Journeymen and crafting

Elsewhere I’ve written about choosing words that reflect the differences between a secondary-world culture and our own. Previously it was about husbands and wives in a matrifocal culture. This time, I want to ruminate about workers: apprentices, journeymen, and masters.

Information Management for Novels

When you’re writing almost anything, you need some way to make the different parts of the thing consistent with each other. You don’t want to keep searching back and forth in your prose; you need “auxiliary information” somewhere, a “bible” that retains ultimate truth, which you can refer to when you’re trying to remember something. We computer geeks refer to this as “external memory” and the process of maintaining it as “information management.” This post talks about the information I need to manage for my secondary-world fantasy (with occasional digressions), how I currently do it, and what I wish I could do instead.

Husbandry

Have you ever wondered what was the connection between “husband” as a noun and “husband” as a verb (and the connection with the phrase “animal husbandry”)?

When you’re trying to create secondary-world cultures, one of the many things you have to do is identify some key elements that are different from your own, and think through the consequence. One consequence is the way people speak, the words they choose, the idioms they use. I’m a word freak, fascinated by word origins and relationships. I’ve learned French, Greek, Latin, and Russian over the years, although they’re pretty much gone from 50 years of neglect. So while creating my early Bronze Age secondary-world fantasy, I started to think about what words and phrases would be different.

Gimbutas on Stone-Age Eastern Europe

A few days ago I posted a brief history of my current work-in-progress, where I mentioned I set it in a magical Bronze Age. When I created (am creating?) my society, I was (have been?) thinking about a long-lost article I read once that claimed an anthropologist named Marija Gimbutas found evidence that the culture of neolithic eastern Europe was matriarchal – and that her work was out of favour. It seemed to me that didn’t matter, since “the world doesn’t work like that” can sometimes be succesfully refuted by saying “this is speculative fiction; that’s one of the things I deliberately changed.” So I went looking for more material, and am glad I did. Here’s some of what I found.

Failure is Mandatory

In the universe of Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary webcomic (and now in our own mundane universe) there exists a book called The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. Maxim 70 is: “Failure is not an option – it is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.” In the last few years I’ve been thinking a lot about failure, and that final maxim.

Eliciting Comments from Beta Readers: ABCDE

Once you polish some piece of writing, it’s not done yet: you need “beta readers” to help you find and fix problems. I’ve been lucky to have been on two Writing Excuses cruises, where I got to workshop the first couple of chapters of two different novels, and the beta reader rules we were taught are worth passing along. We were asked to watch Mary Robinette Kowall’s video; the scheme she teaches there has since evolved into the acronym “ABCD” which a few of us alumni have expanded in to ABCDE.

Drafting a Novel: a 4-Year Journey (So Far)

 I’ve said before that I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo several times: 2006-2009, then 2012-2018, “winning” all but twice out of 11 tries. This means I’ve written 9 “NaNovels” – things that resemble novels but aren’t. In my case they’re not even complete first drafts, in that they don’t have a full beginning, middle, and end. But now I’m working hard on editing two of them together, hoping that by the end of October, 2019, I’ll have finished something. This is a brief summary of my journey so far.