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.
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