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I dread this, but it's for the best

ritaxis: (hat)
Sunday, March 3rd, 2013 10:00 am

I have to find and replace a word that has been bothering me from the beginning, which I have used maybe hundreds of times . . .

There's a particular wooded wetland that is central to the early part of the story, and another one which is central to the last part of the story. The English word for this type of wetland, which is an upland forest only seasonally flooded, is "carr:" but people don't really know that word, so it doesn't add anything to comprehension to use it, so I'm not attached to it though I have been using it for 165 thousand words worth of story. But it's been bothering me more and more because it doesn't conform to my orthography rules for place names. I have eliminated the letter C and the letter J because they are too confusing in my context, and replaced them wherever they show up with less unruly letters, because fantasy novel readers can be heavily distracted by questions like this (witness my discomfort with this word, for example).


I thought of spelling it Karr instead of Carr but I decided that wasn't really accomplishing anything except making it look German, which is not a tragedy but not at all useful. So I had a flash of genius and asked the Prague contingent for a word, and now I have one (luh), and now I have to at least eventually change the many many occurrences of Carr to Luh.

This is not the first time I have had to do this, but the other times I wasn't so deep into the book.

At least I'm having fun again, now that Yanek is Discovering His Real Heritage and so on.

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My research, let me show you it

ritaxis: (Default)
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 08:52 pm
Where streams of base-rich water run through bog, these are often lined by strips of fen, separating "islands" of rain-fed bog.

I picture the whole duchy of Steibrenner in this way: to the south, the foothills of the mountains (bearing the rocky streams for which everything and everybody is named, almost): to the north, lowlands leading eventually to a river which Steinbrenner gets none of. But the rocky streams of the north join into somewhat larger streams running through the marshland on their way to the river. Obviously the streams don't all make it to the river. So Steinbrenner proper is fen, drained fen, carr, and a bit of semi-upland meadow and a few trees here and there. (Carr is a wooded fen).

I'm trying to figure out exactly what the natural resources survey crew Yanek is detailed to five minutes ago (but no, it's not an intruder, but while I knew he'd be doing this, I hadn't decided what they were actually doing there). Sometimes I think they're prospecting for copper. Other times coal. Other times I keep thinking about that carr, and all the juicy stuff it keeps throwing up -- maybe some plant product.

Electric guitars are preferentially made of alder wood, because of the bright tone it provides. I don't think I can use that for a backwater degraded "empire" federation of uncooperative principalities trying to get things they need for an upcoming military adventure.
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