Kevin's Watch

Bear with me as I again bore the heck out of yers with another product of my mental insecurity :

Obviously the vast majority of folks on this messageboard are fantasy fans ... well you'd want to think so!

Who's ever tried to write their own fantasy novel?
Who's ever tried to event their own language, or at least character set?
Who's ever mapped out a fake land or city?
Who's drawn up a timeline of mediaeval events or genealogy of some non-existent royal family or race?

(my answer to these questions will be withheld until I find out how humiliated I am likely to be)

well, i've TRIED, but I'm not very creative, so no one will EVER see my attempts

Tried just writing a story, Or anything else?

I'll admit I've written stuff, outlined a story, and written out bits of it. But it was a while ago, and upon looking on it these days, I get the same feeling TC got when he came back from the Land and looked at his old novels.

I'd played with languages and character sets. But mainly I'm a map-freak, so I actually have a full-on planet with continents, some of which are further delineated into nations, some of which are further delineated into regions with towns and histories and stories.

I have one fully completed street directory of a fake city (works out about the size of a place that'd house around 100,000 people). That one is modern age, with rail systems and football leagues (local code) and so on.

The planet was fun, just took an old styrofoam disco ball inside (which I now notice since being exposed to the yartz can be found at a yartz supplies shop), and got stuck into it with highlighters.

Another continent has a lot of fantasy work added to it as a background, many timelines and genealogies.

But one must note that its all extremely amateur, and I cringe at a lot of it, now, the childishness, the skill dearth, the lack of originality!

But its so much fun, I have always kept all the work, and would love to just keep playing with it, in a 'never-intended-for-publication' sort of way.

Anyone else tripped the light fantasy?

Landwaster wrote:Bear with me as I again bore the heck out of yers with another product of my mental insecurity :

Obviously the vast majority of folks on this messageboard are fantasy fans ... well you'd want to think so!

Who's ever tried to write their own fantasy novel?
Who's ever tried to event their own language, or at least character set?
Who's ever mapped out a fake land or city?
Who's drawn up a timeline of mediaeval events or genealogy of some non-existent royal family or race?

(my answer to these questions will be withheld until I find out how humiliated I am likely to be)

I wouldn't say I have tried to write a fantasy novel but at one stage I thought I'd be able to write a novel. After about 10 pages and 324 gory murders later, I decided it wasn't for me I tried a bit of short story stuff, some poetry etc but that's mostly been canned

Language? Character set? They were all the rage when I was young and at school. It was mostly coded stuff but very cool

Fake Land or City? Furtherest I went was my tree-house in the bush and the world one creates around it.

Timelines? Nope. Cannot say I did that

Ive written some short stories, made tons of maps...never went as far as a language...

So, Vain, you certainly went in a violent direction! Poetry was always the worst, everything I ever wrote looks like bollocks mere seconds after completing it. I canned mine, too. Generally I found that a little four line stanza is much easier than a full-on poem.

Lord Mhoram wrote:Ive written some short stories, made tons of maps...never went as far as a language...

I prefer the map-making,t he creation of the setting, by far more than anything else. I'd love to see anyone else's maps.

Regarding languages, the whole concept is way over my head ... just working out a lot of root words and making up some replacement text is pretty simple, but then there's all the variants (I don't even know the terminology used for this stuff).

With one language I got as far as creating new characters for the sh's and the th's and the two y's ... but that's as far as I got ...

Despite it all, though, it gave me nothing but satisfaction to give it a burl. I for ages could remember the character for each letter and therefore could write English in that script, and can still to this day remember about 4 simple phrases.

But how someone like Tolkien could have gone the WHOLE HOG, never ceases to amaze me!

I'm still working on the great american fantasy novel. Whole damn thing is in my head, but I'm too lazy to write it (so far... i keep telling myself I need to learn more... or find a good editor who works for free). I've sketched out maps, timelines, character histories. funny, i've never thought about creating a language (considering i'm a linguist by avocation and former vocation). i have a ton of poetry, some of which doesn't make me cringe when i look at it. a couple short stories.

time, tho... time. i'll get it done eventually. wouldn't mind being the one to pick up the torch.

Well, I started writing a book, but I hated all of the characters, so I shoved it in a drawer and left it there to gather dust. And yes, it had maps, but no attempts at a language, that's just beyond my capabilities. I have some folders of poems in the same drawer, even won an award for one once, but for the most part they just gather dust (and rightfully so, the world should be spared)!

Hmm when 13 yrs old I and mates began to create a country out of the country town and surrounding areas ... made maps ... books which served like community guides ... and I've since set short stories in there ... mainly through high school (THOSE you'll never see!).

But I really should one day get a few photos of the old maps and so on.

Its great when something you invented yourself eventually becomes reasonably old, and then it feels like there's a little more 'gumption' to it!

Was anyone particularly proud of a certain instance of a name (of a place or person or event or something) that they created? The one that I was always happy with was Anipor Ballek ... which translated through one of my pathetic language thingies as land of two weathers. It's one of the continents.

(am I prattling?)

I started on a fantasy epic when I was about 15 (too many years ago!). I stopped shortly after, because it were crap! But I did like some parts of it, so I took these, and merged them with other ideas I had had, and eventually came up with a complete history, from the creation of the world through to war in heaven, the casting down of the "evil" character, war on Earth etc. (large chunks stolen wholesale from the Bible, Silmarillion and every other creation myth going).

I went as far as creating genealogies for four or five races of Elf, three houses of Humans, one dwarven, and the lineage of three out of five species of Dragons; A-3 maps of three continental land masses (all about one and a half times larger than Australia) and an A-4 map of a large island nation (about twice the size of the British Isles); maps of towns, mountain chains (including isoheights), fortress plans, roads, canals, etc. I had about 2,000 place and character names, several of which I liked so much I decided to use them as the etymological basis of a number of language threads.

For example, Dragons all belonged to the order "Artamanis" (Mani = great, artam = reptile); Red dragons were the "Artamanis Oregreo" (C), Dragons of Red Fire (Oreg = red, Reo = flame). From this, anything in the language that was red would have Oreg or a recognisable variation within it. Trees were "Orn", so "Reorn" would mean Fire Tree, whie "Aragorn" would have meant "Red Tree".

Lingually, I got as far as numbers from 0 - 100, including a character set, the colours black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, silver and gold, and translating several names.

Some day I'll come back to it and try to make something out of it. Some day...

Sounds like something I might read MGF...

I wrote a story many years back - I was about 14 or so. Made up a character set for my own language. Its long since gone tho...*snif*

Should have kept it

Wow what an effort, MGF ... dragon lineages ... that's a pearler!

Someday indeed! You're not alone in that.

Earthblood wrote:Made up a character set for my own language.

This where you now try to remember what you can of the character set ... and jot that part you can remember back down for safekeeping. Then it becomes some archaic language of which only a few scraps have stood the test of time

I'm currently writing a fantasy/spy novel. I doubt that it's any good though.

I have made a few maps for the world I'm "creating".

That's about all.

Who's ever tried to write their own fantasy novel?

Well, I either dream up the entire book in my head (like with my first novel) or I build it as I write--flying blind. The latter is what I'm doing with Brokinar, which is about 30 pages so far. Won't start again with it till I finish my first novel, though. Anyway, the prologue is free for anybody to look up on the Watch, under this forum somewhere...

Who's ever tried to event their own language, or at least character set?

I've been working extensively on a language called the "Old Code". Nobody really knows what it was called, so they labeled it with their own speech. Old Code is a dead language during Brokinar, having been wiped out during a crippling war. The only function the language serves in my book is to help weave plot intricacies. For instance, only highborn have names in Old Code, and there is a rogue in the book named Torgalas, which is Old Code...hmmm... The King's name, Brokinar, means "Sword of Flame".

Who's ever mapped out a fake land or city?

Several times, although no final draft. The land surrounding the Golden Castle (the southeastern region of Naryon) I've got pictured perfectly in my head, though--from political borders and physical makeup. Although, I've not touched upon the intricacies of the Golden Caslte's inner parts--which is basically a small city surrounded by old, yellowed walls and a keep at its heart.

Who's drawn up a timeline of mediaeval events or genealogy of some non-existent royal family or race?

I've not dipped into Naryon's past as a whole, but I've done the past 300 years for the southeastern region, where the Golden Castle lies. What goes on within there is all that really matters, anyway. The rest of the continent is not important, nor is the world. The world is destroyed, anyway, in Part III, and the finale takes place in a little place I like to call "Purgatory" . I'll touch upon the subject of the afterlife there, I'll wager, once I get to it... Book's probably going to be 1,000 pages, it seems.*grumbles*

I'm writing one right now. Its a four-book epic (one per season) set in a quasi-medeviel kingdom. Maps? Yes. Languages? Not quite, although I've used a software designed for same to get words and names to fit certain ideas (one language is vaguely French-ish, another vaguely Celtic, with another kinda sorta Arabic).

I have designed a castle, though. And an increasingly detailed set of religions. Plus heraldry.

Even have a discussion group for folks to give me feedback </SHAMELESS PLUG>. Some folks here even belong to it (*waves*).

There're wizards, political intrigue, dragons, a civil war, prophecies, incest, religious schisms, a truly disturbing villainess, etc.

I've written a short fiction, about an evil scientist, for one of my Honors college classes. It was a lot of fun to write. It's a humorous fiction. Maybe I'll post it here one day.-jay

please do, Jay, I know that I, for one, would love to read it!

Arg!!! I'm writing three books at a time. This is impossible!
1.horror/fantasy 2.sci-fi/fantasy 3.horror/sci-fi/mystery/fantasy/adventure *passes out from brain overload*