#work db

[elliswriting]

First Lines

((I stole this idea from @pixel-is-writing 👀))

Out: You are totally ordinary.

Duty Bound: “Dylen.”

The Forgotten Star: "What, me? No, I... I can't, I'm not... "

The World Beyond the Looking Glass: The first time I saw him, I forgot to breathe.

The Romantic Trials and Troubles of Daisy Fraisier: I was twenty years old when I fell in love for the first time.

[elliswriting]

Oh! Also! For The World Beyond the Looking Glass, you say Samantha has a gift for languages - will you be doing any constructed language work for the WIP? (I would be happy to help you if so, I have a BA in linguistics and have worked on a couple of languages to varying degrees of completion)!

hoo boy

I don’t want to say I’m doing a lot of conlang, because honestly? I’m pretty lazy so I only ever really make up words that I need, and I’m a lot more interested in how culture affects the way they speak. For example, in Leric some common interjections refer to the stars (”Oh, stars” or “stars above”) while in Zyherian (which is from Duty Bound and not TWB) it’s usually a reference to a particular god or patron that applies to the situation (”By Taia, you are beautiful” or “Prayers to Hian for a victory”).

But there is one language in TWB that I have actually had to build and it’s because one of the main characters, Keight, is mute. So while he knows Leric and some Gainnish, he and his sister also made up an entire signed language when they were children, which because of her gift, Samantha also now understands and can use, and this is the language that I’m most focused on creating. 

But (1) I will absolutely hit you up with language questions, and (2) what kind of languages are these that you’ve worked on? Are they for your writing? How do you go about constructing them? I am so into this kind of stuff, please share

[elliswriting]

Bloop I think was the word ajbsns

Bloops for facts!

Before I got rid of nighttime in Qyharae, Fernanda is so terrified of the dark that she can’t sleep during a new moon. She stays awake all night with candles and lanterns and read or write to occupy herself until morning.

[elliswriting]

Practical!

━━━ writeblr inbox meme  

send me a positive adjective and I’ll tell you about a character from my wip that suits it the most.

This is actually really difficult because like 90% of my OCs can be summed up with: 

That said though, I have to go with Dylen. Her father commands the King’s Royal Army and he raised his children the same way he commanded his troops. So Dylen grew up training, taking orders, aspiring to fight for her father’s army despite the fact that women don’t fight.

But she’s good, and she gets in, and she does really well. Even when she gets reassigned to babysit the princess she’s nothing but practicality and professionalism in the face of Fernanda’s blatant flirting for much longer than expected.

[elliswriting]

Happy Storyteller Saturday! What are your OCs favorite fairy tales, myths, or folktales?

Oooh this one is hard because RT&T is based in Greek mythology, so most of the characters just find the way the stories have been misinterpreted through a game of telephone to be hilarious.

But Duty Bound has a huge religious backstory, and this story is Dylen’s favorite, partly because Nysis’s story inspired Dylen’s own mother to stand up to the man who would become her husband, and Dylen’s father:

“Nysis is not Zyherian,” Tylan told her. “She was the guardian of your mother’s village. 

“She was the oldest daughter of a family of candlemakers, kind and caring,” Tylan went on. “When your mother was young, raiders from Zyher came to their village. Everyone hid, letting the raiders destroy and take whatever they wished. But Nysis, after ensuring her own family was safe, went out to confront the raiders.

“No one knows what she did. But the raiders left shortly after, and her family found her body in the street, where she had stood up to them. She saved their village. They built a temple in her honor, and she became their guardian, for protection and for courage.”

And Fernanda is a sucker for a tragic romance, and what better than the very first one: 

“When Unnu was cold, The Mother gave him fire,“ Tylan went on. "When he was hungry She gave him crops, livestock to tend. When he was thirsty She gave him rain and the rivers. And when he was fearful of the night, She created the Guardians, Yene and Dyrr, to watch over him while he slept.”

He went on to tell her about the origin of man, how Yene fell in love with Unnu and snuck down from the sky to be with him, of The Mother’s punishment of women when their daughter, Amas, was born, the story of the three sons and daughters and the first deaths, the creation of the stars as guardians and reminders of the lessons the patrons taught.