fast here. Keep up, okay? Diving in to the clutter of my mind now:

Trip time. Hubby and I are heading to the mountains either tonight or in the morning to see about running some rivers. We have this friend, Ralph Altman, I’ve known since 10^th grade, and I had totally forgotten he is a paddler from way back. He told us about this roll class at UNC Asheville, in a heated pool, thank God. Gonna learn to roll. Whoowhoo! Need to get it right so I can write *what I know*. First rule of writing, but then I write fantasy too … Hmmm. That rule so doesn’t work for fantasy writers. Anyway, we hope to meet up with some people in the pool who want to run rivers on Thursday, and maybe Ralph will join us. Isn’t that a great name? Ralph Altman. Needs to be a character. I bought a full length wetsuit on Friday, and I have lots of cold weather river and hiking clothes, so I am ready. See what I said about my mind being full of clutter? Wait – there’s more!

I am having panic attacks about deadlines. I have a short story (not started) due June 1st, two books due on June 1st, and two magazine articles due by March 30^th, (not started). As of today, I have the rough draft of one book done (about whitewater paddling, by my AKA, Gwen Hunter) about 200 pages of a skinwalker book done (by me, Faith Hunter) and the backstory of the characters in the short story put together, and the world built.  But I have 3 months (less than 90 short days) to get it all done. I have this faint (it’s the size of a rodeo bull and it has claws and fangs) sense of panic crawling up my spine. Now, I know Catie has been on the deadline from hell – much worse than my deadline – but for once, knowing that someone else has it just as bad (okay, worse) is not helping. I am BIC to the point of gaining back all the Christmas weight I lost, and so the diet is sooo back on. No comfort foods to chase away the rodeo-bull-sized panic attacks.

So why am I *taking off* and going to the mountains? Research for the whitewater book. I can revise it on the way up and down the mountains. But to do all that I have to stock the RV with food, clean it and put sheets on the bed, and get all the cold weather clothes moved to it. Hubby has to get it ready to travel, a much more involved job.

I also need to brush the dogs and clip their nails. Vacuum the house. And decide on the subject matter for the articles. I need to exercise, (yoga and weight machine), and I have yet to break in the new hiking shoes I’ll need if I decide to hike a river. Can you say blisters on top of blisters? Need a manicure. Note to self (take cell phone charger to RV.)

You know… I became a writer for lots of reasons. So I could see justice on paper, let the crazy people living inside my head out, get all the stories I was narrating in my head out, so I could look for peace (in a way). And I got all that. I really did. Being a writer is the best life in the world for me. I live with a head full of clutter (see above) and writing frees me from it. Being able to focus on a story is like having a bulldozer in my brain. But I also got deadlines. Not just pesky deadlines, but rodeo-bull-sized deadlines. And more clutter in my brain than I can focus on.

Next time, I’ll try to talk about world building. Stuff other writers might enjoy. For now, I’ll drink another cuppa tea, and start packing. Maybe yoga after lunch. Then finish and rewrite the scene of back-story I wrote Friday for Jane Yellowrock, Skinwalker.

Oh – Catie? I finished House of Cards. OMG! You are a goddess! I am so lucky to be on this blog you and David and Misty. Oh! One more clutter bit: Misty’s signings are good??? I hope? Mom started in on MadKestrel and she is enthralled!

Deeeeeep breath. Blow it out. Yeah. I can do this.

The writer’s life for me!Faith Hunter  

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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I tried to come up with something brilliant and wise for today’s post….but my book was released Tuesday and people are saying nice things about it, so I’m a goof at the moment. I hope you’ll forgive a bit of silliness instead.

Back in February I had the day off (when teachers have workdays, everybody wins!) so the Beetle and I drove up to our favorite bookstore. While there, I found Rules of Thumb, a neat little book of essays about the writing life. One of the essays discussed writer’s quirks - the weird little things we do or say or wear or listen to while working. I got to thinking and realized that I, too, have quirks.

- The four little guinea pig pirates on the corner of my hutch have to be arranged the right way. If someone moves one (or more), my eye will be drawn to them until I fix them.

- I cannot write in silence. Music from the iPod is great, but noise from the television is okay, too. My desk doesn’t face the TV, so I’m not distracted by whatever’s on. But I have to be able to hear something.

- I have to put on my fuzzy purple socks before I sit down to write, because I hate wearing shoes, but my feet get awfully cold. Sometime I even have to wear my fingerless gloves. I’m told this happens to other writers as well, which makes me wonder why we don’t all die of some bizarre form of frostbite.

So there you go…now it’s your turn. Tell us what little behaviors would get you committed if you performed them in front of normal people! Spill, y’all!

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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As an author, I like to think that my latest book is my best book.  I look back on my first couple of novels, and while I still feel a certain pride in that early work, I also cringe at some passages.  I believe that I have been steadily improving my craft over the past decade and at this point, with eleven books written (nine of them in print, one in the the pipeline, one waiting to be sold) spanning four different series, I feel that I’ve come a long way from those first efforts.

So when I’m asked, “What’s your best book?” I usually name my most recent publication.  When I’m asked, “Which book of yours should I read first?” I’ll usually recommend the first book of my current series.  But occasionally I’m asked, “What’s your favorite of all your books?”  That’s another matter entirely.

Certain books of mine are dearer to me than others.  This has nothing to do with how good or how flawed I might think they are.  It has everything to do with the emotions I drew upon when I wrote them, with the characters I encountered as I developed them, and with what milestones they might represent in my career.  My favorites of those books I’ve published so far are The Outlanders, the middle book of my first trilogy, and Weavers of War, the final book of my Forelands series.

The Outlanders is one of those books that I mentioned in the first paragraph.  Yeah, there are parts of the novel that make me cringe and cover my face and say “No!  Tell me I didn’t actually write that!  How did that get past my editor?”  (Always easiest to blame the editor.  I mean, I’m just the writer.  It couldn’t be my fault, right?)   But the book is special for me in a couple of ways.  I’d known that I had one book in me.  I’d been writing Children of Amarid in my head for the better part of a decade before I actually sat down to write it.  But I wasn’t convinced that I could write a second book, or that I could make it as good as the first.  Turns out I made it better.  The Outlanders convinced me that I could make a career of writing.

It also introduced me to characters who remain to this day some of the best I’ve ever written.  They were complex and conflicted, and they surprised me again and again.  I had more fun writing The Outlanders than I’ve had with any other book.  I challenged myself, I did things with character and plot that I hadn’t known I could do.  I learned a tremendous amount.  All of which was good, because I lost both my parents while writing that book.  I wrote it during the most difficult emotional time of my life.  And that book, along with my wife and first child (the second hadn’t been born yet), were all that kept me sane.  So yeah, it’s my favorite.  Not my best, but the one I love most.

Weavers of War, on the other hand, is absolutely one of my best.  But I love it for a slightly different reason.  The final book of the LonTobyn series, Eagle-Sage, received a lot of criticism from people who thought that it didn’t do a good enough job of completing the series.  It offered resolution, but I think some people felt that the book didn’t peak quite as high as it should have.  And though I think it was the best I could do at the time, I have also wondered if I just wasn’t very good at ending a series.  With Weavers of War, I proved to myself that I could write a kick-ass series conclusion.  That probably sounds self-serving and full of myself, but that’s okay.  We all have our insecurities in whatever profession we pursue, and authors are no different.  This was my biggest insecurity, and Weavers helped me get over it.

One of the books I’ve yet to publish, or even sell – the first book in my contemporary fantasy — is my other favorite.  It represents a huge departure for me: the first novel I’ve written that isn’t epic fantasy.  Again, as with The Outlanders, I love this book because it challenged me, forced me to grow as an artist, introduced me to characters who are unlike any I’ve written before, and ultimately showed me that I could do more as a writer than I had ever believed.  I guess that’s what makes me fall in love with a book:  that struggle to become more than I am, to stretch myself, to step out of my creative comfort zone.

So, fellow writers, never mind which book is your best or the one I should read first.  Which of the books you’ve written is your favorite?

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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One of the questions I get fairly often (and, I suspect, so do most other writers) is “How much control do you really have over the cover art/book format/back-cover-blurbs?”

Actually, the real question people get a lot (though I haven’t, because I’ve been very very lucky with my covers) is, “Why did you let them put that awful thing on your cover?” or “That didn’t look ANYTHING LIKE your main character, how come it looks like that?” or other things to that effect. This is something I’ve talked about on my personal journal more than once, and so besides talking about it here I’ll point you at previous entries on this topic:

1. Art Fact Sheets: Harlequin’s data entry system for information about what an author might want to see on her cover.

2. The actual art fact sheet for HEART OF STONE.

Having provided what, by dint of actually having links of their own, are clearly *not* short answers to the question, the short answer to the question is: “Writers have pretty much no control at all.”

This gets quite long, so I’m going to attempt a cut tag *drumroll*:

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Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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A reviewer questioned why I chose to put the Rogue Mage universe, the alterniverse of the Enclaves, in an ice-age instead of in a hot-house of global warming. To me it was so obvious that I thought it was a trick. I mean, why would I put a story about angels and demons in a place that is exactly like our world today? But then I realized that there were lots of answers to the reviewer’s question hovering around in my brain, so I thought I’d toss a few ideas out, things relating to the question of the ice-age in the Enclave world, and things about why a writer chooses the world he/she does.

First, I was trying to get as far away from the *reality* of our world as I could get. Cold and ice, glaciers, mountainous hellholes full of demons seemed to work. As the world grew on paper, so did my feelings abut the characters, the hardships they faced, etc. The setting became almost a character itself, evolving and affecting the storyline and adding conflict as much as the actions of a character did.

Second it was winter when I started this conceptual journey. We were not too far distant from a 22 inch snowfall, the deepest ever recorded in our area. Reality can drive a writer’s thoughts. Duh.

Third, there are great sites online about ice-ages. This one is pretty cool. (Pardon the pun.) http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/why_4_cool_periods.html

As to why a writer chooses the climate, cityscape, time period, urban, sea, or forest settings we do? Well, a lot of it is the simple thing I thought about when the reviewer asked the question in her critique. I think it has a lot to do with what we want out of the book we are writing, the logical part of the answer to the question. It’s hard to do a highly sexually charged book set in a cold place, but easy to do it on a hot seashore. Hard to write an epic about magic set in modern times. Impossible to set pirate book in a desert. (Sorry Misty. I couldn’t resist.)

But a lot of the reasons are deeper, more from the subconscious. I am now writing a book about a shape changer—a skinshifter or skinwalker—and set it in New Orleans, in a world similar to ours but with witches and vampires and other things that do magic and go bump in the night. And that city, of course, is where the concept of modern urban fantasy originated, at least in my opinion. Anne Rice and her Interview With a Vampire. OMG! I was a kid when it came out, I guess. And even then I *very* seldom would reread a book. But I guess I read that novel three or four times. It hit me on a level that brought my must to life as much as lightning did Frankenstein. It was part of what drove me to write.

I wasn’t thinking about that when I chose the city, not logically, anyway. But New Orleans has always called to me, the scents, tastes (food,) sounds, textures of that place. I love it. And when I set Jane Yellowrock in that city, in the French Quarter, the rest just seemed to fall into place.

 So. Maybe our other writers (David, Misty, Catie, and all you other guys and gals out there) will share how your alterniverse(s) affect you and your writing.Faith Hunter      

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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