#wizard novel

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my process lately has been writing scenes longhand, and then line-editing as i copy into scrivener. i'm happy with the results, and wanted to share an excerpt of what i transcribed today:

With no way to measure time but their stomachs and torches, Hallbjorn didn’t know how long they walked, didn’t know how far into the mountains they were delving. He didn’t know how deep into the earth they were when something began to change. It was a slow shift, one he wasn’t sure at all was real until it became undeniable. The cave walls, previously the craggy and uneven shape he expected, took on a character more… intentional. The corners smoothed away, the cracks disappeared like a wall being filled with daub. No longer were they walking through a crack in the mountainside, but through a great winding tube. Like the innards of some enormous fallen beast, wet and cold and endless. The air clung to his skin as breath. [...] Eight days, Gunnarr estimated, until the mountain spat them out in Bjornárdal; the mistake was assuming they’d be able to keep track. The dark swallowed time.

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haven't had the time or energy to actually draw lately so i bashed out my guys in the BG3 character creator. fasenil is a high elf sage>wizard and hallbjorn is a human soldier>fighter. gripe: character creator needs more body hair options and no abs. this is an anti-ab zone. things to fix with mods later.

bonus short hair hallbjorn

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i have to do a pov shift for my thesis dev class and it's only ~four pages but it is kicking my ass in a major way. part of this is because it's a disruption to my routine obviously but i'm also incredibly inexperienced in writing first person, and it doesn't come naturally to me, and it's just wrecking my ability to focus and put text on the page because i'm stressing over every word.

i also just really don't think that fasenil is a good character to write in first person because he is pretentious as fuck and i don't want him to be actually annoying to read. right? like with a little bit of distance his ridiculous vocabulary and strong opinions are more charming, or at least that's the goal, but i feel like actually being in his head and listening to him bitch is gonna get real old real fast.

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author ask tag game

Thank you for the tag, @catchingbigfish! I'm tagging @sarahlizziewrites, @moonandris, and @sam-glade with no pressure, and with an open tag for anyone else who is interested. Apologies if you've already done it, this has been sitting in my drafts for like a month.

All of these answers are in regards to my thesis, which is a large-scale dark fantasy novel with an alternating third-person PoV.

(1) What is the main lesson of your story (e.g. kindness, diversity, anti-war), and why did you choose it?

I don't like to conceptualize my fiction as having "lessons." It's not so much that it's inherently inaccurate as that it's not constructive, or conducive to deep and resonating fiction; I have found that this presentation lends itself to moral absolutism. Furthermore, I don't tend to have my characters learn objective moral lessons, but rather learn or decide something about themselves or the world, and make a choice about how they are going to act in the future.

So to phrase it in that way, "what does your main character realize or decide about himself," my main character Fasenil decides that there is enough in the world that makes it worth saving even though it's largely hostile to his existence, and that he is willing to sacrifice himself in order to save it.

(2) What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding (like real-life cultures, animals, famous media, websites, etc.)?

I am very aware that the first thing that any of my readers think of when they read my drafts are Skyrim. While it is an inspiration to some extent, my world is far more inspired by real-life cultures, primarily real-life Viking Age Scandinavia. I take historical research very seriously, and I take great pains to maintain historical accuracy when relevant. I have a frankly massive number of sources that I'm not going to cite here.

That's the main inspiration for the area of my map where the novel takes place; inspirations for the larger world include the Holy Roman Empire, 20th century fascist movements, and more.

(3) What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, help readers grow as a person?

I think that this question runs up against the same problems as the first. I don't desire to teach readers any sort of specific lesson with my fiction. If they take lessons away, that's nice, but it's not something that I concern myself with.

To answer a related but separate question, I hope that some small fraction of readers who feel the same things as I do feel on some level seen; not the shallow "validation" that is so often talked about in online art and fandom spaces, but with the sort of universe-reordering forcefulness and urgency that I've felt so few times in my life. Not saying "you are a market that it is advantageous to target," but "you exist, I see you, and I know." I am writing, in that sense, to my younger self.

My characters both are in an abstract sense seeking to transcend their pasts, and to find belonging. At the beginning, Fasenil is at first balancing his desire for "success" and accolades with the growing threat that visibility presents to him. Hallbjorn is trying desperately to carve out a life that is free from the obligation of violence, but can't seem to do it. I don't consider it my job to pretend that any of these struggles have objectively correct or moral answers. I can only have my characters make decisions, and do their best to forge a way forward.

(4) How many chapters is your story going to have?

I mean, there are thirty in my outline, but that is extremely fluid. It is possible that it will eventually be divided up into a duology.

(5) Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

It's an original fiction novel, also functioning as my MFA thesis. I don't plan on posting anything more than snippets and supplemental content (art, memes, etc) anywhere; it will be traditionally published.

(6) When and why did you start writing?

I've been writing since I was a little kid. I've only been taking it seriously as a craft and as a career path for about a year and a half.

(7) Do you have any words of engagement for fellow writers of Writeblr? What other writers of Tumblr do you follow?

I follow many, many writers of tumblr, too many to name here.

The piece of advice that I repeat to myself most often is, "good prose is a renewable resource." What this means is that you must trust in your ability to be able to generate good prose in the future, and not stay married to ineffectual passages just because they are well-written or you are fond of them. My first priority is the function of a paragraph/passage/scene within context, because that is much more difficult to revise than prose itself, which can always be improved.

Also, participate. Write weird essays and post them. Read more. Pick a topic that interests you and read half a dozen papers about it on jstor. Ask questions and offer to workshop people's stuff for them, and then get good at workshopping. Form your own opinions instead of just absorbing whatever's popular in the social media-sphere that you're in.

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i need to synopsize my novel for my thesis dev class this week. here are some highlights so far

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currently rewriting (simplifying) my outline. under the scene where one character swears an oath of fealty to the other, i wrote "big sexy." this communicates a lot about both the novel and me as a person.

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Happy Worldbuilding Wednesday!

Can you tell me a bit more about your conlangs? What's your approach to creating them, where do you start? To what extent do you draw inspiration from real world languages? Which ones?

Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier but YES ALWAYS, thanks for the ask!

Okay so the best resource/inspiration for conlanging I've ever found has been this video:

because it just completely illuminated the process for me. I've always been interested in languages/linguistics but have had no idea where to start, because a lot of guides or videos assume some background knowledge of linguistics, and I have basically none except what I've picked up from very casually studying a handful of languages and reading the single chapters on languages in the anthro textbooks I buy from used bookstores. So this guy says, "you need these few things, and you do these few steps," and then boom, you have a functional pseudo-conlang!

This isn't for crafting a FULL constructed language, it's for doing the sort of hollow-iceberg equivalent; you do this background work so that your needs are met (generating proper nouns and basic words), and you have everything you need to be able to create whatever is necessary relatively easily when you need it. So, if I ever want to have a version of the plot-relevant prophecy in my novel in an elven language, I have a handful of words, list of consonants and phonemes, and sentence structure, so I can just whip that up without too much work.

I started by printing out the Wikipedia IPA consonant and vowel lists and deciding which ones I wanted; in the video he explains how they usually come in groups/patterns, so I stuck with that. I generated a list of syllables from those phonemes, and to create words I just started jamming them together. I decided which ending syllables indicate gender and plurality, and how compound words work, and just started filling out the list of words I wanted.

So, the most central language in my novel isn't a conlang at all; it's just real-life Old Icelandic, and without getting into the details of my continental map I'm also going to be using little tiny bits of Arabic and Latin. My only completely constructed language is the elven language, which is a little complicated because it's sort of two languages.

Here's the deal: a long time ago there was the elven empire, the Elfirasalin Empire, and they had this language, which is called Imperial Elvish. It's the enforced language throughout the empire. After a while they go around to the other side of the continent and invade, and take control of this space of valuable land, which becomes their only real colony. Several centuries later, the colony rebels, stages a revolution, and kicks the empire out, and becomes the fascist nation, the Elven Ascendancy. And their government, as a form of governmental control/newspeak, changes the language: they say that it's a more archaic, traditional form, and it's true to their roots, and excising any corrupting foreign influence etc, but actually they're making big chunks of it up whole-cloth to serve their own purposes.

So, some modern Imperial words go back to their longer, archaic forms (the modern Imperial word for river, rathlin, reverts to the archaic rathsalin), but also a lot of modern words have been excised, and new words have been created. I haven't developed many of them yet, but in an example stolen but expanded upon from 1984, there are only two words for sex, "good sex" which is heterosexual vaginal sex for procreation without regard for the pleasure of the woman, and "criminal sex," which is literally everything else (from sex for pleasure outside of marriage to homosexual sex to bestiality). There is only one word for "criminal," meaning someone who breaks a law, which is more similar to the English word "deviant," meaning someone who is separate from acceptable standards, presumably by nature, and this includes anyone who has "criminal sex," and these people are the scapegoats of the culture; they are the cause of all of our ills, and only can we reach our former glory by eliminating them. This creates a culture where everyone is constantly on the lookout for those among them who don't belong. But the thing is, with such strict standards, you can make the argument that basically anyone is "deviant" should it fit your needs. Since some of the main themes of my novel are homophobia and being classed as criminal, all of this is actually relevant instead of just being background.

In terms of phonic inspiration the elven languages are similar to the elven languages of Dragon Age and the Elder Scrolls, because I like the way they sound and the accents that their speakers have when speaking English. I think of my Imperial and Ascendancy Elvish speakers having an upper-class British accent, similar to TES' high elves... but my characters aren't actually speaking English, they're speaking Old Icelandic, so what on earth does that accent sound like in-universe? Imperial doesn't have rolling Rs, no H or NG, no umlauts, and no voiced fricatives (th as in that). So I think that Imperial speakers would generally tap their Rs instead of rolling them and have trouble with NG and H, and have great difficulty with the twice-as-many vowels of OI. They would also have a bitch of a time with the inflection/cases, and the addition of a neutral gender. This is made harder by the fact that the OI-speakers don't really write much; they have a written form, runes, but most people are barely literate and don't use them at all.

So I'm sure that's way more than you were expecting, but I am in the THICK of the language thing right now and it's really fun to talk about. I could go on about it forever lmao.

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Happy Worldbuilding Wednesday!

A bit of a meta question today: you know these long lists of questions on weather, flora, fauna, fashion, religion, government, etc. that are supposed to help you flesh out the setting?

Which section do you find is inapplicable to your setting? Be it because the plot doesn’t let you explore it or because it’s just not a thing in your setting (e.g. fashion may not be applicable in animal xenofiction).

Oh, that is a super interesting question. I don't think I have a really clear-cut answer in that any of those things straight-up don't apply, but I think the one that is generally the least useful to me is fauna.

I read some essay or article semi-recently about how the presence of animals in fantasy fiction has been disappearing over time and that made me really want to pay attention to it and work animals in, but like, my novel takes place in the complete dead of winter basically at the arctic circle, lol. So I'm trying to show the presence of wild animals through furs and their presence in characters' memories and stuff like that, but I don't really need to know if the bears around are more like Eurasian brown bears vs Alaskan grizzlies vs polar bears, because they're all fucking asleep, lmfao. In addition, I'm generally not making stuff up whole-cloth, so I can just say that if these animals live in real-life Scandinavia, then they probably live here too, it's just not super relevant to me right now.

Flora is probably the closest second, again because it's winter, but I'm paying very, very, very close attention to food and so it's just sort of more present; while wild game doesn't make up a large amount of the people's diet, foraged greens do, in addition to all of the spices that are imported and the vegetables that are grown just a little bit north.