Moving into Chapter 3 now, which is our first introduction to the #2 POV for this story. It also features a place well-known to readers of Chronicles of the Otherworld, specifically Written in Black and White and Situational Awareness. Of course, four millennia of change renders it essentially unrecognizable, but that’s how it goes when you’re writing something like this.
Today’s word count: 2,006
Total word count: 14,250
Daily average: 1,781
Projected total: 53,437
That’s more like it. Finished Chapter 2, finally. Tomorrow, I’ll introduce the secondary POV character, and then I can start looking for a way to tie these two threads together. Figuring out how they connect to the “mainline” story of Otherworld is, of course, a task for much, much later.
Today’s word count: 2,202
Total word count: 12,244
Daily average: 1,749
Projected total: 52,474
I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s something big going on today. So I didn’t write that much. Really, all I did today was catch up on what I missed yesterday. Still in Chapter 2, still working on it.
Today’s word count: 1,149
Total word count: 10,042
Daily average: 1,673
Projected total: 50,210
Not much today, I’m afraid. This is what happens when you’re out all day running errands. Well, and sleeping all morning, even though you went to bed at 11 PM last night. Can’t be helped, not without risking my health, which I’m avoiding this year.
Today’s word count: 815
Total word count: 8,893
Daily average: 1,778
Projected total: 53,358
Not feeling all that great today, but that’s not going to stop me from writing at least something. And I did get a fairly decent day out of it, although it took me longer than expected. So I’m into Chapter 2, and this part’s all about connecting the dots. One nice thing about writing this particular story is that I can throw in references to Otherworld whenever I feel like it. (Okay, I’ve done that in The Beast Within, too, but that’s different.)
Anyway, I’m done for now. I hope I’ll feel better tomorrow. And that I’ll get that job I applied for, but one miracle at a time, right?
Today’s word count: 1,993
Total word count: 8,078
Daily average: 2,019
Projected total: 60,585
Three days, one chapter. A far cry from the frantic pace of last year, I know. But that’s okay. I’m happy, I’m healthy, and I’m still doing a good job.
Seasons Change takes place 4400 years before Out of the Past, just so you know. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some similarities. In my head, I’m already drawing analogies between these characters and the familiar ones from the Otherworld series. Once I release this story, you’ll probably pick those up in about 5 minutes, tops.
Today’s word count: 2,173
Total word count: 6,085
Daily average: 2,028
Projected total: 60,850
So weird to be pacing myself while writing a novel, but here we are. I’m taking this slow, or at least slower than usual. So I’m still in Chapter 1, but a bit further through it. And now I’ve got time to do other things. Like, say, playing RimWorld.
Today’s word count: 1,914
Total word count: 3,852
Daily average: 1,926
Projected total: 57,780
It’s going to be weird not doing the crazy late-night scheduling this year. And it’s going to be weird juggling this and a potential job, but I’ll make it through.
So, let’s get this party started. Seasons Change. Chapter 1. So far, there’s not much to say. It’s an introduction to the main character, who just happens to be one of the few named in the main Otherworld series, despite over 4000 years of time difference. We’ll see where it goes.
Today’s word count: 1,937
Projected word count: 58,110
Remember, I’m taking it a little easier this year. The Soulstone Sorcerer brought me perilously close to a breakdown, and I’d rather not repeat that. So expect a lot more days with 2000 words rather than 5000 this time around. Maybe I’ll splurge a little on the weekends, but who knows? I sure don’t.
It’s that time of the year again. Kids are dressing up, the leaves are turning, the weather’s getting colder—it must be Halloween. And you know what that means. November is almost here, so it’s time to write a new novel!
This year’s entry is tentatively titled Seasons Change (how appropriate). I have done some pre-planning through the month of October. In the spirit of the competition, however, I haven’t started writing just yet. That can wait till tomorrow.
As for the story, well, I don’t know exactly where it’s going to go at the moment, but I can tell you where it falls in the universe of my writing. Seasons Change is the first in what I’m calling the “Othersides”. These are set in the Otherworld setting (Chronicles of the Otherworld, etc.), but have no direct connection to that ongoing story. Thus, I don’t need to do as much worldbuilding as for an original setting, but I can plausibly claim I haven’t done any work on the story yet.
Now, I’m targeting about 55-60K words for this novel. Given what I did with The Soulstone Sorcerer last year, you might be thinking, “Well, he’ll be done with that in about two weeks.”
Probably not. See, this November brings with it an added degree of difficulty. I’m looking for a “real” job at the moment. If I get one, expect my available writing time—and my daily average—to plummet. Add in the things I have to do around the house, the mental stress of the midterms, and an increasingly special woman who doesn’t like me writing, and…this one’s a lot harder.
Still, I think I can pull it off. And if I do, it’ll mark 7 years in a row that I’ve written either 50000 words or a complete novel in the month of November. For reference, here are the others:
This year, Novel Month is a real challenge, but I’m not giving up. I’ll be here, and I’ll also be posting my daily progress on the fediverse. If you use Mastodon, Pleroma, or any compatible platform, follow me: @mikey@toot.love.
I talked about this a while back, but now it’s for real. Today, I introduce to you a new conlang: 🖼🗣. Or, to put the name in something pronounceable, Pictalk. Yes, the glyphs making up the name are emoji. Yes, so are all the characters used in the entire language.
Strictly speaking, Pictalk isn’t a full-fledged conlang. It’s written-only, first of all. There is no true spoken form. Instead, it should be considered something closer to a conscript, an artificial writing system, modeled after hieroglyphic and ideographic scripts. But that’s enough to encode ideas, thoughts, sayings, and anything that might need to be written in this modern, digital age.
The hardest part about making Pictalk is the very restricted set of available glyphs. True, there are over 1200 emoji characters available, and they cover a wide variety of concepts, from animals to emotions to transportation and more. But I don’t have control over which symbols the Unicode Consortium adds to the list. While that list will grow (they add more each year, it seems), there’s little rhyme or reason to which new characters come in.
But that’s okay. We can do this. English only needs 26 letters, right?
Even with the wide array we have, it’s safe to discard quite a few right off the bat. First, I’ll drop the “cat face” group, such as 😸, because they really only repeat the normal human smileys. Next, toss out the handful of CJK ideographs in circles or squares, like 🈹—I’m an English speaker, and even Unicode gives up on giving them reasonable names. The skin tone modifiers (🏻 and friends) don’t make sense in the context of language; Pictalk thus won’t give them meanings, but will allow them to modify other symbols as a kind of synonym.
Likewise (and here’s where we start getting into the grammar bits), gendered forms like 👩🏫 or 👨⚕️ are synonymous with their “base” forms. With many languages, particularly in the West, where there is no neuter form, masculine is considered the default. Pictalk, however, is gender-neutral. That’s not out of some misguided idea of social justice or diversity, but simple expedience. Unicode has neuter forms for most of what we might call agentive glyphs. Where it doesn’t, we can use either, and that’s fine.
Last, flags. These take up a good chunk of the emoji list (about 15%, all told), and they’re mostly country flags. Well, for Pictalk, those flags represent their countries, and that’s that. Unlike most other characters, they don’t really participate in the construction processes we’ll see later on.
Before we get to that, let’s go over the rest of Unicode. Obviously, since the whole point of Pictalk is to create a hieroglyphic script using the emoji characters, they’re the focus. But we’ve got a few other options available. One I won’t use is Latin letters. Or, for that matter, any other alphabetic script. In earlier versions of the language, I did utilize them for derivation and some small grammatical particles, but I’ve since removed the need for them. Only proper names use alphabetic characters; these are written as they would be in either the speaker’s or the audience’s preferred language.
Numbers, on the other hand, are perfectly usable. They’re already a little bit ideographic, after all, so it wouldn’t destroy the purity of Pictalk to include them. So 0-9 work exactly as they would in English: as the numerals zero through nine. And you can build on that as you do in English. (Pictalk is base-10, by the way.)
Punctuation works the same, as it’s very difficult to design a conlang that doesn’t need it. So sentences can end with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Quote marks work for, well, quotes. Commas aren’t as necessary, but you can still use them to mark off clauses. Colons, besides having their normal English function, are used as attention-getters, in a sense, following the intended recipient of a statement or question. And we’ll see the other “special” characters as they come up.
Quite a few emoji work as words by themselves. Think of 🐕, 😄, or ✈, for instance. In Pictalk, that’s the most basic sort of word, and most symbols can function alone. Some are considered nouns, others adjectives or verbs, but there’s always a way to convert them.
Other symbols are “bound”, in that they can only occur fixed to others. An example here would be the (optional) plural marker ➿. By itself, it has no meaning. Suffixed to a root, whether a single symbol or a string of them, it gains meaning: 🐕➿ “dogs”.
More complex are the compound symbols that make up the bulk of the lexicon. In general, nominal compounds are head-final, as in 🐕🏠 “doghouse”, while verbal compounds are often head-initial, as with 📖🏫 “study”, from 📖 “read”. I’ve tried to refrain from being cute with meanings, striving instead for transparency, but some compounds remain idiosyncratic in meaning.
Last, a form of word-building that English doesn’t often employ comes into its own in Pictalk. Reduplication is productive for many basic words. For nouns, it can create a kind of collective sense: 🏠🏠 “neighborhood”. Verbs instead use reduplication as an intensifier: 💭💭 “to contemplate” (or possibly “to overthink”).
All in all, I think this just might work. We can make words using only emoji characters. Next up, we’ll see how far we can go in making a language.