God I want to know who thought summers were fun enough to be considered the so called free time of the year. Who wants to spend their free time suffering in 40 degree (celsius) weather? It really just saps your entire damned energy having to sweat out or just be exhausted from how hot everything is. Doesn’t help either that the shower decided to break today…
Still, wanting to strangle john summer aside. Manging to crank out 2000 or so words today was good, even if the heat makes me too lazy to do literally anything. I hope you all don’t have summers this bad where you live. Because I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.
Okay, I’m feeling much better now. No longer angry. I’ll bite the bullet, revert all the changes where I converted US spelling to British spelling, and then go through every word in my story and manually change it to British spelling again. Will be a good chance to review and revise the prose anyway.
As I don’t have a formal WIP thread, I figured I’d post here instead. Once in a blue moon, I get in my own head and sci-fi isn’t my normal wheelhouse, so I’m certainly working to adapt.
To those willing to have a few small spoilers (that are honestly very tiny and do not give away really any core plot beyond some introductions), I’d love to know in a poll what you think of the writing in the following images. None of this has been edited properly yet. Dialogue has been something I’ve been striving to improve upon, to strike a balance between details of note and the words given to each character, so I’m hoping that I’m doing a solid enough job:
I mean, who wants to work in that heat? Better if you can just do nothing.
I would argue it was more because people were needed on the fields, but maybe that’s just us. (Our schools used to have harvest vacations, for crying out loud.)
You’ve got it backwards. The idea of summer vacation happened because summer fucking sucked and nobody wanted to do anything during them. Why were students off during the summer? Because it was too fucking hot to sit inside of a schoolhouse prior to air conditioning and attendance would plummet as all the families that could leave for the summer did so.
It’s probably a little of both. It’s probably safe to say summer was the time of year students were most likely to be absent, whether it was because rural students were needed on the farm or urban dwellers who could afford to get out of the stifling city did so.
As for how summer came to be considered the “fun” season? Consider that there are places with relatively mild summers, but absolutely brutal winters. Also, consider where wealthy folks who could afford to get out of the city for the summer tended to go - the beach, the mountains, places that actually are quite pleasant in summer.
The thing about the “needed on the farm” idea is that most crops are planted in the spring and harvested in autumn and those are the times when labor is needed the most. Why would they make a special point of having kids available for labor in July?
If you were scheduling school around “when people are needed at the farm”, you’d have summer and winter semesters and spring and autumn breaks.
I believe that mostly depends on the location you live in and the crops in question. I know where I am, a good number of crops are planted and harvested in the summer. AKA. This time of year here. Whereas other places may harvest and plant more in spring or fall. It adds credence to the idea of it being farming related. But for places which don’t in fact have summer crops. It doesn’t quite answer the why. Unless there are in fact no places that don’t plant or harvest in the summer…
So, I’m in the middle of writing a personal thing for myself. Also kind of about a fictional version of me. But I decided I’d try and write it as a way of dealing with past trauma and stuff and accepting and getting over those things.
I have the whole thing planned out already but I’m having a bit of trouble with how I want to space it out?
For example, I plan to have the whole story go over about 7 weeks in the setting? So almost about 2 months.
And my problem arises because I can’t decide how to space out some chapters.
So for example.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday are always going to be their own chapters because I plan to have most of the important things like character growth, setup for the next big thing thats going to happen, etc. take place on those days.
And then Monday > Thursday (Because for story reasons they have to be back to the main place by Friday Night) I was going to either condense it a bit so like, Monday and Tuesday would be one chapter and then Wednesday and Thursday would be one which would fit it around 39? Chapters by the end. (Intro on a Thursday with the story starting that first Friday.)
But I also have two people floating suggestions at me like trying to suggest I should make those their own shorter chapters too while the other person is suggesting that I kinda fit the whole Monday > Thursday into one thing.
I’m honestly indecisive because they all work, I didn’t plan for the weekdays to be super long as chapters mostly because all the important stuff happens on the weekends and I wanted the focus to be on those even if the weekdays are still important hence why my brain initially went to condensing two days into one chapter unlike the weekends.
Some thoughts would be appreciated. I’m not much of a writer and this is hurting my brain to think about. lol
I read an article yesterday about the connection between King Arthur and Sarmatian heavy cavalry of all things. And it blew my mind. I mean, Britain is seriously far from Sarmatia. The last time a historical fact caught me this off guard was when I found out the Celts actually made it all the way to Anatolia.
Stuff like that makes it even more ridiculous when some fantasy IFs still cling to the tired old “ye English medieval fantasy” formula, where it feels like the entire world exists in a bubble and no one from outside the local tavern has ever set foot there. If you ever write a fantasy WIP, please remember that people moved, traded, and explored far beyond their borders.
You aren’t obliged to take my advice at all, your decision is personal, but my mind likes the idea of two chapters every week. And then a prologue and epilogue, so I guess 16 chapters total? Just feels easy, and like you can compartmentalize well for COG.
But honestly, I think Chapter structure is a pretty core part of your story in interactive fiction, and you should decide what works for you. It’s not up to others.
I think that this kind of setting is just so wide-spread it’s intuitively easier for many people to write.
At least until you start considering that even in Europe, different regions have different cultures and traits, so even European fantasy doesn’t have to be so homogenous.
You could take idk Brittany and the legend of the city of Ys and write a mermaid story maybe.
For my work, I took some inspiration from Northern Caucasus and also ancient Khorezm ¯_(ツ)_/¯ So many interesting places around the world.
But also some writers just want a setting that’s familiar to them and their readers.
There are 2 reason why I think people are drawn to that setting:
I think it’s just very intuitive for people to write about their own history. I know a lot more about British history than I do, say, Anatolian history. So when people decide they want to write a historical fantasy, their mind automatically goes to somewhere they already have a good idea about. That’s where you get anime about a fantasy version of historical Japan. They know more about Japanese history.
I also think the prevailing popularity of the Lord of the Rings, Narnia, King Arthur, etc. When someone wants to write a fantasy book, they’ll probably look to what they know. And most people who like fantasy have read at least one of the classics. And the classics are pretty British in origin.
The problem I think ultimately comes from the fact that most fantasy writers write based on fantasy genre conventions which were in turn derived primarily from mediums which were shaped by people or inspirations with extremely imperfect understandings of the past.
One of the reasons which (for example) A Song of Ice and Fire became such a “breath of fresh air” when it hit in the 90s, and then again as Game of Thrones in the 2010s was because GRRM based his setting on a better (but far from perfect) understanding of history, and not genre tropes - which meant he basically went to the same kind of source that Tolkien (who didn’t derive his work from modern tropes but the tropes of the literary traditions of the cultures which he studied and based his own world on) did.
As I seem to keep pointing out, history - even Medieval and Early Modern (because plate harness is early modern, despite what mass media and “common sense” would tell you) was weirder, gayer, more complex, and more diverse than most people could possibly imagine - and a good worldbuilder who’s willing to do their due diligence when creating worlds based on that time period and that place will take that into account.
If they don’t want a world which is strictly bounded by historicity, then they can basically do whatever they want. I’m on record as saying that “modern” high/heroic fantasy is basically just cyberpunk with wizards, and in that context, there is literally nothing stopping you from having a court mage in exile from a Mali-inspired empire who walks around on a spider-legged “wheelchair” made from ensorcelled clay.
Except Japanese media is fascinated with “western medieval fantasy” the same way a lot of westerners are fascinated with medieval and early modern Japan. Record of the Lodoss War was made by Japanese creators, and Ghost of Tsushima was made by Americans. They often get things wrong, but the way they get things wrong is often a reflection of the fetishisation and distortions present in the pop culture of those traditions’ home cultures.
Well, both can be true at the same time. Japan is interested in western fantasy, so they write that kind of story. But they also write fantasy about their own history. They do both, just like Americans write both medieval Europe fantasy and Chinese/Japanese inspired fantasy, like Avatar.
So I’m not seeing the problem here. It’s possible to write fantasy based on your culture while acknowledging that said cultural inspiration didn’t exist in a vacuum, and that none of these “cultural traditions” which we draw from were siloed.
A considerable chunk of the Arthurian Mythos is French, Goku is Chinese, and a huge chunk of the mythos of the American West comes from Germany and Italy.
