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NaNo blather!
So I've been using most of my spare brain cycles reading and thinking about NaNo. This is the level where I'm at: I have just realized that I have exactly *one* honest-to-god male character in this story. "Honest-to-God" being taken literally: I do have a couple gender-variant characters who would probably in modern culture identify as male, but in their milieu, when they get down on their knees in honesty, they identify either as female or thirdsex.
All the other developed male characters are either dead before the story starts or are killed soon after my character meets them. The only cisgender man who gets much of a speaking part spends most of his appearance in the story running errands for his girlfriend. ...That's kind of cool, considering that I didn't do it on purpose at all. And that I'm supposedly writing a patriarchal culture.
Anyway, I've been meaning to post more world-buildy stuff in the last month, but, um, not so much, and writing starts tomorrow! One thing I did get written up, rather than just marked in a library book, is my world's cosmology: Anyone writing in a fantasy world is writing in a world where the basic underlying principles are at least a bit different from ours, and I think it's important that the writer know what those principles are. My *characters* won't necessarily know, or they might have a lot of it wrong, and it may never come out in the story that they have it wrong, but I have to know what's possible, what's impossible, and what's absolutely necessary for the world to hang together.
It was especially tricky for this universe because I want it to be a world where the gods are present and magic works - but I also want to be able to use this world for alternate-history fantasy stories set anywhere from earliest prehistory all the way to near-future speculation. So I had to come up with a cosmology where Gods were present and magic works for *every* religion and belief system ever, from animism to m-theory, with minimal fudging necessary.
Um. Tricky. But I had a lot of other people's efforts to draw on, so here's what I've got, and I think it'll work for at least this story's world, with enough options left open to make it work for others, too:
So, before everything, there was the Endless and Timeless. But endless and timeless is very boring, so in it there was created Bubbles of Time and Space, and two of the bubbles met, and on the enclosed surface of the flat plane between them the world came to be, and over it stretched the dome of the heavens. And everything under the heavens was ruled by the right path, the way, the truth, justice, dharma, ma'at, what was meant to be and what ought to be and what may yet be - 'mayet'. It is mayet that keeps the bubble inflated - mayet that separates earth from chaos. And the Gods were created to embody the Mayet and to be stewards of it.
And then, out of the matter of the Earth, the Gods created humankind. And to give the forms they had created life, the Gods placed into them a small piece of the Endless and Timeless. When their earthly shape dies, that spark leaves the bubbles and rejoins the timeless; but it is changed by its time in time. And because of this humans are both part of the mayet-bubble and outside it, and are therefore uniquely able to act against the mayet - they have free will and can do evil. The Gods, being created with the mayet, had no experience of this; they have the power to shape the mayet, but not to act contrary to it. And so very soon after the Creation, (either through accident or guile or carelessness, depending on the story) Man acquired from the Gods the power to shape the mayet, too; but because they have free will, they can alter it without regard for its flow. And this is called 'sorcery', and it is very dangerous both for the sorcerer and the world (sorcery's not always evil, when used with care, but it is dangerous.) And the sorcerers began to derange and unbalance the Mayet, and the Gods could not stop them, for it was the Gods' own powers, twisted, that they used. So the Gods chose humans who did keep mayet and gave them a portion of their power, so long as they used it in obedience to the will of the Gods and for mayet, to balance the sorcerers' work, and these were the first priest/mages.
But there were two bubbles. And under the other dome, on the flipside of Earth, is the other world, which is held in shape by a *different* mayet. There good is bad and right is wrong and gods can die and humans cannot, men bear babies and rivers flow uphill, unliving things have spirits, eating causes one to hunger and the sun rises to bring the darkness of night. And because it is a wrong mayet, no gods were created to keep it, but it must be in balance or its pressure will deform the upper world - so some gods went there to keep it, and were changed by the other mayet. And because mortals cannot die there, the parts of a man that are neither the earthly body, nor the timeless soul - the shadow, the memory of a man - dwell on in the underworld after earthly death. The wall between our world and its underside is strong, but thin, and humans and gods both can cross it - but with great care. The skill of using the other mayet and walking the other world is learned by shamans as a source of both knowlege and power, and all humans dwell there in dreams, but there is always a danger of becoming to much a part of its mayet and losing touch with ours - being trapped there - or of trapping things from the other world in ours.
Later things get progressively more complicated as the souls that have spent lots of time on Earth bring change to the Timeless and They start to act on Earth with their own initiative, and the border between the Mayet and the Timeless gets more complicated - and then there's this thing where a human is born who is inhabited by not just a bit of the Endless, but by *all* off it, and everything changes from the inside out - but at the time of this story, there have only been a few billion human lifetimes *ever*, and it's all still pretty simple.
Tomorrow: Draw maps, work out language phoneme charts for naming, make last plot outline. Oh, and make a Halloween costume.
All the other developed male characters are either dead before the story starts or are killed soon after my character meets them. The only cisgender man who gets much of a speaking part spends most of his appearance in the story running errands for his girlfriend. ...That's kind of cool, considering that I didn't do it on purpose at all. And that I'm supposedly writing a patriarchal culture.
Anyway, I've been meaning to post more world-buildy stuff in the last month, but, um, not so much, and writing starts tomorrow! One thing I did get written up, rather than just marked in a library book, is my world's cosmology: Anyone writing in a fantasy world is writing in a world where the basic underlying principles are at least a bit different from ours, and I think it's important that the writer know what those principles are. My *characters* won't necessarily know, or they might have a lot of it wrong, and it may never come out in the story that they have it wrong, but I have to know what's possible, what's impossible, and what's absolutely necessary for the world to hang together.
It was especially tricky for this universe because I want it to be a world where the gods are present and magic works - but I also want to be able to use this world for alternate-history fantasy stories set anywhere from earliest prehistory all the way to near-future speculation. So I had to come up with a cosmology where Gods were present and magic works for *every* religion and belief system ever, from animism to m-theory, with minimal fudging necessary.
Um. Tricky. But I had a lot of other people's efforts to draw on, so here's what I've got, and I think it'll work for at least this story's world, with enough options left open to make it work for others, too:
So, before everything, there was the Endless and Timeless. But endless and timeless is very boring, so in it there was created Bubbles of Time and Space, and two of the bubbles met, and on the enclosed surface of the flat plane between them the world came to be, and over it stretched the dome of the heavens. And everything under the heavens was ruled by the right path, the way, the truth, justice, dharma, ma'at, what was meant to be and what ought to be and what may yet be - 'mayet'. It is mayet that keeps the bubble inflated - mayet that separates earth from chaos. And the Gods were created to embody the Mayet and to be stewards of it.
And then, out of the matter of the Earth, the Gods created humankind. And to give the forms they had created life, the Gods placed into them a small piece of the Endless and Timeless. When their earthly shape dies, that spark leaves the bubbles and rejoins the timeless; but it is changed by its time in time. And because of this humans are both part of the mayet-bubble and outside it, and are therefore uniquely able to act against the mayet - they have free will and can do evil. The Gods, being created with the mayet, had no experience of this; they have the power to shape the mayet, but not to act contrary to it. And so very soon after the Creation, (either through accident or guile or carelessness, depending on the story) Man acquired from the Gods the power to shape the mayet, too; but because they have free will, they can alter it without regard for its flow. And this is called 'sorcery', and it is very dangerous both for the sorcerer and the world (sorcery's not always evil, when used with care, but it is dangerous.) And the sorcerers began to derange and unbalance the Mayet, and the Gods could not stop them, for it was the Gods' own powers, twisted, that they used. So the Gods chose humans who did keep mayet and gave them a portion of their power, so long as they used it in obedience to the will of the Gods and for mayet, to balance the sorcerers' work, and these were the first priest/mages.
But there were two bubbles. And under the other dome, on the flipside of Earth, is the other world, which is held in shape by a *different* mayet. There good is bad and right is wrong and gods can die and humans cannot, men bear babies and rivers flow uphill, unliving things have spirits, eating causes one to hunger and the sun rises to bring the darkness of night. And because it is a wrong mayet, no gods were created to keep it, but it must be in balance or its pressure will deform the upper world - so some gods went there to keep it, and were changed by the other mayet. And because mortals cannot die there, the parts of a man that are neither the earthly body, nor the timeless soul - the shadow, the memory of a man - dwell on in the underworld after earthly death. The wall between our world and its underside is strong, but thin, and humans and gods both can cross it - but with great care. The skill of using the other mayet and walking the other world is learned by shamans as a source of both knowlege and power, and all humans dwell there in dreams, but there is always a danger of becoming to much a part of its mayet and losing touch with ours - being trapped there - or of trapping things from the other world in ours.
Later things get progressively more complicated as the souls that have spent lots of time on Earth bring change to the Timeless and They start to act on Earth with their own initiative, and the border between the Mayet and the Timeless gets more complicated - and then there's this thing where a human is born who is inhabited by not just a bit of the Endless, but by *all* off it, and everything changes from the inside out - but at the time of this story, there have only been a few billion human lifetimes *ever*, and it's all still pretty simple.
Tomorrow: Draw maps, work out language phoneme charts for naming, make last plot outline. Oh, and make a Halloween costume.
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For what it's worth, that sentence right there filled me with glee and excitement.