Today is the fourth of July, a wonderful holiday because it gave us the country I love so much. It is one of those holidays so divorced from all the pain and sorrow that came up to it, all those years ago, but still meaningful for me. I just don't really get into the celebrations as much (for anything actually). We have some friends coming over for board games and grilling, but nothing else really.

My dentist visit went fairly well. He said the weird feeling in my tongue should be gone in a few weeks, if it goes more than a month, then get another appointment. Otherwise, things seem to be going pretty well and I'm on the way to recovery. I suspect in two weeks, most of my discomfort should be completely gone.

Got some interesting idea to work with Fedran, my steam punk world. I've been slowly creating the languages for the world as I went, but struggled a bit with the writing systems. While wandering through the Unicode charts, I saw a couple really pretty script languages already in the charts, so I'm thinking about using them for my writing systems. The desert folk pretty much already use Katakana and Hiragana for the word constructions, so why not just use that for the writing system also? For the more common language, I considered Canadian Syllabics or Ethiopic. Yes, they aren't really "fantasy" scripts, but to a purely English reader, they are exotic enough to get the feel of the language and I'm already planning on coming up with the grammar myself. I'd also use Tengwar, if I could, but it isn't in the Unicode planes yet and I'm not entirely sure about the copyright of the scripts; the Tolkien estate seems very... rabid about legal threats but if it gets in Unicode, that pretty much says the symbols isn't limited (and maybe that is why it isn't there yet).

I think languages are a wonderful thing in fantasy worlds. I love playing with them, but it really seems to direct how they respond. Obviously, I'm not that experienced in creating custom languages but that is part of the fun.

Other writing news: I'm still working on chapters 1-3 of DG. I just finished the rewrite of chapter 1 and I'm a lot happier with it. It cleans up a lot of the passive voice in the original and ramps up the interesting bits a lot. It also went from six thousand words down to four. If any history is to judge, the first ten chapters are going to be the hard part. After that, I'll start editing less on the individual chapters. My goal is to be finished with this edit by GenCon this year.