A fruitful day today. I seem to be recovering from whatever sinus malady has been afflicting me the last few days. The dizzy spells are becoming fewer and farther between, so that’s good. And Nocturne is coming along nicely. I got most of Chapter 2 done today. It’s still in the expository phase right now, but I’m closing in on the main plot hook.
Previous word count: 2,650
This session’s word count: 3,510
Total word count: 6,160
Daily average: 3,080
And so it begins.
Nocturne is a bit different from last year’s Otherworld #2 (now called “The City and the Hill”). It’s going to be a mixed 1st and 3rd person, with the 1st person stuff told as kind of a flashback sequence. It’s also shaping up to be a bit dark, probably darker than even I like. We’ll have to see where the story takes us, as I don’t have a lot of plans for it yet—another way this year is different.
Today, I wrote up the Prologue, which is a 3rd-person intro to the story proper, and the very short Chapter 1, told from the title character’s POV as if it was in his voice. With any luck, the meat of the story starts tomorrow.
This session’s word count: 2,650
Total word count: 2,650
So we’re getting close to another November, and that means it’s time to get to some serious writing business. Tomorrow, I’ll start, and I hope to reach the magic 50,000 mark once again. This time around, I’ll give a lot more story detail in my daily updates, along with the running word counts.
The novel I’m writing this year has the working title Nocturne, and it’s my first real attempt at book-length fantasy of the “traditional” style. It’ll have magic and mystery and all that stuff. And unlike my Linear Anthology series, it’ll be a “full-length” novel.
But what does that even mean? What’s the difference between a novel and a novella? And where do short stories fit in? Sure, there is significant overlap, and you can say it’s really a continuum; you can have short novels and long novellas. But for an objective metric, a first approximation, we can use the same measurement that every NaNoWriMo participant will be looking at come tomorrow: word count.
Taking the length of one of my works, I divide it into one of three categories: novel, novella, or short story. The numbers I use are pretty simple, and they’re loosely based on the NaNoWriMo “50,000 words” milestone.
A novel, for me, is a work that is at least 50,000 words. Preferably, I want it to be 60,000+, but that’s for a very specific reason: I consider my Otherworld series (I’ll start posting those to supporters in the coming months) to be made up of novellas, but some of them run as high as 59,000 words. This is where the stylistic argument comes in. Oh, and there’s no real upper limit, either. The longest work I’ve written weighs in at about 250K, and it’s still a novel. A ponderous tome indeed, but a novel all the same.
A novella is shorter, no more than 50-60K. It has to be a minimum of 15,000, though 20,000 is better. (The mathematically inclined reader will notice a pattern here.) By the 20K standard, I don’t actually have any novellas written yet, but I’ll remedy that soon enough.
Finally, I consider a short story to be anything under the minimum for a novella. Thus, it can range up to 20,000 words, though anything over 15K is pushing it. (If you prefer a category of “novelette”, then you can slot it in here as 5-15K or 6-20K, with short stories being even shorter than that.) My short stories, however, often have a lot more plot and worldbuilding than you’d expect from something with that name.
So, to sum up, it looks like this:
| Type | Length (5) | Length (6) |
|---|---|---|
| Short story | < 15,000 | < 20,000 |
| Novelette* | 5,000-15,000 | 6,000-20,000 |
| Novella | 15,000-50,000 | 20,000-60,000 |
| Novel | > 50,000 | > 60,000 |
Pick which progression you want to follow, and there you go. If you like the novelette category, use its minimum as the maximum for short stories. And don’t neglect the style differences between the different types of work. They’re what led me to make two different classifications in the first place. Novels have more subplots, for example, and I want a novella to be long enough that it has the depth to hook me, but not so long that I can’t read it in one sitting.
Now, it’s onward to November. Can I do this for the fifth straight year? Stay tuned!
For Ardari, most of what was previously said about Isian still applies. It’s a Eurasian culture with Eurasian animals and little contact with the New World, sub-Saharan Africa, or Australia. As such, it has a lot of native terms for the animals common to Europe and western Asia (not as much the East, though), but most of its words for more exotic animals are borrowed, like èlfang “elephant”.
Where Ardari differs is in the way it treats gender. As a language with three functional genders, the sex of an animal becomes grammatically important. This is especially so in the case of common barnyard animals, where there is a lot of suppletion rather than derivation. Chickens are kukya, unless they’re hens, in which case they become tyemi. Cows are mughi, a bull is an arda, and the generic “cattle” comes out as an inflected form of khawm. A male dog is rhasa, but a female is sëdi. (Note that the latter word doesn’t have the same pejorative connotations as its English equivalent.)
Some other domestic animals show a more derivation-like approach. Horses can be koza “stallion” or kozi “mare”, or you can refer to them by the generic puld “horse”. Ducks are gèr, gèra, or gèri (neuter, masculine, and feminine, respectively). Similarly, goats are ägya or ägi; the slight difference in spelling is a quirk of Ardari orthography.
Finally, a few animals native to the region where Ardari is spoken are grammatically of a single gender. Cats (avbi) are always feminine, as are birds (pèdi) and spiders (visti). Rabbits (mèpa) and snakes (synga), on the other hand, are masculine by default, as are animals (blèda) in general. (Most others are neuter, but all of them can be “converted” by changing the inflection patterns.)
Beyond the mere grammatical minutiae, there’s not much to say about Ardari that wasn’t already said about Isian. They have about the same things in their menagerie. Ardari does, however, have far more words for specific types of animals, particularly those the speakers know well. Maybe we’ll see some of those later in the series.
A word of note here: most of these nouns follow the typical pattern for Ardari. Those ending in -a inflect as masculine, while nouns in -i are feminine, and consonant-stems are neuter. Where words are listed as gèr(a/i), that indicates a gendered pair or triplet, where the only differences are the final vowel and the inflection pattern. Words noted as “grammatically feminine” or “grammatically masculine” are fixed to those genders.
We’ve previously seen that Isian is a language of the Old World. That means it’ll have a generally Eurasian stock of native animal terms. Isian speakers have many of the familiar domesticated animals, such as the dog (hu) and cat (her). Beasts of burden include the horse (tawl, only the most general term), among others, while tame meat usually comes from the tu “cow” (plural form tus for bulls, tur for cows) or the jeg “pig”. The speakers also enjoy many types of fish (pach), and sheep (lini, with the same gendered plurals as tu) are raised for both wool and meat.
Birds (firini) are also well-represented in the lexicon. Two of the more important ones are the choch “chicken” (a hen is a chay, plural chayr) and the duck. The latter has two words: masculine hanka and feminine hadi (plural hadir), with the feminine form being the default.
Isian’s speakers don’t like insects (eketi) any more than we do, but they’ve given names to some of the more common ones. Flies, mikhi, are everywhere in their land, as are iti “ants”. But not all insects are creepy-crawlies. There’s also the fifal “butterfly”, an object of beauty, and the source of delicious honey, the disi “bee”.
Out in the molad “wild” lands, there are even more animals. Plenty of Isian men hunt for onte “deer”. Some prefer smaller game, however, like the habas “rabbit” or hule “fox” (plural hules). Only the bravest or most foolhardy would go after the gor “bear”, though.
Finally, the speakers of Isian know that a certain segment of fauna has something in common with humans. Dogs, cats, cows, and goats (cawat or cawar) all produce milk for their young; the latter two also make it for human consumption. These are the melembini “mammals”, a compound literally meaning “milk-animal”.
The fauna to plants’ flora, animals are those living beings that move. That’s not exactly a scientific definition, but it suffices for linguistic purposes. Plants just sit there, except when their leaves are falling or their seeds are blowing through the air. Animals, by contrast, are mobile. They walk or fly or slither or swim. They hunt, and they eat. From the perspective of language, they’re more like us.
Just as languages will have words describing plants, they will have a large portion of their vocabulary devoted to talking about animals. Think about how many names of animals you know. More than likely, you can probably recall a hundred or more. (Ubuntu managed to pick one for every letter of the alphabet, although they had to resort to a few obscure ones, like “eft” and “quetzal”.) Add to that the number of terms for animals’ body parts, their young, their meat, and you’ve got a laundry list of language.
The words a given tongue will have for animals can be roughly divided based on a familiar rule: those animals that are known to a language’s culture for a long time are more likely to have native names. Hence, English has dogs and cats natively, but it has to borrow raccoons and koi. “Foreign” animals get foreign or descriptive names, octopus being an example of the latter. And the more obscure ones often have compound names…when they didn’t have to settle for scientific ones. (Interestingly, this is one way linguistic historians can track the movement of a speech group. If they borrowed a name for a “local” animal, then they might not have always been in a place to get to know it.)
Those animals that have been domesticated will have the biggest chunk of vocabulary dedicated to them. Not only are there the general terms for an instance of the kind (dog, horse, etc.), but these are more likely to have gender differences even if the language doesn’t normally distinguish gender. In English, for example, we have pairs like horse/mare or bull/cow, where one of the gender-specific words is also the generic, and we also see three-way distinctions such as the generic chicken, male rooster (or cock), and female hen.
Domestic animals can also earn special words for their young. Sometimes, these are derived from the “adult” word: chick, kitten. Others are unrelated: puppy, pony. Note that these are not the same as diminutives. Those refer to smaller animals, not necessarily younger ones.
Languages may also give this type of animal a whole associated vocabulary. Breeding is a popular topic, as seen from words like thoroughbred or mutt. Purpose, for working animals, is often denoted by compounding—lapdog, workhorse—but separate terms can arise, e.g., an ox is merely a specialized kind of cattle.
These animals are also more likely to provide us with a number of metaphorical and analogous words or phrases. We can speak of someone being hounded after, then being cowed into submission. A coward is a chicken, while someone feigning death is playing possum. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as the saying goes—a rare bit of gender equality. The list goes on.
Those common yet untamed animals will be referred to by a different sort of terminology, but most of it will remain “native”, rather than borrowed. It’s still possible to have gender differences, but it’s more likely that the non-default sex will have a derived name: lion, lioness. Young may have dedicated words, but they probably won’t be specific to a single kind of animal. Bears and tigers both have cubs.
The rest of the vocabulary will be affected to the same, lesser, degree by wild animals. Some of the important ones get immortalized in metaphor (snake in the grass) or even slang (bear, as referring to a specific type of gay man). But they won’t be all that common.
Even rarer are those animals which don’t really exist in the “natural” sphere of a language’s influence. For English, this includes anything out of the Americas, Africa, or Australia, along with quite a bit of Asia. These animals are much more likely to be called by borrowed names. Indigenous peoples gave us our words for a great many animals. As an American, I can point to raccoons, opossums, and moose, among others. An Australian would instead hold up the kangaroo, dingo, and wallaby, while South Americans and Africans can provide their own examples.
Another option (and this is, in fact, where many of the indigenous names come from) is onomatopoeia. Animals can earn names that resemble the sounds they make. It’d be like us calling a cow moo. Although that sounds strange, plenty of languages do just that.
Finally, a more scientifically advanced culture may try to give a name to everything. Our scientific names (or binomial names) serve to identify every living thing on Earth, including animals, plants, bacteria, and more. They are rigorously rational and mechanical, however, and every one of them is invented. (Not only that, but they’re then shoehorned into an entirely different language, Latin.) For a future language, possibly one needing to name alien species, this is an attractive option.
Not every animal named in a language actually exists. Some come from mythology and imagination. Greek myth, thanks to its influence on classical education throughout the West, has given us quite a few “creature” names: phoenix, basilisk, Pegasus, centaur. Dragons are common to many parts of the world, as are giants, which may be important enough to earn their own word. Elves, fairies, and anything else you can think of will fit in this section, as well.
Creatures of myth and legend can be named in any way. Many are derived terms (basilisk coming from the Ancient Greek word for “king”, wyvern from a dialectal form cognate to “viper”, werewolf combining “wolf” with an old term for “man”), but some are original. Sometimes, an entire “race” of creatures can be named after their mythological founder, as is the case with Pegasus.
Animals are very important to our lives. One of the ways we show that is by including them in such a large part of our language. Even the most generic terms have use, as we can speak of animal magnetism or the reptilian part of a brain. More specifically, an animal that we see every day, that we interact with regularly, will insinuate itself into our speech. We’ll compare things to it, judge others by it. And when we meet a new creature, we’ll give it a new name. Sometimes, we’ll relate it to what we already know. Other times, we’ll simply call it as the locals do. And that’s fine, too.
After the usual Isian and Ardari posts, we’ll get back to more human concerns by looking at ways to work. Along the way, we’ll (finally!) pick up some more verbs, something we’ve been sorely lacking. I hope you’re having fun, because even though this is the 20th entry in the series, we’re not even close to done.
I’ve told a lot about the writing I do. Now it’s time to show it. “Miracles” is a little story I wrote in March 2015, and I’m posting it here as a free example of my work. Although it’s a little over 11,000 words long, I still consider it a short story.
Set in the 1730s, it’s a brief tale of a young brother and sister, Thomas and Mira, and their flight from England to the American Colonies. Crossing the Atlantic is treacherous, especially for a pair of twelve-year-old orphans, but they have to go. They can’t stay home, but can they outrun the dark secret they share?
The medieval era gets a lot of screen time, and for good reason. Medieval Europe has a kind of romantic appeal, with its knights and chivalry and castles, its lack of guns and bombs and cars and planes. It’s our collective nostalgic getaway. Fantasy, of course, revels in the Middle Ages; the “default” fantasy setting is England circa 1200, at the height of the era. But any kind of fiction can take us to medieval times. We have our Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, yes, but also our Vikings and The Last Kingdom, our Braveheart and Excalibur.
But what about earlier times? What about the days before the castles and cathedrals were built, before knights wrote their code of chivalry? What about the ancient era?
First, let’s define what we mean by “ancient”. We can consider the Middle Ages to end in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople; the refugees fleeing into Europe from that city sparked the Renaissance. The beginning of the era, however, is harder to characterize. That’s mostly because of the Dark Ages, those centuries where nothing much happened. (Except when it did.) Records are fairly scanty in the period before Charlemagne—before about 800—but I think we can all agree that the Roman Empire really was ancient. Thus, the year of its fall in the west, 476 AD, marks a good boundary between the ancient and the medieval.
So we’ll say ancient times ended in 476. When did they begin? That’s a difficult question that gets to the heart of anthropology. Suffice to say, the ancient era began with human civilization. Even if you’d prefer to subdivide (Bronze Age, Classical Era, etc.), its all ancient.
That leaves us with a grand sweep of history, possibly as much as ten thousand years! In our modern, fast-paced world, that seems like an eternity. Indeed, it is a long time, no matter how you look at it, and things changed remarkably from the beginning of the era to the end. Fifth-century Rome was nothing like Homer’s Athens, and neither really resembled Sargon’s Babylon from the eighth century BC, or Middle Kingdom Thebes a millennium before that, or the Stone Age settlement of Çatalhöyük. (Jericho has been occupied almost continuously since the beginning of the ancient era, and you can bet it went through a number of different looks through the ages.)
Writing an ancient-times work requires you to know the period. For the big names—Rome, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia—that’s relatively easy. These cultures all left a large body of written knowledge, in addition to easily excavated structures. We know a lot about how they lived, so a writer has more than enough to work with. Lesser-known peoples, such as the Etruscans, Harappans, or Picts, are much harder. Quite a few are only attested in a few sites, and those may be impossible to fully grasp. (On the other hand, that means no one can complain that you screwed up your history!)
Whichever part of Antiquity you choose as your setting, you’ll have to get to know the world. The hardest part is seeing what little you have to work with. Technology, for instance, is such an important part of our times that it’s hard enough to imagine the medieval world, with its lack of…well, everything we take for granted. And ancient times were even worse in that regard. At the earliest, we’re talking about days when the wheel was the height of invention. The reason the Iron Age is called the Iron Age is because it’s defined by the working of iron. For ancient smiths, that was awfully hard as it was; steel was literally impossible.
But the ancients (especially the Romans) made great advances in their own right. Rome, of course, invented concrete, while the Egyptians built the pyramids and the Greeks had all their grand wonders. China built a Great Wall that, like the Maginot Line, never really lived up to its promise. These cultures of old also developed early sciences (the Greeks were pretty good at geometry, as you probably know) and quite a few other things. Our modern legal system also owes a lot to the Roman one, filtered through the Middle Ages though it was.
One part of life rises above everything else in the ancient world: religion. Every ancient culture placed a heavy focus on matters of religion. In fact, it’s often hard to untangle religion from other fields, because it permeated life. Science, government, art, and literature were all tools used for religion’s purposes. And it’s not hard to see why. When the world is so much bigger than you, than anything you know, and when it’s so wild and untamed compared to ours, where can you find any form of safety? Religion was so important that most archaeological sites are practically assumed to be religious in nature until proven otherwise.
Besides the sacred, many other forces worked to shape the ancient world. Remember that we’re dealing with a time before modern industry, but also before the developments of the Middle Ages. People had to look to their basic needs first: food, water, shelter. Survival. Only once they were certain they could survive could they work to thrive. Most people didn’t make it that far, however. Subsistence farming was a way of life. So was hunting and gathering, a practice preserved in only a very few spots today. Only a select few rose above that. True, there were more “middle-class” people in the great cities, particularly towards the end of the era, but urban life was for the 1%.
Travel was hard. Communities were small. People could go their whole lives—much shorter than our own, on average—without leaving their homeland. But that was probably for the best, as danger lurked everywhere. Disease, predators (on two legs or four), war, famine—all these can be subsumed under the one word that best describes the foreign: uncertainty.
Rome was the big exception to this. Romans made a habit of being worldly, urbane, sophisticated. Their empire, as horrible as we’d consider it today, was the apex of ancient civilization. It removed the uncertainties of life in the era, replacing them with the rule of law, with connections and bureaucracy and, well, government. Earlier cultures built roads to connect towns, but Rome took that to an extreme. Aqueducts existed long before the Appian was built, but we associate these creations with the Romans because they perfected the art through repeated practice.
A story set in Imperial (or even Republican) Rome will still have most of the same aspects as something from earlier Antiquity, but it can also show a different way of life, one which has much more in common with our own. That’s probably why it has some of the best representation in fiction, including:
By contrast, other ancient cultures show up less often in modern media. The Greeks get endless retellings of Alexander, the Iliad, and the wars against the Persians (e.g., 300). Ancient Egypt gets fanciful flicks like Exodus: Gods and Kings and The Scorpion King. Mesopotamia is almost totally limited to Biblical stories such as Noah. (In books, things are a little better, if only because you don’t have to spend money on costumes and set design.)
It’s entirely possible to write a story about the ancient world. It’ll take research and thought, as well as the capability to imagine a time so alien to anything we know. It’s been done before, though, and there are good stories to tell. Not just the Caesars and the Constantines, or Jesus or the Jews. Antiquity comprises an entire world far larger than our own, a world in the process of being formed.
Ardari mostly inhabits the same region of space and time as Isian, as we have previously stated. It’s a little more…worldly, however. Yes, it’ll take in loans from outside languages, but not always, and it’ll often change them around to fit its own style. It has essentially the same “stock” of native botanical terms as Isian, though with a few quirks.
Remember that Ardari has a gender distinction in nouns. It’s not entirely arbitrary, although it may seem that way when you look at the vocabulary list. But there is actually something of a pattern. “Flower” words tend to be feminine (byali “berry”, afli “flower”), while “stem” words (pondo “stem”, kolbo “root”) are often masculine.
Ardari doesn’t like compounds very much, but nature is an exception, as you can see from nòrpèpi “orange” below. The other words are pretty standard, with the “foreign” plants often showing up in loanword form: bönan, pòtato, etc. Note that the masculine/feminine distinction above doesn’t carry through the whole language, but there is a tendency for fruits and flowers to be feminine, while “ground” crops are more often masculine.
Again, Ardari has more words for plants than I’ve shown here, but I don’t want to be here all month. We’ve got better things to do. The next part of the series moves on to animals, from the tiniest insects to the biggest behemoths nature can throw at us.
We’ve already established that Isian is a language of our world. We’ve also set it somewhere in the Old World, in a place relatively untouched by the passage of time. By definition, that means it won’t have much contact with the Americas, so the most common plant terms will be those from Eurasia, with a few popular items coming from Africa. On the other hand, Isian has native words for all the different parts of the plant, as well as what to do with them. Again, this comes from our worldbuilding: Isian is spoken in an agrarian society, so it’s only natural that its speakers would name such an integral part of their world.
These are parts of plants, mainly the important (i.e., edible) parts, as well as a few terms for the broad types of plants. Note that all of these are native Isian words, and almost all are also “fundamental” words, not derived from anything.
This set of words names specific types of plants. These fall into three main categories. First, there are the native terms, like pur “apple”, which are wholly Isian in nature. Next are the full-on loanwords, taken from the “common” names used in many parts of Europe; these are usually the New World plants where Isian has no history of association. Finally, there are a few compounds, like cosom, “pepper”, formed from ocom “black” and som “seed”.
These are far from the only words in the Isian language regarding plants, but they’re a good start, covering a lot of bases while also illustrating how we can combine worldbuilding and conlanging to make something better. Next week, we’ll see things from the Ardari side of the fence. Spoiler alert: it’s not exactly the same.