Okay, people may think that in credible fantasy tales, you simply don’t commit a random faux pas along the lines of actually publishing RPG character sheets / stat blocks for the characters.
Let me say that a) I don’t particularly mind that practice at all, and b) the following stats have absolutely nothing to do with writing or preparing stories of any kind. I will not roll dice when writing stuff. I made these just for fun. =)
I’ve found yet another great class of software that makes writing easier: Genealogy software. In the stories, there’s a giant number of characters, and obviously, also a giant number of relations between the characters.
One of the great big stumbling blocks of the real-world specialist software is that it doesn’t really lend itself all too well on use with fictional worlds. Luckily, the folks of Avarthrel have same number of months per year and days per month as we here do, but how would the calendar systems deal with years in four different ages of year-keeping? (Look, I’m not a really gigantic Tolkien fan, but in every good fantasy setting, people reset their calendars all the time when something big happens. Or just if the King happens to walk over to the other side of the river. =)
In this case, the software seems to work perfectly so far, however. The software does, however, cause a few problems from the narrative point of view. Consider, for example, how I started writing stuff about an adventuring company based in Anchorfall…
Owned by four generations of Sandbrooks, a family of people with strong innate magical abilities, usually inherited strongest on the maternal side.
…and then I spend next eight hours (I think I’m not kidding) digging through (read: coming up with) the Sandbrook family history. Well, we may not know much yet about the famed long-standing mercenary company with magical and mysterious founders and proprietors, but I sure as heck know who the current owner’s great-grandmother was!
I currently have a rather vague idea on how to handle raw historical data. I have a hand-edited master timeline, and I’m supposed to keep together a small list of important dates for the character in question. I may be able to solve a part of this mess through a mysterious GEDCOM-to-MediaWiki-messuppery-bot, but I really need to figure out how to handle historical references that don’t necessarily concern with any people in the notes. Perhaps I’ll throw together a giant mess soon.
Here's one odd perspective to my writing. For some odd reason or other, sooner or later, no matter how adventurously I start, I end up writing about plain ordinary life of the characters. It can be a good thing, because that's actually what I want to write, but I'm not entirely so sure that it is what the people want to read.
Let me recap: Jenyr's Company went to investigate a forgotten temple, went through a mind-numbingly pointless trek through seas, went to take back a besieged city... and now they're kind of stuck where they are.
And oh boy, will the fun ever stop: Sooner or later, Faira's getting married to, of all people, an elven duke, and right now spends time in Anchorfall running a pawn shop and sorting out, er, little things. Gnedrnygr's a magician, and magicians can spend decades sitting by a stack of books. Facyr's dreams have come true and he's happily guarding the city with his newfound soulmate and wife Cassandra. And the giant crises that threaten the country have gone, gone, gone! Great opportunity for covering life in a pseudo-mediaeval world. Not-so-great opportunity for fantasy genre in general!
So what can I do right now? I can't think of a big crisis to shake things up, so I have to deal with little crises. Let's see what I have in store for the future: Facyr's and Cassandra's new life as a married couple -- and as city guards. Faira's new business venture, a good investment for the future, and some gambling luck. And, um... well, I have a whole bunch of little stories on little people on not so epic events.
The point is, since these are small events, they don't really expand all that well into short stories. And that hinders me. I have always had the tendency to write short stories -- my stories just seem to grow naturally into the short story or novella size. Perhaps one day, I'll even finish that novel. But here, I have a bunch of small stories that just don't work as short stories. I seem to have had this irrational contempt, I verily dare say, for flash fiction. I certainly seem to have the material for them -- why the heck am I not writing them more!
I recently did a Flash a Day thing to, among other things, shake my thoughts loose. I don't think I'll be doing a Flash a Day soon, more like "More or less pre-prepared flash fiction story published every day for one week" -- but I really, really need to start thinking of writing more of the flash fiction stories, because I think they can help me dislodge some of the ideas that are too small to grow into the scale of short stories. I also think I'll not do the "limit to one page" thing; I'm, after all, writing this stuff on a crappy lappy and LaTeX right now.
But the big point is -- I hope to write more flash fiction soon! I really need to rethink the whole thing... again.
The wiki I use internally switched software yet another time. This time, to MediaWiki.
Why? I don't know exactly why I moved from that. SnipSnap worked for its purpose. But there was something about it that made it not quite work right. Maybe the user interface was clumsy. The markup was definitely clumsy, and the categories just weren't neat. SnipSnap was a good software, but maybe it just didn't work for my own work. It had features that I didn't care much about, like the blog thing and mysterious view types. It was a blast from past, working kind of like Everything2.
But regrettably, as an active Wikipedian, I've found MediaWiki the best wiki engine ever. It Just Works.™ and has tons of features that make my life easy.
If it's the zillion-ton gorilla that takes care of one of the most useful and popular websites out there, it has to be good enough for me...
The only bad thing about MediaWiki is that it needs the Satan's own database system, MySQL. I only switched because someone somewhere somewhy rambled about MediaWiki's upcoming support for PostgreSQL. I hate MySQL. Some silly, silly features, and the mysql client is just... not good. Especially if I installed it out of box and there was no help. Grr.
Anyway, I think I may open the wiki to people some time later. It might prove to be interesting. I plan on using CC BY-SA license for the wiki content, and reserve the right to grant myself and people the right to use different license. I plan on relicensing the stories I've written, for example, under CC BY-ND.
On writing: I wrote a character questionnaire yesterday. It seems like a fun way to build some initial material for a character's bio. 100 questions, and now the count rose to 108... I can find out a lot of interesting sides of the character by figuring out the answers to these questions.
Here's a funny thing to consider: People speak a lot in different styles, yet it somehow makes sense to write in only one style.
I'm actually in favor of older literature. In older literature, characters didn't try to be personal what comes to their voice. These days, it's suddenly all the rage to use dialectual, colloquial language - it's probably easy for the reader to then tell apart the laidback and stiff-necked, the peasants and the nobles, the farmers and the townsmen.
But I can't. I'm not a native English speaker, for starters. And even my dialectual and colloquial langiage knowledge of Finnish is somewhat limited. I could invent a whole new dialect for the stories, but that would be kind of tricky too. Yet, if you look at the older books - characters exhibit some wonderful personality even when they, superficially, speak similarly.
So I plan to get this covered what comes to wordiness, complexity and other related things.
Let's compare: Facyr is basically the boring, background-dwelling author-self-insert who just does things and won't get noticed anyway. He's not overly wordy, goes to obvious conclusions, and won't say them unless they're not completely obvious - he won't bother his friends unless they need to know something. Faira is cunning and smart, Gnedrnygr is only smart. The big difference is that Faira speaks more and Gnedrnygr ponders things a bit more before saying them aloud. Gnedrnygr knows a lot - Faira and Facyr don't know as much, but if they can somehow get the wisdom out of Gnedrnygr, Facyr can apply it practically and Faira can formulate something out of it.
And here's one of the problems I noticed in my writings: Most characters tend to be wordy. They babble and babble and babble and use complex language. Mostly because when I write random things, I tend to babble and babble and babble and use complex language. So I have to fight back - basically, if the character isn't a total geek, they shouldn't talk that much.
A note to self and other people who write: If you think you make a good joke, hope you'll find it funny in a couple of decades. And, you may end up needing to live with it.
A good case would be Gnerdnygr Adithebadoggr. The character was first mentioned in Faira's backstory. Faira's backstory, of course, was written semi-jokingly; While I want the overall tone to stay fairly serious and realistic, I went consciously slightly over the top with that story.
At that time, I didn't think much about the character naming. Fantasy stories are always rather complicated what comes to naming of the people. After making the bad joke, it was time to get back to the reality and start rationalising this... challenging name.
I initially thought it'd be fairly simple; humans speak one language, elves another language, and Gnedrnygr is from a distant country with a completely different language. Nowadays, the languages would be Varmian, Elven and Colemian, respectively.
The real story behind Gnedrnygr's name is very simple: There's Grignr, widely known as "just like Conan but more difficult to pronounce". Then I rationalised my choice as "Okay, it's a good fantasy name. Good fantasy names are difficult to pronounce." And then I realized that hey, where Gnedrnygr comes from, there's more folks named the same way.
That's the lesson that you need to remember. Jokes may not kill you, but you end up supporting them if they get real enough!
So this is where the Colemian language starts evolving from. It's probably going to sound kind of like ancient Norse. Just that I don't know much how that sounds like, but still.
