Rainwvalker - You Must Be Truly Desperate To Come Here

What does Shaensigin's voice sound like in human tongue? Is she better at speaking spider-paw words or the language of two-toes? And what is her natural tongue/sounds, if any?

Shaensigin is very good at spiderpaw talk and something of a mimic. In a time long past, she and Ilganyag had a game they’d play, where they’d start with one word, and go back and forth repeating it, adding a new word of their own every round. Whoever couldn’t repeat the entire string of words first lost the game.

Shaensigin kept up with the bird pretty well.

More impressively, Shaensigin helped the Inak create their language. She’s not only good at it, but responsible for large parts of it. Of all the senet beast gods the two-toes have and still do worship, she has the longest history with them.

Humans can’t speak the two-toe tongue; we can’t make the right sounds. I’m not even going to try and type them out, but there are clicky knocks they make in their snouts, a growled consonant, and little gruffs :3 When I imagine Ruffles squeakily gruffling to her nanna I wish to slightly die.

When a physicist falls in love :)

Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946.

"Asteroid," poem assembled from quotations from Wikipedia articles

Hello Ashley! Returned to an old story of mine and trying to rebuild large parts of the plot that didn't satisfy me. I figure it's best to detail all the major story beats before I fill in all the icing around them. From chapter 1 to chapter 15 (so we're not considering spoilers!), what major story beats would you say you finalized first? Was it hard deciding which little bits needed to come up and when, even after you had scripted the major steps?

–You’re definitely on the right track, I also used that method. I had a beginning and an end point for the first book, then looked backwards from there, mapping the major beats in each chapter. It’s also personally important for me to know the WHY of everything. I need a Why for everything I write and do, I find it motivating.

So it’s been a while and my memory is foggy, but I believe the broad outline was like:> Duane & Sette have misadventures that help them understand each other. Why do they need to understand each other? Because they are lonely, broken people and the goal is to better them.> They make it to her cousin’s along with the macguffin, which results in a climax, but macguffin escapes. What is the why of the macguffin? The macguffin isn’t just an antagonist; it’s all antagonism. It is the ultimate macguffin, and is motivated by the misery and misdeeds in the story itself.> They chase the macguffin and wind up isolated in a situation that forces out the best of Sette and the worst of Duane, with disastrous consequences. Why is the worst of Duane important to see? Because if there’s hope for the worst of us, despair is only an excuse. Why is the best of Sette important to see? Because it’s not so very Best, and she needs to see all the room she has to get better.> They reunite with the macguffin for another battle.

Easy-peasy. But now let’s flesh out that first step and mark out the milestones:

engage and fight the wand’ring root, introducing their respective characters in very broad strokes

encounter the RBB, enter the crypt, still in-character, but each gradually starts to crack. Duane goes super violent, Sette shows fear

fight each other at the waystation, Duane’s veneer of civility is fully shattered by admitting he’s a closet cannibal with control issues, Sette’s veneer of roguishness is shattered by admitting she’s scared of failing her da

True selves semi-revealed, Sette has an adventure in town, starts trouble, leads to…

Duane battling Quigley, coming face to face with Alderode

Sette sneaks Duane over the border, enters his memories

By seeing who Duane truly was, Sette fully understands who he is now

During their fight the next day in the toyshop, Duane fully understands what Sette needs of him (he doesn’t fully understand who she is, he’s not as insightful as she is)

And bam, that’s how I outline. It’s a pretty simple structure when you lay it out like that, but then you start adding in B and C plots, two dozen secondary characters, and it becomes deceptively complex!

Otherwise yeah, figuring out where to move the plot forward, where to cut away to other storylines (and how much to devote to them), where to pause and meander for character building - that’s all the most difficult stuff. Most of us can sit around and write cute dialog or character studies all day - fanfiction is FULL of amateur writers who can do this marvellously - but the BEST and most successful writers are able to tell an engaging narrative with lots of moving parts and suspenseful story turns. Maybe they get panned because their prose isn’t elegant or maybe their characters are hackneyed - but they still sell mountains of books because they know how to keep readers turning pages by structuring a suspenseful story.

Good luck with that, ‘cause it’s the hardest part! And personally, I have particular considerations I have to make that you probably don’t have to in prose, particularly prose meant to be read all at once. I need to try and make each page at least mildly engaging and end on a hook wherever I can, since there’s no guarantee the reader is going to come back to progress the story in two days :D

Reblogging for posterity's sake

What do Crescian and Aldish nationalists see as the end-goal of their war? I imagine Alds want to spread the dammakhert as far south as possible and maybe abolish the monarchy and Crescians want to destroy the dammakhert and Ssaelism.

It’s varied over the centuries, but you have listed the major angles that have driven them both in the past.

At present, Cresce is ostensibly in a defensive position, claiming that Alderode struck first and is occupying one of their bordertowns. Alderode claims that it is merely retaliating for Cresce sending spies and militants (surveyors) over the border, and that it will take a piece of Cresce into itself to send a message.

The Aldish deep state has other reasons for its international aggression however, just as Cresce probably is hiding something itself. This’ll all come out in the next few chapters.

mysteries 🌜 happy autumn equinox!

unrestrained summer fun

Twitter | Instagram