As a kid, I took all my notes in my diary: I always had it on me, it was a journal I loved, and I always knew where to find my school notes, my maps, my keys to secret languages… Everything I scribbled down.
At the beginning of term last year, a friend of mine mentioned she was going to try and write in a single notebook for the duration of the program, and I decided to return to my roots.
I’m glad I did, because the pandemic hit in the second term.
Read MoreThere’s no straightforward path to becoming a successful writer. (Or if there is, I wouldn’t know about it, since I’m not one. Not yet.) But there are a number of ways to make money at writing, and the more you put out there the closer to becoming “successful” you get.
(Side note: success is what you make of it. My personal definition of success is “the ability to live comfortably off money earned from writing while also writing whatever I like”, which is… asking quite a lot of the universe, unfortunately.)
Read MoreMy dissertation project, working title Antikythera, is set in the early 4th century BCE. I’m well aware that my main characters’ contemporaries are long dead. Their ancestors are long dead, or at least so well-scattered it’s hard to trace the family tree. I’m well aware that none of their friends are going to come up and tell me I’m doing it wrong. I know, logically, I have a little wiggle room.
It’s just so… awkward.
Read MoreEveryone likes PIE.
I am, of course, talking about Proto-Indo-European, the grandfather of the largest family of languages in the world. PIE transformed into European, Slavic, Celtic, Anatolian, and Hellenic language families—essentially, it populated what we know as the European continent and leached into Asia around the edges. If you’re reading this, you’re familiar with its reach.
Last week I talked about constructing a minlang—a small language, in this case based on a concept—so this week I wanted to talk about the exact opposite. One of my biggest projects to date involves creating a root language.
There’s a joke in here somewhere about it being a recipe for PIE, but I’m not going to go there.
Read MoreOutlining gives me the scope to do a little content editing as I go, and it means I can nudge the characters in the right directions when I need to. It gives me a level of omnipotence I wouldn’t really get otherwise, which streamlines the whole process and means I can actually finish my projects.
One of the biggest problems with outlining is that it can lead to a rigid plot without much room for character interaction. If you just write down a list of places you want your characters to end up, you’ll find yourself staring at your characters while they refuse to move or react to anything. I suspect this is the problem most people have with outlining: it’s hard to translate natural characterization into bullet points.
But it’s not impossible.
Read MoreI’ll come clean. One of the main reasons I’m restarting this blog is to take advantage of a captive audience and talk about conlanging—the art of constructing languages.
It’s probably my dorkiest passion, and I literally crochet my own sweatervests, so that’s an extremely high bar.
Codon is a language I came up with back in 2014. It’s complete, usable, and utterly impractical—it only has a vocabulary of 64 words. You’d never find something like it in the real world.
Except you totally would, because it’s based off the structure of RNA.
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