Writer's Notes! - Themes, Tone, and Setting

Come back next Monday for the beginning of chapter 4 - our adventurers' first side quest!

In the mean time, here're some reflections on writing the book.

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In high school (many, many years ago), I read Howard Fast's (1951) Spartacus, in which a gladiator leads a slave rebellion in ancient Rome. The story was very different, definitely much slower, than I expected it to be, partly because it's told in an odd way. 

As I recall, Spartacus's story is actually told as flashbacks, with the main story revolving around a bunch of late adolescent, upper middle class Romans enjoying a summer vacation in the Italian countryside. It actually reminded me a lot of The Great Gatsby. Over the course of the book, their host tells them the story of Spartacus's failed rebellion (which happened before their time). It's an awkward way to tell the story about the evils of slavery, but it almost pays off in the ending.

At the close of the story, their host finally takes the young people to (the Roman equivalent) of a garment factory, where he shows them scores of malnourished, dirty people working around the clock to make his bank account fat and happy. The young Romans, of course, are shocked to learn that not one of the people in the sweatshop is a slave; while Spartacus's attempt to end slavery had failed, the practice was dying nonetheless, as savvy capitalists had realized that minimum wage laborers (many of them freed slaves) cost less and worked harder with fewer complaints than slaves kept in the shops and fields against their will. It was an unusually grim, dystopian ending for a historical fiction novel.

Though I largely hated the book for consuming my winter break, I always found that ending fascinating, and it's helped me understand a lot about modern history - primarily it helped me to understand that oppression doesn't require chains or whips, and that its most subtle forms are often the most enduring.  

So, I wanted to write a story that tackled some of those same ideas through a modern lens, adding in the component of intersectionality. Modern society isn't a simple contest of us vs. them, black vs. white, man vs. woman, but rather a sort of points system, in which you get 'privilege points' for certain luck-of-the-draw attributes. It's a robust system, resistant not simply to change, but even to notice. Someone who's scored, let's say a 5 out of 10 on that points system is playing against the same stacked deck as someone who's scored 1 out of 10, but because they got luckier with the hand they were dealt, they're much less likely to see the house's game. I think that, being neither fortunate nor unfortunate, those people don't really see the role of luck in their lives, and because of that, they struggle to understand the idea of 'privilege.' From their point-of-view, everyone has what they deserve. After all, considering the alternative would raise an uncomfortable question: "Do I deserve what I have?"

I guess I wanted to poke that hornets' nest a little, but I didn't want to write a book actually set in the real world. The way I see it, if someone can't see the problems in the world they live in, they aren't likely to see those problems in a book showing them that same world (or they're going to cross the street to avoid that book). Set those injustices against an incongruous or exaggerated backdrop, however, and the reader might be more open to what you're trying to say, and might think about those ideas a bit more critically than they would otherwise.

Or maybe that book would just provide a cathartic experience for the people who already 'get it' - I decided that would be okay too.

So, I initially chose a fairy tale setting and format, with overt satire, and a dragon serving as a metaphor for those few Americans who make money off of having money. I'm not talking about the millionaire doctors, lawyers, or athletes. I'm talking about the multi-billionaires who make a dramatic show of donating a trivial portion of their wealth to their own charity so that it can buy a private jet for them to use. The people who publicize flashy, grand gestures, rather than actually contribute to society by paying fair taxes or even just spending their money on lots of ridiculous, hedonistic things made by American workers.

I started the book in January of 2013, but dropped it due to an especially rough year of graduate school, and a sense that the satire might not play as well as I hoped - it would just be too thick. Then, in December of 2014, this interview aired, and I decided - you know, maybe that idea could have worked after all. I went back to the book; I scaled back the fairy tale prose and wrote it more as a historical fiction novel, recounting a tale from a world a bit more similar to ours - a world with universities, coffee shops, and massive debts. 

As in the United States, overt slavery and feudal serfdom are non-existent in Caelia. Though there is a nominal monarchy in Caelia, the power of wealth supersedes any notion of divine right by blood. People are educated in schools - at a cost. Effective healthcare is available - at a cost. Law enforcement is divided between noble, under-appreciated protectors and violent bullies, with little oversight to differentiate them. People complain about paying taxes while also complaining about the state of their public roads, and there are a lot of people who will accept someone ****ing on them from above if they feel like they have someone beneath them to **** on themselves. (That's the premise of trickle-down economics, right?)

On the other hand, there are some very important differences from reality. Most significantly, violence is a much more tangible source of problems in Caelia than in the United States, and it's also a much more reasonable response to those problems. Highwaymen are a real threat, and no one thinks too much of it if you kill some bandits or monsters. It is, after all, a fantasy story, and being cavalier with violence is just part of the genre, right? Batman refuses to kill the Joker because it would be crossing a terrible line, but Legolas and Gimli not only kill without remorse or hesitation, they treat killing as a competitive sport; it even becomes part of a beautiful subplot about interracial male bonding.

Fantasy plays by different rules, even compared to other forms of fiction.

Fantasy also gives you a lot of room in your dialogue - after all it's somewhat silly to accept that people in a fantastical realm completely unrelated to ours speak English, but then question how they speak that English.

Given that freedom, and because so many of the themes in the book are drawn from the modern world, I wanted the characters to speak like people their age do now. Their cadence, informality, and even a little bit of their slang is modern. I felt it was an important part of the setting the book's tone. Modern communication is inextricable from the conflicts between the cynical and the hopeful, between the deniers and the 'woke SJWs', and between those who are condescending and those who are... actually, there's no real dichotomy there - communication in our world is basically 50 Shades of Disdain.

Because it was so important to me that the characters speak 'normally,' one of the hardest decisions I made was actually to trim down the four-letter words; I feel like the language in the book now is unrealistically clean for any time period, but I wanted to broaden the accessibility of the book, and 'curse words' are, strangely, a real deal-breaker for some people. Hopefully, that decision didn't significantly undermine my millennial snark.

Of course, there is a downside with the modern language; fiction never provides a complete picture of the world surrounding a story, so we tend to play fill in the blanks by making associations to what is in the story. In order to envision the world a story takes place in, I think a lot of readers look for certain benchmarks to align the setting to a real place and time in world history. I think readers look for thou, thee, verily, and wouldst to help them imagine a world with castles and swordsmen.

But then, Caelia (and the larger world it exists in), doesn't align with any particular time and place. Partly, that's because the amenities that define an era cost money, and Caelia has little. Kingstown bears some similarities to 15th century Europe (e.g., printing presses, plate armor). People from less fortunate areas, though, look at that sort of thing the way I looked at the touch screens in Jurassic Park as a child. Or Crystal Pepsi; I guess you can never really guess what's going to catch on.

But even considering that variation, the presence of magic and alien cultures have given Caelia's world a very different progression. For example:

• Ailments and injuries are treated with foul tasting potions and treatments, but these aren't the primitive hokum of medieval Europe; they work as intended (usually), sometimes better than 21st century medicine. It's like living in a world where a bottle of Pepto can heal a gut wound, but a cancer diagnosis is vague and posthumous.

• While no one is carrying a Glock under his doublet, a highly proficient spell-caster can summon fire or lightning in the palm of her hand. Quite unlike medieval Europe or modern America, Caelia exists in a world in which a post graduate education is required to effectively conceal and carry a deadly weapon. 

• Ochsner's people are incredibly knowledgeable about many of the physical sciences, but do not apply that knowledge in all the ways they could. The dwarves have never achieved an industrial revolution, due to a cultural insistence on everything being artisanal.

Admittedly, even my "immersion-meter" (as MXR might call it) twitched a fair bit when writing the book. Like casual violence, however, anachronism and alien cultures are part of the fantasy genre; shirtless barbarians rub elbows with knights in 15th century plate armor, while 19th century ninjas assassinate 10th century emperors aboard 16th century ships.

If my wife is to be believed, the best example may be T. H. White's (1938) The Sword in the Stone: it doesn't just have anachronisms, the narrator stops to identify them for the reader, and to explain why they're there.

But R. E. Howard's Conan series certainly gives some stern competition: Conan features many civilizations based on real world nations, but with no regard for contemporaneity. That includes two civilizations based on the Roman Empire - one thriving and one long dead. Basically, Conan's world includes Schroedinger's Rome. 

And then there's J. R. R. Tolkien, who turned anachronism into a thing of beauty. Owing to his books' intense level of detail, one barely gives any thought to hobbits wearing 17th century waist coats, keeping time with 18th century French mantel clocks, and smoking tobacco (or something), while their neighbors to the southeast huddle in mead halls and use trebuchets to fight off vat-grown genetically engineered armies armed with black powder explosives. 

I feel like we were really only one, harsh edit away from Return of the King ending this way:

One does not simply walk into Mordor without a cyborg super-soldier.

Writer's Notes! - Language and Pronunciation

Language/Pronunciation

I was asked a long time ago to provide a reference for the pronunciation of names, so here's a brief note in that regard. 

To start with, I should acknowledge that I'm not at all bothering to invent a language for Caelia or any other kingdom in Kaleida. By necessity, the narrative is in English and the dialogue is in English, so having the main characters all conveniently speak English while every other race speaks some completely alien language seems a bit ethnocentric. 

Accordingly, a lot of names will be derivations or outright bastardizations of words and names from other languages in the 'real world.' 

• "Native Caelian" doesn't really exist, given "native Caelians" don't really exist.  There won't be any 'old Caelian' names.

• The ancestral tongue of Gnomans is based on old school Latin, so Gnoman names will tend to sound like Latin words. Although, the founders of the Gnoman empire share a common ancestry with humans and dwarves, their spoken languages are all pretty far removed from "Old Feguncian," so the similarities among them aren't obvious.

• The old languages of elves will be based on Japanese and Greek, but names in Caelia will be heavily anglicized (despite the age of some Elves). 

• Dwarvish names will primarily be based on German and Hindi.  

• Arbarii names will probably end up a mish-mash of Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek. 

• Orc names are more or less random nonsense accounting for the pronunciation difficulties surrounding their tusks (tip of the hat to Warhammer for mentioning that problem); because some orcs have pronounced lower teeth, you won't see many words that depend on bilabials or otherwise require the meeting of the lips.     

Of course, names are rooted in old languages, but spoken language is very dynamic, evolving into different regional dialects. Even within the same region, spoken language varies as a function of culture, exposure, education, and temperament.

• The Gnomans don't have a unifying accent because their domain is large, with high internal mobility. In other words, if you ask a Gnoman where she's from, she's likely to say something like "all over the place." Though it doesn't necessarily come off in the dialogue (because I didn't want to be super-cartoonish), Vinny has something comparable to a Brooklyn accent. (Though if the My Cousin, Vinny reference didn't communicate that, I don't know what would.) 

• While many elves are just average people working in the fields alongside humans and orcs, there are definitely some 'old money drama queens.' In a world of 'haves' and 'have-nots,' they are the 'had-and-hanging-ons,' who lecture their children about emotional discipline and propriety, but readily express that as frigid passive-aggressiveness with occasional outbursts of melodrama. So, think New England WASP/Southern Belle, without the slang. Kaira actively tries to avoid this, but it's been deeply ingrained in her - her attempts to be 'folksy' and salt of the earth tend to come off as obviously superficial.   

• Dwarves are generally well educated, and as a culture they value both precision and beauty in what they create. Consistent with that, they would tend to enunciate clearly, and speak at a moderate pace and volume. Ochsner, of course, does not always abide by this - she's lived in Kingstown a long time, and is easily excitable by nature. 

• Due to being pushed to the fringes of society, orcs primarily speak with rural or lower class dialects - this is consistent with a tradition started by J.R.R. Tolkien, whose orcs spoke with distinctive cockney accents (albeit, with no rhyming slang). Given that Caelia is supposed to feel a bit more North American and a bit less European, it'll be a bit different in these books; for example, one charming, well educated fellow combines southwestern U.S. and western Canadian, while his brutish father speaks with a combination of British cockney and American 'red neck' that's essentially a crime against grammar.

As to the pronunciation of specific names:

Azraea Michelle Thanel 

• Pronunciation: In "Azraea" emphasize the Z and the second A. The first A is short, like in the word "cat", the second A is long, like in the word "wave", and the third A is short, as in the word "about." "Michelle" Is exactly like the real world, western name. In "Thanel" The "Th" is audible but not emphasized. The "an" sounds like the "an" in "plan", not "plane". The "el" sounds like "L" (like Superman's Kryptonian name, actually).
• TLDR: << ah-ZZ-RAY-uh MEH-shell th-Ah-nell >>
• Origin: "Azraea" is a reference to "Azriel," the biblical angel of death, though the name is pronounced pretty differently. "Michelle" is a reference to the biblical archangel "Michael", though the pronunciation is westernized. "Thanel" references the Greek personification of death, "Thanatos."
• Reasoning: Azraea is the descendant of immigrants; as such, her name would have some old world history behind it, but also some elements of cultural assimilation. Since my readers are going to be mostly, if not exclusively western, I threw a familiar, real world western name into the middle of an otherwise unfamiliar one. Is "Michelle" an immersive name for a fantasy? Given the main character of Star Wars is named "Luke," and his mentor was "Ben," I think I'm okay. As to the meaning behind the name, she is a necromancer, so if anything I probably made it overly obvious. 

Ochsner

• Pronunciation: The "chs" is pronounced as "x", not "sh" - where people get the latter, I have no idea, but it can produce arguments even within the same family.
• TLDR:  << OX-nuhr >>
• Origin: This is a real world, German name that means "Ox herder". 
• Reasoning: None, really, except that it's a sort of 'humble' name like 'Smith' or 'Shepherd,' which fits the character's disposition. 

Kairumina Doro Asterigennithika

• Pronunciation: Please don't make me.
• No, Really: << KAI-roo- MEE-nuh DOH-roh ass-TEHR-eh-GEHN-ith-EH-kah >>
• Short: << KAI-rah >> 
• Origin: Mangled Greek: "Charoúmenos Dó̱ro Astéria pou Genní̱thi̱kan"
• Reasoning: Her family name translates to "Star Born", so appropriately pretentious. But her given name translates to "Joyous Gift", which will make more sense when you learn more about her parents.

Vinny, Vidi, and Vicki

• Pronunciation: Exactly what you'd imagine.
• TLDR: Tough.
• Origin: It's a pun on Julius Caesar's famous quote, "veni, vidi, vici" - I came, I saw, I conquered. 
• Reasoning: The Gnomans are supposed to bear an unsubtle similarity to the ancient Romans, though even more than the Romans, they value one-sided, crushing victories in everything - essentially, surveillance, sabotage, and espionage should make the outcome of any conflict a foregone conclusion. Caesar's casual assertion expresses the Gnoman attitude concisely, and the specific names for the Gnomans have some individual relevance to their characters.

That's all for this week! See you Monday for the start of chapter 3!

Writer's Notes! - Illustrations

Chapter 2 will begin on February 5th! 

In the mean time, allow me to embarrass myself with my atrocious artwork!

I actually did, at one point, consider trying to illustrate the book. That point in time was... well, brief. This was a sketch I did a very long time ago for the first chapter of Rise of Azraea. The picture doesn't quite line up with the descriptions in the book, because over the course of finishing the book, revising it, writing the sequel, etc., the character's have become more concretely pictured in my mind. It's also helped that I've found better words to describe things I see in my head.

You can't tell it from this picture, but Ochsner's skin tone is supposed to lean more towards tawny than towards the fair skin we generally associate with dwarves in fantasy - if anything, she probably looks a bit like Mindy Kaling.

It's likely a detail you missed reading the first chapter, because I mentioned it only in passing, and never really returned to it. Unlike Azraea's skin tone, Ochsner's skin tone doesn't really come up much in the book because the other characters don't think much of it, certainly not in the context of her dwarven size and build. Azraea's physical appearance marks her as an Arbarii descendant, and Ochsner's physical appearance marks her as a dwarven Caelian. Though both are technically people of color, the way they're treated by other Caelians is very different.

Caelia's dwarves make up a very large percentage of the kingdom's population, easily outnumbering elves and orcs combined, but they tend to be relatively insular, staying in their subterranean metropolises. In the end, most surface-dwelling Caelians feel about their dwarven neighbors the way U.S. Americans feel about Canadians. We have some stereotypes about them, and some prejudices I'm sure, but except for Nickelback, we generally don't have strong opinions about Canadians. Likewise, Caelians don't really have strong opinions about dwarves, and if they feel any mistrust, it's probably because they see them as sketchy 'city-folk'.

Likewise, Kaira's skin tone isn't clear from the picture above, because scanning pictures from my sketchbook makes them darker. She should be - literally - white as a sheet of copy paper. I don't mean Caucasian, I mean white. And I don't mean she's pale - her unfreckled, unblemished skin is actually pigmented white, obscuring the veins and other subcutaneous features that are visible through the skin of white humans. Because the picture was small, I didn't draw-in the elaborate tattoos she's covered that canvas in, though for reference, I tried doing a really basic version later:

Of course, not only is it over-simplified the asymmetrical
tattoos made one eye look smaller than the other. 

Needs work.

Obviously, Azraea's skin tone doesn't come-off well in a gray-scale image either, but I think most people can understand my dilemma, and for those who can't I'll be blunt; a picture of a black person drawn by an amateur artist has a very real chance of coming out look like a racist ad from 1912.

The other thing that's off here is her hair. I originally chose to draw it in tight braids for two reasons. The first reason is that, over the decades, Azraea has been pressured into downplaying her racial attributes, so her style tends to be low key in a don't-scare-the-white-people sort of way (completely the opposite of Kaira's approach to fashion).

The second reason is that, even if that pressure weren't present, Azraea wouldn't be inclined towards loose or 'big' hair-styles. Azraea is a necromancer, and there's a good reason why someone who cuts open bodies wouldn't necessarily wear her hair loose or have a large bushy beard. Azraea could crop it very short, of course, and not really have to deal with it at all, but she's willing to spend extra time on her appearance. Azraea's not vain, but she feels (more than most of us) the need to be in control of her life, and one thing she can exert control over every day is her own appearance. Every day she dresses nicely, applies make up precisely, and styles her hair, not to grab the attention of others, but as part of a silent mantra that says, 'I control my life.'

I'd originally imagined her having her hair in many small, tight braids, and that's what she has in all of my early artwork for these books. However, one day I encountered a woman whose hair style immediately leaped out as 'that's Azraea!' Her hair was bound tight to the scalp, in several thick french braids. The result was immediately evocative of a European fairy tale princess, while at the same time depending on a volume and texture that few people of European descent could match. It was distinctive and eye-catching, but (hypothetically) it would also be easily protected from flying viscera.

Of course, I tried drawing it.

Obviously I haven't much practice with braids. 

Granted, if we're nitpicking style and fashion, then it should also be pointed out that Azraea's dress shows more cleavage in this picture than it realistically would. That's because I suck at drawing squishy things (I'm much more comfortable with robots).

Of course, come to that, Ochsner is probably showing less cleavage than she should be. Given it's a tightly packed bar at the start of summer, and Ochsner was born and raised in a regular 55 degrees Fahrenheit environment, she'd be sweltering in that layered outfit.

As it seems in poor taste to post a picture of Ochsner's cleavage, I'll leave it at that.