Writer Senses

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com. Languages in the Ark Saga are not any Earth Prime language. My philosophy of writing the characters’ idiom – how they speak and write as natives – was rooted in the principle that my narrative style is a direct translation of their fictional language (vocabulary, syntax, and grammar) into idiomatic American English. Years into writing the books, I formalized unique alphabets for two of the languages represented in the fictional world of the Ark Saga. For the language the main characters speak, I realized that, given my philosophy of language within the story, any time a unique letter was named, there was not a complete correspondence between the English alphabet and the fictional alphabet. What this meant was that any time a character wanted to talk about the language they speak, they didn’t call it “English.” When any character had to directly name a letter or directly spell a word, they had to name the letter(s) in their language, not English...

Currently listening to: Balamb Garden theme (Orchestral)from Final Fantasy VIII composed by Nobuo Uematsu. ____ I am excited to officially announce my first novel, Ark : A sci-fi/fantasy tale. I conceived of the idea 7 years ago, during my senior year in high school. The tale was initially to be a Star Wars fan-fiction, but after watching the entire series of Avatar: The Last Airbender this summer, I realized that for my story to be taken seriously, I needed to spend the time and effort to construct my own world and mythology, rather than stealing George Lucas.' (Another plus: I don't have to pay royalties to his real-life Empire.) I thus began in July to work on background-related issues, which I did until October. In late October, I began working on the first draft of the first chapter, which was submitted to Scribophile.com on November 5th. I received numerous encouraging reviews on the chapter (and, most recently, 2nd place in a NaNoWriMo contest) and have been w...