OOC: Next Novel (with poll)

[sythyry]

So, I'm poking at the next novel. Some particular goals:

1. A small story: about a manageable number of characters, keeping the world-shattering events down to a modest number. (Marriage of Insects and Sythyry's Vacation are small stories.)
2. Something that has some chance of being saleable. Specific desiderata:
   1. Recognizably fantasy instead of the fantasy/sf blend I seem to indulge in usually. At least, as much fantasy as World Tree is.
   2. Not so much emphasis on potentially-disturbing stuff.
   3. Minimal sex. (Yeah, I know that sex sells, but not the way I write it)
   4. Minimal war. (Yeah, I know that war sells too, but war isn't a small story.)
3. Totally in my style, and playing to my strengths.
4. Specific influences currently in mind: Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Man; Roger Zelazny's Amber (first series); Alan Dean Foster's The Tar-Aiym Krang. The first two are among my favorites. Krang is not; I read it once in the mid-70's, and found it adequate.

The backstory of the setting concerns two species from different worlds. The first is the couatl, winged feathered serpents, who learned how to slither delicately between worlds (which few species can do). They were clever and friendly and gentle, and were explorers and traders, and learned much in their travels and became very civilized. In time they came to the world of the lammasu, mighty winged lions. The lammasu were not gentle. They learned the power of throwing open the gates between worlds, and they went forth and conquered a thousand worlds. Including the coatls, of course.

I'm kind of thinking of the coatls as very loosely like classical Greece, and the lammasu as very loosely like classical Rome at its peak -- and like the Instrumentality of Man from Cordwainer Smith. The domain of the lammasu is run with ruthless benevolence. The lammasu try to make it a decent place to live, for nearly everyone. This is a strategic point: it cuts way down on rebellions and other troubles. And the lammasu intend their empire to last forever. (As of the start of the story, it has been around for centuries and is quite robust.)

So here's the fussing of the day: vocabulary.

I am thinking that the vocabulary of inter-world travel will come from the coatls, since they did it first, and the vocabulary of empire will come from the lammasu. I have a modest number of technical terms in mind. I could just use "gate" or "portal" as the way you leave one world and come to the next, but that's so overworked I dunno. Anyways, I am considering trying to abuse the Nahuatl language for couatl words and the Sumerian language for lammasu ones.

I'm making some attempt to pay attention to actual Nahuatl and Sumerian. I'm ultimately more concerned with literary use than linguistic purity.

"š" is pronounced "sh". There are a few other odd letters that scholars use for Sumerian (ģ for an ng sound); I might use some of them too.

So here's my core vocabulary.

Word	Language	Short	Definition
calac	couatl	gate	Portal between tlalli. A calac leads from one tlalli to the next.
coatl	coatl	winged serpent	One of the older, more powerful, and more civilized species
Ensi	lammasu	governor	Nešgeš-appointed governor of a tlalli
gi-nun	lammasu	slave	Subject of Nešgeš, but without the priveleges of a mašda. (About 5%)
lugal	lammasu	lord	One of the most important people of the Nešgeš. (80% of lugals are lammasu)
mašda	lammasu	commoner	Citizen of the Nešgeš. (About 95% of the subjects of the Nešgeš are mašda)
Nešgeš	lammasu	empire; instrumentality	The empire of the lammasu, controlling dozens of ohtli and thousands of tlalli
ohtli	couatl	road	A string of tlalli connected by calacs
tlalli	couatl	land; worldlet	The region readily reachable by a calac. Usually a populated country some 50-100 miles in diameter. Generally much smaller than a whole world.

And here're some specific questions. I'm doing this as a LJ-quiz because it's all scales.

[Poll #1487398]

Comments

[zeeth_kyrah]

"slither delicately" suggests more a pathway, a door or hole, a small cavern's length, than a protective gate or generic portal. Perhaps something more metaphorical, like "forever-step"? "Passed we through forever-step, to Imlac and Boaz came we in whispers and were captured there. Ur-beasts our captors the Iammasu, who burst open new forever-step and forthward ventured in mighty heart. Soon captured were many islands in the dark, and tearful were we who had taught them all, no matter the light hand of our mastering brutes."

[teaotter.livejournal.com]

You're missing the question in there, btw.

My main concern about the set-up you've got is the use of imagery (winged serpent) and the language of an actual real-world conquered people whose descendants are still getting the short end of the stick. It's the sort of thing I think you'd have to look at pretty seriously for issues of racism and cultural appropriation. As long as you're planning to be careful with it, I think it'd be really cool.

I, for one, tend to ignore accent marks. Which made the 'masda' sound like "mazda," which led me to thinking about Ahura Mazda -- which may not be where you're headed. ;)

'Calac' sounds too... abrupt, to me. It's more a word for a discrete thing than a word for something that moves you between places, in my opinion. The other coatl words you're using are longer, smoother-sounding. I'd pick a different word.

And for all of that, I really like the ideas, and I'd be interested to see what you do with them!

[teaotter.livejournal.com]

You're missing *a* question. Sorry.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Ahura Mazda

That's what I thought of too.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

The accents are an interesting case. I've limited myself in Thirteen Ribbons because, at least near the start, I had to confine myself to old-school 7-bit ASCII. (FurAffinity sucks. That's why I'm giving up on it.) I think they can work nicely to remind the reader of a different pronunciation, to give that slight edge of mystique... but keeping it down to one or two is good, and making them common ones is even better. You've done both, so I'd say, let it roll.

For vocabulary, I'd say... if you can keep the special words down to the things that are significantly variant from what could be covered in the reader's own language, it should be fine. Interestingly, this guideline means that all the coarl words above seem appropriate, and the lammasu ones seem gratuitous. (The gates are unusual and need I feel that they should be used rarely, and possibly only as parts of names or the like instead of terms that'll pop up everywhere.

As far as the cultural implications of borrowing an existing language.... I'm not touching that with a twenty-three-and-a-half-metre pole. I'm nowhere near a good enough writer to comment on your approach. *grin*

[rowyn]

My thought on languages is similar -- it's okay if it's a genuinely unique concept, like ohtli. Familiar concepts should get familiar words. As a general rule, but sometimes you really don't want to use a familiar word. In a fantasy setting, for example, you might not want to say "hospital" for the place-where-sick-people-go, because the word feels too modern and conjures the wrong image.

Using English hybrid words to express unique concepts works well, too, like the "forever-step" suggested above.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Quetzlcoatl is going to be a reasonably familiar figure to most readers. I'd suggest that if you call the winged serpents 'coatl' it builds an expectation that at some point these are going to be revealed to be the same species as the Aztec god. Unless they really are, I might avoid that.

I'd use familiar English terms for things such as a gateway, a citizen, or a slave, unless there's some important difference between a gi-nun and a slave. The terminology gets in the way of the concept.

Lugal and Ensi I'd prolly keep, though - people are used to hearing political titles in their foreign versions - the Mikado, the Fuehrer, etc. Leaders' and nobles' attributes tend to be much more culture-specific than those of citizens and slaves, too.

[quoting-mungo.livejournal.com]

Strongly disagree with you on the point of "slave". Most American readers will likely associate the word with the "sub-human" connotations of American pre-civil-war slavery. Considering the lammasu are roughly parallel to Romans, it's likely gi-nun better conforms to the Roman "sub-citizen" notion of slavery. Avoiding people drawing that kind of connections is a good reason to use different vocabulary.


-Alexandra

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

See q_m's thread, but - although gi-nun may encompass an entirely valid meaning of 'slave', it may not call to mind the right meaning in the majority of the readership. Modern institutions of slavery have been pretty vile compared to what I know of the Romans - not to say theirs was flawless, but that at Rome's height, slavery seemed to offer at least some more hope than that which most people are familiar with.

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

The challenge will be to differentiate it from furry Stargate.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

While I love your aptitude for language construction and the way it shows up in your work, sometimes you make words a little too foreign.

I'm not sure if this entirely makes sense, but there are words that are foreign but which my brain easily handles as words, and there are words are so foreign I have trouble dealing with them. It's like my normal language processing center can't deal with them so I have to focus higher level processing on decoding and understanding them, which requires much more effort. If I'm reading something with too many of the latter, they all start flowing together into this mental amorphous blob which makes it hard to stay in the work.

Anyways, I like most of the words you have here, because they seem foreign without being too foreign like that. The only two I think I'd end up confusing would be "ohtli" and "tlalli".

[zeborah]

What others already mentioned re cultural appropriation.

Specifically, if the coatl are like ancient Greece, why not use ancient Greece-flavoured language? Contrariwise, if you want to use Nahuatl, then why not make the coatl more like the Aztecs? (Preferably involving research into reliable sources rather than using the distorted stereotypes and faux-trivia that are all most people 'know' about them.)

No matter how cool the language, if it clashes with other aspects of the book then it serves neither you nor the people you're taking it from.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

The analogies aren't much stronger than I've given. The coatls have their own history and culture, which was nice but weak; they got absorbed by the much more powerful Neshmesh, the lammasu empire. I might use Greek, but that would make the Sumerian more jarring -- why not go use Latin for the lammasu?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'd read this in a heartbeat. However, lammasu, and especially couatl are specifically D&D terms, and will set up all manner of gamey expectations in the minds of many readers. The issues the Becca raises about racism and cultural appropriation also seem important here. That said, a SF novel with winged serpents and flying lions traveling between the stars is one that I'd dearly love to read.

On a side note, I love Zelazny's work (and Smith's) and greatly enjoyed (as the enjoyable fluff that it is and was so clearly meant to be) Foster's Flinx books. However, I've always found the Amber novels as some of Zelazny's weakest work, do you like them better than most of his other work, or merely as a good part of a wonderful writer's many books (I'm still both amused and pleased at how long I managed to pattern my life after Doorways in the Sand, although sadly w/o the aliens.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

The aliens are simply taking their time.

Amber features I'm also using: a very large transuniversal setting in which a very limited number of people can travel between worlds; heavily personal rulership concerns thereof. Maybe other things too. And, though I'm taking some inspiration from RL cultures with rich mythologies, I am not doing a Lord of Light sort of toccata and fugue on Sumerian or Nahuatl mythology.

And I'm kind of hoping for saleable fluff here.

Anyways, thanks!

[bloofox.livejournal.com]

I think the idea of borrowing from older languages is great. Though my only quibble would be with 'coatl'. When I read it my first association is Mezo-Americans and human sacrifice and not exactly what I think of as civilised and gentle.

Regarding accents, generally I think they're great, though it would be neat to put a pronunciation key in somewhere.

Though when I first read 'š' the immediate thing that popped into my mind was "Damn it, not again, why can't these people use IPA like God intended?"

Apart from that (which won't be common), I think accents and such would be great so longas you have a pronunciation key. Maybe footnote each word the first time it's used.

Apart from THAT, I like the plot idea you've come up with. How loosely are you thinking of Greasing and Romaing them?

[alonewiththemoon]

"Though my only quibble would be with 'coatl'. When I read it my first association is Mezo-Americans and human sacrifice and not exactly what I think of as civilised and gentle."

I actually like the idea of turning that association on its head. Maybe there could be something that looks like sacrifice from the outside but is really something beautiful from the inside, something that would give the lammasu an apparant--though not real--moral edge over the couatl in the eyes of the rest of the universe.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

A null assertion is either 100% true or 100% false; I go with true!

Regarding racial names... couatl seems fine by me(although I do concur with the commentary that maybe basing them off of Mesoamerican civilisation, loosely, may be better than Greek; not least but certainly not only because it would be more different than Roman to Greek - such serpents are more prominent in Mesoamerican than Mediterranean myth from what little I know of both). Lammasu, on the other hand, I'm not as keen on. I can't entirely explain why.

At least they're not being cast (from what I can tell) as definitive bad guys, which would be definite culture clash from anyone who sees the word and takes a peek based on that(IIRC lammasu are definitively Good Guys in D&D setting).

I like foreign vocabulary so far as it connotes particular shades of meaning that English is inadequate for; if it's a foreign word for sake of foreignness, it can feel pretentious. (This is coming from someone whose early writings, which thankfully no longer exist, used invented words all over. I was a pretentious git when I was younger; I'm trying to keep it under control these days.)

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I don't really do good or bad guys. Everyone in my stories is good, in their own eyes. Couatls and lammasu are both good guys in D&D; I have my own plans for them (or a few individuals anyhow).

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I think any book without humans is a hard sell. You should write it the way you want to write it, thus, and not try to hard to make it conform to nebulous marketing standards. :,

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Not sure about humans. I've still got the majority of the Neshkesh's subjects to think about. One is a catgirl or something close (I have a use for 1/4 of her tail), but I don't know about the others.

I'm not so much trying to make it conform to marketing standards as to write a story of the kind I want to write, but picking one that has a relatively good chance -- relative to other stories of the kind I like to write, though, not relative to other stories on the market. If I can't sell the most saleable edge of my writing, I'll go entirely elsewhere; that is useful information.

E.g., Sythyry is very concerned about sexual orientation, far more than I am; I don't expect to be fussing about it in this story. Food, doom, moral subtleties, and culture clash are core topics for me, and I will use them.

Thanks!

[quoting-mungo.livejournal.com]

I don't like using non-standard vocabulary for the sake of doing so; the other words don't come off that way but the word for gate/portal does, to me.

Also, whether you should use the accents I think depends on how you intend to present the words, and how often you use them; I can put up with a lot more of weird accents and foreign letters in italics than in running text.

[redbird]

I would avoid using non-English words for English concepts. Species names, yes—though in that case, "coatl" fails because it does suggest borrowed-from-Earth. Using a non-Engish word for the gates/openings/routes between worlds seems reasonable, in part because those aren't the same as terrestrial paths, bridges, gates, etc. And maybe for "the area reachable by one of those paths." But "lord" or "ruler" or "governor" likely describes what that term means here well enough to use it, at least as a common noun: maybe something else as a formal title, a la "Lugal Yerni was head of the schools in that district."

The problem with accent marks is at best, you're dropping in a pronunciation note, as in Brust's Brokedown Palace, and may still have readers stopping to think "now, how is that z pronounced," and at worst, people aren't getting even close to what you want with regard to pronunciation. Use them if you need them--if you're trying to get in a sound not regularly written in English--but think twice about "need" here.

[valdary.livejournal.com]

Imagine that you are having it read aloud as an audio book by a famous actor and choose words and names that can be read easily and comfortably at first sight without stumbling or hesitation.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

http://xkcd.com/483/

[rowyn]

I think that scale should be flatter at the beginning -- a few words don't affect the probability one way or another. >:)

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

I'm puzzled by how the results look. The page is displaying what appear to be the wrong results for what I clicked on. Anyway:

The assertion "" is False, says Python. More importantly, remember that you do heavy-duty anthropology in your writing. It's cool, but it can be overwhelming even to those of us who like it. Adding a raft of terms from not one but two ancient languages (with accent marks, even!) would make the story impenetrable for all but the most dedicated readers. It'd be an extreme case of "calling a rabbit a smerp", making alien concepts needlessly hard to understand. The fact that you think the underlying linguistics are cool suggests you'd be adding this complication for your own entertainment at the cost of the reader's, so be careful!

As with the sentient-trees story opening you posted, I feel like I need something familiar to hang onto if the story isn't going to be a puzzle just to understand. That one had aliens interacting with more aliens in an alien setting with magic. With World Tree we readers can at least think "okay, these guys are talking raccoons" and that's a close enough description for us to get started and eventually figure out what they're really like.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

New book! Eeee, squee!

*ahem* On to serious points...

>>Recognizably fantasy instead of the fantasy/sf blend I seem to indulge in usually. At least, as much fantasy as World Tree is.<<

A potential hurdle there is that far-traveling exists both in fantasy and science fiction. In order to achieve your "recognizably fantasy" goal, you'll need to do things like: 1) keep the technology level low, 2) use terms with a fantasy flavor or at least not SF flavor (an argument for using foreign terms), and 3) include as many strongly-fantasy motifs as possible.

>>The backstory of the setting concerns two species from different worlds. The first is the couatl, winged feathered serpents, who learned how to slither delicately between worlds (which few species can do). They were clever and friendly and gentle, and were explorers and traders, and learned much in their travels and became very civilized. In time they came to the world of the lammasu, mighty winged lions. The lammasu were not gentle. They learned the power of throwing open the gates between worlds, and they went forth and conquered a thousand worlds. Including the coatls, of course.<<

Well, I'm fascinated already.

>>I'm kind of thinking of the coatls as very loosely like classical Greece, and the lammasu as very loosely like classical Rome at its peak -- and like the Instrumentality of Man from Cordwainer Smith. The domain of the lammasu is run with ruthless benevolence. <<

If you cut it down to philosophical and political basics like "ruthless benevolence" then that should work. But be careful about cultural leakage. You've picked two very distinctive inspirational cultures in Nahuatl and Sumerian, both extremely different from anything European. You don't actually need to borrow the Roman example for the latter: Sumer was a big, relatively stable society for a long time and you don't have to go far to hit Babylon, which was an expansionist empire for a while. Put those together and you've got your ruthless benevolence. (Sumerian is one of my religions, by the way, so I can recommend some resources if you need them.) Now Nahuatl will require more digging if you want to get a "gentle" society out of it. Central and South America have, well, mean hungry deities. I'd say your best bet for finding nonviolent motifs would be to search through the agrarian references and throw out all the stuff about how human sacrifice makes the crops grow.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>I am thinking that the vocabulary of inter-world travel will come from the coatls, since they did it first, and the vocabulary of empire will come from the lammasu.<<

Valid plan. Did you know that "lammasu" is one of several Sumerian words that English speakers tend to translate as "demon" ...?

>> I have a modest number of technical terms in mind. I could just use "gate" or "portal" as the way you leave one world and come to the next, but that's so overworked I dunno.<<

I strongly recommend that you use the foreign terms, which don't come with so many preconceptions. In fantasy, "Gate" and "portal" are used to refer to passageways from one dimension to another -- but those are also used in science fiction (gate more than portal) referring to star travel devices.

Anyways, I am considering trying to abuse the Nahuatl language for couatl words and the Sumerian language for lammasu ones.

>>I'm making some attempt to pay attention to actual Nahuatl and Sumerian. I'm ultimately more concerned with literary use than linguistic purity.<<

That's fair -- particularly if you take the approach that occasional travelers across dimensions can pick up or drop linguistic bits along other cultures as they go.

>>"š" is pronounced "sh". There are a few other odd letters that scholars use for Sumerian (ģ for an ng sound); I might use some of them too.<<

Works for me.

>>One of the most important people of the Nešgeš.<<

That says nothing about why they're important; only the previous field "lord" does. I suggest adding "ruler" or "politician" or something like that to the longer description to refine this.

>>Citizen of the Nešgeš. (About 95% of the subjects of the Nešgeš are mašda)<<

Add that to gi-nun and you have 100%. That sounds wrong. You'd need at least 1% rulers and other higher-class people, and 5% would be more plausible. Or if the rulers are part of the citizen class, then you need to specify that as a slave/free division. Otherwise people tend to look for a low, middle, and high class division.

On the whole, this looks like something I'd enjoy reading. As for whether it's marketable ... I'm not sure. I think the things you do best are not what the mainstream really wants, and you don't have much taste for the mainstream's favorites which are essentially variations on a theme. That's going to be a challenge. Hmmm ... you might try scanning TV Tropes or any other good guide to popular motifs, and try to identify which ones prominent in fantasy are ones you like, then include as many of those as you can. It'd be fan service, essentially, but it might help boost the marketability.

Anyhow, I hope this is useful input.

[rowyn]

Incidently, I love the concepts behind tlalli and ohtli. Connecting strings of worldlets instead of whole worlds makes the empire seem less incalcuably huge, and it lets you make each worldlet be fairly homogenous without getting the weirdness of the sf trope "every planet has just one culture, except Earth, which inexplicably has hundreds". Or the even more inexplicable "and so does Earth". O_o

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Earth does only have one culture, from an alien's point of view anyway.

[djinni.livejournal.com]

To be honest, it throws off my suspension of disbelief when an entirely non-human, non-earth culture has a language directly from an Earth culture. I'd prefer them to have their own languages. From what you've described, it seems like the only reason they have to use these languages is on the meta level of them being creatures from the culture who used that language.

That said, the story sounds really cool, and I would very happily read it. I would just be happier if they had their own languages, or if their use of Earth languages had an in-story reason.