There really really ought to be a book about how the staple crops of different civilizations shape and influence those civilizations, and I really want to read it.
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (three are alcohol, three have caffeine) are not quite that, but may still be of interest?
I read Salt back in the day and it's so so good, second the rec. I have heard of 6 Glasses and not read it but I am sure I would probably love it. Gotta see if the library has it. Thank you!
A Short History Of The World According To Sheep by Sally Coulthard blew my mind. So many things are tied to wool and sheep and weaving and so many words and phrases are tied to wool, people have no idea.
Example words which come from textiles/weaving, if not specifically wool (go look them up!): subtle, shoddy, tabby, Brazil, rocket, twit, warped, going batty, on tenterhooks, text...
I'll throw in a rec for Pickled, Potted, and Canned by Sue Shephard - a very interesting look at food preservation and how the availability of different types of food preservation shaped cultures and cuisines.
The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past might also be up your alley. It's about "forgotten" foods and staples. They talk about different types of wheat, sauces, veggies, etc and a little about the cultures from whence they come
DO I HAVE A SERIES FOR YOU. University of California Press has a gift for you and it is a 80+ book series on food studies. There are even some that are open access (legally free), but the rest are in libraries.
I also highly recommend Frostbite by Nicola Twilley. It’s about the impact refrigeration has had/is having on food preservation and culture, globally. It was one of my favorite books of this last year.
Can't believe no one's mentioned Consider the Fork yet, which is about how environment/resources shape our ways of eating, which shapes both our culture and our concepts of politeness. So interesting, really recommend!
God I have been struggling so much to explain my irritation with a certain trend I keep running across in LGBTQ+ "cozy fantasy books"
Because everytime I try to verbalize it, it just comes out as sounding like I'm trying to say there's like. An upper limit on how daydreamy an author can be about worlds in which their every fantasy is fulfilled (entire farming village based on mutual aid; where also everyone is queer and/or gender-conforming! And there is little to no conflict! And everyone knows therapy speak and is unfailingly kind and generous and good!)
Because like--there's not, really, an upper limit on these things.
But there is an invisible line of tolerance for me where it turns from "cozy fantasy" to "oh my god grow the fuck up; this is so saccharine it's become one-note and boring and dull that I can't actually ENJOY the low-stakes cozy vibes"
But it sounds like I'm complaining about "there's too many gender queers and not enough homophobia in this book" and it's Not That
Ugh idk take your 2 stars and let me delete this book off my Kobo, I finished it and that's honestly more than I think it deserved.
(a 4.07 average star rating are you FUCKING kidding me)
The problem you're trying to pinpoint is TENSION ISSUES, and cozy fantasy is fuckin RIFE with them. Major chronic problem with the genre, and editors just keep letting authors get away with it instead of developing the story.
Low stakes are fine, utopian settings are fine, even low-conflict is fine -- but you gotta have a source of tension SOMEWHERE, or it pisses people off. If everyone's cooperating together and an amazing team and there's no interpersonal drama, ok great, but hit them with a tornado or a famine or heavy rains that wash out the fields right after planting.
The following have been called the "7 types of conflict" but people always think conflict means fighting or angry feelings, so i do think that "7 types of tension" might be a better wording:
Person vs Person (this is the one that cozy fantasy is most allergic to, and that's ok!)
Person vs Society (cozy fantasy also allergic to this one, we're still fine!)
Person vs Self (inexplicably underutilized, it rules, highly recommend)
Person vs Supernatural
Person vs Fate
Person vs Technology
Person vs Nature
And here is a list of free cozy fantasy tension points for each one of those. Feel free to steal these, adapt them, tweak them, etc -- as long as you promise to commit to the bit and actually make your protagonist face their problems head-on and have feelings about them and actually DO SOME HARD WORK to resolve them instead of conveniently handwaving it all away. (Your protagonist's name is Blue.)
Person vs Person: Blue's neighbor has a longstanding grudge and is trying to get Blue's bakery shut down by any means necessary, including reporting Blue to the health inspectors, who threaten to shut the whole operation down. (If you are writing for adults, then the grudge is bad enough that it CANNOT be solved with the power of friendship or by offering said neighbor free daily croissants. C'mon, don't wimp out. Imagine the Worst coworker you've ever had. Imagine the pettiest HOA lady ever.)
Person vs Society: There is a war in the neighboring kingdom which has impacted the chocolate chip import market. Blue's bakery is struggling financially, and the bank is making ominous noises about Blue's fantasy student loans.
Person vs Self: Blue is having a crisis of faith. They inherited the bakery and they hate running it, but they feel an obligation to their beloved dead relative. They don't know how to balance this against their own dreams, and they feel a ton of guilt about it.
Person vs Supernatural. Blue boasted that they're a better baker than the local hearth goddess. Blue now has a curse that fucks up every loaf, danish, cookie, and sticky-bun they touch. They can't even go into other people's bakeries without jinxing them.
Person vs Fate: Several generations ago, a fortune-teller spoke a prophecy that says the bakery will fail if someone matching Blue's description takes over. Blue doesn't give a shit about that, Blue is determined to make it work, Blue spits in the face of Fate.
Person vs Technology. A new bakery opens just a block away from Blue's, with newfangled magical ovens and staffed entirely by magic robots. Can Blue compete against this? We explore the upsides and downsides between artisanship and mass manufacturing.
Person vs Nature. A really bad winter strangles the town, trapping people in their homes. Blue doggedly wades through waist-deep snow on their daily bread deliveries to the old folks of the town, but they slip on ice and twist their ankle really bad.
(Anyway read my book Yield Under Great Persuasion, which is an M/M cozy romantasy with lots of different tension points -- we've got a lil bit of #1 and #2, a WHOLE LOT of #3, and a smidge of #4 and #5)
There is no drug on earth that can replicate the absolute euphoria of hitting a writing flow state at 2:00 AM. You aren’t even typing anymore. You are a vessel. You are a channel for the gods. The characters are speaking directly into your brain and you’re just the stenographer trying to keep up. You feel like you could fight a bear. You feel like you invented the alphabet
I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody:
zeug·ma ˈzo͞oɡmə/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).
#in english class in high school my teacher had us write our own zeugmas in class#and one guy came up with ‘he fell from her favor… and the window’#i am forever looking for opportunities to use that one
This probably deserves a far longer response (it probably deserves a book), but I’ll take a stab at it.
This is going to be broken up because it’s so long. I’ll talk about my conlang Yuk-Tepat & its logographs (Tepatic glyphs) but also the real-world logographic writing systems. I’ll get into some specific advice later. Of course, if you (readers) have logographic scripts please add on whatever you can about how yours work & how you made it, in order to make this more comprehensive. Or if you just have something to add / correct.
This goes on. (TLDR Logographs =/= pictures, they don’t represent translinguistic ‘ideas,’ they have a phonetic component that reflects the spoken language, and use semantic signs to disambiguate words. To be continued.)
Logographic systems work quite a bit differently from most ‘phonetic’ writing systems. Your inventory of signs will be much larger than other systems. Think a couple of hundred. Tepatic glyphs ended up with about 200 distinct signs, which is appoximately the number of Chinese radicals.
However, it also works similarly to ‘phonetic’ systems, or more similarly than you might expect. Some of the stuff you need to do will be the same as for any writing system / conlang - for example, consider the writing medium (paper, stone etc.) and tools (brush, etc.) and how they affect your system. Also, know your conlang’s phonology and basic grammatical structure – logographic or not, this will be important (as you’ll see).
First, I would like to talk about what logographs are, and how they work. Since you, Anon, asked the question, I’m guessing you might already know what logographs are, hence you are asking, but in case you don’t, I want to go into what logographs are, because I think many people don’t quite get what they are, and unless they are Chinese (or Japanese), don’t know how they work, and this is going to cause problems in making the script work if they try to make logographs for a conlang. In case you already understand logographs well (or you’re Chinese) you can skip over what I’m writing. Or read it anyway, if you want to hear about how other systems work. I advise you reading up a lot about how other systems work.
Earth has at least four families of logographic writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Chinese characters, and Maya glyphs. They’re all very different, but have some similar principles, and one of them is they have a phonetic component, just like any other script. Also, logographs (also called logograms) are not ideographs or pictographs (‘picture writing’).
Many people think that hieroglyphs or Chinese somehow represent thoughts directly through some kind of picture, bypassing “words” and spoken language, but they don’t. This is no doubt exacerbated by the fact most hieroglyphs undeniably LOOK like ‘things.’ So it’s natural to think that an obvious picture of an owl must represent the idea of an owl, but often it doesn’t. Confusion about this will make you not get how to make your system work especially when expressing something abstract that you can’t draw. Logographic systems are intimately tied to the languages they are used to write. Hence, yours will be tied to your conlang. You should already have a good idea of your conlang. It doesn’t need to be complete (when are they ever?) but you should know the phonology, and some other parts of the grammar may be helpful (is it very inflectional, word order, etc.)
Logographic systems contain signs that can represent whole words (or roots), which may or may not be recognizable ‘pictures.’ They also have phonetic elements (which may also look like pictures). The way the phonetic elements develop is usually by what we call the rebus principle, which means a sign is borrowed to write something else which sounds similar.
I’d like to illustrate this with an example. I wrote the following English sentence in pictures:
If you’re having trouble, try saying the name of each thing depicted. You should get:
eye can knot bear two leaf ewe.
Now try saying it faster and see if you get it.
What I’m trying to say is, “I can not bear to leave you.”
This is something I still didn’t quite get when I started working on Yuk Tepat.
You will note, that none of these little pictures are actually pictures of the concept referred to by the word they are used to spell. They are pictures of the thing whose word sounds like the word for the thing you want to represent, but can’t easily, so you get at it by using something that sounds similarly. (I know that sentence is hard to parse, please read it again.) This example only works because “I” and “eye” sound the same in English.
Now, imagine for a minute that English-speaking America is pretty much the same as in our world but English is written logographically. Nuclear war or something happens and the country gets buried under mounds of ash and dust and dug up hundreds of years later by archaeologists for some human civilization from elsewhere, unrelated to America, and their texts are deciphered. In this future civilization’s version of Youtube, people start making videos explaining their mysterious, cool writing system.
“The ancient American sages represented the word for oneself, I, as a picture of an eye. And if you think about it, the self is a perceiving self; without a subject able to look around and observe an outside, objective world, there is no self, no ‘I.’ The self begins with a perception of the world. This is the profound and mystical wisdom of the long-lost ancient civilization of The United States of America. Every letter hides a profound truth about the world.”
The simple, possibly boring explanation is just that ‘I’ and ‘eye’ sound the same in English, so they could be written the same way. But laugh as you might, there are tons of people online (invariably non-Chinese) making similar fluff about Chinese characters. Beware.
People may think to write ‘be’ logographically you have to think up some cool symbol of the concept of ‘being’ but the likely solution for an English logography would simply be to draw a bee (the insect that makes honey) and have it represents the copula.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that it is very common (even usual?) for the word the sign is borrowed for to completely take over that sign, and that a semantic indicator will be added to indicate the ORIGINAL meaning of that sign, or a new character created for it. The sign will completely shift over; it is no longer a picture-drawing of its meaning, even in a highly stylized way.
The typical development often goes:
- A picture is drawn to represent the word for the same thing that the picture represents. This is still pre-writing; you cannot draw a picture of everything you might want to talk about.
- The picture is borrowed to write another word or syllable in the language which cannot be depicted, but which sounds like the word. This is going to be different for each language because each language has different words and different words will be homonyms; hence you cannot separate a logographic script from the spoken language it was made for.
- Some of these signs develop into phonetic signs.
- The system reintroduces ‘pictures’ (or their relics) to clarify the meaning of words which might phonetically be spelled similarly.
This has happened many times in Chinese characters. It is probably the main way Chinese abstract, grammatical words get characters. The character 水 is ‘water,’ from an image of 3 parallel water flows. 永, representing probably a person floating on water, meant ‘swim’ (Old Chinese *ɢʷraŋs). This was then used to write the similar-sounding *ɢʷraŋʔ ‘forever,’ an idea which is hard to depict visually, don’t you think? ‘Forever’ completely took over 永. Then when they wanted to actually depict ‘swim,’ they added three water dots (itself ultimately a form of 水) to the left side to make a new character 泳. This is essentially ‘that ɢʷraŋ-ish sounding word that has to do with water.’
Signs like the three dots are called a radical in Chinese, and the remainder is called the phonetic. Some radicals are extremely common and form a great classificatory system, marking characters containing them as glyphs referring to words for people, animals, birds, plants, liquids, earth, etc. The vast majority of Chinese characters are of this type: composite characters made up of a part indicating roughly the sound, and a part assigning the meaning to some semantic domain.
Similar signs to radicals are found in hieroglyphs and cuneiform, the main difference being that they are called determinatives and they are still written as separate signs rather than being compressed into a single character like Chinese.
(I will note, radicals are basically a lexicographic tool for indexing characters, and not an etymological classification. But the radical usual corresponds to the semantic component of a character.)
If you understand this, you understand one of the key principles behind logographic writing and are ready to proceed.
So, logographic scripts generally have three components:
(1) Logograms (logographs) – signs that represent a word (or root) in the language
(2) Phonograms – signs that indicate sounds
(3) Semantograms / Determinatives – signs that mark
The way this works out in particular scripts varies. Not all of them will have all of the parts. I think Maya doesn’t really have a system of semantic determiners. And it may very well be that these may be functions and a language may use the same sign in each of these functions – but perhaps with a system for indicating when it is working as a logogram, a phonogram, or a taxogram. In Chinese and Maya, signs are generally compressed into a ‘block’ to indicate they are functioning together – as we saw in the Chinese example. In Egyptian, a particular sign may perform any of the functions, but when it is used as a logogram, a small vertical mark is added to it to indicate it is a logogram.
Systems can get vastly more complex: Old Persian or Japanese. Japanese is probably the most complicated writing system ever – certainly the most complicated in use now. But I will set that aside, and notably both of those systems are the result of existing logographic systems being repurposed to suit completely unrelated languages.
You can tweak this overall system a bit. In Yuk Tepat, I have incorporated a class of marks I have variously called ‘operators’ or ‘modifiers,’ which are attached to and modify the meanings of logograms. For example, adding various different marks to the sign ‘hand’ forms signs for finger, knuckle, thumb, palm, have, lack, etc. You see this sporadically in Chinese, for example the characters 刀 ‘knife’ and 刃 ‘blade,’ or 木 ‘tree,’ 末 ‘branch,’ and 本 ‘root.’ In Chinese though, this is a sporadic thing, while in Yuk Tepat this kind of marking is very systematized.
Since logographic systems are still at least partly phonetic, the phonetic / phonemic part can be classified by the different ways it works, same as phonemic writing systems. Hence, you can have logo-alphabets, logoabugidas, and logosyllabaries. Egyptian hieroglyphs are logoconsonantal (an abjad). The other systems are syllabic. While I don’t know any logoabugidas, you can always make one. Think about which one suits your language. Egyptian, e.g., is logoconsonantal probably because it’s Afroasiatic and abjads seem well-suited to their style of consonantal roots. The only difference between these and fully phonetic writing systems is that the phonetic part of logographic systems usually has much less phonetic precision, hence why semantic signs are needed to disambiguate similar-sounding words.
Your system doesn’t have to work just like any of these. You can figure out your own type, although it will likely mix logograms, phonograms, and taxograms in some form. I’ll grant that, of course, you don’t have to do even that. If you want something ideographic, you can try to make it. People constantly imagine fantasy languages that work completely differently from any real language, and that’s their prerogative. But if by ‘logographic,’ you meant a system like Egyptian/Sumerian/Chinese/Maya then it will be somewhat like I describe.
So to wrap up, logographs =/= pictures, they don’t represent translinguistic ‘ideas,’ they have a phonetic component that reflects the spoken language, and use semantic signs to disambiguate words. Once you know this, you basically understand the mechanics of logographs.
With that, I’m going to stop for a bit, then get back with Part II where I will get to some more particular points about making a script.
And of course, if you (readers) have a logographic script that you’ve made I’d like to know how you managed the overwhelming whole of it. Add a comment or reblog and add what you did.
Ok adding to this though that even though it is extremely relatable, this is a KNOWN thing with professional writing. 10k is often referred to as "having a pot boiling" or "having a stew" - it's the point where you often see an idea coming together and it's exciting! But THEN... 30k-50k is the point where that fun has to start coming together. In theatre, it's usually week 3 of a 5 week rehearsal period where you have to stop talking about the play and really get it all up on its feet and cohesive. In art, it's committing to what are going to be the final visible layers of colour and texture, in sculpture the moment where you're truly at the point of no return with carving out the shape.
It usually feels really bad. Because this is the point it becomes real craft. It's so, so difficult to really be able to identify if it's truly not going to be anything or you're just in the hardest part of the process, and really the only way to know is to... write through it. Write it badly. Or, if you really can't, put it in a drawer and come back to it after a few months of breathing space. Remember, you can fix so much in the edit, but you can't fix nothing!
(I say, fully looking at my latest draft of my book and considering throwing it in the bin. But my editor said exactly this to me, so I'm passing it along.)
this is 100% true. I've written 6 complete novels at this point and every single time around the 40k mark I feel lost in the woods. Nothing seems to be working. I feel awful; I can't sleep. I keep going even though I'm convinced I'm going to fail. And then... It's like leaving a tunnel and getting back out in the sunshine. Stuff starts coalescing. Things that weren't working have obvious fixes. I "can write" again, except I was writing the whole time. It just felt hopeless in the moment. It's not. You just gotta get out of the woods.
ah yes, 1/3 of the way through, the point where the plot thinnens and your soul withers and you have to plough through anyway or you'll never finish anything
Sometimes, fanfiction is carefully plotted out stories, with plot points and call backs and themes that all tie it up in a meaningful and exciting way.
And sometimes fanfiction is, ‘Watch me do a fucking KICK FLIP off this cool sentence!! Also here's some sex'
planning my fic in a normal way. 1) what incredibly indulgent scene do I want to write next? 2) what connective tissue do I have to set up between indulgent scenes to get us there?
the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
