Holidays, Calendars, and Stellar Physics

Journal 95 26 June- 2 July 2023

I thought about skipping for the holiday weekend, but at the same time I really dislike every time I skip a week. Even if I don’t have much to say I want have fingers on the keys every week.

Which makes me shake my head that I’m still not working on the manuscript.

Yeah, I haven’t touched the novel and all of my other work has been toward the next novel. I’ve spent weeks filling the city of Dusk with adventurers, merchants, oddball characters, noble families with dark secrets… brewers fighting for the top three beers of the city spot… and plenty of factions and guilds all stabbing one another in the back.

World-Building Via Character

The more I create these people the more I flesh out the rest of the country (these nobles have a house in the capital, but they come from further afield). The senate versus the true shadow senate and the “Wrack Mages” aka the Assembly. These are all terms that were placed on characters that needed to be defined (and I’m still working on all wrack mages are part of the Assembly but the Assembly are not all wrack mages… )

I’ve had to further define the military organization… it was heavily influenced by the legions of Rome, but it is NOT Roman. Meaning I have to constantly stop myself from using Roman names and titles because “that’s the easy” way to do it… and because I really wanted to divorce my world from a “Eurocentric” view.

But that’s a little foolish when you have a fantasy Egypt named Aegyptus right in the center of your map.

Gamers Steal for Games

Except I made this world when I was fifteen. Eurocentric was my ONLY reference point. I hadn’t started to admire Asian culture and history yet. My only other reference was published gaming material. So, I used a ton of real-world reference to make the first version of the map….

Then I stole the rest from every game system I came across well into my 20s before I stopped. Realized I couldn’t publish any of my stories with a world that was a patchwork of other creators’ materials. It might be fine for gaming, but it’s not good for novels.

This is DM 101. Every game/campaign/world is filled with material lifted from novels and TV/Movies. Maps taken from other adventures and dropped into your own world. The serial numbers knocked off.

I mean its not hard to spot the things that could be considered taken from others even in the world I’m crafting now… where I have taken pains to remove anything blatantly taken from another source.

I’m not the first to have a “Hammer of Oblivion.” I used to use a “weave of magic” before I changed it to Aether (and while I got Aether from some New Age book, I read in high school, I’m sure there is a game out there that uses this term as a name for mana, spells per day, or some other “magic points.”) My mages have to “weave” the aether into spells, or channel it directly.

There are enough clues that people can argue if I stole the idea from someone else or had it first. One of the reasons I have this website is to catalogue the various iterations of my world and how far back it goes in gaming (early to mid 90s), how much it physically changed (multiple map iterations from 97 to 14), and the novels/stories written in it starting back in 07 to now.

All of this is somewhat off topic.

Calendars and Holidays

Sorry. But I’m not about to spend an entire blog picking at all of my material.

I tend to use a lot of real-world shorthand for things. This might be a bad habit. Because it reinforces that eurocentrism that I want to remove. Writing a note saying that Dusk culture was founded by a bunch of humans and FANTASY lineages that come from a mainly Mediterranean and Levantine tribal peoples, with a later dash of Roman influence and Phoenician and Aegyptian trade and language… starts to erase that FANTASY element.

As a lover of history and learning about other cultures I become bogged down in reading and researching these things (thus procrastinating from writing, but in a good way). Because I’m fairly well read on Rome, I tend to start go to that well a little too often.

Causes problems when I start putting all that Roman stuff into a country NEXT to the one that is actually Roman… oops.

But I’m wandering off topic again.

Shorthand, Dates, Time

My short notes get me into trouble.

I tend to overthink the timing on everything. To the point where I measure the distances from every location and then figure out the optimal speed of travel, figure out the days, weeks, etc… and then try to timeline/calendar chart everything.

In the current novel I have two storylines moving toward each other and I had to figure out the full travel times of both parties so that I can have the characters arrive face to face. I literally created my own two “trains leave a station” problem.

To make it harder in my notes I use a regular calendar. March April May.

But does it make sense for me to use those names in the world? No. Plus, I established that there are a handful of calendars in the world. Then my brain makes it worse… I’ve established that the world is about 20-30% larger than the Earth. Does it rotate slower? Is the year longer?

Stellar Physics…

…am I being a jackass? Do I need to go down another rabbit hole of research?

This is how I procrastinate. This is what my brain does to get out of writing (despite the fact that I get some visceral joy from the act of typing).

How about the rest of you? Do you care about calendar? Do you just avoid using dates at all?

One of my earlier blogs I talked about this, how I used planting cycles and crop descriptions to put a date on the scene. And then I pointed out how I did a lot of research to determine all of that information and that no one… and I mean no one, would be able to figure out the dates from that information. Maybe a few people in north-west Europe could figure out the month, but that’s it.

Anyway, I think I’ve prattled on long enough. Dates and Calendars, do you make a new one? Do you just use the real-world? Do you just avoid dates entirely?