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Water Road: Wednesday: The Neldathi Clans

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

As I mentioned last week, the Neldathi, who live south of the Water Road in the universe of The Water Road, are physically quite distinct from the Altrerians who live to the north. They’re different species, in fact, although they can produce infertile offspring. When it comes to how their societies work, the differences are even more pronounced.

While the Altrerians are organized into what we might call nation states (or city states, at least in the case of the Arbor), the Neldathi are organized into clans. Each clan is ruled by a thek (or chief), selected in various ways, from based on heredity to something more like democracy (without the coin flips). Some clans are patriarchal, some matriarchal, others more egalitarian. In other words, there’s a good deal of variety to how each clan is set up.

There are several other positions of authority in Neldathi clans aside from theks. Two of the most important are War Leader (which is just what it sounds like) and Master of the Hunt, each of which is responsible for ensuring the clan’s survival. Speakers of Time are individuals who become walking storehouses of knowledge – libraries with legs, essentially – and pass on the clan’s history, traditions, and laws. Finally, kels act as judges, settling disputes between clan members.

The Neldathi are nomads, which is why they don’t have “states” as we (or the Altrerians) think of them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t territorial. Each clan has a Great Circuit, a route along which they regularly move through the year. Each guards its circuit jealously. Three clans have circuits that cover the northernmost ground, near the Water Road itself – the Dost, Kohar, and Haglein. Three more stick toward the southern coast and the Islander cities – the Mughein, Elein, and Sheylan. That leaves five others – the Chellein, Akan, Volakeyn, Uzkaleyn, and Paleyn – who roam the most mountainous ground in the middle.

The Great Circuit’s aren’t defined with great particularity and clans don’t necessarily travel them in regular cycles. As a result, it’s not uncommon for neighboring clans to run into one another, which leads to violence. For example, the Volakeyn and the Akan have circuits that border one another. If they happen to wind up in the same space at the same time, they’ll fight over resources, same as anybody else. Neldathi don’t fight wars of conquest – they’d have no means of securing territory – but they do fight.

In fact, the Neldathi have a history of long-simmering feuds between clans, for several reasons. One is that if clans meet when circuits overlap, that frequently means resources are limited in that area and one side is bound to lash out. Another is that the same clans routinely interact with each other, breeding bad blood. Finally, the Speakers of Time tell stories of glory won in battle and of the evil done to their clans by their enemies. That allows feuds to grow and fester between certain clans.

That last feature, in particular, provides an opening that might be exploited by outsiders.

When Magic Isn’t

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

I recently got around to reading the first of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series, The Final Empire. It’s pretty good (full Weekly Read coming up later? Perhaps!). One of the distinguishing features of the series is the system of “magic” that it uses. The use of quotes is intentional, because about two-thirds of the way through the book I started to wonder if Sanderson was really dealing in magic at all.

The magic in Mistborn revolves around metals and what people can do with them. Allomancers can ingest small portions of certain metals, “burn” them, and thereby enhance their physical and mental powers. “Mistings” can burn only one particular metal, while “Mistborn” can burn all of them. Mistings are useful. My particular favorites were the “soothers,” who are able to calm or inflame another’s emotions to make them more cooperative. Mistborn, on the other hand, and basically superheroes, able to leap tall keeps in single bounds, possess extraordinary strength, and heal wounds more quickly.

Actually, the better analogy would be to characters in a video game. Indeed, one reviewer knocked Sanderson’s system for “sometimes feel[ing] a little like a video game trick (press X-Y-X-X to burn steel!). And, honestly, once you get past the “this is what this metal does” exposition, the constant references to characters burning this and pulling on that get old. It’s work-a-day, it’s formulaic it’s . . .

Not all that magical.

Which isn’t, inherently, a bad thing. I really like Allomancy (and the related Feruchemy that plays a role, too) – it’s certainly different than casting spells, waving around wands and such. But it does call for different characters wielding it. “Working magic” is my mind conjures someone like the wrinkled, slow, puppet-based Yoda of the first Star Wars trilogy, rather than the CGI-spawned ass kicker of the prequels. It takes some getting used to.

And it can seem kind of out of place for what is, after all, supposed to be fantasy. I’m not one to suggest fantasy has to have magic – far from it! The Water Road trilogy has not a whit of magic in it. But if you are going to build a world with magic, shouldn’t be a bit more magical and mysterious? Indeed, as one commenter put it elsewhere:

I’m inclined to label Sanderson’s Mistborn as hard sci-fi, because of the way he fleshes out the abilities of allomancers. This might seem odd, because the author really makes it look like magic. But the way they invoke their power, the limitations on its usage and strict adherence to the framework of physical laws that we the readers are already familiar with, strike me as less magical, and more of an empirically-discovered science, and thus some form of sci-fi rather than fantasy.

Putting to one side the hard/soft discussion, that sounds about right. Part of what makes magic special is that it’s inherently vague, squishy, and unpredictable. It shouldn’t work all the time, just because you know how to work with the constituent parts. It’s about corralling the elements and playing with the very stuff of existence, after all, not just figuring out how to use the natural world to do things better.

Or not. One of the great things about fantasy is that it’s only bounded by your imagination. I don’t think I’d come up with a system like Sanderson’s, but his works for his world and it’s consistent. It’s hard to ask more than that, even if, maybe, I do.

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Water Road: Wednesday: The Neldathi & Their Lands

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Although the Altrerians lend their name to the land in which The Water Road takes place, it’s not theirs alone. The land to the south of the Water Road is quite different from that to the north and includes a very different species of inhabitants.

For starters, the Neldathi don’t have green skin, but blue, although some have complexions that near completely white. They’re still humanoid, but where the Altrerians are smaller than your average human, the Neldathi are bigger. For a sense of scale, Rob Gronkowski would on the small side of average for a Neldathi. Thus they’re strong, but also slower of foot and, to the Altrerians, slower of thought, as well. More on them as a people next week.

The lands south of the Water Road are defined by a series of rugged mountain ranges, all named by and after Altrerians, although very few of them live there. The mountains begin to rise just south of the river, becoming fearsome snow-capped peaks in short order. The ranges often run up against one another, sometimes parallel to each other. Some of the mountains are covered with great stands of timber. It’s forbidding territory, a place that’s referred to in curses and hushed tones by Altrerians.

Because the continent of Altreria is in the southern hemisphere, the further south one goes the colder it gets. The lands south of the Water Road, therefore, are frequently blanketed in snow, making existence there difficult. Neither the climate nor terrain lends itself to the kind of settlements that developed to the north. Unlike the north, there are no great cities in the south.

Which is not to say there are no cities at all. When the land nears the coast, warm currents provide a more hospitable climate. In four locations along the southern coast, the Slaisal Islanders have built cities, way stations for use during their trade with the Neldathi. The Islander cities are the one place where the Neldathi clans share space, along with a small population of Islander sailors and the occasional Altrerian, mostly traders and the like – or at least they appear to be.

Water Road Wednesday: Altreria & Altrerians

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In the universe of The Water Road the name “Altreria” carries several responsibilities.

For one thing, Altreria is the name of the land in which the story takes place, by which I mean all of it. It is that world’s equivalent to “Earth,” for lack of a better comparison.

Altreria also refers to the world’s only major landmass. It’s a continent that runs roughly north to south (think of Australia turned on its side and twisted a bit) and sits in the southern hemisphere, so traditional American/European directional notions (north is cold, south is warm) are reversed. There’s also a chain of islands, the Slaisal Islands, off the northeast coast. The Water Road itself runs from west to east – from Great Basin Lake to the Bay of Sins – across its width about two-third’s of the way down the continent. To the north live Altrerians, with Neldathis to the south. More of them later, of course.

Altreria also refers to the land north of the Water Road – hence the reason those who live there are called Altrerians (if you’re noticing that they seem to control the vocabulary of geography in this world, you’re right). That land’s most obvious distinguishing features are two other rivers, the River Innis and the River Adon, that run north to south through the middle third of the continent. North of the source of those rivers are the Badlands – a dry, dusty, and hot region with very little in it.

Those rivers also help define the political landscape of Altreria. To the east, between the River Adon and the coast, is the Kingdom of Telebria (fully the “Bonded Realms of Greater & Lesser Telebria” – they’re a bit picky about it). Southern Telebria is home to the Endless Hills, which lend their name to the second book of the trilogy. To the west, between the River Innis and the coast, are the United Guilds of Altreria. In between is a dense forest known as the Arbor, which consists of numerous city states gathered together in a confederation. Again, more of those later.

Altreria has several major cities of note. In Telebria, on the east coast is Sermont on the Sea, the kingdom’s capital. In the west, Innisport, the largest of the Guilder cities, lays at the confluence of the River Innis and the Water Road. Finally, there’s Tolenor, a fairly recent settlement, a planned city built on an island in the Bay of Sins. It’s home to the Triumvirate, of which – yet again – more later!

As for the inhabitants of Altreria, they’re not human. No one in The Water Road is. They’re bald humanoids, a bit smaller than we are with skin that’s green, of one hue or another. Generally those born deep in the Arbor have dark green skin, while those born closer to the Water Road wind up nearly white, with just hints of light green. They’re not particularly strong, but they’re quick, cunning, and good strategists.

That’s not all (obviously!), of course, but that gives you a taste of the world of The Water Road. Or at least the lay of the land, so to speak.

Water Road Wednesday: Je Suis Napoleon!

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

“Wait a second,” I hear you saying. “I thought you wrote fantasy and the like. What’s Napoleon got to do with The Water Road?”

A fine question, one that comes down to that dreaded word (by some) – inspiration. As I’ve written before, ideas come from all over, often when you’re not expecting them. The key is having that flash of creativity in your brain that makes you think, “there’s a story there” when you see it.

One of my regular stops on the Internet is Wikipedia’s front page. It’s got several blocks of featured articles, one of which is a “today in history” thing. It lists about a half dozen historical events, in addition to a few holidays. I usually skim it, see nothing all that interesting, and move on.

One day, one of the events listed was either the date that Napoleon left Elba to return to France or the date he arrived in France. Either way, it was the start of the Hundred Days, which would end at Waterloo and with Napoleon’s second exile (it stuck that time). Now, this was not news to me – my undergrad degree was in history and the area that most interested me was 19th-century Europe and the rise of the nation states. Yet, somehow, for some reason, something struck me that had never struck me before.

Which was this – Napoleon’s arc of ravaging Europe, being defeated, being exiled, then returning for a sequel – sounds just like the bad guy in a fantasy series! After all, why kill or adequately imprison the villain if you need him for the rest of the trilogy? Honestly, it’s almost on the level of a James Bond villain’s diabolical scheme to kill Bond that, of course, always fails. Hanging would have been quicker and easier, but not left open the sequel!

Which is not to say that The Water Road trilogy is based on the life of Napoleon or that it tracks his defeat, exile, return, and defeat again. But that was one of the jumping off points. Things, naturally, got more complicated from there. That’s one of the great things about writing fantasy – when an idea comes along, the only thing that limits you as a writer is your imagination.

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Water Road Wednesday: What Is a “Water Road” Anyway?

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

Welcome to 2016, the year of The Water Road! Every Wednesday I’ll be providing some previews, background, and “behind the scenes” information on my upcoming fantasy saga, due for release beginning in the spring. Let’s start with the logical place – what is a “water road”?

To begin with the Water Road is a river. Not just any river, mind you, but one that is the primary geographical feature of Altreria. It runs almost the entire width of the continent and is navigable all the way. It divides the two races that live in Altreria – the Altrerians live to the north, the Neldathi to the south. They’re related, but very different.

Next, The Water Road is the name of a book, my next novel and first in a trilogy. It’s a story about two women from opposite sides of that river who discover a shocking secret about the way the Altrerians and the Neldathi have treated one another. What they do after (independently) learning this secret changes their world forever.

As I said, that’s the first volume in a trilogy, which is also called (zing me for lack of creativity here), The Water Road Trilogy. It’s composed of The Water Road, The Endless Hills, and The Bay of Sins. In addition, there will be two shorter works that fit in between the novels, The Badlands War and The Trails of the Arbor. More on those stories, the world in which they’re set, and the people who inhabit them as the year goes on.

Finally, it’s a excellent song of very fine album of the same name (that is, The Water Road), by UK proggers Thieves’ Kitchen. It’s got a dark, brooding quality to it (it’s all the strings and Mellotron), but the theme that pops up here and there really soars, particularly when the guitar player gets a hold of it. It’s not an inspiration for the books, but the name stuck in my head. Credit where credit’s due.

TKTWR

All Vocabulary Is Good Vocabulary

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

There’s no point in lying – I’m fond of profanity. I don’t trot it out all the time (I’ve managed to never let expletives fly in a legal brief, for instance), but I don’t lock it away as something evil, wicked, or never to be said. It creeps into my writing sometimes (much to the consternation of my mother-in-law – but she came around!).

More than anything else, I’ve always thought that deciding not to use certain words because they were “bad” is just silly. I take the position Henry Drummond, the William Jennings Bryant doppelganger in Inherit the Wind, does:

I don’t swear just for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should use all the words we’ve got. Besides, there are damn few words that anybody understands.

Sometimes “fuck” really does say it all in a way that something more elevated just can’t. It always aggravates me when courts bowdlerize cursing in opinions if they’re quoting something a defendant said – if it’s important enough to report, it’s important enough to report accurately!

But what really drives me nuts is the superiority that those who forgo cursing wield over the rest of us, particularly the argument that cursing is a sign of a limited vocabulary. The implication, of course, is that we’re just simple minded beasts, not refined human beings.

Turns out that might be complete fucking bullshit!

A bigger vocabulary is a bigger vocabulary — no matter whether you are quoting Shakespeare or cursing like a sailor.

This is the takeaway from a study recently published in the journal Language Sciences, which finds that fluency in ‘taboo words’ is correlated with having a larger vocabulary in general.

As the article points out, this goes against common sense (which, in my experience, is mostly wrong anyway) and some prior research, but it seems solid:

These findings suggest the idea that ‘fluency is fluency,’ as the researchers write. People who could recall a lot of bad words also tended to be more eloquent in general. In other words, swearing is not necessarily a sign that a person has a limited vocabulary or can’t think of anything better to say.

Some other interesting findings include that the amount of cursing isn’t linked to how religious people are and that the foul-mouthed tend to be more neurotic and less agreeable, but also more open to new experiences. In other words:

swearing is mostly a vehicle for expressing strong emotion – anger, frustration, derogation, surprise and elation — among people who care less about who they might offend. Cursing is an intense, succinct and powerful way of expressing yourself, even if some people find it unpleasant.

Fuckin’ A. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

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Back In the Saddle

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Hey, everybody! Did you miss me? Now that November’s become December, it’s time to get back to blogging. First us, here’s what I’ve been up to for the past thirty days:

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That’s right, my National Novel Writing Month campaign was a smashing success, with a grand total of 66.744 words written for The Bay of Sins. I got into a groove right away and averaged about 2200 words a day, about 500 more than necessary to meet the 50,000 words in a month goal. Not bad, considering I have a day job and everything.

Actually, this is by far the best year I’ve ever had. I’ve usually struggled across the 50k line on the 29th or 30th. My previous best was when I did the first draft of The Water Road and hit 55,000 in the month. So 66,744 is a hefty improvement.

What made it easier this year? For one thing, The Bay of Sins is the final part of a trilogy, so it’s all downhill. I’m working with characters I know well (for the most part) and in familiar locales, so the learning curve that usually goes with a new story is pretty much gone. For another, this is the first thing of this length I’ve sat down to write since releasing stuff out into the world this year. That makes it easier, believe it or not.

Having said that, there’s much more to go before The Bay of Sins is finished. Hopefully, I’ll knock out the rest of this draft before Christmas.

Look for way more info about The Water Road – the entire series – with Water Road Wednesdays, coming in 2016!

“Quotas” – A (Very) Short Story

/ JD Byrne / 4 Comments

I’ve written stories that are lots of different lengths. Moore Hollow’s a novel, albeit a fairly short one. The books of The Water Road trilogy, on the other hand, will all clock in at over 110,000 words a piece. Then, of course, in The Last Ereph and Other Stories there are stories ranging from just over four pages to nearly twenty.

But I’ve never written a story in 100 words before. Until author Eric Douglas (who interviewed me way back in April), issued a challenge to write a 100-word story for Halloween. Not less than 100 words, not about 100 words – 100 words exactly. Holy hell, was it hard! I had to bag my first attempt, but I really like what I wound up with.

Here it is – “Quotas”

“Nothing personal,” the demon said, squatting in a fetid cloud of hot vapor. “Just business.”

“You’re trying to take my soul!” I tried to back up, but the tunnel wall blocked any escape.

“It’s nothing to do with you. Trust me.” The demon waved an oozing appendage at him.

“You’re a demon!”

“Then don’t.” The demon shrugged, in the way it would if it had shoulders. “Can’t stop some things, regardless.”

“Like?”

“Death. Taxes. Such as it’s the end of the month,” the demon said, long forked tongue slipping over its calloused, slimy lips. “You know. Quotas.”

The demon sprang.

Happy Halloween!

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Be sure and check out Eric’s website for links to all the other 100-word stories he got!

The Incredible Shrinking Second Draft

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I have a weird way of handling second drafts, maybe a unique way.

It grew out of my day job, in which I sometimes have to synthesize argument originally made by other lawyers into a final brief. I quickly decided that just dumping someone else’s words into a brief and doing a quick edit wouldn’t work – we all have a different voice, after all. Just dumping was inelegant at best and headache inducing at worst.

Instead, I take the section provided by someone else and rewrite it in my own voice. The final product includes the same information, the same argument. But it sounds of a piece with what came before and what comes after. That’s the theory, at least.

I imported that system into my fiction writing. I take the first draft, print it out (usually as a PDF these days), then work my way back through it, rewriting from word one. That allows me to do a couple of things. Most importantly, it allows me to focus on the words themselves, the really bottom level grunt work of writing. That’s because I already know what happens to whom and where, so I don’t have to worry about plot stuff.

The other thing it does is it lets me fill in gaps that occurred in the first draft. Sometimes they’re gaps I didn’t realize at the time but that, as I go through it again at a brisker pace, make themselves known. Other times it’s because I was stuck on the first draft and didn’t want things to grind to a halt completely and I left myself a note to add something or expand something.

Either way, the usual has been for the manuscript to grow in the second draft. Moore Hollow was just over 50,000 words in the first graft, but grew to about 65,000 in the end. The Water Road, the first volume of the trilogy I have schedule for next year, grew from about 110,000 words to 135,000 in the end.

Which is what makes my experience with The Endless Hills kind of odd. This is the second book of The Water Road trilogy, and it wound up with about 127,000 words in the first draft. But after the second draft (which I finished last weekend), it’s actually dipped a bit, to 123,000. And that’s including a couple of new scenes or chapters that I had left behind in the first draft.

What the heck happened? A couple of things, both of them good (I hope).

First, I’ve become very sensitive about using dialog tags and trying to clean them out of my writing. For those not in the know, dialog tags are those things like:

“This is a dialog tag,” JD said, to nobody whatsoever.

There’s frequently skirmishes on writers forums about the need for them at all and whether, if you use them, you should just stick to “said” and let that be that. Earlier on I went the John Scalzi route and tried to use “said” exclusively and all the time. I think it goes back to my legal writing where ambiguity about who is speaking could be lethal to a legal argument. But for fiction tags can sometimes get in the way, particularly if you’ve only got a two-way conversation going on. So I took a lot of that stuff out on the second draft.

Second, I’ve also been trying to pare down my writing as a I go forward. Trying to do more with less, I guess you’d say. I’ve never been the most verbose of writers, but I’m not exactly Hemmingway brief, either. I think I’m getting better about tightening things up without sacrificing what’s important.

One of the things more experienced writers will tell you (if you listen) is that writing is as much craft as art. Becoming a better writer is partly down to learning how to do things better, from a mechanical point of view. Sitting down and writing something ten years after you started writing completely should be easier and be a better product when it’s finished.

At least that’s what I’m hoping!