skribeworks

This is part one of a summary provided by the Norhaven Institute about the lead up and background to the Battle of the Strand.

Please check out Part two (available here) to find out what happened and the ramifications. Some that are still being felt thousands of years later, and directly affect the journey of all the characters in my world across the different eras.

On Saturday, my Eldest and I went cycling. It was shopping trip for some of his essential supplies. In any case, part of our journey requires us to travel through an area that’s in the process of being developed. There’s a lot of construction going on and that means there’s oodles of heavy equipment in use, including tonnes of trucks. This one had one of its truck tyres go boom.

For the last 30 days, I’ve been engaged in a communal activity called Blog June. Its purpose is to promote bloggers to post. At least every day, if possible, but it’s not a requirement, just a goal. People are generally time poor and so garnering enough energy to blog can be difficult. Plus, coming up with thirty different ideas for a blog post can be a challenge. But this year, we got there. So here’s the thirtieth post for this June. Hopefully there are many more to come.

The Glyphs is a multiple-choice game where you control the fate (and demise) of a gong farmer, as they explore the sewers beneath the Ancient City. Just choose an option from the poll below, and the most popular option will decide what happens next. I’ll put out one of these every week.

New here? Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

For much of its history, the language of the Kza-Lan used an abjad script. It is for this reason that there is some speculation about the exact spelling of most of the words in the language. In this article, we’ll be using the convention employed by the linguists and historians from the Second Armen Kingdom, while also including various alternatives used through history.

South-East Asia generally, and Singapore specifically, is a gourmet’s delight. The food here is diverse in style and taste. There is so much variety it can be hard to decide which glorious dish (or ten) to eat, when given a choice. Many of them involve rice.

However, there is one rice dish that the people here despise, and it’s the one that my mother taught me to make.

As has become something of a trend of late, we went cycling again last Friday. We rode to the North-East coast of the island. For the last kilometre or so, I raced the kids. They’re still teens and more than up for the challenge. Or so they thought. I won by a comfortable margin, which surprised me. I’ve still got some level of fitness, it seems. Unfortunately, it’s likely the last time we cycle as a family for a while.

Monday marked the return to school for most kids in Singapore. While My Eldest still has a couple of extra weeks before he returns to studies, My Youngest was amongst those heading back. Or he would have been if he wasn’t going on a school camp.

A few days ago, I read a post asking readers what elements took them out of the story. The reason might be stylistic or a functional decision the writer had taken. Amongst the more popular reasons for being taken out of the moment were secondary world anachronisms. For example, the characters cry out the name of a present-day primary world deity, or the world has the same days of the week or month names as our primary world. Here are three ways to avoid secondary world anachronisms.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I love making maps. I make a lot of them. Some are continental-sized, some regional, city or town-sized, and others as small as individual houses or even rooms. While this won’t be a tutorial (although I will provide links to some of the tutorials I learnt from), I will detail some of the many tools and techniques I use when creating my maps.

I like making maps. The first thing I usually do when beginning a project, long before I start writing, is to make a map (or several). It might not be a continent-sized creation. It might just be the floor plans where the main scenes are set. Or an adaptation of an existing map. For instance, on one recent project I adapted the street map for a place but set in 2070.

Maps help ground my work, so I know where everything is. They also allow me to work out how long it takes to travel between places. Or where characters are born and raised and how that affects their world view. However, drawing up a map for readers, well that’s a whole different kettle of fish. I find that incredibly difficult.