Did some realmscaping tonight as my head feels like a herd of pachyderm’s are listening to Kriss Kross.

Couldn’t get a creative process going if I had resurrected Isaac Asimov – so I did some transcription and realm work.

Another day without entertainment writing.  I’m trying not to classify it as “creative writing” because almost anything I write is creative =P

Emails, volunteer documentation, etc. – all worth the time spent – but not writing for publication.

I’ve been a fan of history for as long as I can remember.  I spent a number of my elementary years devouring history texts and biographies of everyone from Helen Keller to King Alfred. I can get immersed in watching the History channels and let half the day slip by.  So tonight while I was trying to get the cranial juices flowing I decided to Google “what happened today in history.” Sub-consciously I know that I have probably been here before but I don’t remember it. I’m thinking this might be a good place to get some writing prompts.

As usual however Google came through with a few sites that I am pretty sure I have never seen. A couple of them looked more like a way to sell something than a place to inspire topics for writing. A few others started throwing up popup adds and other such nonsense so they got ye old Alt-F4. This one however had a few items that led me off into Wikitopia (where you wander into a link at Wikipedia and realize an hour later you’re fourteen pages away from whatever it was that brought you there in the first place.)  Brainyhistory was another site where I lost more time than I had anticipated. It actually had a date for the year 250. On this day in 250, Saint Fabian was executed for his refusal to deny Christ.

One interesting observation struck me as I was perusing these sites, they were all mostly set to Eastern Standard Time (EST). I kept going to sites that were already providing me the “Day in History” for tomorrow. When are they going to realize there are only two time zones to select from when automating date entries in web pages?  Those two are either UTC (the time-zone formerly known as GMT) or PST.  Why PST? Because everyone knows that Silicon Valley is the centre of all things IT and besides – it’s the timezone Blizzard uses.

In reading a book on writing science fiction I learned that the reader who reads that genre has an expectation that the writer is going to either follow the laws of physics as we currently understand them or have a damn good explanation why not. If the author comes up with some new form of faster-than-light travel there had better be a really good explanation of why and how it works.  My first reaction was “whatever” because I never consciously analyze the scientific probability of something I am reading for entertainment.  The more I thought about it though, the more I realized I do – just not with science fiction, at least not consciously.

There is  something that authors of fantasy do all the time that annoys the shit out of me.  They draw these really cool maps with mountains, rivers, deserts and forests placed in precisely the right locations for the story to work.  They don’t however seem to give much effort to establishing a foundation for the geographic reality of their creation.  I don’t why it annoys me – it’s not like I’m a geography major or geologist, but it does.

To that end I have tried to  educate myself with what natural phenomenon would account for the creation of a desert or the elevation required for a Montane forest.  Now I’m not a total stick-in-the-mud – I’ve reserved the right to blast a mountain out of existence right where I need a pass to facilitate the flight from the evil Cheesemaster of Fungadoria, but for the most part I want to stick with something that makes sense.

It’s more than just the lay of the land one needs to understand when developing a world though.  There are things like the proximity to the sun, rotation of the planet, existence of radiation belts, etc.  All things that don’t really belong in a fantasy novel.  I do think though that the information can be inferred in an entertaining manner if it is given a bit of thought. If the sky has two moons there would probably be a pretty significant impact on the tides (presuming the world had large bodies of water). So if all the seas are peaceful and calm it’s going to conflict with my belief of how it should be and thus distract from my enjoyment of the material.

Weather is another thing that impacts the geography.  Powerful winds and torrential rains will cause great amounts of erosion for example. There should be signs of this in descriptions of environment. The weather itself will be impacted by the geography – the chinook winds coming off the eastern slope of the Rockies wouldn’t exist without the proximity of the Pacific (and I would presume a few other factors, I’m not a geologist or a weatherman, I just stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night).

Part of me thinks this effort is just another way to not write – to find something else I need to research so I don’t have to pound out pages of dialog, setting and voice.  Maybe – but it really does annoy me, so I don’t think so.  Someday when I’ve actually finished something I think I’ll send it off to the local college geology department for review and maybe the local weatherman.

First let me clarify that the “Age of Text” applies to far more than texting on one’s phone.  It covers instant messaging (IM) and chat – whether it is Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or the communication channels in a massively multi-player online game (MMOG).

Ever since I started playing Asheron’s Call back on June 12th, 2000 my punctuation and grammar have gone to pot.  One of the first bad habits I picked up was using multiple periods to separate thoughts instead of a single period.  Another way of separating thoughts without using proper punctuation is the overuse of the hyphen. The third thing I did was quit using capital letters.  Now this one doesn’t bother me as much as I am idealistically opposed to the concept of uppercase letters anyways and have been for almost three decades. The are a waste of ink on paper and slow down typing due to the necessity of mashing on the Shift key…I digress.

Then I started omitting those little words that complete a sentence but aren’t really needed for comprehension. You know the one’s I’m talking about; a, it, the, of, etc.  After that I started incorporating numbers into my written communication – later became l8r, see you became cya.  Now abbreviations are something I have used for years, well before my gaming days.  I’ve used them in verbal communication so much that  I’ve had to educate people on what my abbreviations meant so they could understand what  I saying.

If that wasn’t enough I started allowing the infiltration of dude speak or 733t $p34|< (leet speak – leet being short for elite) into my non-gaming communication. I remember writing an email to my family members and being asked for an untranslated version. One of the last bad habits I picked up was intentionally misspelling word – teh and caek are two of the more common examples.

The more I write here – the more I realize my grammar sucks – I’m really gonna need a good editor….kk, cya, l8rs – haev a g00d n!t3……

I’ve got a bunch of books on writing – cause it is a lot easier to read about writing then it is to actually write.  I’ve read a number of them more than once, started most of them and plan on getting around to the rest.  The one thing I am not doing however is buying anymore – at least not until I finish something.

That doesn’t preclude me however from reading websites. So I am going to start my first links category thing here on the blog.  This is going to be short as I’m on a roll with a concept.