Journals of Fedran

Origins, Hasan, Second-Hand Dresses 6, Spoilers, The Choice, and One More

2017-07-05T05:00:00Z

This week introduces our second love interest for the novel, Hasan. Lily's life gets more complicated as the two men who were responsible for her not being chosen for a wife have come back into her life, months before she officially becomes a kudame.

Origins

The first chapters of Second-Hand Dresses came because of my effort for the Journals of Fedran, a collection of short stories set in my world of Fedran. I originally wrote the first chapter of The Silk Touch which was about a debutante arriving in her family's town and meeting a potential husband because of a carriage accident.

It, like Raging Alone and other pieces ended up being a larger piece. The original intent of Journals was to create a newspaper-like entry which had various stories ending in cliff-hangers. That didn't really work since I like to view the stories as discrete projects instead of attached to a single one.

When I submitted the first chapter of The Silk Touch to my writing group, the folks who were really into romance told me it was a great start and not to write it piecemeal. So, I wrote Second-Hand Dresses instead… which ended up having the same problems with The Silk Touch in that it was better treated as a full novel.

Hasan

Hasan is a contrast with Kendrick. Where I established Kendrick as dark, moody, and mercurial, Hasan needed to be the opposite. It is obvious what he wants and how he goes about it. He is persistent but no less passionate about Lily.

Her lure to him should be pretty obvious. He never stopped caring for her and is willing to give her the attention, love, and passion that she's been missing for nine years.

Second-Hand Dresses 6: A New Home

With her decision to embrace becoming a kudame, Lily is faced with the consequences of her choice, the biggest is moving out of Rose Manor and into her own home. Thankfully, the Kasin family was willing to provide someone to ease her into her new life, though the person they selected was the last one she hoped to see.

Read the chapter at https://fedran.com/second-hand-dresses/chapter-06/.

Spoilers

The next few sections have some spoilers.

The Choice

I'm still planning on writing The Silk Touch but as a more story about one woman and one man. Second-Hand Dresses ended up going in a different direction with Lily having the affections of two men, Kendrick and Hasan, and having to choose between the two.

Well, as I got to thinking about it, I remembered that I really don't like many of the “choice scenes” of romance novels where the main character has to choose between the men she loves. I love the teasing, talking, and interactions, but the “I have to leave you” never sat well with me. There are authors who do it well and ones who don't.

I came to the conclusions that I didn't want that type of ending. Second-Hand Dresses became more of a “why choose” with the eventual intent that Lily does choose one over the other, but she doesn't lose her relationship with the other. In effect, a polyamorous story with primary and secondary relationships written in the constraints of the Tarsan culture I'm developing.

And One More

That was a pretty good direction until about half a year ago when I was talking with one of the ladies of the writing group and realized I had another problem with my original plot, consent and communication. Consent is important to me as is communication. It is one reason I have a trigger warning on the legal page of my books and I believe in being forward about where I'm going.

The story written at that point focused on the two men. The problem was Hasan. He was a married man who never fall out of love with Lily. As their relationship grew deeper, I realized that I was basically writing an adultery piece because Hasan would never honest with his own wife.

There are a couple ways of handling that, one is not have Hasan married. The other was to include Hasan's wife (Mindil) into the story and let all four of them figure out a balance between their interests. Some of this came from a depressing article about a woman who was poly because her husband was a serial cheater; I didn't want that. I wanted consent with all the adults involved and for them to find an equilibrium.

That was important to me, not only for my beliefs, but also because I think it would be a fun story to write about Lily, Kendrick, Hasan, and Mindil.

Patrons

If you like it, please review my books or even become a patron. My first three novels are free on my website. Reviews, conversation, and subscriptions are what pays for the next book. Two of those only require time and not a single dollar but help me immensely.

I do have my books properly edited. By the time I finish serializing them, they have gone through at least two editors and a number of beta readers. The patronage is what pays for that, the more I get, the faster I can finish a book and move to the next one.

Subscribers get access to future novels I'm still working on, including the currently being serialized Second-Hand Dresses and the mostly completed Flight of the Scions.

Sand and Blood 17, Flight of the Scions 23, magical healing, and power addiction

2016-06-22T05:00:00Z

Both chapters this week deal with the interplay of differing personalities working together. I didn't intended it to line up, but it was interesting that it did. I like cooperative stories. I love it when people work together instead of infighting or going their own way. That is reflected in some of my writing, more so with these two “three character” novels that I apparently wrote but didn't realize it until I wrote this.

Sand and Blood 17: An Evening Run

One of the topics I haven't seen frequently in novels is the idea of addiction. These teenagers (or young folks) gain these super powers and can do tremendous powers. Excluding the ones that just turn evil right away, there isn't much about what it is like to have these powers. Most of the time we get a short montage training session and then they are off.

In my world, stronger powers are addictive since there is a rush of power and an euphoria that comes with it. For the Shimusògo, the surge comes from running at high speed and having the power of the clan spirit flowing through it. A long time ago, I once was a rather obscure anime about a bunch of girls who raced down a ramp and performed long jobs. One of the major themes in that story was this burst of light as they lost themselves into the run and they had a “perfect” sprint. While Rutejìmo will (probably) never experience that rush, that anime drama does make its mark in this chapter.

This is also the point where “Shimusògo Run” became the clan motto. I may have used it earlier, but this was the first time. They run, it is the only thing they do to touch their spirit and that brief touch with a god-like being is addictive. They find peace in running. If you look through this novel and the next, you may notice that every Shimusògo runs when they are stressed or need to calm down. That is all tied into this idea of joy of running (something I personally never have experienced).

Oh yeah, and Rutejìmo learns how to throw fireballs using a rocks.

Read Sand and Blood 17: An Evening Run at https://fedran.com/sand-and-blood/chapter-17/.

Flight of the Scions 23: Midnight

There is a lot in this chapter, but one I can't talk about until book four of this series. There are a lot of little hooks with the rest of the series throughout this book, I have all four planned, but they are (hopefully) subtle ones that won't be obvious until later. We'll see if I'm that awesome in three years.

So, you may notice the casual healing in this chapter. It was right before I read a book on RPG design that explained how magical healing was a crutch. I had already established that Virsian has magical healing and decided not to change it. Instead, healing became one of the rarest of magical talents (right up with folding) in my fantasy world and the dalpre is one of those rare individuals. Actually, that ended up leading me into an idea for another book, Her Hidden Claws, which if I write it, would be her story as a little girl finding out about her powers.

This is a world-building chapter in that it talks a bit about dalpre. In my world, they are a crafted race of humans that were spliced with animal features. There are some other traits encoded into them, much like Mercedes Lackey's Black Gryphon, which I adored. Some of them are obvious, some less so. The biggest is that the child of a dalpre is always a dalpre. They are also vulnerable to mental domination (seen in the “red ball” chapter from earlier) and orders.

This chapter also gives a hint of Kanéko's compassion when she worries about the horse she injured a few chapters later. The hardest part is that she is a teenage girl, she doesn't always do the right thing, but she means well. In many ways, she is more heroic than Rutejìmo, but she also treated her weakness as a challenge instead of something to accept.

Read Flight of the Scions 23: Midnight https://fedran.com/flight-of-the-scions/chapter-23/ (subscribers)

Italics

So, this little micro-conversation showed up on Twitter.

@bbeaulieu I agree with it. I just didn't with my books because I have language dependent plots and use notionally translated pretty heavily
— D. Moonfire (@dmoonfire) June 19, 2016

I never really thought about it before, obviously, and I went back and italicized all of the conlang words in Sand and Blood. Because of that, I didn't want to go back and remove all those words (though it required a lot more effort on my part). Also, in Flight of the Scions, the language is very important to the plot and I use both notationally translated ("you bitch") and untranslated words (barichirōma) rather heavily. After a bit of thinking, I decided to keep the italics in place because it was a visual indicator that a different language was being spoke.

The reason I decided to leave it in the Sand series (because everyone is speaking the same language) was consistency with Kanéko's story.

The hard part is deciding what to do with the telepathy. I foolishly included a lot of that in this novel also and there are times when I have all three languages being used in the same chapter (though I don't think in the same paragraph). I know that I'm going to use guillemet for telepathy, such as «You can hear this in your mind.» I originally got the idea from Diane Duane's So You Want To Be a Wizard series which I absolutely adore. She used parenthesis in there but I drifted slightly from the original idea.

Now, the other difference was that when I originally wrote it, telepathy was sans-serif while the rest was serif. That changed two years ago when I wrote Journals of Fedran because I used sans-serif for out-of-world elements and serif for in-world. I'm inclined to keep that convention, which means I'll probably leave telepathy italicized and serif.

Patrons

More so in the near future than the past, my writing is supported by patrons and donations. Releasing the books as Creative Commons means you can read it before you buy it. If you like it, then consider donating money or subscribing to have access to all my drafts and published novels.

Sand and Ash progress

I ordered the proof of the new Sand and Blood with its shiny cover. I'm also waiting for the editor for Ash. Once I get that, I have a little bit of page shuffling to add some extra cruft at the back (for its license and advertising of the other books in the series). It's taking a while, but I'm almost there and that excited me.

Missing Files

The electronic copies of the files are still missing, I'm obsessing about getting the books out and I don't think I'll have the recovered until after July 16th.

Sand and Ash, Creative Commons, and Patreon

2015-08-09T05:00:00Z

I still remember when I went to create the ebooks for Sand and Blood. I spent two days toying with the idea of making it Creative Commons licensed and simply giving it away. In the end, I didn't have the courage to do it. It was too scary and I had just spent a couple thousand dollars to make the best book I could possibly create.

When I finally hit the “submit” button, I told myself that when Sand and Blood paid for itself, I'd relicense the work. Recoup my costs and then give it for free. I wanted to do the same thing Cory Doctrow did with his books.

Gifting

I've gotten so much out of Creative Commons that I wanted to help. It's been part of me for many years much like the other “gift community” licenses that helped me get into computers and programming.

Over the years, I've given away a lot of things. Almost all of my code is available on Github including my games and personal projects. The programs I use, the libraries I love, they are all given away in various forms of licenses that allows it. Even my major programming project, Author Intrusion was always going to be free; that hasn't changed.

I'm a product of my past. It was because of those libraries, tools, and programs I used to learn were free, I feel the need to do the same.

Editing

The problem came down to polish. With a computer program, you can post something out there that isn't 100% perfect. First impressions were nice, but so was getting it into the hands of people and getting feedback.

With writing, it is harder. I don't want my first impression to be riddled with typos, but at the same time, I want to get it out. For a year now, I've been telling fans that Sand and Ash would be out later because I couldn't make it perfect.

I can't make it perfect, not and get it out on time. I have these stories there, sitting on my computer, almost in a completed state, but I can't gather up enough to push it past that final step.

Why? Because of my family. I have priorities and my family is number one. Taking care of them is important and things are in a state that won't give me a lot of liquid funds for a few years. And that means hobbies and pet projects get pushed aside.

But it still frustrated me. I tried posting Raging Alone on Wattpad and Penflip but it didn't quite feel right. I didn't want to put up something that was a draft (even one that had gone through my writing group) without it being polished.

Obscurity

I'm obscure. I don't know if it is my voice being quiet, my lack of advertising, or what, but I don't gather a lot of people even on my social network of choice. I have less than two hundred people that follow me, when other authors are happy with their tens of thousands.

Cory stated it very well in his post (link above). Piracy isn't the problem, obscurity is.

Doing things like the SFBPO will help that, but I have years to go before I can pull myself out of the shifting clouds of other authors out there. I'm not worthy of attention yet.

Patreon

Another author I respect and cherish is Ksenia Anske, a very enthusiastic writer and someone I've enjoyed talking to. She has done the same thing as Cory and it worked out. And when she does it, it feels right to me. I like what she's done and I think it fits with my personality, my style of writing, and my attempts to earn fans.

One of the things she did was have a Patreon to give people the chance to show their appreciation. She posts freely, but then accepts donations. The same with some of my favorite comics, such as Grrl Power and Questionable Content.

They aren't perfect. They do reasonable edits but then post the best thing they can. The other thing they do is post over time, not all at once.

Thoughts

I've been thinking about it for a while. Earlier this week, someone made a comment that set me down a train track of thoughts and I decided to try it out. I already had a choice, wait 1-2 years for Sand and Ash to come out, or post it slowly over time and give those who want it a chance to read it.

The idea evolved since I pulled the trigger on Wednesday. Now, I've decided I'm going to post freely on a few sites: the main one, Wattpad, and Penflip. The main site will have the most features, mainly because I'm going to work on the wiki at the same time and cross-link everything. I can also build up the ebooks automatically and make them available as I post.

These are drafts. Yeah, I've sent them through the writing group and gotten feedback, but they aren't perfect. I felt guilty of that, but I'm also setting up a Patreon page to give people a chance to help me get them edited and covers made. No one has to donate to read them, but the choice is there.

The entire point of the Patreon is to get it edited. I'm still going to do it. Without help, it may take longer, but I'm dedicated to getting Sand and Ash polished, edited, and illustrated. Patreon will just make that happen faster.

Schedule

I'm going to post on Wednesdays for now. No specific time, but on that day. If I do a chapter a week, I should have a buffer of about a year if I include the sequels in this effort.

I'm also going to occasionally post stories for my Journals project. I already have issue 1 (religion) and issue 2 (games) planned.

Overall, I can easily produce 6-10k words every month for the next two years. Even if I hit one of the goals and increase the rate, I'm probably good for at least a year.

Rewards

There are two rewards on the Patreon. The $1 allows for voting on the short stories, mainly what I'm focusing on.

At the $4 point, I'll give a link to the entire novel (which is completed) in its current form. Yeah, that won't be a public link, but it is something. I'm sure the story will be compelling enough for at least someone to want to read ahead.

And, if interest in Sand and Ash gets Sand and Blood sales up, I'm still planning on making the first novel Creative Commons licensed once it hit the black.

Other New

In other news, I turned forty today. There isn't much to say about it other than I have high hopes of my writing career in the next ten years.

Writing News

2015-04-12T05:00:00Z

It's been a few weeks since I've posted about writing. The reasons are the same as usual: obsessing about writing, trying to figure out the program of the day, solving problems at work, and struggling to be the best father that I can.

That usually makes the blog posting near the bottom, right below “a few more minutes of sleep.” But then I'm reminded that sometimes my posts are the only way the rest of my family knows what's going on.

Quite a few things happened in the last few weeks.

Sand and Bone

I finished submitting the last chapters of Sand and Bone to the writing group. This will bring the end to the entire trilogy, which I've been working on for the last few years.

I worry about the ending of books in general, I really like a satisfying conclusion to a book. This is even more for the end of a series, which has to be a solid end to three books. The feedback of the writing group was fairly positive, so that will help a little.

The next steps are, unfortunately, the same as Sand and Ash. I'll put it in the queue of books to be edited and move to the next one.

Raging Alone

One of the Journals of Fedran serials was Raging Alone. It was a coming of age piece about Desòchu as he, as a sixteen year old boy, struggles with his anger over his mother's death.

This series ties into the Sand trilogy since it gives some hints of events in Sand and Ash and Sand and Bone, but no major spoilers. It also expands on my R5-D4 plots with interconnected stories.

I submitted the fourth (and last) chapter to the writing group for this week. Once I get the feedback edited, it will be added to the queue.

Lyrics

A few months ago, I found out one of my co-workers in Russian was in a fantasy metal band. It was a pleasant news since they bought a few copies of Sand and Blood, but even more when they asked for a little help with their lyrics.

I came up with a few of them and send them back. Not much happened other than the occasional feedback that they were recording. And then earlier this week, I got this link to their album.

And if you expand the lyrics, you'll see my name. I wrote Trollhunter, They Are Coming For Me, and The Last Enemy. I also did some editing on some others, but not enough for credits.

So, if you like metal bands with a fantasy feel, you might check out Gorge of IX. I don't get anything, just like to help others. And if you want to see my co-worker, he is the protagonist in their video, Death Parade.

Fictionary

As I mentioned earlier, I made a fictionary for Sand and Blood. They announced it along with dictionaries for Android (they had Kindle earlier). It is a free download and gives hints about most of the obscure names I've used in the book. I'll be creating ones for Ash, Bone, and Raging Alone in the next month or so.

Winding up for WisCon

We are also winding up for our big family trip which ends at WisCon. I'm waiting for the schedule on that, but I said I was interested in the sign-out and a few panels.

Coming up Next

I'm not entirely sure what I'm working on next. Either I'm going to work on Flight of the Scions again and get on the queue (my first post in 2006 was about it) or work on Second-Hand Dresses, a Regency romance set in my fantasy world and part of the Journals of Fedran project.

Creating a Fictionary

2015-03-15T05:00:00Z

Wandering about the Reddit, I've seen a discussion or two about a fictionary, a specialized ebook dictionary for a book. A fictionary lets a reader click on a name, place, or obscure word and see the meaning. Most of these descriptions are spoiler-free, they are just reminder for the reader. For larger works that spans a dozen books, this could be helpful when it's been a few hundred pages since you last saw a specific character or someone referenced some place.

Five days ago, I came up on a post on Reddit about fictionaries for the Dresden Files. One of the interesting thing is that Fictionary is now providing author services to let any author create a fictionary for their book and have it hosted over at http://thefictionary.net/.

Since I was stalling on my programming project, I figured it would be a fun to try making a fictionary for Sand and Blood. One of the biggest complaints is that I had some difficult names for English readers (e.g., Rutejìmo and Desòchu for example). A fictionary would be a way of possibly relieving that since I'm not planning on changing the character names for world reasons.

Getting Started

After a brief discussion on Reddit, I eventually switched over to email to figure out the process. The person running thefictionary.net doesn't have their name anywhere, but let's go with “Fictionary” just for purposes of this conversation.

Fictionary provided me with three files:

A template spreadsheet with a number of columns.
A sample version with a single entry.
A sample HTML which is what the dictionary entry will look like.

The only thing I, as the author, needed to provide back was the spreadsheet various cells filled in.

For each term, there were the following:

Value: This is the name of the dictionary term, a proper phrase or single word that is relevant for the book. For example, “Rutejìmo”.
Additional Matches: This is any additional terms, separated by semicolons, that also point to the same entry. In my case, “Great Shimusogo Rutejìmo” and “Jìmo” are the same guy so they went here.
Key Facts: This is where you can have a key/value pair of entries. Some authors have this, such as date of birth or family members, but I won't for reasons I'll describe below. It is also optional.
Definition: This is the definition of the term. Even though it is a cell, it can be fairly long.
Importance: This is either blank or with a numerical value of how important an entry it. Lower is more important. Fictionary uses this to determine how multiple entries show up on common words, like “Valley” in my case.
Person Indicator: “Yes” or “No”.

In the end, it is pretty easy thing to fill out. Copy/paste from your notes (or a pretty form of it) and then send it in.

The hardest part is making sure you get all the terms. One of the services that Fictionary provides (and how they are paying for the free hosting of the dictionary file) is an analysis of the document to find unusual words or phrases. I considered it money worth spent, mainly because it found a single typo (there will be version 1.1.1 or 1.2.0 in the near future because of it). It also gave me a decent list of things to make sure I had properly documented.

Before that point

Before I started creating a fictionary, I had already created a wiki-like and a resulting website that had information about all the characters, quotes, and details of the world. I figured it wouldn't be too hard to convert that into whatever format Fictionary wanted.

One of the biggest things I knew I needed to do was handle the “spoiler-free” part of the terms. Originally, I just tagged the entire page as having spoilers. However, with my future plans for writing, earlier entries would be helpful to later authors. To work with that, I changed it from tagging the entire page to having a “spoiler” tag for specific works.

This made it interesting for Rutejìmo's page since he already has spoilers for Raging Along and Sand and Blood.

What I did was write a program that includes the entire page until it hits a relevant spoiler tag. Since Sand and Blood happened after Raging Alone, it would include spoilers for Raging Alone but stop as soon as it encountered the Sand and Blood spoiler. When I create a secondary fictionary for Sand and Ash, it will include spoilers for Raging Alone and Sand and Blood, but stop before the Sand and Ash spoilers. I think that fits the intent of the fictionary.

It is also why I don't have data elements for characters. Their name, date of birth, date of death, and even who they fall in love with can be a spoiler for a later plot. If I leave those points in the linear narrative, I can cut at the spoilers and still give the relevant information.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results.

Expanding entries

One thing I realized is that filling in the wiki is an exhausting process. I worked on it for a week or so previously, but as I prepared for the fictionary, I realized it was still missing so much. I took the effort to really expand out the characters, providing a few paragraphs back story for every character who showed up or was referenced in the novel.

The length of the entries isn't an issue. I have a couple thousand word entries and I could probably easily ten times that and it will still work. Not to mention, I could easily expand the entries by a few orders of magnitude and the Fictionary's system will still work.

I saw that Fictionary provides wiki service. Obviously, I'm not using it but I could see why some authors could use it. Paying someone to create a wiki (which is what most fictionaries are based on) has a certain appeal. Hand a copy of the book over and you have a wiki created magically about every character, location, and proper noun in the book.

At least until you get a couple fans willing to do it for you.

Generating the file

I was worried that I went the wrong way from the beginning. My intent with the wiki was a Wikipedia type of site. Something that gave the narrative of a character including early life, various significant events, and even follow-up links.

Seeing a small entry in the example, which was more of a list, made me think I was going in the wrong direction. However, after a late-night tweet, Fictionary sent me an email and we talked about it. I'll have to admit, it is really nice talking to someone who knew their stuff and the limitations of their software. We quickly figured out that I could directly generate one of their interim formats and get the same results.

A couple hours later, I basically had the file generated from YAML and Markdown (my source files). Less than a day later, I saw my first fictionary for a book I wrote. It was cool. I found some typos, fixed them, and sent up a new version.

Going live

The fictionary should go live in a week or so. I'm sure I'll make an announcement when it does.

However, what did go live was my updates to the site. The wiki-like now has all the details, including spoilers for at least two works. It also has a fairly detailed character page including a list of every character in or referenced by the book. This also includes all the quotes from before.

One thing I've written is a plot summary of Sand and Blood. I hesitated on this, but in the end I did it for a few reasons. The biggest is that I will have a second and third book. A “previously on” summary is good to have for those who delve into the other books, or just want to know what happens. It's marked with a spoiler, of course.

Styles

One of the side effects of doing all this is my three major sites for Fedran have the same style:

It is a little thing, but I'm beginning to like it. It is quirky, but relatively stylistic with a few subtle things.

Meandering This Week

2015-01-26T06:00:00Z

Over the last few weeks, I've been trying to knock things off my to do list so I could focus on Author Intrusion. I thought I was ready to switch over, but then I realized I needed to focus on something big this week at work and I'm stick. So, it would be better to work with smaller items for the time begin. So, this week is another to do week.

Sick Again

I was perfectly fine when I headed out Thursday night. By the time I got home, I wasn't. In a few short hours, I got nailed by a nasty head cold which has made everything difficult in general. Thankfully, I have a wonderful spouse who lets me sleep, but I still had to get other things done.

SSL

I managed to switch the Journals of Fedran website over to SSL thanks to StartSSL.com. I know that there isn't nearly enough there for privacy concerns, but I believe that most sites should be SSL these days and thankfully, I don't have to pay a couple hundred a year to get it.

Editing

Probably the best thing that came out of last week was going over edits for Under the Streets and Raging Alone (Part 1). Both of these ended up being rather drastic reworking, mainly because of a beta reader pointing out a few flaws.

I've uploaded new versions to the website, but I don't really expect anyone to read them. Hope, yes, but until I get these edited, I'm not really pushing them.

A question came up during the edit, but I'm going to make that a different post.

MfGames Culture

Since I can't focus for Author Intrusion (including the Markdown parser), I decided to work on little things. One of them is to hopefully figure out a system for managing dates in my little fantasy world.

Dates and calendars are a nasty little thing, mainly because so much code is written to handle the Gregorian calendar but not other calendars (Islamic for example) or a fictional one. I, on the other hand, use different cultures when I write and I'd like the ability to tag various elements with the “in world” date but still have the information to put them on a time line or figure out when one chapter is before another.

I started MfGames Culture quite a few years ago with the idea of writing a library for that, but it was never a high priority and it never went anywhere. Eventually, I planned on using it in Author Intrusion so I should the difference of times between chapters without faking it via the Gregorian calendar.

Most of the system is based on Julian Days (JD) as a generic baseline (it is just a decimal, so its easy to work with). The plan is just to get the two calendars written up and capable of parsing the formats into JD and back again.

Rolling up the Weekend

2015-01-05T06:00:00Z

Every time I “finish” a project, such as last week getting Journals of Fedran to a stopping point, I spent a week or two working on the little things that had to be done. Some of these are just items that accumulated while I obsessed about a writing project or the detail-oriented items that have to be done in the project.

It is amazing how little items add up. I've only been working on Journals for two months and I had over a hundred items on my to do list (written in Markdown, of course).

But, I've been plucking at it for a week and managed to get it down to 73 items. As they were little things, it feels like I haven't gotten anything done.

Journals website

Because Journals is going to be Creative Commons licensed, I needed to figure out how to create the website for it. This is something that would have to be done by the time I was completely done, but I ended up doing it this week.

Redoing the website also meant I revisited the style of the Fedran sites and trying to get something a bit more cohesive across all of them (including Sand and Blood. That might take longer, but the results are pretty good so far. I'm using a common Git repository for the shared style, so updating the other sites will be easier.

I know I probably shouldn't post Journal at this point, but I wanted to ask for alpha readers and it was easier to post the link to them when they are on a website.

To work on that, I created two Github projects to help support it:

Critique partners

I think I'm getting to the point I need a critique partner or two. On the first, Maggie Stiefvater posted a critique partner hookup. I found two people who might be in the same genre/area as me. We'll see if they'll work.

Part of this comes from the success of the writing group. There are a lot more people there, which means more people asking to submit their entries. Because of my writing output speed, I have set myself as a “if no one else wants it, I'll take it” so others get a chance, but it also means I'll go long periods without being able to submit.

Finding someone willing to alpha read is important to me. And I think I'm at the point where it has become something I need if I want to keep going.

As part of this process, I ended up doing a longer critique. It was fun seeing another person's writing, everyone finds a different ways to say things and that is one thing that makes writing fun.

Tarsan calendar

One of the little things that had to be resolved with Journals was creating a calendar for the non-desert culture. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but this week ended up being a good one for doing that. I like the results, though I'm definitely getting a world-building fatigue when I do too much of it in a single shot.

More work on Miwāfu

Another part of the world is Miwāfu, the first conlang for the desert folk. I got a little work on that done this week, but the website isn't ready either.

Fedran wiki

https://github.com/dmoonfire/fedran

Because Journals is licensed under by-nc-sa as is the Fedran site, I decided to move the wiki over to Github also. I don't really expect anyone to jump in and start documenting what I wrote. I wanted to support Creative Commons in some way and this is a way of being more public about it.

In a different byline, I've had fan art and fiction before. It's a great feeling seeing it out there. I'm hoping the same thing will happen with Fedran, though I'm hoping it doesn't take fifteen years like before.

I think Creative Commons is a better way of indicating acceptance toward fans than something like Amazon's shared worlds does. I know there is a “gray area” when it comes to fan art, but I'd rather be explicitly open to it instead of saying “no” to start with.

Heavy metal lyrics

A Russian friend asked me to come up with “more English” lyrics for their metal band. I said yes and wrote five song lyrics. I'll find out in a few weeks if I got the right feel for it, but it was fun coming up with fantasy metal lyrics.

Ebook library

I learned the hard way that ownCloud doesn't play well with Calibre as well as Dropbox. I learned this when my main ebook library corrupted right as I was reformatting my machine. Since I wanted to pick up Adam j. Whitlatch's new book, I had to get it up and running again.

Interestingly, when I pulled the Calibre library to my Linux machine, it managed to recover most of the files for me. Adding in the last of the books, I migrated everything to a Windows 7 machine and got it hooked back up to serving OPDS file.

The main reason I like OPDS is that I can have a server at home that let's me download books. Calibre's server also lets you sort by date entered (something that most places don't seem to add), so I can see what's new to pull on my phone. Overall, it's nice for having books on demand.

Created a dictionary file

Since I decided to put my conlang, Miwāfu, on Github, I went with a wiktionary-style Markdown files. This is good for individual pages, but less so when I'm trying to find a word while doing translations. So, one lunch, I wrote a Perl program to take the individual files and create a dictionary. This is a pretty generic process, which means I might be able to provide it as a library for other conlang tools.

Formatting ebooks

I did format two ebooks and posted one. Fun things, but they didn't take too much time to figure out and finish.

Beyond that

Beyond that, there are little things that worthy of a to do list. Things that need to get done that sometimes are just a chore. But, I got a lot done.

And for this week

This next week is going to be a scattered one. Maybe I'll knock a few more items off my to do list before I jump into the next project. Since I have two outstanding writing projects, I'll probably switch to the Markdown library and see if I can get that to a finished state.

Tarsan Standard Calendar

2015-01-01T06:00:00Z

About a year and a half ago, I created a calendar for my fantasy world, Fedran. Now because of my work with Journals of Fedran and a Reddit challenge, I need to do the same thing for the non-desert cultures.

This is going to use the same process as the above link: start with a simple calendar and then “mess it up” with various observations and politics. In the end, the intermixed calendar should appear to resemble closer to our own calendar in that it isn't neat, the months don't end in the same length, and the names are non-regular.

World mechanics

Though no one in world has figured it out, I have come up with a completely arbitrary values for what the “real” annual and monthly cycle are.

The solar cycle is currently 368.3087 days long.
The lunar cycle is currently 32.8873 days long.

Cultural mechanics

The starting point is based on the culture that created the calendar. In this case, Tarsan is one of the longest surviving country in the “civilized” world. It is a place rich with history and ritual.

Families are the most important aspect of society.
A person's mother and father are part of their identity.
- The given name comes first.
- If the mother and father come from the same family, then “dea family” is used. For example, “Djan dea Monsar” is John of the Monsar family.
- If the parent's families are separate, then the two families are both used in the name.
  - “de family” for father's family.
  - “da family” for the mother's family.
  - The order is based on who is more politically powerful, usually based on region.
  - Example would be “Marigold de Kasin da Maifir” which is Marigold with her father from the Kasin family and her mother from the Maifir family.
Names always start and end with a consonant.
Nouns end with vowels.
Lorban, the language of Tarsan, is based on Lojban. This means that most of the initial words come from that language.

Comparison with the Kyōti calendar

Because the Kyōti are split between the day and night clans, that culture will identify the exact cycle of day and night respectively faster than Tarsan. This means that this calendar will eventually get close, but there will be a lot more political changes over observation. There is also relatively less diminutions on the name because of the Tarsan's obsession with ritual and history.

Changes over time

Below are the various changes that happened over the calendar over time.

Start with the optimism

The initial calendar starts with seven periods, masti, one for each of the seven families. Each masti is fifty-two days.

Kasin mastir
Disrobin mastin
Rinfir mastim
Pun mastik
Joknig mastip
Lamaster mastit
Wilim mastil

Fortunately, Tarsan is obsessed with “order”, so this means we can get away with only the acronym of the names for the months.

364 = KM 52, DM 52, RM 52, PM 52, JM 52, LM 52, WM 52

Formalizing the weeks

To break up the longer months, the concept of a jeftu (week, short form is jef) is introduced. Each jeftu is seven days long, starting with the first day of each month. The first day is nodei (zero day). Each month has a remainder of days, a torjef (short week).

It doesn't take long

It was only a few years after the calendar was established that the fight over the calendar itself became apparent. Since the creators of the calendar were Gof da Joknig de Wilim and Fahin dea Lamaster, they were given additional days for their family's months. The reason it took so long was because there was actually a small war over this change with Lamaster taking offense because they were only going to add one to their month even though Fahin's mother and father were from the same family.

368 = KM 52, DM 52, RM 52, PM 52, JM 53, LM 54, WM 53

A bit of infighting

The Disrobin family starts a fight with the Rinfir. After a few decades of fighting, it ends when the Disrobin almost goes bankrupt and loses a great deal of face. Unable to recoup the full costs of the fight, the Rinfir steals a day.

368 = KM 52, DM 51, RM 53, PM 52, JM 53, LM 54, WM 53

Formalizing the bells

Up to this point, most people only referred to the parts of the days into vague organization.

Early morning
Late morning
Midday
Early evening
Late evening
All of the night

The first five became the foundation of the bells, a tradition of ringing a towns bells ten times throughout the day and night, each one spread evenly throughout the time. Like many numbers in Tarsan, the first is the zero-bell all the way up to the ninth bell.

The past is never over

One of the greatest hobbies in Tarsan is digging up dirt for someone's ancestors. This usually involves a lot of back-stabbing, gossip, and blackmail to figure out, but once it comes out in public, the results are usually swift.

The worst crime of Tarsan is spoiling a bloodline. When something like this happens, typically every descendant's accomplishments are taken away and their misdeeds magnified.

As it came to be, Fahin dea Lamaster's grandfather on his father's side was revealed to not be a male and also not the direct bloodline of the Lamaster family. What happened was Fahin's father's parents were actually a lesbian couple with one of them masquerading as a male for the last forty years of her life. This was possible thanks to magic, but in a patriarchal society (linage is equal but only males controlled families at the time), this was a scandal. It also negated, in society's eye, Fahin's contribution to the calendar and the two days were stripped from their month. They stripped another day because of the deception.

One would think that a fairly accurate calendar (368 days) would not be made more inaccurate, but the politics were stronger than research at the time. It would be three centuries before they would get back to the 368 day calendar.

365 = KM 52, DM 51, RM 53, PM 52, JM 53, LM 51, WM 53

Further breaking down the day

The length of time with the bells became a little too long for many tastes. Each bell was split into two, the divison called a cacra (hours, cra). This lead to a twenty-hour day (which is what I meant when I say hours in my novels because it's "close enough.")

Likewise, the hours were broken further down into mentu (minutes, ntu). There are sixty-four minutes in an hour. This number was decided by the woman (a talent with perfect time-keeping) to honor the seven great families plus her own. This broken up the hours into eight parts and then each one of those broken into eight more which resulted in the sixty-four minutes.

Derobin and Disobin split

The Disrobin family broke apart a century after the last calendar change and kicked off a civil war that lasted nearly forty years. The reasons were wide and varied, but the split was so great that the Derobin family actually split completely from Tarsan and formed a new country of Gepaul.

One of the consequences of this was a diminution of three of the month names from the formal masti to mahi.

Disrobin mastin became Dobmahin.
Pun mastik became Punmahik.
Wilim mastil became Wilmahil.

Clawing back the days.

Three hundred years after the three days were taken from the calendar, there was another battle (yeah, Tarsan fought a lot with each other and Gepaul). Three lesser families (Pinnir, Xahos, and Tibirim) who aided Rinfir and Kasin during a border dispute where deemed worth of a great reward. As the nature of the great families, these “great rewards” were typically useless posturing or empty gifts tied with strings. And what would be better than to give these allies three brand new days named after them? But, they weren't the original great family, so they got a single day each (yes, Tarsan is petty). With Pinnir having the same letter as Pun, the lesser families used two letter abbreviations.

Kasin mastir (KM)
Dobmahin (DM)
Pinnir mahap (PiM)
Rinfir mastim (RM)
Punmahik (PM)
Xahos mahar (XaM)
Joknig mastip (JM)
Lamaster mastit (LM)
Wilmahil (WM)
Tibirim mahan (TiM)

Sticking with the same block. The shorter months are considered to be all torjef or short weeks.

368 = KM 52, DM 51, Pim 1, RM 53, PM 52, XaM 1, JM 53, LM 51, WM 53, TiM 1

Further diminutions

Time always corrupts languages, usually causing the names to be shortened. Most of these were the more complicated ones. There was a lot of effort by some of the other families not have their names shortened (think Xerox's attempt to save their name).

Kastir (KM)
Pinhap (PiM)
Joktip (JM)
Lamaster (LM)

The actual days didn't change.

368 = KM 52, DM 51, Pim 1, RM 53, PM 52, XaM 1, JM 53, LM 51, WM 53, TiM 1

Bit of backroom politics

Tarsan remains a patriarchy even to the events of the novels and Journals. Much of the marriage involves dowries. There are also trade agreements or exchanges of power. A number of these happened over the next century, but we can include them in a single step.

Lamaster lost a day to Tibirim mahan.
Kasim mastir lost a day to Dobmahin.
Wilmahil lost a day to Rinfir mastim.

This results in the following block.

368 = KM 51, DM 52, Pim 1, RM 54, PM 52, XaM 1, JM 53, LM 50, WM 52, TiM 2

Finally, getting some partial days

Over a hundred fifty years after the desert clans figured out fall days, Tarsan finally accepted that the year doesn't fit neatly in a given days. Actually, it is well accepted that the idea was stolen from the desert cultures (after the Fimùchi Calculations) but Tarsan had to do things their own way. Instead of two days losing one every four and one every eight, they did something else.

Moved the short months combined into one at the end of the year.
The Xahos mahar is retained but the “i” is dropped.
There is an additional day once every three years (effectively adding 0.3 to the days).

And the results.

368.333 = KM 51, DM 52, RM 54, PM 52, JM 53, LM 50, WM 52, XM 4.333

The lesser families gain power

Over the next century or so, there were more battles and marriages, shuffling around the days. As the lesser families gained power in the country, their days were moved over to Xahos mahar.

In addition, Rinfir mastim was reduced to Rinfirm.

Kastir (KM) lost 2 days to XM
Dobmahin (DM) lost 3 days to XM
Rinfirm (RM) lost 3 days to XM
Punmahik (PM) lost 2 days to XM
Joktip (JM) lost 2 days to XM
Lamaster (LM)
Wilmahil (WM)
Xahos mahar (XM) gained 12 days

This evened out the months a bit.

368.333 = KM 49, DM 49, RM 51, PM 50, JM 51, LM 50, WM 52, XM 16.333

The Tabrin Withdrawal

The Tabrin family, a very small one with only a single estate on top of a mountain dedicated their life to observation of the sun and moon. After a number of decades, they proposed a single to the calendar to bring it in line. Normally a change like this would be laughed out of the families, but the Tabrin managed to pull of an amazing number of favors, deals, and ties that it was accepted almost unanimously.

Remove two days from Xahos mahar every 81 years. (-0.025 days).

The Tabrin family didn't explain how they came up with this change. They refused to answer until the Tarsan great families decided to press the issue. They sent a contingent of a hundred warriors (a rekihobehe) to arrest the entire family, only to find that every single member of the Tabrin family dead. Later investigations suggested that the Tabrin were killed before the proposal was ever made.

Despite pressure to ignore the Tabrin changes, it was accepted. In fact, the final decision by the great families of Tarsan made a ruling that they would allow changes to the calendar by unanimous decision by all the members. This final calendar is what would become known as the Tarsan Standard Calendar.

368.308 = KM 49, DM 49, RM 51, PM 50, JM 51, LM 50, WM 52, XM 16.308

Holidays and significant dates

Tarsan has a number of celebration days (detsalci).

One for each “birth” of each of the great families.
The day Tarsan declared victory over Gepaul.

In addition, each family has their own holidays and special dates (lazdetsalci) which is celebrated both in the family and their cities (identified with "Ku family").

Tarsan society, as a whole, is obsessed with correctness. This includes date. When a celebration day is established, it is tracked against the “correct” day even across changes. This means that any date before the final change travels across the calendar (a “traveling date” or litrudetri).

Which year to start

As I mentioned in the desert calendar, I wanted the “start” of the calendar to be 1832. This is a completely arbitrary date which is the year of the first Journals issue.

Formatting dates

Because Lorban is based on Lojban, numbers are written out (123 is “li pareci”). The numbers are as follows: 0=no; 1=pa; 2=re; 3=ci; 4=vo; 5=mu; 6=xa; 7=ze; 8=bi; 9=so.

However, to indicate a date, the short form of date (detri) of det is used to indicate the following is a date. The format is just the numbers without the “li” terminated by maha (month), dei (day), naha (year). Numbers are always zero-based. A month name can be used instead of the number.

det # maha # dei # naha

For example, for Punmahik 11, 1832, any of the following are correct:

det vo maha papa dei pabiciro naha
det Punmahik maha papa dei pabiciro naha
det Punmahik papa dei pabiciro naha (can skip named months)
det py.my. maha papa dei pabiciro naha (py.my. is “PM”)

In cultures that have numbers, a shorter form uses periods to separate the names. This format is slowly beginning to be popular in Gepaul but not in Tarsan. Zero padding is optional, but typically not used.

4.11.1832

Conclusion

There are three major calendars in my world at this point: the Tarsan one above and the two desert ones. The hardest part is writing up something that converts between the two of them, but that is a subject for a later day.

Journals of Fedran is at a stopping point

2014-12-28T06:00:00Z

Over Thanksgiving, I started working on a new project, Journals of Fedran, a collection of short stories, essays, and general world-building goodness for my fantasy world, Fedran.

I had a lot of fun writing this, mainly because I decided to write the various stories in different styles by creating characters who actually wrote the pieces. And I used the theme of an old style newspaper as the theme to gather it all together.

Writing as characters

I've never written as characters before. There were a few rough points, some of the stories, like Under the Streets and Raging Alone are definitely my prose, but Ramus and the Savage Slasher is just as much not me. But, when I established that one story was written by a character, then all of them needed to be.

There are some hints to various plots in these stories, including those writing the tales. It is fun scattering them in there, though not all of them will pan out because of my writing backlog.

Notes from the Editor
Introduction to Resonance
Ministry of Standards
Farimon’s Gift
Farimon’s Revelation
Speaking Miwāfu
Raging Alone (Part 1)
Painful Love
The Cros Gambit
Grand Cros Clashball
Bloodball
Steam Engines
Ramus and the Savage Slasher
Alone
Under the Streets
Crime of Hearts
Midlife Crisis
Growing Up
A Cup of Soup
Zoetrop Knives
Simple Chicken Soup
I Love Her, I Hate Her
Second-Hand Dresses (Part 1)
Simple Goren
Classifieds
Action
Credits
Colophon

Kind of scary how it turn out. The entire length is just under forty thousand words. Which is about ten thousand more than I expected. A lot of it came from Midlife Crisis, a short story that was recently rejected by an anthology.

Next steps

I'm pretty much at a stopping point for Journals in that I don't think I can do much more until I have an editor look at it. I've been editing, reworking, and generally staring at it for a few weeks and I'm not really getting any more progress.

Unfortunately, like Ash, I think things are going to be mostly on hold for these. Even though I'm planning on releasing this under Creative Commons, it does need a proper editor or two to finish it up. So, I can't really say its completely “done” until that happens.

Alpha reading

That said, I'm still going to post the alpha version of the Journals up on my website. These are self-edited, but not quite the polish that I would consider acceptable for the final or print version.

Version 0.0.0 (Alpha)

I'm throwing these up for a couple reasons. The biggest is a sanity read. The problem with grand ideas and working in relative isolation is that sometimes things don't really mesh together. Likewise, I've never written a short story collection before, only novels. With the short stories, they are more disjointed than the linear plots that I usually work with.

So, if you are willing to read it and give opinions, I would love anything you are willing to give me.

contact@moonfire.us

Journals of Fedran covers

2014-12-17T06:00:00Z

When it comes to book covers, I lean toward typographic and abstract designs. Something that hints at the contents instead of painting an illustration or using a photograph.

This is a contrast to the bulk of the books in my library which are the opposite and why Sand and Blood has the cover that it does. That and I know that my severe style for covers doesn't appear to be that popular.

For Journals of Fedran, I'm going with a typographic cover based on newspapers. While I wanted to do the entire thing like a newspaper, I don't think reading a four thousand word story in nine point font in four columns would be that appealing. Not to mention that ebooks can't be formatted that way, so it would be a moot point. A cover, on the other hand, can give the impression of being a newspaper and still get that “feel” that I'm going for.

The Issue Cover

The first thing I worked on was the issue cover. I used a program called XeLaTeX which is a programming language for typesetting books and documents. It can also do some pretty impressive things when it comes to laying out PDFs in general.

Even though most of the examples of newspapers from the 1800s didn't have teasers on the front page, I started with lead-ins for the pieces, but that didn't work. Eventually, I ended up on the first couple of paragraphs of each story. It ends up being an impromptu table of contents.

I'm planning on putting some images on the page, mainly a little advertising, to help with thumbnail recognition, but that's going to be a later step.

About half way through making the cover, I switched from hand-writing LaTeX to writing a program to pull in the paragraphs and sections. Written in Perl, this scans the source file for the project, pulls out the ones that are significant (based on metadata in the YAML markdown), and then inserts them into place. The advantage of this is that I don't have to update the cover manually when I edit the pieces. Just type make and the covers will be refreshed.

Overall, I think it looks pretty good for what I'm aiming for.

Individual Stories

One of the things I'm toying with is allowing individual downloads of the stories. If I do that, then I need a distinctive cover for each one without getting an illustrator. Since I have the issue format, I took bits and pieces of that and created something more specific.

With the story, the lead-in worked out pretty well. I seem to have consolidated down to eight lines of text, all proclaiming the contents. Overall, when lined up, I think they look pretty cool.

I did keep the header and footer in there (though the author can change). That way, all of the issue zeros will be tied together.

Like the issue, this is based on a Perl program for generating. That keeps it up to date if I have to make changes in the first X paragraphs at the bottom, but also lets me update them in a single shot. Most of the leading data is just YAML at the beginning.

---
Author: D. Moonfire
cover:
  leading:
    - A barbarian child
	- Burning with rage!
    - A helpless brother
	- on the brink of death!
    - Abandoned in the desert
    - And left to die!
    - See the barbaric rituals
	- Of a foreign land!
Title: Raging Alone
---

Putting it in the metadata allows me to change the lead-in text, remove the capitals, or other minor changes. It also keeps the data for the story in a single file instead of spreading it to a control program.

Series

There are pair of series pieces in here (Raging Alone and Second-Hand Dresses). These will eventually have their own ebooks and downloads, with a cover that doesn't reference a single issue but will probably still have the same lead-in and title as the others.

Licensing

Like when I was about to release Sand and Blood, I'm considering Creative Commons for this. It is a scary idea, but part of me has been asking to make something CC-licensed for years. I already get so much from the Commons and I want to contribute something back.

The other reason is Cory Doctrow's discussion about his book, Little Brother:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me – for pretty much every writer – the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. [..]

Those two paragraphs has been hanging around me since he spoke at ICON a few years ago. And I think Journals might be a good fit for that. At least for a few issues.

Cory sells print versions of the book even though he gives away the ebook. I'm thinking about doing the same, make a print version and throw up a donation link, but otherwise just let the stories go wild and see what happens.

That led into the effort to make individual covers for the stories.

Journals of Fedran progress

2014-12-15T06:00:00Z

Editing

I didn't have much new stuff written, except that my first and second round editing processes usually add words instead of removed them. SMWM says that's wrong, but I already know that is how I work. Those two rounds are actually rewrite edits; anything I don't like, I usually rewrite the entire paragraph or section to smooth it out.

For the writing group, I originally edited A Cup of Soup and Raging Alone. However, once I got through Alone, I was 1.5k words over the submission limit. I dropped Soup and added two of the essays instead. That brought me up to exactly the limit.

I think I have the table of contents and the order of the entire piece finally figured out. It starts with the important thing about the world (what is resonance, units of measurement, pronunciation). There are stories scattered pretty evenly with essays and poems breaking up the longer pieces.

Notes from the Editor: Why I'm doing this and the philosophy behind it
Introduction to Resonance: Essay
Ministry of Standards: Essay on measurements
Farimon's Gift: Essay
Farimon's Revelation: Story about desperate invention
Speaking Miwāfu: Lesson on Miwafu names
Raging Alone: Coming of Age story set in the desert
Painful Love: Poem
The Cros Gambit: Story about a violent sports game
Grand Cros Clashball: Essay on aftermath of the Gambit
Bloodball: Essay on the aftermath of the Grand Cros announcement
Steam Engines: Poem
Samus and the Savage Slasher: Over-the-top story of pulp adventure
Alone: Poem
Under the Streets: Forensics mystery story
Growing Up: Poem
A Cup of Soup: Story about a mother who abandoned her magic and her daughter who just got it
Chicken Soup Recipe
I Love Her, I Hate Her: Poem
Second-Hand Dresses: Romance story about an almost-spinster meeting the man who ruined her life
Simple Goren: Fable
Classifieds: Short collection of classifieds
Colophon: Final notes, licenses, etc.

The only two pieces that don't have at least a first draft are the classifieds and the colophon. Worst-case scenario, I'll drop the classifieds section.

Lead-ins

Because of the inspiration for this piece, I wasn't originally planning on having very obvious titles. I relented on that, but they are going to be set in the same font and size as the rest of the world. To emphasize the introduction, however, I was going to have a lead-in.

A BARBARIAN CHILD

ABANDONED IN THE CRUEL DESERT!

WILL HE SURVIVE!?

HOW WILL HE DIE!?

FIND OUT IN

BANTOR NIFSIN'S

TERRIFYING TALE

OF

MAGIC,

DEATH,

AND

CRUELTY!

This is what I was thinking for the lead-in for Raging Alone. Yeah, everything is overly dramatic, but I think I'm okay with that.

Style

There are going to also be a lot of horizontal rules in this. Section breaks in the sample newspapers were basically short lines while the separation between pieces are a single line that goes across the entire column. I'm going to stick with that, even in the ebook, because I think it adds to the ascetic.

I'm also planning on the convention of serif fonts for in-world and sans-serif for out of world pieces (credits, my introduction). I'm not going to say that, but I think it should be obvious.

Of course, if it doesn't, then I won't.

Capitals

Capitals are used pretty heavily in this piece, mainly because of the inspirational material. In the text, I've marked them as bold but the end result will have them in either small caps or all capitals, I haven't decided.

Part of this comes from Gail Carriger's description of a certain vampire ("You can hear the italics.") but also just to keep building on that overly dramatic emphasis that just seems to show up in newspapers.

There is definitely a “style” to writing this. The different pieces have different authors, and I think I've found a somewhat workable way of showing their focuses in the story. For example, in A Cup of Soup, one of the reasons for the piece is to sell products (not unlike soap operas). So, the bold comes in for product names. For Samus, the bold are for the dramatic strikes and well-telegraphed twists.

Lexember

Through this, I've been participating in Lexember. Mostly, I'm posting on Twitter #Lexember hashtag.

I've also thrown my conlang, Miwāfu, up on GitHub. I've done this for a couple of reasons. One, I like showing my work. And two, I'm not going to put most of it in my novels. While it would be awesome to translate hunks of the book, it would be more work to explain what the words mean instead of doing notational translations (put it in italic English).

It is a one word a day thing, so every day I'm creating a word. Most of them have to do with either Sand and Blood, Sand and Ash, or the Journals of Fedran.

Plans for this week

This is a little thing week. I want to get a lot of little things done and at least started in the pipeline:

Create a cover or two to get a feel for them.
Edit at least one more story.
Create at least two of the lead-ins.
Get the build system to generate the entire piece.
Try to get at least a PDF version.

I'm Not Your Target Audience

2014-12-05T06:00:00Z

Over the last week, I've been moving forward with Journals of Fedran despite some setbacks. I still think it will be an interesting idea, but after some conversations, I'm beginning to doubt it.

I'm still going to do it, but that doesn't mean that Inner Critic isn't sitting on my shoulder whispering “you're insane, everyone will hate it.” I hate that aspect of writing, the self-doubt that hang over my head as I write. I just learned how to keep writing even when its whispering at me. It's the only way I can keep moving forward.

The Writing Group

One of the writers had to pull out at the writing group this week, so I submitted two of my stories in their place. The more people who read it, the better. While writing something, I don't always see the flaws but having others talk about it usually bring it out in the open.

The two pieces I submitted are:

Farimon's Revelation: This is a story inspired by a lot of artists that I've read about, not to mention counter-cultures, inventors during the early 20th century. It's a piece about drugs and invention, and how a world-altering discovery sometimes comes from the strangest of places.
The Silk Touch: A high society romance where debutantes are presented, courtship takes years, and everything from the color of the dresses is planned years ahead.

Farimon's wasn't very popular. A few of the writers like it except for some specific issues, but most of the table wasn't fond of it. The biggest complaint is something I can work on, but “the protagonist isn't very likable” came up a few times. That's an interesting problem because Farimon is based on two things. In his personal life, he's an addict who says the right things to people with money and obsesses about solving the world's problems with no concern for anyone else. After he changed the world, he was thrown up on a pedestal and most of his fans ignored the darker aspects of his life and only talked about the positive.

Silk on the other hand had a straight divide across the table. Those who read romance novels thought it was fantastic and those who didn't pretty much said “I'm not your target audience.” Those who loved romance tried to encourage me to “not waste” it on the Journals and to create a full-blown novel out of it and submit it under a different byline.

I'm actually considering that, but I really want a romance piece in the Journals. Silk is a sweeping story, so I'm going to pull it out and replace it with Second-Hand Dresses which is set in the same city as Silk but doesn't quite follow the language of romance novels as closely.

I'm Not Your Target Audience

I think this is actually going to be the hardest part of the story. Looking at the range of genres I'm planning on writing, I think it is a cool idea to show different styles of writing (forensics, romance, pulp adventure) but it also means that if the first story in the collection doesn't appeal to someone, they may not find the story that might be latter that does.

At the same time, I read almost all genres and I like them. I love the different styles and touches they have, the language and flow that works for one genre but not another.

I may not be great at writing any of them, but that doesn't mean I don't want to write it. I'm having fun doing it, at least the first six stories.

Though, I might consider a byline for the romance ones. So far, that has a potential to stand on its own, but I'm going to clean up the next couple of chapters and send it to the romance lovers and see if they think it has potential. (Same applies to anyone else who is interested in reading an alpha version of a Regency-inspired romance in a steampunk world.)

Status of Journals

So, a week is past and I've gotten quite a bit of writing. In addition to the two above, I have:

The Cros Gambit: A violent sports short where someone with electrical powers manages to get a high scoring game at the cost of his life. Basically obsession and sports. (1st Draft)
Raging Alone: Desòchu's coming of age, a contrast to his his younger brother's rite in Sand and Blood. (1st Draft)
Simple Goren: A fable about the perils of disobeying parents. (1st Draft)
Under the Streets: A Mudd Fourier, a forensics mage I created quite a few years ago. It's not a murder mystery, but just a story to get me back into his head. (1st Draft)
A Cup of Soup: A story of a mother and daughter struggling with using magic. (1st Draft)
Second-Hand Dresses: A romance serial of a near spinster meeting up with the man who ruined her life. (1st Draft)
Ramus and the Savage Slasher: A pulp adventure, somewhat formulaic and completely over the top. (1st Draft)
All five essays. I have topics on two on clashball (the sports game), resonance, Farimon's accomplishments, and one on units of measurement. (1st Draft)
Lessons on Miwāfu and names in the world. (1st Draft)
All five poems are done. One of the poems is interesting since it is a Miwāfu one and I had to come up with a language-centric style. (Done)
An introduction to the Journals, editor notes of sorts.

All of these names are subject to change. Actually, everything might change as I work out the ideas. This also brings me out to twenty-seven thousand words. With the second drafts, the word counts will probably increase and I should be right at thirty thousand, my goal.

I actually only have three things left to do:

Create some advertising for various products in the Journals. These are going to be graphical, probably using images I can, but should give a nice flair.
Come up with the newspaper-style introductions to the pieces. It isn't going to be a simple title, but as short block of text. Also not sure how I'm going to write these for the formatting system.
Create the cover or covers. At some point, I suspect these will be Creative Commons licensed pieces (but not to start with). If that happens, I'll break each one into a separate ebook with its own cover.

There are also some secondary pieces:

The calendar for Tarsan. I've written the desert one, but I need the non-desert one for the Farimon essay.

Is This the Same World?

This was a question that came up during the writing group. The group has been fantastic reading all three of the Sand series, which has shown them a very specific culture in the world. And only one of my planned pieces actually ties into those novels.

It is the same world and roughly the same time. My reason for that came from probably one of the strangest places: airplanes and travel. When I sit down on a bus, a train, a plane, I have a tendency to find the person who likes to talk. And we talk, about life and anything else that comes up.

I've come to the conclusion that the world is a starkly different place, like two completely separate worlds in some cases. I have had a number of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Indian coworkers. The things they describe in their life is different than growing up in a suburb of Chicago or near the middle of Iowa. Sitting on a plane heading to South Carolina, I saw a different world. Visiting Mississippi, the same thing. Reading biographies of famous people paints another different story, one that doesn't really mesh with my personal experiences.

One of my goals with Fedran is to create a rich world. And, for me, that means differing stories that tie together as a whole but are not thematically related.

It is also a challenge. I think a lot of writers struggle to create starkly different characters and worlds. I don't like bigots, which is why I try to write them. I don't like violence, so I write it.

I'm still having fun

Yeah, I'm still having fun. This is a grand challenge to write. I have some nasty little things to finish up (paying for an editor), but overall, I think I now have a solid idea of how this first Journals is going to work. And I still like it.

Journals of Fedran idea

2014-12-01T06:00:00Z

As I mentioned in my last post, I had an idea to “write more words.” After the last week of writing (which I can't thank my wife enough for giving me the time to do so), I think I have enough of a seed that I think it can work.

As is my nature, I like to see what others think even as I'm slowly moving forward with it. So, this is my current side project, the Journals of Fedran.

The original idea

The original idea came from a combination of three things: a poor review of my book, browsing through my old writings, and a random exploration of the Internet that found images of old newspapers.

The newspaper is what combined everything together. Older newspapers had a certain flair to them, dramatic blocks of capitals and italics, breathless excitement for even the most mundane of things, and completely insane advertisement (e.g., snake oil and mechanical trousers). The narrow columns with the vertical lines also appealed to my ascetics.

What I had forgotten is that they also had fiction and poetry. Most of the ones I found also didn't have short teaser columns leading to other sections, but simple blocks of text that crawled down the page until they were done, and then moved to the next topic.

They were dense blocks of gloriously random information, a touch of the world for those who can't experience it.

This fits my view of Fedran beautifully. In Flight of the Scions, Kanéko's only experience with the world are newspapers and journals, including Emerging Wizardry which is the first journal of technology. Since the urbanization of the world hasn't occurred, most of the population frame their lives around the stories of “other places.” This would have come from told stories from travelers or… journals that are shared among the entire village until they fall apart.

Variety is the spice

I read a lot of different things. I also happen to enjoy writing them. Because of that, there are a lot of stories in my head that don't quite have the wide-ranging scope of Sand and Blood or Flight of the Scions. In my work-in-progress branches, I found some romances, forensics, and even sports pieces. There are little side stories from the Sand series that I thought could use telling, including Desòchu's own rite of passage or the reason Meris' was kicked out of school (from Flight). Or just different cultures.

This has always been a problem, though. Advice I've seen repeatedly is “stick with a genre.” I don't stick like to stick with one genre though, because I like variety. Every style of writing has a different difficulty, but it's a fun struggle. A Regency-style romance has a different feel, a different set of details, and even a different manner of speaking than say a pulp adventure or a forensics mystery.

This idea is less of sticking with a genre and more of “sticking with a world.” I had intended to write Fedran for a while, to really sink into the world and have fun. There are a lot of stories that I can tell, not all of them are drama or action pieces.

Frameworks are everything

I like to start with frameworks, something to give me constraints but also to help guide me. Sand and Blood was suppose to be a ten thousand word piece of world-building. It's going to be just shy of two hundred thousand by the time book three is out. Short stories are my weakest form too, but for a newspaper-style piece, short stories are really the only thing that can be put in.

So, I took a few ideas of history but altered them. I'm aiming for three to five thousand word pieces. Most of them are complete stories, a couple of them are serials that will take a few journals to finish. Nothing over five thousand, which is about a half hour of reading for most people.

For an entire length, I was going to start with thirty thousand words. That's about half the length of Sand and Blood and about right when it is bound into a A5 book. I wanted to make a print version of this, just because I think it would be fun. Not to mention, I like typesetting.

If I stick with about seven fiction pieces, that would give me about 22-25k words. The rest of it was going to be articles on the constructed languages I've created, rules of games, or even essays about the fiction pieces. Scholarly bits about the world with similar blind spots and assumptions they had during the Victorian ages.

Together, I think it would create an interesting world piece and also let me have fun with the world.

What I have so far

After the week, I had a lot of words but many of them don't work out. I also went a little further on the serials, but the tail ends are much rougher than the earlier pieces.

What I have the first drafts are:

A mystery with a forensics mage
A Regency-style romance serial with High Society in Tarsan
A artist/inventor inspired by Andy Warhol and a few other historical artists
Desòchu's coming of age, probably in two or three parts

I'm planning on finishing up with:

A magical sports piece inspired by Shaolin Soccer
A pulp adventure bit that has some similarities to Doc Savage
A mother/daughter inspirational (this one is going to be hard)

I also want some essays/technical pieces on:

My constructed language, Miwāfu
A description of the sports game rules
An essay on the invention story
An essay on resonance, which is a key factor of my world

What might not work

The only part I'm not entirely sure is the meta-story and formatting. The newspaper style appeals to me, but these days, it isn't the format most people enjoy reading. Even at three thousand words, that's a really long bit for reading in four dense columns. Not to mention, impossible with ebooks. I might change it to just be collected articles like a SigGraph collection interspersed with advertisement (if I decide to put those in).

The other bit is meta-story. With the newspaper style, it is easier to create a story by the creators of the journal. That might be a bit harder to do, but I also think it will come out if I do more than a few of them. Not entirely sure.

Purpose

The biggest reason for doing this is to “write more words.” But, since this is going to be a single author collection (to start with, one person has suggested writing a story in my world), it could also be used to drive readers to my mailing list or simply seeing what I write. It also helps establish that I'm going to do a poor job of “sticking with a genre.”

Opinions

So, that's my idea. I love opinions, criticisms, and anything else.