#Relancii worldbuilding

[thecurioustale]

A Romance Story (No Not That Kind)

Tolkien considered "fantasy" to be different from "faerie-tales," namely in that he considered a fantasy to involve the sprawling and immersive development of what he called a "secondary world," i.e. a fictional world apart from our real one. Even if you didn't know that about his views, it should come as no surprise to you, given how deeply detailed Arda is, and how the few stories he wrote that were set in Arda were as much byproducts of the worldbuilding as endeavors in themselves.

I don't draw that same conceptual distinction myself but I see exactly what he's saying, and I do feel irrationally proud that my work would in fact qualify as a Tolkienian fantasy by his own criterion.

I feel very old-fashioned coming on Tumblr and talking over and over about JRR Tolkien, because I know a lot of people who see this are hip young things who are frankly Over It and are way more interested in contemporary stuff that's more inclusive / fits modern sensibilities better / etc. But I really never do seem to run out of things to say about Tolkien.

Today's saying is this: I too have an esoteric conceptual box that I set my work in. I consider After The Hero to be a "romance" in the vein of (but not identical to) the classical sense of the concept of literary romance: pomp and pageantry, a sweeping sprawl to the world, and epic adventures and quests within it. You might think of such a story as one that is told "for its own sake," as opposed to having a particular agenda in mind via the plot or a main character arc. There is a lot of spectacle all throughout The Curious Tale, with many scenes and moments being of the sort that would typically be omitted for length in most books. Last week, when I mentioned the scene of Sodish city runner Kayaju running alongside a bard as the bard sings her a song about the city's history as the Sun is rising, the reason I mentioned it is that it's just a really beautiful moment. But it doesn't do anything. There's no plot there. Kayaju is deep in the B-list of character importance. It's really just "Here's a beautiful moment I want to share." And that, for me, is the epitome of romance.

And it only works if the story is also a fantasy in the Tolkienian sense! 😂

I'm rereading one of my favorite novels of recent years, Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie, and it's even better than I remember it and I'll probably have something to say about it in this space soon, but it's so very much self-excluded from being romantic. Too practical, too cynical, too down-to-Earth, and too attached to the rails of the plot. No scenic detours, other than establishing paragraphs here and there. It's all very well done; don't get me wrong! But it takes real flagrance to write romance. You have to be prepared to put your readers through thousands and thousands of words that don't do anything.

It's a sacrifice I am willing for you to make! 😁

[thecurioustale]

Hello! I’m interested in checking out your work, but all I can find is the prelude to After the Hero. Is anything else publicly available?

I don't have much published fiction, sadly! I'm a slow-cooker kind of artist. Besides the Prelude to After The Hero, I have two other published fictional works at present, both of which are under the umbrella of my fantasy series The Curious Tale:

The Great Galavar is, like the Prelude, one of the "Interludes" or satellite-works to the main After The Hero story. This work tells the story of Galavar, one of the main characters in After The Hero. It is presently unfinished and on hiatus. I was publishing it as a weekly serial back in the mid-2010s and I stopped due to life hardships, and haven't yet gotten back to it in favor of working on the main novel instead. (I do, however, plan to finish it in the future.)

The other fictional work is Empire on Ice, which is a sketch comedy series that uses the same cast as After The Hero but in an alternate reality where After The Hero is a movie that they are all making together. It was published in the form of written screenplays. Empire on Ice was another weekly feature back in the mid-2010s that got put on hiatus when life went haywire for me. Since it isn't an overarching story, it wouldn't make sense to call it "finished" or "unfinished," but I will say that I do not consider the project "concluded," i.e., it would be nice to get back to it at some point if I can.

(Note: My website is pretty outdated and doesn't have one of those security certificates that are standard on the web these days, i.e. is http rather than https, so your browser might give you a security warning if you click on any of these links, but, for whatever the word of a Tumblr stranger is worth to you, my site is totally harmless—except of course for my world-bending ideas and philosophy, lol.)

So, that's the bad news: There's not much fiction to read so far. Though, if you like worldbuilding commentary, I also had a weekly series called Curious Tale Saturdays where I talked about the fictional world of Relance in great detail. This series also went on hiatus when disaster struck for me back in the 2010s, though it lives on in a reduced form over at my Patreon, where I sometimes write worldbuilding essays—most of which become free for anyone to read after a 3-day exclusive period for patrons. And I also write worldbuilding essays here on Tumblr sometimes. You can follow the tags on this post to see more.

The good news, meanwhile, is that I have not one but two novels officially in the works: Chapter 1 of After The Hero: A Curious Tale, and the first novel in a science fiction series called Galaxy Federal. I don't have ETAs on either of these books yet, except that they won't be done in the short-term future.

I also have other projects I am working on.

If you stick around, I hope to be able to make some relevant announcements later this year. (In fact there will be a non-fiction announcement in the next week or two!)

[thecurioustale]

Meats of Relance

Some of the meat animals, fishes, and fowls on Relance include clucko, quignard, dilark, horngack, snow lamb, red cricket, puff, pletthock (or plett rather), hesbreene, sampofish, tartfish, and galt, just to name a few. Unlike our modern society, where there are only a handful of different meats that we regularly consume, Relancii cultures typically have much more variety—though less consistency except for the most abundant and widely-raised animals in various areas. Clucko, for instance, is very widespread.

These concepts, and the words themselves, date from all across the history of The Curious Tale. Around half of the terms come from Mate of Song, which remains an extremely rich vein of Relancii worldbuilding to this day, while the rest come from the Prelude, The Great Galavar, and the upcoming ATH Chapter 1. If I had scoured my files further, I could have found a fair few more—including from some of the old, Pre-Draft-10-Era stuff.

A few highlights:

Clucko: An obvious chicken analogue, but closer in taste to turkey and closer in size to a very small turkey.

Quignard: A smaller fowl with a sharp gamey taste perhaps to our palates reminiscent of offal. The GN is pronounced NY in the French fashion, i.e. "QUIN-yerd."

Dilark: Donated to Galavar and the Guard during the events of the Prelude. A rich, flavorful, dark meat comparable to beef but sweeter.

Puff: A sheep analogue, often raised for its wool. Its meat is sometimes described as having a sour or fermented taste.

Sampofish: Provided by God to the Ieikili as a key source of protein. Quite bland, but oily and well-suited to added flavors. The flesh is pinkish-white.

Galt: A pig analogue, but with bigger bones beloved for their marrow. Galt is a cheaper, more accessible meat source, widely available across the world to the galt's tolerance for many climates. Galts are known for having a very high sense of themselves (and, doubtless, if they could speak, a very low opinion of the state) while actually being quite filthy and unproductive. Sometimes considered a "dirty" meat, and is properly well-washed both before and after butchering. It is considered one of the best meats for salting and pickling.

Meat in general is more available on Relance to the lower classes than it has been on Earth historically. Viutars are bigger meat-eaters in general than humans traditionally have been, though compared to a modern human diet in the developed world the ratio of dietary meat is fairly similar. The viutari tend to eat proportionally more of their meat as fish and fowl relative to ungulates and other land animals than we do.