#korë blogging

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

A few years ago, @incognitajones asked her followers to talk about our writing processes and inspirations for our latest projects, or favorite ones. Here's what I said on the blog I was using at the time:

My fantasy series has a straightforward origin story: I was eight, and my parents were playing Secret of Mana on our SNES. The Girl captured my imagination—she was grumpy and arrogant, and had immensely powerful elemental and healing abilities. She also had a dragon friend! And it was her boyfriend, rather than her, who was captured in the tower by the wicked witch. (As far as I recall, anyway.)

So I wrote down a story about a grown-up princess based on her for a book report, which my teacher didn’t like. In fairness, it was supposed to be a book report, but still, the experience was very discouraging! Discouraging or not, though, I kept plugging away at it, expanding and overhauling the story as I got older and older (and older, and older …).

There have been a lot of other influences since then, and the series is now drastically different from pretty much all the versions I wrote prior to my mid-twenties. Nevertheless, the character inspired by The Girl is still one of the main protagonists, so the original influence lingers (and I put some really pretty covers of the Secret of Mana theme on my writing playlist, hah).

Oh, and the current version of the series has its own origin story. Well, current-ish; I’ve revised it a lot of times, but they all have the same shape, characters/storyline, and general material. In any case, I was taking a YA fiction writing class as a senior in college, and using it to work on this ongoing story, and I kept trying to come up with some functional beginning to it. I wrote a bunch of different beginnings that didn’t work quite right, but as I was walking out of class one day, an opening line just … manifested in my head.

It required a lot of overhauling to make the new beginning work (including a switch from third- to first-person narration), but I loved it so much that I was willing to rewrite long swaths of the story just to make that one line work. And while I can’t say what the line is, since I’m still using it, the premise and priorities it set up have guided pretty much every other part of the story I’ve written.

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

I am being so brave, y'all.

I'm finally organizing the files accumulated over the last ... seven computers or so that I've owned. Each computer's files includes files saved from the previous computer, so there's a lot of overlap and there are many identical duplicates etc, but sometimes the files are actually different versions and I want to keep both. So, digital hoarder that I am, I just kept everything I've saved to a computer ever.

But between one thing and another, I'm using 678 GB of my laptop's space, which is kind of a lot. So now I am sorting things into proper folders and deleting extra files with the exact same names and file sizes. It is terrifying tbh!!

On the bright side, I'm finding things I haven't seen in years. Some are just undergrad homework and the like. But there's also a document meant for a quick writing exercise according to its label, in which inspiration descended like a beam of sunlight and I came up with the first line of my novel—still the first line—after years of trying to figure out a beginning. It's dated to 2011. Shhh.

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

[Original date: 24 June 2019, for my cross-post]

At the time, I said:

Another one I somehow missed! A truly adorable A— and G— by the incredible @croclock.

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

I am suffering because I've realized that a major family name in my novel doesn't follow in-world linguistic conventions properly.

Now, etymologically speaking, the family's name does not come from the local language, but a) it doesn't follow the conventions of the original language either, and b) it's supposed to have been altered specifically to fit the norms of the local language.

The name is one of the earliest I came up with and ends with a silent E that modifies the previous vowel, as it would in English. But in both the original and the local languages, a final E is not silent. As it currently stands, the final E is pronounced in the original language's version of the name, but not in the variant adapted to the local language ... a language which always pronounces final vowels otherwise.

Agh!

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

I was struck by an idea for a short story that I might be able to actually write! But after about an hour of pinning down ideas and fiddling with opening sentences, I realized that it's got far too much going on for a short story, and therefore has to be delayed (along with the rest of my life) until the dissertation is over.

Next year's Nano project, I guess. :\

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

[Original date: 14 February 2018—I filled a meme about making Valentine’s Day cards for your characters, with credit and apologies to @croclock)

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

[Original date: 9 June 2020]

I've been going over the draft of my novel, and I'd completely forgotten that the most purely good-natured character in the book is a rhetoric teacher.

[4/20/2023 note: I'm not in rhetoric myself—I'm in literature and my undergrad minors were in psychology and creative writing—but I do respect a number of people who are.]

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

I downloaded another bunch of fonts, and naturally, wanted to try these ones out, too. So I finished off the series of my main characters + D&D:

The art comes from a gift from @croclock <3

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

My spirit will never be broken or caught

THE SEER: a playlist for the proud daughter of a defunct dynasty.

In the course of double-checking old posts, I saw that @elwing had requested a link to the playlist for the pictured character a long time ago (19 January 2021!). So here it is—probably the playlist I listen to the most often as I write, when I listen to anything.

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

[Original date of my post: 17 May 2018]

I have somehow never posted this!

I was once asked what scene from my novel I would most like to see illustrated, and I casually said that it would be this character and her illusions à la @croclock. Then, to my very great astonishment at the time, @croclock herself sent me a full illustration of the character’s baby steps as an illusionist, for my birthday.

It’s still high up on my list of favorite presents ever <3

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

[Original date: 5 July 2016]

The more I write, the more I feel that “Oh, but it’s a fantasy world! You’re not actually depicting any real cultures” is not at all useful or productive. For one, if you can’t see the connections between things like Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire and medieval Europe, I don’t know what to say to you. They are not direct depictions, but they are very, very evidently rooted in history and culture—and the baggage that comes with them.

It’s true that the connecting fibers are much thinner for some works than others, but while most are not on quite the scale of Middle-earth or Westeros, many follow in that kind of tradition. Speaking as a writer—in my day job (such as it is), I study early modern and eighteenth century British literature, and my interest in those periods constantly pervades my fiction. I did as much historical research for the first chapter of my fantasy novel as for straightforward historical fiction, because many aspects absolutely are drawn straight from history.

At the same time, of course, it is a fantasy and a secondary world, and those are never going to be directly equivalent.

For instance, ASOIAF is obviously and unabashedly inspired by the Wars of the Roses, enacted across a continent rather than one small island, but the Starks and Lannisters are not simply fantasy versions of the Yorks and Lancasters. During the Wars of the Roses, both families were Plantagenets, branches of the royal house of England with rival claims to the throne. In ASOIAF, neither the Starks nor Lannisters have any direct claim to the Iron Throne at all—we see the Plantagenet vs Plantagenet dynamic more with the deposed Targaryens vs their Baratheon cousins who won the previous phase of the conflict.

The Baratheons’ ebullient warrior-king, Robert, is probably most comparable to Edward IV, and his beautiful, ambitious wife to Elizabeth Woodville. However, Cersei Lannister is altogether a wilder, more amoral figure than Elizabeth, and Robert marries her out of political expediency rather than Edward’s passion for the unsuitable Elizabeth. Also unlike Elizabeth, Cersei triumphs over the austere northern lord who would strip power from her and her children, where Elizabeth lost the immediate battle to Richard of Gloucester—a far more ambiguous figure than Ned Stark.

In character, Cersei is perhaps more akin to the Lucrezia Borgia of legend, if not history. She comes with an ambitious, highly intelligent father who ruthlessly uses all his children (Tywin Lannister/Alexander VI), an incestuous brother-lover locked into an order that denies him an inheritance (Jaime Lannister/Cesare Borgia), and a second, widely loathed brother (Tyrion Lannister/Juan Borgia).

The parallels aren’t exact there, either, though. Cesare’s strategic and administrative brilliance goes to Tyrion, Lucrezia’s overriding loyalty to her family at odds with (in the fictionalized versions) a burgeoning conscience goes to Jaime, and Juan’s incompetent, wild recklessness goes to Cersei.

As far as Wars of the Roses analogues go, Daenerys Targaryen’s place seems to draw nearest to Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the future Henry VII. Daenerys and Henry are, respectively, exiled survivors of the deposed branches of the royal family (Targaryen/Lancastrian) who, with local and foreign support, return to reclaim the kingdom. Yet Daenerys is wildly dissimilar from Henry. Even her claim to the throne differs. Where Daenerys is the only surviving, legitimate child of the old king, Henry’s Lancastrian heritage came through an illegitimate and female line, and he had a prudent, restrained personality in general, more like—say, Jon Snow.

That’s ASOIAF. If you jump to Tolkien, it’s not surprising that he linked Gondor to the Byzantine Empire in its decline. Like the Byzantine Empire, Gondor is the surviving half of a once-towering empire, holding on while the other half (Arnor/Holy Roman) loses its territory and decays into little states and feuding communities. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields has striking parallels to the fall of Constantinople, and Tolkien directly referred to Minas Tirith as a take on Constantinople.

Yet again, the parallels are not 1:1, even setting aside the basic fact that it turns out completely differently. Denethor is at most a tragic inversion of Emperor Constantine, but even that seems a stretch. His sons, Boromir and Faramir, don’t plug into any particular historical figures, and the faithful Rohirrim don’t exactly map onto anyone despite their clear Germanic inspiration.

Gondor is also heavily inspired by various regions of Italy, complete with internal strife and ruling princes who have discretion about sending armies to the Pope Steward to defend Rome Minas Tirith. Tolkien insisted that the rejuvenated Gondor at the end of LOTR is not Northern European, but essentially a restored Roman Empire with its seat at Rome. He identified various areas of Italy as the real life counterparts to Gondor, most notably Venice/Pelargir and Assisi/Lossarnach.

However, Gondor is geographically far larger than Italy, large enough to extend to Greece and Turkey, and has influences from ancient Egypt as well. The Egyptian influence lies not only in Gondor’s embalming practices but their massive monuments, their religion (which also has Jewish influences), royal imagery (especially with regard to the crown), and the general trends of Gondorian culture.

None of these, of course, are perfect models of reference—though at least you could legitimately argue that the films’ casting choices for Gondorian Dúnedain weren’t actually accurate to “Tolkien’s vision,” as is often claimed. But these are probably the most recognizable models for Gondor, with strong connections to history—and even with those, the references are multi-layered and flexible.

Essentially: this particular genre of quasi-historical fantasy absolutely draws from real history, sometimes closely, sometimes less so, which makes it perfectly possible to talk about accuracy, appropriation, and so on, in the context of fantasy. At the same time, it’s complicated by the fact that references are never direct and are worked out in the context of their own stories—a complication that is silenced rather than addressed by dismissing the relevance of history.

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

And now for something completely a bit different, as far as taking my D&D + original character graphics seriously :P

This is genuinely another of the main characters of my novel and series, featuring the art of @croclock again. The piece this is cropped from is here, and one of my personal favorites! The character, meanwhile, is an eventual POV protagonist as well, and the first character I ever wrote.

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

[Original date: 18 July 2020]

I feel a weird urgency to finish my novel after many, many years of poking at it (it's currently at 70k words after I painfully cut out 25k), but also ... exams.

[Note from 4/21/2023: I did end up finishing it, or at least finishing a draft of it that ended up at 105k words, and passing my exams after various complications.]

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

This was a gift from my dear friend @croclock nearly ten years ago—a moment between my characters Loraya (left) and Peliana (right) from a short prequel I wrote to my fantasy novel.

(In the event, it would take me seven[!] more years to finish the novel, but Juliana’s art helped keep me going <3)

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

Don't think I'm ever gonna make it home again

THE WITCH: a playlist for a banished mage.

This playlist is the direct "sequel" to The Seer, and I think may also have been prompted by @elwing at the time, though it's been awhile! The witch in question is the POV character of my entire novel; I'm quite fond of her and definitely enjoyed revisiting the list.

(The art in the icon is of the actual character and was created by my good friend @alias-sqbr. Their original version is here.)

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

Why not think about times to come? And not about the things that you've done?

THE ENIGMA: a playlist for a troubled but well-intentioned survivor

Awhile back (a long while back >_>), I followed up @elwing's requests for playlists for the other main characters of my novel with this list, which is for the last of the main trio. The artists are mostly the same, but the tone quite different!

(The art in the icon is of the character in question, cropped from @croclock's picture of all three main characters plus their dragon frenemy. It's here.)