Elivera

Writing Process: An Update

Posted by Aibird on June 5, 2016
Posted in: Characters, Elivera, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , . 1 Comment

Update on The Dragios Twins Trilogy

Book 1: The Lost Ones

A few weeks ago, my editor returned my book to me with some excellent edits and suggestions. She noted areas where I needed more precise and descriptive words, areas where believability was an issue, characters who weren’t as strongly painted as other characters, suggestions on how to reword convoluted sentences, and other mistakes that I had missed. Objective eyes really can help polish a book, because a lot of these issues I hadn’t noticed. Although I had spent many weeks scouring it for mistakes, being that entangled with the novel, my brain tended to fix things for me as I read through the pages. Sometimes an objective pair of eyes can ferret out easy to miss problems because their brain isn’t automatically fixing it for them; for the editor, this book is new to them, the material fresh, so they don’t have the history of the story’s evolution like I do, and are able to see problems as they are. I highly recommend all writers find a professional editor to review their work. It really does help.

What’s the next stage? Researching legitimate agents, writing query letters, and submitting queries. I have a few potential agents picked out, but now I have to research their submission process and make sure I abide by it. I also need to try to write my queries  so that I sell myself and yet also sound succinct and professional. This is a hard balance, and it’s been stressing me out. This is the part of the writing process I hate the most.

Book 2: The Experiments (or The Found ones)

I have started the second book in this trilogy and am near the quarter point of 25,000 words. The first book is more of a mystery in which the characters try to understand what is happening to them and why by seeking out clues. In the second book, the characters understand what is happening and are now fighting to save each other from dangerous situations. They know what they need to do, but doing the actions are proving difficult. So the second book has a lot more action and fighting scenes.

The theme of the second book is tied up in the theme of the first book: empathy, seeking truth, and conflict resolution.

Analysis of my Character’s Journeys

I tried hard to avoid any spoilers in the following analysis.

Kia

Kia’s journey starts with her in a healthy place in life. She has conquered cancer, emotionally fairly healthy, and has regained some of her strength. She strongly believes in equality and civil rights, and fights against xenophobic attitudes within her classmates behavior, especially if they direct it at Kate. She’s a fighter to the core but also loyal to those she loves. In the second book, these qualities are put to the test to a high degree.

In The Lost Ones, Kia is kidnapped and placed in a terrifying new world that she doesn’t understand – the only similarity between her new world and her old is pain. She understands pain very well due to her cancer and due to fighting against discrimination. By the end of the first book, Kia and Kate come to understand who Kia’s captors are, but their motives are still obscured by a language barrier. In the second book, Kia struggles with anger and a growing hatred of her captors and their actions. She starts to distrust anyone who looks like her captors, and in doing so, she starts to judge everyone within that species as bad — discounting the good ones that are actually her allies. Her distrust and growing hatred of her captors puts her in danger of becoming the xenophobic person she had fought so hard against at the start of The Lost Ones.

The climax of the second book depends on Kia mitigating her anger into less destructive avenues and quelling her hatred of her captors in order to find common ground with potential allies who seek to end her captivity. As Kia toes this line between constructive avenues for her anger and destructive, Kate serves as her foil; she holds Kia accountable, and for Kia, who ends up in a leadership role during the events of the second book, she needs to be held accountable and needs the emotional support, so that she can make decisions and act in a way that drives toward justice and resolution rather than destruction and revenge. All good leaders need someone to hold them accountable.

Kia’s question becomes: how does one seek justice without perpetuating a cycle of violence?

Kate

Kate’s journey in The Lost Ones centers on her anxiety disorder and how she mitigates its effects on her life. She has lived most of her life in the shadows of other people, quite content to support them so that she could escape notice. She doesn’t like to be the center of attention and struggles to speak up about her needs due to her anxiety. In the first book, Kate must learn how to speak up and fight for those she loves, and she starts to discern when speaking up is necessary and when to use her tendency toward silence during stressful situations to her advantage.

In the second book, her newly developed skills are put to the test as she and her cousin must fight their way to Kia. Kate, who prefers to avoid conflict at all costs, must learn how to defend those she loves and most importantly how to diffuse intense conflict by speaking and fighting back. This is extremely difficult for Kate due to her anxiety disorder and also due to her struggle with PTSD, as the events of the first book will have a tremendous effect on her mental health. Throughout the second book, Kate struggles to articulate her needs to those she trusts and allow their help when she needs the support.

Kate’s main motivation is finding and freeing Kia, the person she loves most in the world, but as the events of the second book progress, Kate’s motivation starts to change. She still seeks to free Kia from captivity, but at the same time, she wants to help Kia heal from the trauma they’ve both endured. Her empathy toward Kia’s struggle and toward the struggle of Kia’s fellow captives pushes Kate to try to find ways to help others discover their inner strength to survive and heal from the trauma they’ve endured. Kate wants a peaceful resolution to the conflicts they face.

Kate’s question becomes: how does one seek resolution and healing in and after traumatic situations?

Jillsa

Jill’s journey differs from both of Kate and Kia. She enters the tale in the latter half of The Lost Ones. As Kate’s cousin, Jill has lived most of her life in Norway, hasn’t experienced that much discrimination due to her unusual looks, and she’s fairly well adjusted. She has a terrible sense of humor, but is very loyal to those she loves. Unlike Kate and Kia, Jill has no desire at all for romantic relationships, and enjoys long arduous hikes and creating things with her hands. She doesn’t have a lot of interest in outside affairs, so when Kate tumbles into Jill’s life, Jill is thrust into a world of intrigue, adventure, and dangerous conflict. At first Jill resists it, but Jill has a strong urge to keep those she cares about safe, so when she begins to hear Kate’s mind-song, Jill finds herself empathizing with Kate’s struggles. This pushes her to assist Kate in finding the truth of what happened to Kia and ways to save Kia from her captivity.

At first, Jill’s main motivation is keeping her cousin safe. She could care less about the affairs of Kia’s captors or the fate of Earth, but by the end of the second book, when she confronts the horrors of the captors’ experiments, Jill must make a choice — she could turn and walk away, go back to her home in Norway, and continue to avoid recognizing the larger problems, but doing so would mean turning her back on Kate and Kia entirely. And even then, she might not escape the impact Kia’s captors have on Earth and Elivera.

Jill, by the end of the second book, has developed empathy for the captives’ plight and for Kate’s fervent desire to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflicts between all the factions involved. Jill understands why Kate wants to avoid loss of life as much as possible, but Jill also understands that sometimes loss of life is unavoidable when people are fighting for their freedom. As much as Jill wants to go back to the life she lead before the events of the first book, Jill slowly comes to understand that if this larger conflict is not addressed her life and many others could be severely harmed.

Jill’s question becomes: how does one balance one’s needs against the needs of the many?

Book 3: Liberation (placeholder title)

At first I wasn’t sure I’d need a third book for this series, but the further I move into the second book, the more I realize how necessary a third book is. The third book will focus on conflict resolution, seeking common ground (empathy for others), and the characters trying to avoid an all-out war between Earth and the scientist factions (Kia’s captors) on Elivera. I have 12,320 words for the third book thus far, and these scenes exist only within notebooks currently. I have yet to transfer them into my Scrivener project. Originally, I wrote these scenes for the second book, but then realized that including them would draw out the ending of the second book too much. So the scenes were shifted to the beginning of the third book.

The events of the Dragios Twins Trilogy takes place a good 900 or so years before most of my planned Elivera novels. This Trilogy is the origin story of my Elivera world. This series has been years in the making, and I’m determined to get it right. Kate, Kia, and Jill’s story has a huge impact on humanity’s presence on Elivera and their relations with their homeworld, Earth, so I best get back to writing it!

 

Worldbuild: Cities

Posted by Aibird on December 6, 2014
Posted in: Aliens, Elivera, World Building, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 3 Comments

In a society, people tend to gather in communities, and over time these communities can expand and grow, developing into cities. Thus, when world-building, cities can prove to be intensely beneficial to your stories. Taking the time to develop them can help you better understand the setting of your story and how your characters may be influenced or shaped by their surroundings.

For example, if your story takes place in a desert, the community may not be a sprawling metropolis, mostly because the environment simply couldn’t sustain it. Think about the amount of water necessary to keep those inhabitants alive. In a desert, water is scarce, and thus a large, sprawling city would be counterproductive and dangerous to survival. You’d quickly run out of resources to continue to expand the city. Even if this city is by an oasis, such rare water sources are not unlimited resources, and if over tapped, that resource will run dry, which would be disastrous for the inhabitants of the city. To avoid this problem, communities in the desert may be smaller towns.

Another consideration to consider is the design of the buildings. Cooling a building may be essential for some deserts. One way to accomplish this is to allow for the flow of air throughout the house. If nights get too cold, these buildings would also have the ability to be shuttered up. The materials for these dwellings should be a light color, as darker colors absorb more light (and thus more heat). As deserts can often be hot (though not all will be, depending on the latitude of your desert), a dark colored structure would make the indoors unbearable during the days. To maximize on cooling, it may be better to have underground structures, where the air can be cooler. There is a reason animals burrow under the desert during the day; this is because the area under the surface can often retain the cool temperatures of the night for much longer than the structure situated on top or above ground. However, there is a limit to how deep you can build your underground structures; don’t have them been miles deep, for the closer you get to the mantle, the more the temperature will rise as that part of the earth’s interior can be substantially warmer than the crust.

That’s just one example of how to build a city that makes sense in its environment. To help you generate ideas, study some of the cities built on earth. Look into how they are built, where they are built, and what problems they face due to their location and the environment in which they live. Not all cities last forever, so look into why cities decline. Sometimes it’s human factors that cause the decline, but also consider environmental factors as well. Make a list of possible ways cities can expand and decline over time, and try to create a timeline for your city. Researching cities on earth can be useful in helping you consider the timeline of your cities, but don’t feel like you have to model your city after Earth cities.

If you are writing science fiction and creating a futuristic city, think about how technology will play into the type of city you want to create. Will technology help compensate for lack of resources in the environment? If so, how would that work and what is the necessary infrastructure to make that technology work within the confines of your city? How many workers or robots would be necessary to maintain that infrastructure? How will the technology of your city play a role in the inhabitant lives? Will they have a city-wide network that inhabitants can tap into?

When examining the history of city design, there is several different styles of design:

  • Traditional designs tend to focus on long straight streets and squares, where there are green spaces or public areas in the middle of the city. A lot of traditional city designs focus on square grids, though some cities utilize a radial form such as Paris.
  • Modernist designs focus more on taller, more elevated buildings being built into city blocks, where the expansion of the city goes toward the sky rather than spreading out over more land.  Modernist designs also focus on large highways cutting through cities. The idea of grouping office buildings together also is part of the more modernist design for cities. In what ways can you examine modernist designs and alter them into something more unique and less earth-like?
  • Green designs integrate natural landscape into the design for cities. This is also known as landscape urbanism. This is a harken back to the pre-industrial cities which were often small with the landscape close by. However, in modern cities, urbanization covers such large areas that natural landscape is often disconnected from those that live in the constructed environment of the modern city. This relationship of the natural and constructed environments becomes more difficult to achieve, especially with the spread and expansive nature of modern cities. Green designs focuses on sculpting the city to fit in with the nature, where nature and constructed environments were integrated in ways that highlight the flow of the landscape. One example is the gardens within Japanese and Chinese cities, where artificial landscapes were constructed within the city. Other examples are coastal cities being conformed to the shape of the coast. Instead of forcing the coast to fit the minds of the designers, the city is molded to fit the coast and is built to handle possible storm surges and rising sea levels. In coastal cities, it’s often not possible to have square grids, as the coast line can often be irregular in its shape, and so the city must be molded to fit that shape.
  • Another design for cities is the Systems design, which focuses on viewing cities like living organisms. This design takes into account the complexity of cities. It highlights how over time they can grow more complex, if more people move to that city, or less complex if the city starts to fail due to various factors. These designs are often simulated in various city building software, and tends to create patterns that resemble more the structure of a brain neuron rather than grid-like patterns or city blocks.

When designing cities, it can be effective to think about what your world is like and the values of your species. For example, my Dragios species is very much focused on biological technologies, so their architecture and city designs are all oriented on the helix nature of DNA, and the buildings are grown through nanotechnology and can evolve into more complex structures. This type of city is very different from earth-like designs and less systematic and grid-like, as it takes more of a helical structure to its layout. This is one of the many ways you can diversify your city designs.

Now that you have the basic layout of your city and the environment in and around it, you have to consider the systems, services, resources, and industries within your city. Where will your people live? What type of housing is available? Where are the markets located and what do they resemble? How is the infrastructure handled such as water, electricity (if it exists), sewage, transportation and so forth? To help you examine this side of city-building, I formulated a list of questions, which I posted to the resources forum at LegendFire: http://www.legendfire.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6795

The above link includes a set of questions for you to answer as you build your city. It also includes some links to further information. I highly recommend exploring it. So readers, how have you constructed your cities? What do you consider?

Tops posts for the week

Posted by Aibird on November 19, 2014
Posted in: Author, Blogging, Elivera, Science, World Building, Writing. Tagged: , . Leave a comment

It’s interesting to look and see the top posts for this past week. I’ve had a lot of people exploring my World-building posts, which is good. The template I created has also gotten a lot of interest, and I’m hoping I’ll get feedback on it soon so I can find ways to improve it. Graph of reshaping reality's statisticsIt’s also interesting to see from what locations people examine my site, and from what links do they come from. Most people seem to find my site through search engines, but others have found my site through Legendfire and some world-building forums.

Looking at the search terms is also interesting, mostly because they seem so random: “Animals elivera, glue and newspaper, earth, western hemisphere, gamergate, gender tropes in literature, future significant astronomical events, why is science uncertain, and paper mache planets.”

I find it amusing when people input in questions into searches. I know I do that sometimes just for the fun of it, so it’s interesting to see a question end up with my blog. I do actually answer why is science uncertain in my Uncertain Universe: How Science discovers its Truths blog entry from awhile back. I also explore how I created my own paper mache planet. There’s also a few posts about my universe of Elivera. I cover astronomy. I also cover gender tropes in other posts as well as diversity. I explore earth in my world-building series when I discuss geomorphology. So all the search terms I’ve covered to some extent, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve written about poetry, my own personal story, and so many other things on this blog that I can’t even begin to link them all. This is a good reminder of what I have done here. It’s been good work.

Yes, I’ve covered a lot of diverse topics on my blog, but if there is one core aspect to this blog, it is that I explore the art of imagination, where we take that instilled essence and create works to showcase to the world at large. We are the creators of universes, the explorers, and we “will not go silently in the dark night. We will rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

So this is a bit of a review of my blog and some of what a reader may discover. I am planning on more content in the future when I have more time, and once I finish my move. So expect another update in a week or so. In the meantime, happy reading!

How I craft a language Part 2: Phonetics and Phonology

Posted by Aibird on April 2, 2014
Posted in: Aliens, Biology, Elivera, Linguistics, World Building, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

You can read the first part of this series here. This is a continuation of that first post.

I’ve made some concept drawings of my Dragios species, but as I’m not the best at drawing, this is mostly sketches with only the head done in any sort of detailed fashion. Here’s one of the design sketches:Image02172014154740 I’m still not fully satisfied with it — the mouth needs to be a bit more triangular and smoothed out, but it’s close enough for my purposes.

In order to start creating their language, I need to consider the details of how this alien species evolved and their biology. The Dragios species evolved on a light gravity planet around a low mass star (spectral class of K5, which means it’s surface temperature is only 4,400K and it is 0.64 the size of our sun. This means the planet has a closer orbit in order to be in the habitable zone.), where the gravity is 3/4ths that of Earth. They are mostly a bird/reptilian type species and can glide short distances on their planet. They have the ability to alter their outer appearance to some degree, the two outer layer of cells fairly flexible, allowing for them to camouflage themselves extremely well. It takes some time for them to learn how to look like other similar sized animals, but once they master the skill, they can easily blend and walk amongst their prey without being noticed. This makes hunting fairly easy, and fairly easy for them to hide if they’re being hunted. They are bipedal with strong legs and strong wing bones, allowing them to run fairly fast and glide great distances. Their hands have a thumb and three fingers, which gives them the dexterity to grasp objects and undoubtedly proved essential in their development of technology over time.

Their mouth is shaped a bit like a bat’s snout, very compact, but with a large nasal area. Their ears are large and can easily move nearly 270 degrees. This gives them a wide range of movement, and allows for greater breadth in the range of their hearing. They also have no lips, and thus would have no consonants corresponding to those types of sounds. Within their throat, they have a four thin vocal chords, layered upon each other, which allows them to sing four pitches at the same time. This gives them versatility with their music and speech, and also makes it hard for a human to ever truly learn to speak their language. Because of this, their language is heavily based around music. When devising the phonology of their language, I had to take all of this into account.

Now I could examine the phonetics of their language, which is the production, transmission, and perception of the sounds of language. This is different then phonology , which concerns itself with the examination of the systematic organization of sounds (such as into words) and how this organizing of sounds constructs meaning. To examine how the sounds are organized, I first have to create the sounds. Here are the two phonetic maps I created:

Consonants: Dragios consonants

Vowels: Dragios vowels

As you can see, I left some space for improvement as this is a work in progress. Although I did base the categories loosely upon human linguistics, I took out a few categories that they wouldn’t have due to a difference in mouth construction. With these sounds and the characters I use to represent them, I can start to construct words, which is where I start to examine the phonology of their language. To do this, I created some simplistic word construction rules, where C stands for consonant and V for vowel:

VCV
CVCV
CVVC(V)
VVC(V)

Although this is somewhat simplistic at the moment, it’s enough for me to start constructing words based on these sounds. I decided to focus first on the musical terminology because of their ability to sing more than one sound at a time and how crucial music will be in their culture. I then expanded the vocabulary to include words for their environment and their society. From there, I could start to work on how they actually construct their sentences. In order to construct sentences, I needed to create a set of rules, also known as syntax. These rules would help speakers form sentences in which to communicate larger and more complicated ideas. Another way to view syntax is to think of grammar rules — all languages have them. Those grammar rules are the syntax of that language.

I started with a simple rule for basic sentences that focused on the word order within the sentence itself: Subject — object — verb

From there I decided that the clicks within the language would serve a bit like punctuation and articles. They’d signify when a sentence is a command, statement, or interrogative. They’d also serve as connectors of one phrase to another within the sentence. With this idea in mind, I began to construct a few basic sentences. Now this is all very simplistic currently, and I do have further plans on how to add depth to the syntax of this language, but as of this moment in time, this is where I currently stand with my alien language.

So that’s the basics of how I created my first alien language. Having a linguistics resource nearby aided me tremendously during this project, but more importantly, I had to examine how various species’ mouths were constructed. This gave me a wider range of ideas on how an alien mouth may evolve, and what it may resemble, and in turn, allowed for more versatility with the sounds they could make. Will I use this language within my stories? Possibly but even if I don’t, the act of building this language has allowed me to examine my alien species in depth. To visualize it more fully and to give me a chance to examine their society and views of the world and how that may differ from humanity. This has, in turn, given me ideas on possible conflicts that can give rise to even more stories. So the act of building their language has inspired me in a great number of ways and further enriches the world-building of my Elivera universe.

It can be a challenge to create a language, but it’s definitely rewarding in the long run.

Snow White and Cinderella

Posted by Aibird on November 9, 2013
Posted in: Characters, Elivera, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , . 3 Comments

One of the reasons I found myself diving into the reinvention of fairy tales is simply because the modern takes on them are too stale. They don’t dig into a lot of the more disturbing thematic elements of the original fairy tales. Now, my purpose isn’t to dig into the more violent aspects that riddle the fairy tales. No, it’s the background of the fairy tales that I bring forward along with some gender-bending since the trope of the evil stepmother is an old, problematic trope that I really didn’t want to continue.

In Cinderella, the backdrop to this tale is a poorer town bordering the extravagant castle where the King and Queen live with the unnamed Prince. There is a lot of poverty in that backdrop, and Cinderella, having come from one of the more prosperous families is forced into servitude, by her stepmother, an enforced poverty that is depicted as fairly similar to the poverty in much of the village. The Ball, where all is invited, is a bit of a misnomer. Not everyone is actually invited, since only those dressed well are let into the Ball itself. The story makes no qualms about the fact that those at the Ball are finely dressed, which means that the more poverty stricken households within the village cannot go. They simply do not have the money or means nor a fairy godmother. Cinderella is basically a dream come true for the more poverty stricken folk, a dream of where magic helps them out of their poverty, where they are seen as the beauty they are and are able to move up in the world, into a wealthier and more prosperous life style.

Most versions of this tale that I’ve seen focus on that transformation of Cinderella, from the girl dirty and overlooked in her servitude to the beautiful bride of a Prince. What they fail to see is the poverty stricken others who will never have that dream. My reinvention of Cinderella examines that backdrop and also gives the Prince a chance to actually have some depth as a character – rather than just being the vehicle for which Cinderella achieves her dreams. In my story, I examine a Prince who seeks, mostly out of curiosity at first but then out of a moral obligation, what the more poverty stricken folks in the Prince’s kingdom needs and how they perceive the announcements and policies of the King and Queen. The Prince is sympathetic to the lower income people, and thus, when Cinderella is revealed in her servitude state, the Prince is able to empathize and to not condemn. It’s not Cinderella’s beauty that captures the Prince, in my tale, but her determination, especially in times of hardship. I add a bit of spice to the Ball itself, for the Prince decides to aid those who do not have the money to make it, by giving them a route into the ball that bypasses the security. There they can protest and plead with the King and Queen or enjoy the Ball as they see fit. The Prince does not fully understand the consequences of this or the riot that will ensue, but Cinderella catches on far more quickly, and acts swiftly to not only get the Prince out of danger, but also to get others to safety as well. This is when she loses her shoe, and also when she must take quick leave of the Prince, leaving only her shoe as a keepsake.

It is my hope to examine the poverty that lurked behind the scenes in the original and various reincarnations, and to bring it to the forefront. The purpose of the story isn’t the romance of Cinderella or the Prince, nor is it the transformation of Cinderella from servitude to Prince’s bride. It’s the struggle of the rich against the poor, and how Cinderella and the Prince are simply pawns in that much larger struggle.

For Snow white, I examine a much different thematic element. In Snow White’s original tale, she is an orphan, her royal parents dead, with only her stepmother to take care of her till she comes of age. (Or is married off as is often the fate of girls in the original fairy tales.) The phrase that occurs the most is ‘fairest of them all,’ and shows how obsession over beauty leads to madness and death. The Stepmother ceases to see Snow White as a person of value, and seeks only to destroy the one person her magic mirrors claims is fairer than her. The dwarves serve as a safe haven, but even in their care, Snow White is not exempt from the malicious attempts on her life; she is shown to be remarkably naive and far too trusting, which is her downfall. In addition to these qualities, she is shown to care for the dwarves, doing the household chores and making their food, and as such, she is being shown as the proper lady in comparison to the stepmother, mad with envy and who doesn’t exhibit these ‘lady-like qualities’ that old tales were often obsessed with themselves. The theme of obsession is even apparent in how much the original versions of the tale stress those ‘lady-like qualities’ and ‘beauty’ Snow White has.

However, it is the Prince’s journey, once again an unnamed Prince in most versions, that gives the theme of obsession an even darker twist. When Snow White “dies” by the poisoned apple, the Dwarves, heart-sick with grief, put her in a glass casket on a mountain for all to see and mourn. She is on display as an object, and this is how the Prince encounters Snow White. He sees her beauty and decides he wants it. He doesn’t seek who Snow White was, nor has any regards for her consent or wishes (which at this point she cannot give). He only wants her to be his based on what he sees in the casket. It takes some time, twice in one version and thrice in another, but he convinces the dwarves, who have ownership of her body, to give her away. Worse off, the Prince then kisses her, despite being told she was dead. Disturbing? Yes. This somehow dislodges the poisoned apple from her throat, and she awakens, only to be married to the prince. The stepmother then, in the original version, dances until she dies as their entertainment. In other versions, she is killed by the Prince or left for dead.

When I set about reinventing Snow White, I focused on the Prince’s journey and that of the Stepmother. The two are interrelated in the sense that both obsess over a particular idea and person. Both obsess about Snow White; in the step mother’s case, the obsession focuses on eliminating her and, in the Prince’s case, about obtaining her. Snow White’s consent and thoughts are not taken into account, and she is at the whims of these two forces. The Huntsman, sent to kill Snow White in the first attempt on her life, spares her partly because of her pleas and partly because of her beauty. She asks for her life to be spared, and he gives her that. Even in this instance, she has little control over her fate. It lay in the hands of the Huntsman, and then later in the hands of the dwarves and the Prince. Secondly, the obsession is shown to be evil in the stepmother, but in the Prince he is rewarded with Snow White, despite his obsession about her beauty. His behavior, especially in obtaining Snow White from the dwarves, served to me as an eerie and disturbing correlation with the sex slave trade that is rampant today. Where girls have no agency and are on display for people to examine them as goods for them to purchase. In some cases, these sex workers are sold into the slavery by people they once trusted. In this vein, the dwarves, whom Snow White trusted, gives her away to the Prince, knowing that he wants her only because of her beauty. He is an object of his desire, and the story ends with their marriage. Nothing is really said about if Snow agreed to it, but then she isn’t entirely in a position not to agree. She has no where else to go, and if she doesn’t agree, she will probably end up with the dwarves, which the fairy tale – and the various reincarnations of it – show as a lesser state than the Prince.

If there is one thing these two fairy tales have in common is that the Prince’s way of life is the ultimate goal for the both girls, even if neither outright wanted it at first (or in Snow White’s case, there is no evidence that she considered it a possibility until she awoke in his arms.) It is assumed in both that the girls would automatically fall for the Prince and, of course, they’d want to wed into this higher status. Both live for awhile in a lower status, and both are lifted out of it. Cinderella through magical means, and Snow White through what amounts to being given away like a heirloom.

In adapting these fairy tales, I realized that I could use the setting of my Elivera universe as a way to expand my own world-building, and to give myself more room to focus on the thematic elements and characterization of the heroines and the Princes. This is why I set them in my Elivera universe, just set a few thousand years in the future from my current batch of Elivera novels. It is my hope that as I explore the two fairy tales I can examine one, the plight of the impoverished in these yarns; two, the consequences of obsession; and three, agency and lack thereof.

Snow White’s tale is my NaNoWriMo project. The Cinderella tale is only half written, and I hope to finish it in the next two months.

Paper Mache Project Completed

Posted by Aibird on October 23, 2013
Posted in: Art, Elivera, Science, World Building. Tagged: , , , , , , . 3 Comments

Here is the final pictures of the paper mache project:

I apologize for the fuzzy aspect to the pictures. They were taken with my phone camera.

Also, I tilted the globe so you can see the north and south poles more clearly:

 

Image10062013214749I am looking down at the globe toward the northern hemisphere and the continent of Vera.  To the east, you can see half of the continent of Ratomae — the desert on the western side of its continental divide.  The continent of Vera is intersected by a mountain range, mostly due to the plate tectonics in that region.  Also, most of it is covered in forest with deserts at the equator that intersects the southern peninsulas at the bottom of the image. The forests of Vera are huge, where the trees can grow to a kilometer tall in places. This is partly because Elivera is slightly smaller than Earth, and slightly less massive, which gives it a lower surface gravity. Other factors come into play to allow for the huge growth of the trees, but that’s already discussed in my world-building posts, so check those out for more information!

Image10062013214804Here is the Isutobek islands. This is my first mistake: those islands are too large. They should be ten times smaller. Something to repair for my next attempt at this project.

Image10062013214812The other side of the Isutobek islands (ugh! too big!  But nearly impossible to fix after I painted them), and the rest of Ratomae, the eastern side of its continental divide.  I also made sure to take this picture looking down on the eastern side of the northern hemisphere, that way you can get a good look at the northern ice cap.  There is a continent under the northern ice cap, but there is nothing but ocean under the southern one.

Image10062013214849I put the globe on the table, and titled it so you could see the southern hemisphere better. This is the continent of Egoni.  Here is my other minor error.  The southern ice cap shouldn’t quite touch Egoni’s southern shore, but I drew it too far down and didn’t realize it until after I painted the ocean around it. It was too late to fix then.  Also, note how mountains encircle the top and sides of the continent.  There are huge, deep canyons in these mountains, and at the bottom of the canyons there is crevices and fissures, that lead to underground caverns.  Winds blow through these canyons at upward of 200 km/hr, so if you’re in the canyon or near it, you can hear what sounds almost like musical notes. This is due to the winds hitting the fissures and the holes in the ground, similar to how you’d play a flute.

Image10062013214858Turned so you can see how close Egoni is to the continent of Kefutji.

 

Image10062013214912The continent of Kefutji, which is a highly mountainous region — a lot of tectonic movement in this area, not just collision of plates, but also lots of hot spots.  There’s marshes, forests, and highlands as well as cold grasslands to the south.  It’s probably the only continent on this planet with the most disparate climate zones.

Image10062013214930I tipped the globe upward even more so you could see the entirety of the southern ice cap and how it overflows onto the southern shores of Kefutji.  The globe is also tipped slightly to the reader’s left, so it’s not entirely straight up and down.

Image10062013214951The ocean between Kefutji and the southern most peninsula of Vera.

Image10062013215001The ocean between the southern tip of Vera and the start of Egoni.  The globe is straight up and down at this point.  No tipping at all, thus the equator should be in the center of this image.

And that’s it!  It was a fun experiment.  What I learned:

  • Glue-based paper mache is simply not porous enough. It took multiple coats of acrylic paint to produce the color hues I needed.  Also, the paint scrapes off easily, so I have to be very careful with its stand.  I may take some fishing wire, create a slim net with it, and set the globe in that, so it can be hung and less chance of the paint being scraped.
  • Styrofoam base for this is too scratchy and porous to handle paint, so something has to be layered atop it for this to work.
  • Self-hardening clay is more porous than paper mache, so may try that as a possible fix.

It’s a relief to see it finished, and I must admit, it’s fun to show to others.  For a first try, it turned out alright.  Now I know what works and what doesn’t, and I have ideas on how to improve this project for when I try this again.  My hope is to create a more detailed and better version of this planet, and then I’d like to create a model of its moons (both are fairly small), and a few planets in other solar systems that the people in my novels have colonized.  It’ll probably take me quite awhile, but I’ll be sure to update here when I start on this.  For the moment, I’ll return to some basic map-making with paper and pencils, and working on finishing some of my current writing projects.

Paper Mache Planet Update!

Posted by Aibird on September 23, 2013
Posted in: Art, Elivera, Science, World Building. Tagged: , , , , , , . 3 Comments

Finally! I have succeeded in determining a way to paint my planet. This is the first batch of paint — it will need at least two if not three coats of acrylic paint – and there is some pieces of continent in the southern hemisphere and three islands in the northern hemisphere that have yet to be painted.

I’m using dark blue for ocean. A turquoise for rivers and lakes (big enough to see from space obviously). Dark green for forest. A basil-like green for grasslands. Dark yellow for desert. Brown for mountains and hills (not sure how to specify between the two yet), and bits of red for hot spots such as volcanoes. I have overlapped areas as well since forests, deserts, and grasslands can appear in mountain ranges and hills. You can see this most prominently on the Vera continent in the second picture below, where the forests overlap the mountain range that cuts the continent in half. I thought about adding texture to the mountain ranges and hills, but I’ve yet to determine a method that would work for what I have in mind.

For the most part, this is just a proto-type to give me a sense of scale and help me determine ways to improve this idea for future planet projects. It’s useful also to just have a globe I can touch when it comes to writing about the world itself. Without further ado, here is the pictures. I’ll be sure to do an update when I’m finished with the piece!

Note: All of these pictures focus heavily on the Northern hemisphere since that hemisphere is nearly finished (the islands in the third picture are not fully painted yet.) When I finish the southern hemisphere, I’ll do an update with those pictures.

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