Congrats! 36,000 Is Not Only A Lot More Words Than Many Might Give It Credit For, But Also (and Especially

Foreshadowing is so fun! Even though I'm still on draft one of my novel, I may list which of these elements I've incorporated so far below.

Lozerief knows stuff she shouldn't. How did she know Izi's dad? If she knew his dad, did she know his mom? (Spoilers, yes, she did, duh.)

Colors. Everywhere. Lozerief wears black, foreshadowing her role as Hero of Earth. Izi wears white, foreshadowing his role as Hero of Cognition and her antithesis. Hota wears teal for their role as Hero of Mind.

I (mostly) know how this will end.

Not a Checkhov's gun but I repeatedly bring up Izi's old home for more reasons than just trauma.

I keep track of what I put in languages that I create so that only I (and the characters who speak those languages) know what they're saying. (I foreshadow the rise of the White Army this way.)

Names with meanings is a big one for Lozerief...

I realize only now that Lozerief is the character who hides the most, and it's amazing she doesn't spoil it all right away. Maybe she's bound by some old agreement...?

subtle ways to include foreshadowing

one character knowing something offhandedly that they shouldn't, isn't addressed until later

the crow rhyme

colours!! esp if like, blue is evil in your world and the mc's best friend is always noted to wear blue...betrayal?

write with the ending in mind

use patterns from tragic past events to warn of the future

keep the characters distracted! run it in the background until the grand reveal

WEATHER.

do some research into Chekhov's gun

mention something that the mc dismisses over and over

KEEP TRACK OF WHAT YOU PUT. don't leave things hanging.

unreliable characters giving information that turn out to be true

flowers and names with meanings

anything with meanings actually

metaphors. if one character describes another as "a real demon" and the other turns out to be the bad guy, you're kind of like...ohhh yeahhh

anyways add anything else in the tags

There's something about Wen Ning kneeling to apologize for everything that went wrong, and Wei Wuxian kneeling down with him as if to say nothing is your fault that isn't also my fault. Either we'll stand together or we'll kneel together.

They are the secret third thing.

Finally got my main characters in the same spot, but one's unconscious and the other one doesn't want a potentially dead body on her ship.

Like come on I'm trying to write a story here I don't have time for you to become sentient, just bring him on board and slowly fall in love already

Day 25 (34 in base 7) of re-writing my novel

Today I explored one of two very important concepts in my novel: what does magic look like without a body to bind to it? Read ahead to learn more, but there are technically spoilers here.

"No," I decided. "It's-" A foul stench slashed at my nose, popping my eyes open. "What the hell?" I stood and plugged my nose, sticking out my hand. "I don't smell it." Hota stood beside me, hands in their pockets while they looked around. From the forest came a rotting buck the size of a semi truck. I could see its skull from beneath the skin that had fallen away, and only one eye remained on it. "I don't see that." Hota gulped and stood behind me. The buck wasn't real, I realized. The buck was made of magic. This was the consequence of failing to restore magical balance quickly enough. This putrid thing, made from unguided magic, wandering aimlessly in a world where it couldn't interact. Had I failed? Would Meiste soon perish?

Magic without a body is aimless. It is undead. It has no will nor way, rhyme nor reason, nothing like that. In fact, the perception of that magic is what caused it to take a form in the first place. It is only putrid-smelling because Izi perceived it that way, and it only looks like a rotting deer because that's what Izi saw.

Find the Word

A tag from @theothersideofthewoods.

The goal is to find these words in my WIP: charm, bubble, poison, kiss

Your words are: gloom, shimmer, muck, home

Charm

Tonight, the chef had left a couple sliced apples with grilled salmon next to it. Irotijv, I thought to myself. The national dish of Zeneste. Definitely a good-luck charm for tomorrow. The apple was sweet and juicy, and the fish was seasoned and seared perfectly. I fell into my bed soon after having supper.

Bubble

I jumped back, ducking beneath the stream of flames when she turned around. Hota crossed their arms and closed their eyes. “I’m casting a blanket of tranquility,” they yelled, spreading their arms. A blue bubble enveloped the whole train car, dimming the flame in her mouth, but not the orange in her eyes.

Scar

[Taguchif] was sitting by a large window in another empty train car, staring out at the coast while the moon shone over it, reflecting over the water. Her gauntlets laid beside her, exposing her scarred hands. She did nothing when I sat beside her.

Poison

(Is it bad that this word literally doesn't show up in Meiste in the first ~50,000 words???)

Paging: @foxgloves-garden and @reedandstorm, along with open tag.

Day 16 (22 in base 7) of rewriting my conlang

While not lagging behind in terms of written content, I am definitely lagging behind in creating Modern Odapir, which is rather important for the story!

Now, there exists one word in Modern Odapir. One word. Tavishy, although this is an anglicism of the actual word. It came from Middle Odapir tabishu:, which meant 'safety, tranquility,' but also meant 'hide, conceal' when used as a verb. I haven't decided how it will be semantically changed yet.

Modern Odapir's vowels will be very cursed btw. Middle Odapir's vowels are already like... super cursed (see last post.) I'm thinking palatal sounds (j, sh, c) turn u > y, and then "disappear." (Like, j > lost, sh > h, and c > ts > s.)

Yeah and I'm gonna try to get rid of the affricates in the modern language. It creates some fun allophonic variation for the stops (e.g. p > f / [+vowel] _ [+vowel], elsewhere p, etc...) I may also have f, s > h / [+vowel] _ [+vowel].

That's all for now, amɜdáhō! (That's middle Odapir for both goodbye and hello!)

Hey! I'm David Peterson, and a few years ago, I wrote a book called Create Your Own Secret Language. It's a book that introduces middle grade readers to codes, ciphers, and elementary language creation. The age range is like 10-14, but skews a little bit older, as the work gets pretty complicated pretty quick. I think 12-13 is the best age range.

Anyway, I decided to look at the Amazon page for it a bit ago, and it's rated fairly well (4.5 at the moment), but there are some 1 star reviews, and I'm always curious about those. Usually they're way off, or thought the book was going to be something different (e.g. "This book doesn't teach you a thing about computer coding!"), but every so often there's some truth in there. (Oh, one not 1 star but lower rated review said they gave it to their 2nd grader, but they found it too complicated. I appreciate a review like that, because I am not at all surprised—I think it is too complicated for a 2nd grader—and I think a review like that is much more effective than a simple 10+ age range on the book.) The first 1 star rating I came to, though, was this:

Now calling a completely mild description of a teenage girl who has a crush on another girl controversial is something I take exception to, but I don't want to pile on this person. Instead I wanted to share how this section came to be in the book.

The book is essentially divided into four parts. The first three parts deal with different ciphers or codes that become more complicated, while the last part describes elementary language creation. The first three sections are each built around a message that the reader can decode, but with language creation, the possibilities are too numerous and too complicated, so there isn't an example to decode, or anything. It would've been too difficult.

For what the messages to decode are about, though, I could do, potentially, anything, so at first I thought to tie them into a world of anthropomorphic animals (an ongoing series of battles between cats and mice), with messages that are being intercepted and decoded. My editor rejected that. Then I redid it so that each section had an individual story that had to do with some famous work of literature. My editor rejected that as well. He explained that it needed to be something that was relevant to kids of the target age range. I was kind of at a loss, for a bit, but then I thought of a story of kids sending secret messages about their uncle who eats too many onions. I shared that, my editor loved it, and I was like, all right. I can do this.

The tough part for me in coming up with mini-stories to plan these coded messages around was coming up with a reason for them to be secret. That's the whole point of a code/cipher: A message you want to be sure no one else but the intended recipient can read in case the message is intercepted. With the first one, two kids are poking gentle fun at a family member, so they want to be sure no one else can read what they're writing. For the last one, a boy is confessing to a diary, because he feels bad that he allowed his cat to escape, but no one knows he did it (he does find the cat again). For the other, I was trying to think of plausible message-sending scenarios for a preteen/teen, and I thought of how we used to write notes in, honestly, 4th and 5th grade, but I aged it up a bit, and decided to have a story about a girl writing a note to her friend because she has a crush on another girl, and wants her friend's opinion/help.

Here's where the point of sharing this comes in. As I had originally written it, the girl's note to her friend was not just telling her friend about her crush, it was also a coming out note, and she was concerned what her parents would react poorly.

Anyway, I sent that off with the rest of my draft, and I got a bunch of comments back on the whole draft (as expected), but my editor also commented on that story, in particular. Specifically, he noted that not every LGBTQ+ story has to be a coming out story, the part about potential friction between her and her parents because of it was a little heavy for the book, and, in general, not every coming out story has to be traumatic.

That was all he said, but I immediately recognized the, in hindsight, obvious truth of all three points, and I was completely embarrassed. I changed it immediately, so that the story beats are that it's a crush, she's not sure if it'll be reciprocated, and she's also very busy with school and band and feels like this will be adding even more busy-ness to her daily life as a student/teen. Then I apologized for making such a blunder. My editor was very good about it—after all, that's what drafts and editors are for—and that was a relief, but I'm still embarrassed that I didn't think of it first.

But, of course, this is not my lived experience, not being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. This is the very reason why you have sensitivity readers—to provide a vantage point you're blind to. In this case, I was very fortunate to have an editor who was thinking ahead, and I'm very grateful that he was there to catch it. That editor, by the way, is Justin Krasner.

One reason I wanted to share this, though, is that while it always is a bit of a difficult thing to speak up, because there might be a negative reaction, sometimes there is no pushback at all. Indeed, sometimes the one being called out is grateful, because we all have blindspots due to our own lived experiences. You can't live every life. For that reason, your own experience will end up being valuable to someone at some point in time for no other reason than that you lived it and they didn't. And, by the by, this is also true for the present, because the lives we've lived cause us to see what's going on right before our eyes in different lights.

Anyway, this is a story that wouldn't have come out otherwise, so I wanted to be sure to let everyone know that Justin Krasner ensured that my book was a better book. An editor's job is often silent and thankless, so on Thanksgiving, I wanted to say thank you, Justin. <3

one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet