Another OC Questionnaire

Double date at the theme park! 💞🥰🎡

Requested by @anyspirit!

The Coalition

This most is mostly an info-dump about a part of Part Three (and Part Four) that I'm working on, but if you'd like, keep reading for spoilers!

The Western Zenestian Coalition

The Western Zenestian Coalition was founded with the sole purpose of recapturing Ir Nouzonif. The founding document dictates that, though it itself is not a governed nation, all states that participate must agree to build a militia, refuse to fight amidst themselves, and plan to recapture Ir Nouzonif under the leadership of the Three Heroes (Iziser, Taguchif, and Hota.) The founding member states were the state of Zenée and Tolftorrijv.

The white symbolizes Cognition (and, later, the White Army of Odapir.) The yellow symbolizes Doom, and the teal symbolizes Mind. These are the colors of the Three Heroes.

Speaking of the White Army, they seceded from Odapir before the coalition was founded, but they later join once they secure control of the border with Ir Nouzonif province. Another state is allowed to join with the approval of a simple majority of current member states.

The founding document also dictates that, upon the capture of Ir Nouzonif, all member states will be independent and recognized by all others. This is mostly for Zenée and Tolftorrijv, since they are states of Zeneste, and the White Army, who seceded from Odapir.

The Great Coalition

After the Hero of Earth joins the coalition in leadership, the states of Ytos, Itaush, and Atepsi, as well as the rebellion group in Pisteeks, the coalition grows into being most of the world, all with the goal of capturing Ir Nouzonif. Maybe I'll make a follow-up post about the Great Coalition.

A Proper Introduction

It only now occurs to me that I haven't properly introduced myself (or this blog!) Welcome. I'm happy to have y'all. I'm Lex (they/them) (18+), your local siren, programmer, writer, worldbuilder, conlanger, composer, and gardener. I speak with a bit of a Southern accent.

This is my main (and only, for now) blog, where I mostly post about my writing endeavors and worldbuilding "woes" (I make myself suffer for fun.) In the future, I may make blogs devoted to specific conlangs or concultures, but I will probably make a website for that, first. If that happens, I will post it here. I follow other blogs I like ad nauseam.

Additionally, I'm always taking translation suggestions for any of my conlangs in any of my WIPs. At the moment, I only have two WIPs, which I'll list below, but I'm really only working on one right now.

My WIPs are:

It Will Hurt: And There Will be no Fire - (On hold) A story about a vegan big-V Vampire, her sister, her cofee bar, and a lot of people who want her power for themselves.

Meiste - (Current) A story about several Heroes running around and trying to restore "magical balance" while also navigating political and economic strife.

Moreover, current conlangs I'm accepting translation ideas for:

Ipol (and Sinezo 'speer)

Odapir

Atepsi

Kwalinu and Kwaleynnũ

Ytos and Itaush

Katla-Khi

Bumpe Nende

Knál Bnú and Kanál Banáu

I'm normally down for connecting with writing buddies, so if you're interested, feel free to DM me! I am also willing to proofread/edit others' works, in addition to helping however I can. I can make websites, make languages, and make music lol.

I promise I wrote today, so there will also be an update following this. Take care, y'all.

I'm getting REALLY angry at all "motivational" books / blogs / posts who keep saying things like "Stop watching TV / playing *World of Warcraft* and you will have a few hours a week to create a business / write a book / whatever".

Because I don't watch TV. I watched like two EPISODES of TV series last year. And probably no more than 5 movies of which some I didn't even finish.

I'm not playing video games. I wish I could but I don't have enough time.

I'm already sleep-deprived so don't even start with "Get up an hour earlier".

And I still can't gather more than a few minutes a day to work on my personal projects.

And even if I *do* find some time, sometimes I'm too tired or overwhelmed to do anything more challenging than going to sleep or scrolling my phone. And before you start with "So stop scrolling social media and you'll be able to write", just DON'T. At those times my level of focus is so low that I couldn't put two words together.

And I still WANT to do those projects. I NEED to be creative for my mental health.

So here's to those who - like me - have daily goals to write TEN words. No, NOT ten thousand or even a hundred. Just ten words. One or two sentences. If I'm lucky and can write a few hundred, that's great! But ten words are FINE. Do you know how many words I wrote yesterday? THIRTEEN. I had literally a few minutes.

I'm often writing on my phone because turning my computer on would eat up all the time I have to write. I don't have any special ritual with scented candles or special tea because all this setup takes too much of my time.

I'm writing all this because maybe you need to hear this.

Maybe you need to hear that setting tiny little goals is OKAY. You don't need to write thousands of words a day.

Maybe you need to hear that watching a movie or scrolling your phone when you're overwhelmed is OKAY. Having free time does not equal being able to do a task, especially a creative one. You can't be always on your 100% capacity.

Maybe you need to hear that there's someone out there (me) who is doing even less than you. If you add 20 words to your current WIP today, you're still ahead of me. So if you see those writers making amazing progress each day, just think there's me who's struggling to do 1% of that.

And that's OKAY.

Day 48 (1:24) of rewriting my novel

Ok today I thought I'd share the Lozerief song:

Particularly when the rhythm solidifies somewhere around the 57 second mark, but the whole thing really. It captures her vibe immaculately, I think; both the badass side, and the yapping side. (She's a chronic yapper.)

I only say this because I start Part Four today with Lozef yapping about the Heroes' plan to retake Ir Nouzonif. I also reveal in this chapter that Lozef loved Dolgof ("Lozerief, ner zimouhes ezimouhes Dolgofenif?"/"Zimouhes, ner lougodenif zisi!") (Lozerief, did you love Dolgof?/Yes, and you're a cow (as an insult)).

Usual suspects: @quillswriting @oldfashionedidiot

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Day 19 (25 in base 7) of rewriting my novel.

I wrote another 1,000 words ish. I've been adding roughly 1,000 words per day, and as a result, I'm somewhere along the order of 24,000 or so words total.

Today, I also completed a grambank table for Ipol! A while ago, @dedalvs created a grambank spreadsheet for conlangs that has been very helpful for documenting my conlangs' grammars (so I don't forget them,) and today I finished a "draft" of a finalized one for Ipol.

I will link it here:

Google Docs

Ipol Grambank

Language Features Grambank Feature,Basic Category,Subcategory,Y/N,Conlang Description and Example(s) <a href="https://grambank.clld.org/par

Submit any questions about it that you might have, or submit translations! I'm always looking to expand the lexicon.

That's all for now.

EDIT: I mistakenly credited David J. Peterson with creating this spreadsheet, but he's just who I heard it from! It is actually by Jessie Peterson.

Edit 2: I knew David Peterson and Jesse Peterson were married, but I didn’t piece together that it was Jesse Peterson who created the grambank spreadsheet.

Hey! I'm David Peterson, and a few years ago, I wrote a book called Create Your Own Secret Language. It's a book that introduces middle grade readers to codes, ciphers, and elementary language creation. The age range is like 10-14, but skews a little bit older, as the work gets pretty complicated pretty quick. I think 12-13 is the best age range.

Anyway, I decided to look at the Amazon page for it a bit ago, and it's rated fairly well (4.5 at the moment), but there are some 1 star reviews, and I'm always curious about those. Usually they're way off, or thought the book was going to be something different (e.g. "This book doesn't teach you a thing about computer coding!"), but every so often there's some truth in there. (Oh, one not 1 star but lower rated review said they gave it to their 2nd grader, but they found it too complicated. I appreciate a review like that, because I am not at all surprised—I think it is too complicated for a 2nd grader—and I think a review like that is much more effective than a simple 10+ age range on the book.) The first 1 star rating I came to, though, was this:

Now calling a completely mild description of a teenage girl who has a crush on another girl controversial is something I take exception to, but I don't want to pile on this person. Instead I wanted to share how this section came to be in the book.

The book is essentially divided into four parts. The first three parts deal with different ciphers or codes that become more complicated, while the last part describes elementary language creation. The first three sections are each built around a message that the reader can decode, but with language creation, the possibilities are too numerous and too complicated, so there isn't an example to decode, or anything. It would've been too difficult.

For what the messages to decode are about, though, I could do, potentially, anything, so at first I thought to tie them into a world of anthropomorphic animals (an ongoing series of battles between cats and mice), with messages that are being intercepted and decoded. My editor rejected that. Then I redid it so that each section had an individual story that had to do with some famous work of literature. My editor rejected that as well. He explained that it needed to be something that was relevant to kids of the target age range. I was kind of at a loss, for a bit, but then I thought of a story of kids sending secret messages about their uncle who eats too many onions. I shared that, my editor loved it, and I was like, all right. I can do this.

The tough part for me in coming up with mini-stories to plan these coded messages around was coming up with a reason for them to be secret. That's the whole point of a code/cipher: A message you want to be sure no one else but the intended recipient can read in case the message is intercepted. With the first one, two kids are poking gentle fun at a family member, so they want to be sure no one else can read what they're writing. For the last one, a boy is confessing to a diary, because he feels bad that he allowed his cat to escape, but no one knows he did it (he does find the cat again). For the other, I was trying to think of plausible message-sending scenarios for a preteen/teen, and I thought of how we used to write notes in, honestly, 4th and 5th grade, but I aged it up a bit, and decided to have a story about a girl writing a note to her friend because she has a crush on another girl, and wants her friend's opinion/help.

Here's where the point of sharing this comes in. As I had originally written it, the girl's note to her friend was not just telling her friend about her crush, it was also a coming out note, and she was concerned what her parents would react poorly.

Anyway, I sent that off with the rest of my draft, and I got a bunch of comments back on the whole draft (as expected), but my editor also commented on that story, in particular. Specifically, he noted that not every LGBTQ+ story has to be a coming out story, the part about potential friction between her and her parents because of it was a little heavy for the book, and, in general, not every coming out story has to be traumatic.

That was all he said, but I immediately recognized the, in hindsight, obvious truth of all three points, and I was completely embarrassed. I changed it immediately, so that the story beats are that it's a crush, she's not sure if it'll be reciprocated, and she's also very busy with school and band and feels like this will be adding even more busy-ness to her daily life as a student/teen. Then I apologized for making such a blunder. My editor was very good about it—after all, that's what drafts and editors are for—and that was a relief, but I'm still embarrassed that I didn't think of it first.

But, of course, this is not my lived experience, not being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. This is the very reason why you have sensitivity readers—to provide a vantage point you're blind to. In this case, I was very fortunate to have an editor who was thinking ahead, and I'm very grateful that he was there to catch it. That editor, by the way, is Justin Krasner.

One reason I wanted to share this, though, is that while it always is a bit of a difficult thing to speak up, because there might be a negative reaction, sometimes there is no pushback at all. Indeed, sometimes the one being called out is grateful, because we all have blindspots due to our own lived experiences. You can't live every life. For that reason, your own experience will end up being valuable to someone at some point in time for no other reason than that you lived it and they didn't. And, by the by, this is also true for the present, because the lives we've lived cause us to see what's going on right before our eyes in different lights.

Anyway, this is a story that wouldn't have come out otherwise, so I wanted to be sure to let everyone know that Justin Krasner ensured that my book was a better book. An editor's job is often silent and thankless, so on Thanksgiving, I wanted to say thank you, Justin. <3

Y'know, it's weird how the Egbert house doesn't have a garage or a carport or anything. Surely a paragon of fatherly responsibility like Mr Egbert would know better than to simply leave his car exposed to the elements at all times.

Day 23 (32 in base 7) of Rewriting my Novel

I was on a plane again today, so I wrote a bunch. If I didn't crack 30,000 today, I'll crack 30,000 tomorrow. Yay!

I finally got around to writing an introduction for this blog, which was long overdue. I'm definitely not only shouting off into the void of binary while I continue to write.

Neither Odapir nor Ipol are to a point where I would feel comfortable publishing a dictionary, but they're to a point where I can translate as I need to and derive words on the fly. If I ever get to a point where I have 1,500-2,000 words, I'll publish a dictionary, then. Probably online.