I think I know what I finally want to do with my 6th pentalogy. I also learned I was misspelling the word "pentalogy". I want to write a 1st-person point-of-view travel log. It will be Cerulean Lotuspond, one of the heroes, exploring the other side of the galaxy, and logging it. What's he looking for? I don't know yet; I just have a generalized idea of what I want to do.
How did he get to the other side of the galaxy? That, I've figured out. There are a few species who have invented spatial gates to travel greater distances than simple warp speed. One or two are on good terms with Hominans, and sometimes allow access. I'm pretty sure the charismatic hero can procure that.
Other than just his writings, I will intersperse narratives with a "found footage", describing the sights and sounds of a video log.
Maybe, like with the second series, I will make five novellas into ten smaller novelettes. There could be a lot more to explore in another part of the galaxy.
Saturday, March 2, 2019
Friday, February 15, 2019
News from my multiverse.
I've made a lot of headway this past year with my writings. I've written the first pentology, and will probably edit it further after having it beta-read. The most recent time Denise, her son, and I went to the Indiana Toy and Comic Expo, I got a business card from someone who could get me in contact with a publisher. He like the general idea of advanced technology and science-based magic.
At first, I didn't know what to do with some of the characters, but one of the series' main villain, Soren Koburn, is well-established. I based him off a character I played in Dungeons & Dragons. The reason I say "one of" the villains is because the multiverse is vast, and I've only explored one corner of one galaxy of one universe. Just like there wouldn't really be one hero; there's the telepathic retiring diplomat Akil Nuevek, the fairy-blooded folk hero Cerulean Lotuspond, the clairvoyant diviner/detective Memet Nazari, among other sidekicks. I also have a favorite anti-hero, the demon-blooded pirate Adiran Blacktrench, who can be called to do heroic things, as long as he keeps his fiery temper in check.
The second pentology is a war, but it will have a weird twist, mixing time paradoxes and magic. I want to explore the limits of magic in my setting, and maybe push them. Lots will happen, and unlikely cooperations will be a driving factor. I had it entirely written out in plot-point outline form, but started deleting plot points as I started writing.
Pentology 3 will tackle the timely issues of fascism, misplaced patriotism, and hate. There will be a dictator that rises to power, but before Hominan society completely eats itself, heroes will come from surprising places. Like usual, this one is written in plot-point outline form.
I've also written out the fourth pentology in plot-point outline form, except for the fifth story. whereas 3 is about fascism, 4 will be about lost aliens looking to find home, believing that Hominan space is their birthright. So basically, it is about Zionism. Touchy subject, especially with people conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, but I want to tackle the subject, even under the guise of my science-fantasy setting.
I have a general idea for Pentology 5: a galactic mafia war. But I want to do something big. I know that the 5th story of Pentology 4 will have something huge as the finale, a merger of super-advanced technology, magic, and psionics.
I should read more science books, like the writings of Michio Kaku, Freeman Dyson, and Terrence McKenna, for inspiration.
At first, I didn't know what to do with some of the characters, but one of the series' main villain, Soren Koburn, is well-established. I based him off a character I played in Dungeons & Dragons. The reason I say "one of" the villains is because the multiverse is vast, and I've only explored one corner of one galaxy of one universe. Just like there wouldn't really be one hero; there's the telepathic retiring diplomat Akil Nuevek, the fairy-blooded folk hero Cerulean Lotuspond, the clairvoyant diviner/detective Memet Nazari, among other sidekicks. I also have a favorite anti-hero, the demon-blooded pirate Adiran Blacktrench, who can be called to do heroic things, as long as he keeps his fiery temper in check.
The second pentology is a war, but it will have a weird twist, mixing time paradoxes and magic. I want to explore the limits of magic in my setting, and maybe push them. Lots will happen, and unlikely cooperations will be a driving factor. I had it entirely written out in plot-point outline form, but started deleting plot points as I started writing.
Pentology 3 will tackle the timely issues of fascism, misplaced patriotism, and hate. There will be a dictator that rises to power, but before Hominan society completely eats itself, heroes will come from surprising places. Like usual, this one is written in plot-point outline form.
I've also written out the fourth pentology in plot-point outline form, except for the fifth story. whereas 3 is about fascism, 4 will be about lost aliens looking to find home, believing that Hominan space is their birthright. So basically, it is about Zionism. Touchy subject, especially with people conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, but I want to tackle the subject, even under the guise of my science-fantasy setting.
I have a general idea for Pentology 5: a galactic mafia war. But I want to do something big. I know that the 5th story of Pentology 4 will have something huge as the finale, a merger of super-advanced technology, magic, and psionics.
I should read more science books, like the writings of Michio Kaku, Freeman Dyson, and Terrence McKenna, for inspiration.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
A linguist's musings.
I love learning languages and find them interesting. With that in mind, I realized something in relation to the setting of "Across the Multiverse." I've already established that the humans in this fantastical future would speak some common language that would be a combination of most of today's spoken languages. I haven't gotten around to establishing that such a language, spread across space, wouldn't be homogeneous.
Soon after fleshing out some of the descriptions of some of the human-settled planets, I realized that varying environments would give rise to varying culinary traditions. This would partly due to the differences in biome variations; an oceanic, island-covered world would have something different to offer than a desert planet. It would also be due to the roles of artificial selection and genetic engineering in adapting life-forms to different terraformed worlds.
But I was thinking from the standpoint of a foodie. My inner linguist hadn't really kicked in much until recently. People who may have a similar base culture and language, separated by light-years, would of course have their own local slang and accents; such a separation would probably have more of an impact than just a separation of oceans or mountains in the real world. Yes, there is a vast computer network throughout the reaches of human-settled space, along with interstellar travel to span the gaps, but those sub-cultural differences would still be there; while we have an internet and airplanes now, English-speakers can still tell the difference between someone from England, Australian, Scot, New Englander, and Southern American.
It's a bit of a challenge, trying to flesh out the differences, but I will figure it out.
Soon after fleshing out some of the descriptions of some of the human-settled planets, I realized that varying environments would give rise to varying culinary traditions. This would partly due to the differences in biome variations; an oceanic, island-covered world would have something different to offer than a desert planet. It would also be due to the roles of artificial selection and genetic engineering in adapting life-forms to different terraformed worlds.
But I was thinking from the standpoint of a foodie. My inner linguist hadn't really kicked in much until recently. People who may have a similar base culture and language, separated by light-years, would of course have their own local slang and accents; such a separation would probably have more of an impact than just a separation of oceans or mountains in the real world. Yes, there is a vast computer network throughout the reaches of human-settled space, along with interstellar travel to span the gaps, but those sub-cultural differences would still be there; while we have an internet and airplanes now, English-speakers can still tell the difference between someone from England, Australian, Scot, New Englander, and Southern American.
It's a bit of a challenge, trying to flesh out the differences, but I will figure it out.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
My writing process: Numbers are everywhere.
Sometimes, during my writing process, I get stuck on taking notes for consistency.
Because of my background as a tabletop, trading card, console, and PC gamer, I am very much a numbers person. I quantify everything with values to help wrap my mind around concepts and ideas. At least once a day, I say the phrase "on a scale of 1 to 10..."
With this in mind, when I envision a species, setting (planet/station/ship), organization (crime syndicates/mage orders), I write up stats for them. These stats reflect different aspects of society, such as different levels of technology, magic, psionics, etc. These stats run from a scale of 0 to around 100.
With the stat method, I have it established that one society has a certain level of military offensive technology, for example, will more likely defeat another society with a lower level of military defensive technology. The greater the difference in those technologies, the more drastic the terms I would use in describing the destruction. For instance, Species A would have an offense of 60 and a defense of 50, whereas Species B would have a 50 and 50, respectively; most battles between the two species would end with a costly victory for Species A. On the other hand, if Species A had a 60 and 60, and Species B had a 40 and 40, then almost every battle would be described as destructive vanquishing of Species B.
After a while of hammering out numbers and assigning values, I've finally starting shaping an ordered matrix of logic from which stories and coherent history naturally flow.
Because of my background as a tabletop, trading card, console, and PC gamer, I am very much a numbers person. I quantify everything with values to help wrap my mind around concepts and ideas. At least once a day, I say the phrase "on a scale of 1 to 10..."
With this in mind, when I envision a species, setting (planet/station/ship), organization (crime syndicates/mage orders), I write up stats for them. These stats reflect different aspects of society, such as different levels of technology, magic, psionics, etc. These stats run from a scale of 0 to around 100.
With the stat method, I have it established that one society has a certain level of military offensive technology, for example, will more likely defeat another society with a lower level of military defensive technology. The greater the difference in those technologies, the more drastic the terms I would use in describing the destruction. For instance, Species A would have an offense of 60 and a defense of 50, whereas Species B would have a 50 and 50, respectively; most battles between the two species would end with a costly victory for Species A. On the other hand, if Species A had a 60 and 60, and Species B had a 40 and 40, then almost every battle would be described as destructive vanquishing of Species B.
After a while of hammering out numbers and assigning values, I've finally starting shaping an ordered matrix of logic from which stories and coherent history naturally flow.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
The damn dam reformed.
Like constipation, writer's block causes someone to just sit there and sit there, with nothing emerging (thank the Golden Girls for that joke). Hopefully, when something does emerge, they don't have the same characteristics. But I disgustingly digress.
I'm blogging on a few blogs tonight to try to break something loose. So far, I'm coming up with setting ideas and alien species ideas, but little to no narrative ideas.
'Across the Multiverse' is science fiction at it's base, with magic and psionics as accents. As I've said before, the concept of somewhat the love-child of Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons. And I'm the type of science fiction writer who would make sure the science theories are strong, then go from there. Questions come to mind like "Could a gas giant's earth-sized moon have a moon of its own?" "Could a red giant have a planet with vegetation?" And I Google things, then get distracted, and Google more things.
So, my writing process is, as they say, like a monkey fucking a football; a lot happens, but nothing gets accomplished.
I'm blogging on a few blogs tonight to try to break something loose. So far, I'm coming up with setting ideas and alien species ideas, but little to no narrative ideas.
'Across the Multiverse' is science fiction at it's base, with magic and psionics as accents. As I've said before, the concept of somewhat the love-child of Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons. And I'm the type of science fiction writer who would make sure the science theories are strong, then go from there. Questions come to mind like "Could a gas giant's earth-sized moon have a moon of its own?" "Could a red giant have a planet with vegetation?" And I Google things, then get distracted, and Google more things.
So, my writing process is, as they say, like a monkey fucking a football; a lot happens, but nothing gets accomplished.
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Hobbies feeding off each other.
My gaming and writing are feeding off of each other. I got into playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. The character I play is a cyborg mercenary with body modification addiction, which reminded me of a character in one of my stories. However, the character I wrote is a bit more principled than the game's character.
In "The Chronicle of the Heir: Death Sets Sail," Scorp is a partially mechanical second-mate and security enforcer of the ship 'Reckless Revelry', who is succumbing to bod-mod addiction. But I'm careful not to make it seem like I'm plagiarizing. Cybernetic upgrading and modification addiction (cybernetic and otherwise), are both common character motifs; and it's really about what the writer wants to do with those motifs.
The main reason I decided to make Scorp a cyborg is because of the old stories about pirates with eye patches, hooks, and peg legs, so I decided to make him have futuristic versions of all three.
Also, I've decided to split the spotlight among three adventuring parties for the fifth "Chronicle of the Heir" story. I haven't quite figured out what will constitute each party, though. I've also started writing the third and fourth stories at the same time - "Wanted" and "Requiem."
In "The Chronicle of the Heir: Death Sets Sail," Scorp is a partially mechanical second-mate and security enforcer of the ship 'Reckless Revelry', who is succumbing to bod-mod addiction. But I'm careful not to make it seem like I'm plagiarizing. Cybernetic upgrading and modification addiction (cybernetic and otherwise), are both common character motifs; and it's really about what the writer wants to do with those motifs.
The main reason I decided to make Scorp a cyborg is because of the old stories about pirates with eye patches, hooks, and peg legs, so I decided to make him have futuristic versions of all three.
Also, I've decided to split the spotlight among three adventuring parties for the fifth "Chronicle of the Heir" story. I haven't quite figured out what will constitute each party, though. I've also started writing the third and fourth stories at the same time - "Wanted" and "Requiem."
Monday, December 28, 2015
Writing is coming along well.
As I've been pecking at it and refining it, my first pentology is getting better and better. For one thing, I found out that the first one is novellette length so far. A novellette is 7500 to 20,000 words in length. I'm at almost 14,000 words so far, and I haven't even gotten to the main confrontation yet.
Since this is my first story in my series, I'm going to use the thousands of words I need to delineate between magic and psionics, explain my magic concept, and explain why not all galactic societies use magic or psionics.
I like writing the character development, as opposed to writing a bunch of cool ideas. It's like deepening the acting in the movie, without relying on special effects to carry it through. It's cool to have my favorite elements and science fiction and fantasy combined together and given my personal touch, but it's really just the backdrop. I'm making it more than just the brainchild of a Trekkie/Star Wars fan who plays D&D and Magic: The Gathering. It's about a family who may fight and struggle, but faces dangers together; about an aging politician who's torn between duty to his people and possibly marching to his own death; about two ethically opposed men who find themselves on the same side of a conflict; and about living under fears versus finding the courage to face them down.
I published the first part of this entry at 4:23 this morning. But, as I went about my day this afternoon, I thought about more stuff to add. I mentioned the Qauthi, the nominal bad guys of this galaxy (at least for this pentology).
I've spent years learning languages. Language and culture are intertwined. For example, a group of missionaries visited a tribe and saw that they lived from day to day, in the moment; so without the ideas of future context and the idea that things either are or aren't, they had no way of constructing a future tense in their language.
That was an example from half a world away. What would the wholly alien symbiosis of language and culture be like when both language and culture are so vastly different from humans? What would the concept of future tense be like for a society where clairsentient seers are part of their lives? Spanish conjugates verbs so that future tense becomes part of the words; "I am watching", "Miro", becomes "I will watch", or "Miraré." Russian has declension, where nouns change their ending, depending on how they're used in a sentence; "river" is "reka"; "in the river" (static location, where something is currently) is "v rekye"; "into the river" (motion, where something is going) is "v reku". With that in mind, I have to ask myself, what would declension be like for such an exotic species?
That's not to say that I'm going to create a new language. I'm just saying that, for example, Yoda spoke to Luke, but used his grammar of his own language. "This blog entry I am typing" for example. That was the grammar structure of his people showing up in his English (Basic, actually). So, basically, I'm going to have any translator take a while and go haywire during conversations. Maybe "I am typing this blog entry" would be "At this current point in this timeline, I am presently George and I am typing this blog entry temporarily."
I'm actually surprised I haven't thought of it earlier.
Since this is my first story in my series, I'm going to use the thousands of words I need to delineate between magic and psionics, explain my magic concept, and explain why not all galactic societies use magic or psionics.
I like writing the character development, as opposed to writing a bunch of cool ideas. It's like deepening the acting in the movie, without relying on special effects to carry it through. It's cool to have my favorite elements and science fiction and fantasy combined together and given my personal touch, but it's really just the backdrop. I'm making it more than just the brainchild of a Trekkie/Star Wars fan who plays D&D and Magic: The Gathering. It's about a family who may fight and struggle, but faces dangers together; about an aging politician who's torn between duty to his people and possibly marching to his own death; about two ethically opposed men who find themselves on the same side of a conflict; and about living under fears versus finding the courage to face them down.
I published the first part of this entry at 4:23 this morning. But, as I went about my day this afternoon, I thought about more stuff to add. I mentioned the Qauthi, the nominal bad guys of this galaxy (at least for this pentology).
I've spent years learning languages. Language and culture are intertwined. For example, a group of missionaries visited a tribe and saw that they lived from day to day, in the moment; so without the ideas of future context and the idea that things either are or aren't, they had no way of constructing a future tense in their language.
That was an example from half a world away. What would the wholly alien symbiosis of language and culture be like when both language and culture are so vastly different from humans? What would the concept of future tense be like for a society where clairsentient seers are part of their lives? Spanish conjugates verbs so that future tense becomes part of the words; "I am watching", "Miro", becomes "I will watch", or "Miraré." Russian has declension, where nouns change their ending, depending on how they're used in a sentence; "river" is "reka"; "in the river" (static location, where something is currently) is "v rekye"; "into the river" (motion, where something is going) is "v reku". With that in mind, I have to ask myself, what would declension be like for such an exotic species?
That's not to say that I'm going to create a new language. I'm just saying that, for example, Yoda spoke to Luke, but used his grammar of his own language. "This blog entry I am typing" for example. That was the grammar structure of his people showing up in his English (Basic, actually). So, basically, I'm going to have any translator take a while and go haywire during conversations. Maybe "I am typing this blog entry" would be "At this current point in this timeline, I am presently George and I am typing this blog entry temporarily."
I'm actually surprised I haven't thought of it earlier.
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