Tag Archives: Writing

Peak Into A Writer’s World Bible – Founding Myth

Hey Everyone, Alexander here.

I’m swinging in for a last minute clutch post because the first post of the month is always the hardest for us to organize. Since our writing section is more than a little anemic, despite me being a writer — and because, I’ve forgotten the post I wanted to do about four separate times in the last two days — I thought it’d be fun to take advantage of this chaos to give you all a little glimpse into my writing notes and pull something out that might not normally see the light of day.

I do so much writing that simply can not make its way into the shorts or novels in anything more than hints but that help me give the world a sense of depth that my readers can sense. Or, more honestly, let me stop obsessing about a particular idea. You might never see the detailed anatomy of a historic country’s geopolitical make up , hell you may only see the country mentioned once or twice ever. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t spell out its entire history from founding to “present” because it has its own natural effects on history.

Where does one start? Why in Myth and Legend, of course! This is how the Universe was Born.

The worlds have always been, The Firstbornes gave them life. For they were great travelers who first crossed worlds. Yet they grew lonely for the worlds they crossed were uniformly barren and lost, separated from each other and lightless. Some among the Firstborne saw the truth of creation, that the worlds they saw were seeds of hope and potential needing light. Those Who Saw convened a great council of the Firstborne to convince them a great sacrifice was necessary. The Firstborne knew it was their duty to creation to give these seeds a chance to blossom so Those Who Became sacrificed themselves by the thousands to give every world its own set of stars to guide creation’s potential. Yet, the Ones Who Set the Stars were of the same people. Thus the life of many worlds can interact with each other and indeed many creatures can thrive on worlds not their own.

But not every Firstborne joined their brethren amongst the heavens. Some were given a harder duty, for the young new species emerging would need the guiding hand of their elder to. Even the Firstborne knew creation could be cruel. Those Who Remained were given the task of protecting the new saplings from predations of that borne in the darkness. For some things only birthed themselves in shadow and lightlessness and they hungered for spark of life they lacked. Those Who Remained split all of creation into two kingdomsL the Praeskensha (Kingdom of the Guardians) and the Etominru (The Kingdom of the Starless). The Praeskensha watched over the worlds of Stars while the Etominru held vigillant in the worlds of darkness, the vanguard of all their brethren had sacrificed. So peace reigned and life blossomed.

That Seemed really clean and ready for publishing didn’t it?

Wanna see the OneNote Page?

OneNote Screen Shot - Glimpse in a Notebook Cropped

It’s Not quite as clean is it?

Oh and Don’t Worry. We’ll get to the Textile and Dye Materials Page. That’ll be Fun.

Well this was fun. Thanks for letting me indulge in parading my world-building around for a few minutes.

Writer’s Corner: Why I don’t like NaNoWriMo

(Intentionally mildly pretentious image of me writing? Check!)

I wasn’t going to do it. You couldn’t have made me. There was no way in hell you were going to get me to throw in my hat into the “Hey guys it’s time for NaNoWriMo!” ring if you held me at gunpoint. But suddenly, here I am. Of course, it’s one of the biggest events for beginning and amateur authors of the year. Confused about what I’m talking about? No worries, it confused me at first. It’s November! Which means that NaNoWriMo is starting up (hey peeps, it already started by the time you’re reading this!). NaNoWriMo stands for National November Writing Month — go here: http://nanowrimo.org/ — The idea behind this event is to give you, the budding author, or the lazy one, a deadline and timeline to force you into writing a 50,000-word ‘novel’. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to be trash, it just has to be 50,000-words or greater. What do you get for completing this Herculean task you ask? Why absolutely nothing, aside from the soul-affirming knowledge that you finished a 50,000-word novel in THIRTY DAYS. Oh and you have a 50,000-word novel now, of course. Why wasn’t I going to talk about this great idea some genius put together way back in 1999? Because, I don’t like it.

Now, don’t get me wrong I don’t think there is anything wrong with the program. I’ve ‘tried’ for the last three years. I have a bunch of writer friends who love it, it’s a fun sort of marathon for all us writer nerds, but it’s not for everyone.

I don’t know about any of you, dear readers, but November might be the most hectic and chaotic month of the year for me. It’s midterm season for many of the students in the US, you have Thanksgiving (American) and the whole month always seems to get really damned full. That’s the first reason I don’t like NaNoWriMo (hence forth Nanowrimo because capitals suck). November is an awfully busy month by dint  of not being December, when everyone is home with their families and being far enough from September that school tends to be really crunching down.

My second reason for not liking it? I don’t write in a way that’s conducive to Nanowrimo. I’m a procrastinator by nature –- yes, I’m sorry Sennie but this is not quite late! –- so I need deadlines and Nanowrimo’s fantastic for that, true. Yet while I have proven I can write novel length books at a George RR Martin speed (Seven years from inception to my first ever –- read: crap –- novel is pretty good in my defense) and I know I want to write novel length books, I just don’t like to focus on them. I created a rich and complex world while working on my first book and I love it dearly but it’s big enough, and I was stupid enough, that I have to create languages. Not one, multiple. The number of which will only go up as I explore this wonderful world. World-building is one of my favorite parts of writing, but the words and time I put in to world-building don’t count toward Nanowrimo. The fifteen short stories I run off to record as inspiration hits me don’t count either, sorry me. Part of this is a discipline problem, I should be able to write down the idea for those short stories and move on; I shouldn’t feel the burning desire to write a small essay about the caliber system used by the primary species in my story (because their guns don’t use bullets), or a 100-word history/bio about the pistol my main character loves… or the eight other weapons that manufacturer makes and their fire rates, ranges, accuracy, general methods of use and history. But for me, for a long time, that was fun and sometimes that’s all you need.

I wanted to –- read: want to and am still working on –- write novel length piece because it’ll show off all the wonderful world-building I love to do but Nanowrimo has proved to be an actively discouraging experience. Just because I can’t write 1600-words a day for an entire month because my life is busy or I’d rather spend that hour or two crafting a half-dozen civilian corporations that may matter later, but I’m inspired to do them now; I was starting to feel like I was less of a writer than my dear friends who were doing it with me. Which was ridiculous because if you’re not careful I have a forty-five-minute lecture on caliber (I call it TEOIS, which stands for Total Energy Output and Impact Strength) that comes all off the top of my head.

So this is me talking to all those other writers who struggle with Nanowrimo incredibly but know they can stick to a proper writing schedule. That when they sit down and focus, they can punch out a prodigious amount of words in a very short time and have already finished a writing project of some length before. It’s okay. Don’t feel bad, Nanowrimo is to help light a fire under people’s asses; it’s not a contest or a measuring stick for writers to beat themselves up with, so don’t. Cheer on your friends who really do try it, help them out and all the while keep chipping away at your own. Do what you love, and do what you’re comfortable with. And HAVE FUN (or at least enjoy emotionally torturing your readers) because that’s why we started writing. We wanted to tell stories bubbling inside of us and we found the written word as our medium.

So keep writing 300-word break downs of every star nation’s ship classes and their traditional and non-tradition tactical and strategic roles… oh. That’s just me isn’t it? Very well then. How about we end with, keep writing.

Shameless plugs:

In case you were wondering, my big writing project a 200,000-word, seven-years in the making novel that is very much not for sale and a pair of short stories on Amazon that I self-published because I could.

Check them out:

Jirvaerka Anniversary:

http://smile.amazon.com/Jirvaerka-Anniversary-Tales-Iradathka-Shorts-ebook/dp/B00W43DNWS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1445924818&sr=8-2&keywords=alexander+pereira

Project Implacable

http://smile.amazon.com/Project-Implacable-Tales-Iradathka-Shorts-ebook/dp/B00W3CG33Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445924818&sr=8-1&keywords=alexander+pereira