Douglas

November 24, 2007November 24, 2007

Day 95: Aqueduct Justified

I’d hoped in the drive back to OKC that I’d have been able to come up with more regarding Kraite, Qwain, and the Drenfennelen from yesterday. I sorted nothing out.

Justifying the aqueduct near the headwaters of a river is going to be tough. For now, I’ll stick with it. For whatever reason I’ve never been much on backing away from my initial inspirations for a scene. I happily amend and discard later on, but my instinct is to build on early thoughts to see where the conflicts take me.

Best I’ve got so far is that the city served by the aqueduct is on the other side of the continental divide for the river. It’s just come to me that maybe due to rapid elevation drop the aqueduct levels out the delivery to a nearby location that happens to near the elevation of the source. I like this. Religious building in the mountains?

My main characters species is undetermined. He does have fur though so far and I have an inclination toward him being more animalistic that heavily bearded. With him also being gay I’ll have to tread carefully to avoid ‘furry’ overtones. I suspect this won’t be hard as I am not really angling for romance as part of the plot here. You know, the plot I don’t even have.

Word count: 220

November 23, 2007November 23, 2007

Day 94: Flowers Along the Drenfennelen

Kraite stroked the ridge of fur back from the corner of his mouth and twisted the thin braid at the end. He disliked the style, but the braids appealed to Mallen. Repeating the action made him feel thoughtful.

He was not thoughtful. At least not anymore.

The bush in Qwain, especially here at the headwaters of the Drenfennelen river, smelled clean even a bit spicy. The warming morning air brought with it the earth aroma…

Lots of thoughts on this. Too many to put together into a thread of words at this point. He’s sitting atop an aqueduct ruin and gay. More later.

Made another theme change. It needs a better header photo, but I like the simplicity and the extra column. Will have to tweak or dump the tagcloud. Snuck a bit of AdSense in there too. Enjoy.

Word count: 136

November 22, 2007

Day 93: Ailchas Pees in New Zealand

Been thinking about doing a little clean up around here. I like the clean lines and the focus on the words. I like that I didn’t have to do anything to get it that way too. I don’t want to spent too much time with the site design since this is primarily about the writing, but the title font is a just a little too small and the link color too hard to distinguish.

What follows is more talky stuff since I can’t find the time to be creative on the holiday.

I am reminded at how much I really dig other cultures. Especially the subtle differences with respect to the same activities. At work I am exposed to the twittering of a group of folks in the UK. It’s work so I don’t get any of their wacky swear words, but there are still differences. One mentioned trains recently and it struck me how European such a notion is–I suspect it’s Asian too. I live in the west and sometimes in the mountains. Trains are for cattle and coal. I am not sure you can even put people on a train in Oklahoma.

On our fifth anniversary we went to New Zealand. There were so many different ways to do the same thing it left me marveling. Never paid up front for a hotel–never gave credentials indicating that I could. Always paid up front for food–typing was inexplicable. Ketchup was too. Urinals were nearly always metal and raised off the main floor a step. Most of them drained under you feet as you peed through a grill. Toilets had number one and number two flush options. I never signed a waiver of law suit even though I rented a car and a kayak as well as flew in a sail plane. There were almost no stop signs–only give ways. Lots of round abouts. All of our driving was on two lane roads, none of the bridges were more than one lane. One of those shared the crossing with a train.

All this is to say that I need to capture that experience for Ailchas when he goes back in time. The trick is to capture it in such a way as to tweak the reader’s sensibilities as well. Maybe it’s time to read "Job: A Comedy of Justice" again. Heinlein pulled that of marvelously. As I recall it was best done by allowing the reader to make assumptions about what they thought the main character was familiar with and then dousing them with reality. Of course that’s easier for Heinlein since, in addition to knowing how to write, his characters were ostensibly in the ‘real world’. Ailchas is not.