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littlemanpoet · 04-20-2002, 06:06 AM

I'm enjoying your responses, everyone.

Rose Cotton: I think it's great that you're following your aspirations already. Keep at it! [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

Welcome, Mirlos. That you wind up with your own story after starting fanfic makes a lot of sense to me.

Kalessin: Whereas I agree with you in general regarding the pitfalls of creating ones own language, I would encourage someone for whom that kind of creativity comes naturally - that is, seems to bubble up from their subconscious. I offer a caveat that if ones language creation happens to do little more than give new or alternate meanings to recognizable words from a given language, then it would be advisable to either reconstruct the words so they don't too closely resemble extant words, or discontinue wasting precious story telling energy on what's not working very well and get to the plot and character development.

Niphredil, for example, seems to me to have a gift for it whereas StarCupCake is recognizable to me as Latin in code. Please understand, Star, that I speak benevolently and, I hope, constructively. I'm intrigued especially by you Bae character, who appears to be Jungian shadow archetype birthed from the archetypal Father and Mother. There is something about him that bears a power reaching back into the depths of time.

Anarya: More power to you. Romance is fitting in fantasy.

KingCarlton: Your comment to keep in mind the set genre is an apt point.

My own process was that I started out with a few key (archetypal) tableaus which had come to mind full-formed; one of an ancient scene of sacrifice to appease the gods, somewhere in Wales, I suppose; another of a ruin where collanades still stood, somewhere east of Cornwall. I really cannot say why these things seemed placed in Britain, for I've never been there. Perhaps it's that my imagination was baptized by Tolkien, and England is somehow my adopted homeland, even though my forebears all come from the Netherlands. Anyway, with these scenes in place I posed a corpus of questions: 1. What if all the mythologies were true (their mutual exclusions based on 'my turf-ism')? 2. What if the starting point for all of it was to be found in the Genesis 6 account of the sons of God and the daughters of men, but not limited to that gender set? 3. What if Enoch (in the Book of Enoch) was close but got it wrong as to the wholesale damnation of the sons of God?
4. And most importantly for my own story: what if there were some college age men and women who unknowingly were descended, relatively pure in stock, from certain Nordic and Celtic gods and goddesses, who in every fourth, fifth, or sixth generation, remarried into their own descendants' line to keep the seed relatively pure? and 5. What if there are a few swords of power (bearing spirits of power) that are so powerful they singlehandedly (pardon the pun) tip the balance of power? So there you have it. Fifteen years later I think one more rewrite will get me ready for publishing. I am currently in my sixth full rewrite.

Am I to understand that none of you are in writers' groups? I wasn't for a long time, but have been for the last two years and I have found my sympathetic readers' help invaluable. Tolkien was in a writers' group, too, you know.

I'm running out of time because I have a writers' conference to get to. Next post I'll share my notes from a forum entitled: "Keys to Successful Publishing of Fiction".

Happy writing, all!

04-20-2002, 06:06 AM	#14
littlemanpoet Itinerant Songster Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The Edge of Faerie Posts: 7,066	I'm enjoying your responses, everyone. Rose Cotton: I think it's great that you're following your aspirations already. Keep at it! [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img] Welcome, Mirlos. That you wind up with your own story after starting fanfic makes a lot of sense to me. Kalessin: Whereas I agree with you in general regarding the pitfalls of creating ones own language, I would encourage someone for whom that kind of creativity comes naturally - that is, seems to bubble up from their subconscious. I offer a caveat that if ones language creation happens to do little more than give new or alternate meanings to recognizable words from a given language, then it would be advisable to either reconstruct the words so they don't too closely resemble extant words, or discontinue wasting precious story telling energy on what's not working very well and get to the plot and character development. Niphredil, for example, seems to me to have a gift for it whereas StarCupCake is recognizable to me as Latin in code. Please understand, Star, that I speak benevolently and, I hope, constructively. I'm intrigued especially by you Bae character, who appears to be Jungian shadow archetype birthed from the archetypal Father and Mother. There is something about him that bears a power reaching back into the depths of time. Anarya: More power to you. Romance is fitting in fantasy. KingCarlton: Your comment to keep in mind the set genre is an apt point. My own process was that I started out with a few key (archetypal) tableaus which had come to mind full-formed; one of an ancient scene of sacrifice to appease the gods, somewhere in Wales, I suppose; another of a ruin where collanades still stood, somewhere east of Cornwall. I really cannot say why these things seemed placed in Britain, for I've never been there. Perhaps it's that my imagination was baptized by Tolkien, and England is somehow my adopted homeland, even though my forebears all come from the Netherlands. Anyway, with these scenes in place I posed a corpus of questions: 1. What if all the mythologies were true (their mutual exclusions based on 'my turf-ism')? 2. What if the starting point for all of it was to be found in the Genesis 6 account of the sons of God and the daughters of men, but not limited to that gender set? 3. What if Enoch (in the Book of Enoch) was close but got it wrong as to the wholesale damnation of the sons of God? 4. And most importantly for my own story: what if there were some college age men and women who unknowingly were descended, relatively pure in stock, from certain Nordic and Celtic gods and goddesses, who in every fourth, fifth, or sixth generation, remarried into their own descendants' line to keep the seed relatively pure? and 5. What if there are a few swords of power (bearing spirits of power) that are so powerful they singlehandedly (pardon the pun) tip the balance of power? So there you have it. Fifteen years later I think one more rewrite will get me ready for publishing. I am currently in my sixth full rewrite. Am I to understand that none of you are in writers' groups? I wasn't for a long time, but have been for the last two years and I have found my sympathetic readers' help invaluable. Tolkien was in a writers' group, too, you know. I'm running out of time because I have a writers' conference to get to. Next post I'll share my notes from a forum entitled: "Keys to Successful Publishing of Fiction". Happy writing, all!