otherworld – Page 5 – Prose Poetry Code

Otherworld talk 2

Last month, I started talking about the Otherworld, one of my most developed and beloved story settings. Well, the second part of the series is out now on my Patreon, so I thought it’d be a good idea to write down a few more thoughts about it.

The world I know

As I said then, the Otherworld is an Earthlike planet. It’s compatible enough in climate, etc., that it could be terraformed by humans and turned into what is essentially an alternate world. The only true difference is that all that terraforming took place before America was colonized by Europeans. Before the Columbian Exchange.

Making that work required a lot of effort on my part. For the first time, I delved into such esoteric topics as anthropology, agriculture, materials science, and so on. Here, I was building a world almost from scratch, and the first thing I had to do was see what tools I had to work with. Those, as you might expect, were fewer in number than if I’d placed the setting on the other side of the Atlantic.

What I took out of all this is simple: the Americas have all the pieces needed for advanced civilization. It was only a quirk of history that prevented the New World from developing ironworking or the wheel. The Otherworld doesn’t have those quirks, and I justified that by placing the point of divergence far, far, into the past. It’s not a case of “oh, a bunch of Indians got sucked into a wormhole”. No, this setting presupposes an almost completely parallel development, one where even our most basic notions about the indigenous population of the Americas may be mistaken.

There are cultural similarities. Working through the lens of the characters I’ve chosen, these are sometimes magnified, and often compared with their Earthly cousins. Some of the natives of the Otherworld are plains nomads. Some built step pyramids like those in Mexico. Yet there are many more differences, and that is the focus of the series as a whole.

Formula one

In a way, I’ve made the individual books of the Otherworld series somewhat formulaic. For the first season, there’s a definite repeating structure: 8 chapters, 7 points of view. One of those is repeated, and it’s a different one each time, usually whichever one has the most impact on the episode’s storyline. For the final installment, Long Road’s End (coming in December), I changed things up a bit. It’s still 8 chapters, but they’re no longer restricted to a single focus. Instead, the first six switch back and forth among those same characters, each one covering a day in the life of the Otherworld. Chapter 7 (Spoiler: that’s when they can come home) has 7 scenes: one for each point of view. And the finale, Chapter 8, is a kind of epilogue to the whole season, containing one scene each for the four non-POV members of the expedition, as well as a character who grew very close to them.

At times, this structure felt a bit constraining. I had a tough time coming up with reasons to focus on some of the characters who weren’t quite front and center. (This is especially true, in my opinion, in Episode V, The Bonds Between Us. I feel that it’s the weakest story by far.) Yet it was also liberating, in a way. By forcing myself to work in this fashion, I was able to naturally build the connections between differing parts of the story; setting up “B” plots and sidetracks was almost automatic.

For the interstitial stories, I went with a slightly different approach. They’re much shorter, for one, weighing in at only about 25-30K words instead of 50-60K. They’re all 5 chapters each, and all but one (the fourth, The Dark Continent) have a matched pair of protagonists. As these were mostly “get over” stories, I thought this more limited setup worked better.

Now that I’m writing Season 2, I’m moving things around again. With the addition of new characters, and the way the story is progressing, I’ve expanded each episode to 10 chapters, each slightly shorter than before. The rotation is a bit “looser”, as well, so some characters might not get a chapter in each episode, and there won’t always be a repeat. As they’re becoming mostly teamed and paired up, this shouldn’t be a problem; there will almost always be another POV character around to pick up the slack.

Heart of the matter

The overarching storyline of the Otherworld series is the world itself. It’s there, and its existence is the single most defining aspect of the story. We see it first by accident. Then, starting with Episode II, it becomes not only integral to the setting, but it’s a source of drama, action, conflict. It’s more than a backdrop, because of the simple fact that it’s so unknown.

But that doesn’t mean that everything is about exploring. Indeed, once the wayward characters come to terms with their situation, true exploration quickly fades into the background—for the time being. With that, the series slowly transitions into a kind of character drama, though I throw in the occasional action sequence for good measure.

Sometimes, I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking with these, but I’m happy with the result. Over the course of 8 episodes, every one of the 11 main characters shows growth, development. They come into their own, and they each follow their own trajectory through the main story. There’s love and loss, there’s good times and bad. They have their arguments, and they often feel lost, homesick. Maybe it’s the length of the series, but I’ve never come out of a work with as good a feel for the characters. Not my own, anyway.

And most of those characters, I hope, come across as real. That’s what I wanted from the Otherworld: verisimilitude, that feeling that this could be a real place, that these things could happen. The characters might be fictional, but I didn’t want them to feel fake. With the Otherworld, I think I succeeded far beyond anything else I’ve ever written.

The road goes on forever

You know, I think I’ll make this a regular thing, because there’s so much I want to say on this subject. So that’s what I’m going to do: every time there’s a new story posted in the Otherworld saga, I’ll post something like this up here. Call it decompression, a postmortem, or whatever have you.

Release: The City and the Hill (Chronicles of the Otherworld 2)

On this Fourth of July, eleven college students have declared their independence from Planet Earth. That’s right, it’s time for the second installment of Chronicles of the Otherworld. Called The City and the Hill, this one picks up immediately after last month’s Out of the Past ended.

This was not part of the plan.

Eleven young men and women woke yesterday morning to darkness and unfamiliar surroundings. Now, they have come to the conclusion that those surroundings are far more unfamiliar than they first imagined. They aren’t in Mexico anymore. No, they are in a different land, a different world. Now must come the questions. Can they go home? When? And what will they do until then?

The natives are not alien. Indeed, they seem almost too human, and that is yet another mystery. In their time in this strange new world, then, the expedition must seek an answer to this, as well as so many other burning questions. They were meant to study ruins, and the hill of their arrival has those, but what lies beyond?

As before, Chronicles of the Otherworld is currently a Patreon exclusive. That means you can only get it over at my Patreon page for the time being. It’s only $3, though, and that gets you access to all the rest of my released stories, too, so you can’t say it’s a bad deal.

Episode 3, entitled A Matter Settled, comes out August 1, so keep watching this space.

Otherworld talk 1

Over at my Patreon, you may have noticed a recent release, entitled Out of the Past. It’s a short novel (or long novella, whichever you prefer) I originally wrote back in 2013, then updated over the past year or so, and it is the first in what I hope is a long line of stories which take place in the fictional setting I call the Otherworld. By the time this post goes up—assuming nothing bad happens in the weeks since I wrote it—I’ll have written a total of 14 works in this setting: the 8 original novels of Chronicles of the Otherworld and a collection of six side stories, A Bridge Between Worlds. Back here at Prose Poetry Code, I’d like to delve a bit deeper into the inner workings of this particular creation.

Origin story

Begin at the beginning, they say, and the Otherworld began a few years ago, sprouting from a two-headed seed. First, I was a bit upset at the cancellation of Stargate Universe (just as it was getting good), which left no real “exploration” sci-fi on television—there’s still not much there, by the way. Second, I like inventing languages, and I had recently begun looking into the cultures that would speak those languages.

Otherworld brings together both of those ideas. The story itself is pretty unspectacular: a bunch of college kids get sent to a medieval-style world, where they have to find a way to survive until they can come home. I originally built the world as a playground for my conlangs, as well as a chance to write a story involving exploration, first contact, culture shock, and other such notions. The whole thing is about being taken out of your comfort zone, and the Otherworld saga has, over the course of four years and half a million words, evolved greatly from that point. I sincerely hope it’s for the better.

False start

As I said, the first part, Out of the Past, was written in November 2013, although it didn’t have a title back then. I even went on to write two and a half more parts (I call them episodes, as the format is meant to mimic a TV series) after that, but I’ll freely admit that they were awful. Halfway through Episode IV, I gave up. I was bored with the setting, and I wanted to move on. So the Otherworld went back onto the shelf, and I thought little more about it for a year and a half.

In 2014, I wrote Before I Wake, as you may know. After that, I started looking through my notes and ideas for something new. At first, I settled on the beginning of what has become the Linear Cycle, plus the “Miracles” short story I’ve put up here at the site. Then, I digressed into the unfinished work currently titled Lair of the Wizards.

That one was the key, I think. Its setting was almost a mirror image of the Otherworld: a bunch of kids in a medieval world find a cache of advanced technology that they see as magic. A kind of novel-length restatement of Clarke’s Third Law, if you will. But writing that got me thinking of the other way around, of the advanced people going to the primitive world. Well, I already had one of those in the works, so why not?

Back in the saddle

So the end of 2015 saw me heading back into the Otherworld, but things were different now. All along, I’d had the idea that the fictional world was connected to Earth. It had to be, for how else would the characters get there? And if it was connected, then it was always connected, which served as a neat explanation for how the inhabitants could get there. More importantly for story purposes, it was the perfect excuse for how they could be human.

The people of the Otherworld are human. That was an ironclad rule I had when I first devised the setting. They weren’t aliens, even if some of them were a bit…altered. (The idea of different races of genetically modified humans actually came about very early on, partially from the D&D campaign my brother and I have made.) But the humans had to get there somehow, and thus I had to begin filling in the backstory.

Again, I did a lot of this back in 2013. It was then that I worked out the sketch of a timeline for the setting’s prehistory. The timing is just barely within the realm of believability, and it’s even within the margin of error of our current archaeological knowledge. But I had to go back and change a lot of specifics to match my assumptions.

The core assumption, of course, is that the Otherworld is derived from the New World. At no point until the present day of the stories (2019, chosen for no reason other than because I didn’t want to risk a tropical storm name being retired) was it ever so much as visited by anyone of European descent. At some point in 2015, I lost myself in research as I looked for a way to make that work. What do they eat? What can they make? How does their technology compare with their Earthly counterparts? (The last was the hardest, as the diverging point is so far in the past that it’s before civilization even began. Fortunately, that almost gives me a blank slate.)

Reset button

After a bit of editing work on Out of the Past, mostly to make it match my new findings, I started on the second episode, The City and the Hill. According to my notes, I finished the first draft on November 26, 2015. The next three followed in quick succession, then I took two months off in May and June of 2016. (That was for the Linear Cycle and Lair of the Wizards, in case you’re wondering.) The final three parts of “Season 1” took up the summer months, ending on September 25.

Even when I was writing the final words of Episode 8, Long Road’s End, I didn’t think I was done. Oh, no. The Otherworld is more than just these eight stories, and it was like that all along. I’d intended from the start to write a second season, a new set of stories that would build upon the foundation that these laid down. The way I wrote, however, meant that I needed something to bridge the nine-month gap that the stories’ structure required.

Thus came A Bridge Between Worlds. This is a story spoiler, so be warned. Some of the characters do not end Episode 8 on their home planet. The bridge novellas were intended to tell their stories. Well, five of them do. The sixth (actually, the third in sequence) ties up a few loose ends from Season 1 while setting the stage for events in Season 2. And that is coming, if I have anything to say about it. I’d like to start writing it later this year, but we’ll have to see.

Moving on

In the coming months, I’ll talk a lot more about the Otherworld setting. It’s my favorite creation, and there have been times over the past four years where I’ve lost myself completely in it. I’ve thought about it in the shower (where some of my best plots and character moments are born). I’ve dreamed about it. I don’t want to give it up, and I know that the world still has more to give. Some authors have a whole shared universe for their works, but I’m content with a single planet, a single world.

Release: Out of the Past (Chronicles of the Otherworld 1)

A new month brings a new story, and this is the one I’ve been waiting for. Today marks the release of Out of the Past, the first installment in my eight-part series Chronicles of the Otherworld. Here’s the blurb, as usual:

It was supposed to be something simple. As any student knows, though, it never is.

What started as a training exercise to prepare sixteen college students for work in the field becomes something else entirely when one of them stumbles across a find deep in the Mexican wilderness. Studying it, the members of the expedition come to the conclusion that it is indeed something made by the hands of man, and it is much greater than it first seems. Much greater, and much older.

Its very existence may rewrite the history of the Americas, but the mystery of its creation pales in comparison to that of its purpose. Perfectly aligned to the sun, to the calendar, it promises to provide a spectacle on one specific day: the summer solstice. And that day is coming soon.

Now, the trick here is that this is a Patreon exclusive. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it that way, but for now, you can’t buy it on Amazon. Instead, if you want to read it, all you have to do is pledge a minimum of $3 to my Patreon. Then, you can download DRM-free copies of it and all my other releases in two formats: MOBI (for Kindles) or EPUB (for everything else). There’s no commitment, no hidden fees, just a simple subscription.

The next part of the series, entitled The City and the Hill, will be released on July 4, and future parts will come out every four weeks.

Virisai pronunciation guide

On my Patreon page, I’ve been posting drafts of a series of long novellas (or short novels, whichever you prefer) called Chronicles of the Otherworld. I won’t reiterate the entire plot of the story here, as that’s what the Patreon is for. Suffice to say, it’s a kind of alternate-universe thing, except without the alternate universes.

On the “otherworld” are a number of invented cultures loosely based on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, but with about 10,000 years of parallel development—including 500 years free from European colonization—and some genetic engineering by a mysterious precursor race. All this has caused their languages to be different from any on Earth. In other words, I built a story around a conlang. It’s okay; Tolkien did pretty much the same thing.

This post describes the pronunciation and orthography of the main conlang of the Chronicles of the Otherworld series, called Virisai. Story-internally, it is spoken by approximately one million people in and around the pre-industrial nation of Vistaan, where most of the Otherworld series takes place. Externally, I started making it in 2013, which doesn’t really feel like four years ago. My goal with Virisai was to make a natural-looking language that wasn’t too hard to grasp (the protagonists only have about two and a half months) while having no real connection to Earthly tongues. Ten thousand years, after all, is enough to give us the linguistic variety of Europe, the Middle East, and most of India…or of the indigenous languages of the Americas. In future posts, if there is interest, I’ll delve more deeply into the language. It’s one of my most developed conlangs, second only to Suvile, which I worked on from 2003–2010, and it remains in development, as I’m currently working on future entries in the series.

Finally, a word before we begin: the meat of this post is written from the point of view of someone treating Virisai as an actual language. If you prefer to think of it as the writing of a character in the story, that’s fine. From this point forward, though, I won’t be referring to any “external” qualities of the language, only what a speaker would understand.

The sounds of the language

Virisai has a fairly simple phonology. In total, there are 31 sounds: 21 distinct consonants, 5 vowels that show distinction between short and long. All of these sounds are simple, in that there are no phonemic distinctions of consonant length, palatalization, tone, or other complex phonetic properties. Speaking Virisai is not difficult for most people, unlike some of its neighboring tongues. The orthography, however, can be a bit difficult to understand.

While there are some dialectal differences, mostly between east and west, these do not rise to the level of unintelligibility. For the most part, this guide will describe the “standard” dialect of the east, with western differences noted as they arise.

Vowels

As there are fewer vowels, it seems prudent to begin with them. As stated above, Virisai has five main vowels, with each coming in a short and long variety. Long vowels sound approximately like double-length versions of their short counterparts, but many also give the short vowels a more lax pronunciation.

A: The vowel a (as in aloc “mill”) is most often pronounced like the Spanish or Italian a. At the end of a word, it may instead sound like German er as in oder. Western dialects use a pronunciation like a in English cat at the beginning of a word.
E: The vowel e (as in esau “lake”) is commonly pronounced like the e in English bet. In stressed positions, it can also sound like the more tense French é of été. Colloquially, an unstressed e can also be pronounced as a schwa, as in English taken.
I: The short vowel i (as in imec “gift”) should be pronounced as in Spanish, but it very often becomes lax, as in English bit. This relaxation is common among lower-class Virisai speakers in the west.
O: Short o (as in oca “but”) usually sounds like the o in French sot, but that of English not is sometimes heard instead, especially in unstressed syllables.
U: The short u (as in uro “round”) is pronounced as in Spanish, but the oo sound of English foot is also acceptable.
AA: The long vowel aa (as in baad “dog”) is a longer version of a. It can be approximated by the British English pronunciation of bath, or simply by stretching out the pronunciation of a.
EI: The vowel ei (as in eib “fish”) sounds like a longer variant of stressed e. The English diphthong ay of say is a close, if strictly incorrect, approximation.
IE: Long ie (as in mies “top”) sounds like English ee as in feet.
OO: Long oo (as in sool “glass”) is pronounced like a longer o. As with ei above, the English diphthong ow of glow is close, although not exactly the same.
OU: The vowel ou (as in crous “to write”) sounds like English oo in boot.
AI or AY: Both of these two spellings (ai as in ain “corn”; ay as in ayc “duck”) represent the sound of i in English like.
OI or OY: These two spellings (oi as in boi “nut”; oy as in proy “mad”) are pronounced as in English boy.
AU: The diphthong au (as in aus “cat”) sounds like ou in English out or au in English caught. The two sounds are in free variation; the preference is largely personal. The sound can also be spelled aw, if needed to prevent ambiguity.
EU: The diphthong eu (as in keud “deer”) has no exact English equivalent, but it can be approximated by the sound of you. When detailing western Virisai, this sound is often spelled ew.

In addition, some western dialects have a set of four front rounded vowels, two long and two short. These arise regularly from combinations of the consonant y (see below) and the vowels u, ou, o, and oo. They are presented here for completeness.

Y: This sound (as in lys “flower”) is a short vowel pronounced like French u or German ü.
UE: The vowel ue (as in bueder, a type of grain) is the long form of y, pronounced like German ü.
OE: The short vowel oe (as in goer “now”) is pronounced like French eu in peu.
EU: The long vowel eu (as in Beus, a month name) is pronounced like German ö, a longer form of oe above.

Consonants

Despite there being more of them, the consonants are much more regular in the correspondence between their written and spoken forms. Only in a few instances are there great differences. Here, we will leave those for last.

First, these are the Virisai consonants most similar to their English equivalents:

B: The sound b (as in boun “big”) is pronounced as in English bee.
D: The consonant d (as in den “from”) is pronounced the same as in English dog.
G: The consonant g (as in gos “cold”) has the same pronunciation as in English good.
H: The letter h (as in heid “this”) has the same pronunciation as in English hat under most circumstances. When followed by b, d, or g, however, it instead has no sound, and causes the following consonant to be pronounced as p, t, or k, respectively.
J: The letter j (as in jon “give”) sounds like that of English jest.
K: The letter k (as in kit “dice”) has the same sound as in English sky. There should be no puff of air following it, unlike in English key. This letter is only used before e, i, ei, and ie.
L: The consonant l (as in los “last”) sounds like the “clear” l of English let. It doesn’t normally have the “dark” sound of American English feel, though few native speakers can tell the difference.
M: The sound m (as in maame “mother”) sounds the same as in English mom.
N: The sound n (as in nin “sky”) has the same sound as English night.
NY: The sound written ny (as in nyaal “south”) is pronounced as the ni in English onion, or like the Spanish ñ.
P: The consonant p (as in pic “horn”) has the same pronunciation as in English spit. Unlike in English, there should be no audible “puff” after the sound. (In technical terms, it is unaspirated.)
R: The letter written r (as in rad “say”) has a pronunciation similar to English r in red, not that of the Spanish, French, or German r.
T: The consonant t (as in tec “temple”) sounds like that of English stay. Like Virisai p, it is also unaspirated.
V: The letter v (as in veis “go”) has a sound like that of Spanish b or v, not the English v. It can be approximated by pronouncing English v without the teeth.
W: The letter w (as in wan “river”) sounds like English w. It is distinct from v, but the difference can be hard for some to hear. V, however, is more forceful.
Y: The consonant y (as in yet “do”; not the same as the dialectal vowel sound y above) sounds exactly like English y in yet.

The rest of the consonant sounds are written in ways that may change depending on the position of the word, the following sounds, or other factors.

C: The letter c can represent a hard k (as in caar “name”) when written before anything other than e, i, ie, or ei. Before those letters (as in cil “small”), it is instead pronounced like the ch in English chat.
CI: The digraph ci (as in ciar “bottom”) is the standard writing for the ch sound of English char, used whenever a plain c would be pronounced as k.
F: The letter f (as in faus “rain”) has the same pronunciation as v above. It is written with a different letter in Virisai, reflecting a distinction of sound that is now lost.
NN: A doubled nn is not actually used in Virisai, but the author has used it to transcribe the word Ninne (feminine form of Nina, a racial term) so as to avoid confusion with the English word nine.
S: The letter s changes its pronunciation depending on its environment. At the start of a word (as in si “day”), it is pronounced like the s in English see. The same is true at the end of a word (as in pries “only”), when followed by a vowel other than i, e, ie, or ei (as in masa “yes”), or followed by a consonant (as in ostir “shoulder”). When preceding one of the four vowels mentioned (as in tiesie “short”), it is instead pronounced like the sh in English show.
SH: At the beginning of a word, or when preceding a consonant, the digraph sh (as in shei “daytime”) is pronounced as in English show.
SI: The digraph si (as in sias “blue”) is an alternate spelling of sh, used much more commonly when ambiguity would not arise.
SS: The doubled ss (as in susse “smooth”) is pronounced like the s in English set. It is used before e, i, ie, and ei, except at the beginning of a word.
Z: Like s above, the letter z changes pronunciation depending on where it occurs. Except directly before one of the four front vowels above (as in zaad “west”), it is pronounced like English z in zoo. Before front vowels (as in feizen “trade”), it sounds like the z in English azure.
ZH: As with sh, the digraph zh (as in zhaan “safe”) is written at the beginning of a word to indicate the z sound of English azure.
ZI: As with si, the digraph zi (as in ziule “fort”) is an alternate spelling of zh.
ZZ: Like ss, the doubled zz (as in dezzic “late”) is only used before front vowels. It is pronounced like the z in English zoo.

Consonant sequences

The grammar of Virisai causes a few cases where consonants can form sequences that look like clusters, but are pronounced as if single consonants. In each of the following, the first member of the sequence is actually silent: dt, bp, gc, zs, td, pb, cg, sz, szi, zsi, dci, tj.

Stress

Under normal circumstances, Virisai stresses the syllable before the last—the penultimate. However, a long vowel or a diphthong in the final syllable will receive stress instead. Inflection affixes are almost never stressed, but they can cause a stress shift in a word’s stem: singular soulos (stress on the first syllable), plural soulossin (stress on the second).

Closing words

The preceding should be enough to pronounce any of the utterances encountered in Chronicles of the Otherworld. Understanding them, of course, is a matter for future posts. As the series progresses, I’ll write further entries describing the Virisai language, so those willing to learn can follow the story at a deeper level.