A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 3

[swan_tower]

My third notebook opens with probably the most sustained example of that conlang I was making up. I won’t translate it, because the text I chose to put there is kind of dumb, but here’s the text itself:

Tíolaic’inn cen

eachtread t’ilith tdeabhíu
ceid tasteal’siad aseo
éis misiuil’siad é conuirtithidh
isin caith’gabhain’siadirh
fara raoneidh cen rannatheidh

Fóire rhiai cosin’siad liate
bronn’iade cenath aithedhé crínnacheidh
élaineí h’isini ómhead h’eseandai

Déarté éis sithé.

So if you were curious what the conlang looked like in action, there you go. It’s . . . well, it doesn’t look so O_O if you know Irish phonology. But if you don’t, well, it has the Irish problem of “holy god what’s with those consonant combinations why are you so in love with the letter H.” (Answer: lenition!)

The next thing in the notebook is . . . an outline? I guess? For that Highlander fanfic. I think I must have been pretending to take notes in class, because that’s the only explanation for the weird formatting. Quite a lot of this notebook is devoted to that story, where it isn’t filled with calculus notes instead, or what I think was an abortive attempt at a college application essay, or translations of the Aeneid, or me writing stuff in Spanish to keep my hand in after I stopped studying it. Judging by the story bits in here, I did not know Japanese history all that well back then — but for an eighteen-year-old in Texas, I clearly knew more than your average swan, which is nice to realize.

In semi-related Highlander content, I also ran a (short-lived) play-by-post game for a seven players, which might have survived longer had I not been ambitious and decided to start off with the origin stories for all of the PCs. This mean I was attempting to run seven simultaneous single-player games set in pre-contact Mesoamerica, medieval England, later medieval Transylvania, Heian Japan, Tudor England, Tokugawa Japan, and the Crimean War. I would consider this a ludicrous challenge now; attempting it back then was sheer hubris.

Three new things appear in this volume. First, we have what I think are some of my earliest attempts at cartography: very messy sketches solely intended to help me figure out spatial relationships, rather than to serve any aesthetic purpose. Second, we’ve got several examples of something I used to do as a writing exercise, which was to take a movie or TV scene I knew really well and write it out as prose. I actually used this same exercise with my students when I taught creative writing, because I think it gives you valuable practice in thinking about which visual or emotional details you want to include and how you’re going to integrate them with the dialogue. Do you give the whole line and then the description? Description and then line? Or do you break up the dialogue with a bit of narration, as a kind of punctuation to control the pace of delivery?

And third, we’ve got the earliest bits I’ve yet uncovered of what at the time were known as “the doppelanger story” and “the outlaw story.” The former, of course, became Warrior (originally titled Doppelganger). The latter came to be known as The Kestori Hawks, a trunked novel that will only ever see the light of day if I decide it has merit as a teaching text — at which point I will put out an ebook of it with annotations about how you can learn valuable lessons on novel-writing by looking at where that book failed. I was apparently putting in a lot of effort at that point to learn how to visualize and describe characters, though, which I had quite forgotten.

So that is Volume Three! Stay tuned for Volume 4 at a later date — I still have a lot of these notebooks left.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[pameladean]

These are just great posts. I'm really enjoying them.

P.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying them myself -- good to know that other people are, too!

[pameladean]

I imagine it would be useful and entertaining to you to do them even if nobody else read them at all, but I love anything about writerly growth and origins, and you seem to have been very well organized. My own juvenilia are much more chaotic.

P.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Trust me, these notebooks are NOT as well organized as I make it sound. They literally contain things like a fanfic scene that flows around me having scribbled "I HATE CALCULUS" in giant capital letters followed by some random bit of the Aeneid.

[sovay]

So if you were curious what the conlang looked like in action, there you go.

I was, thank you! The use of the fada also makes it look very Irish. I can't tell if the apostrophes are morphologically plausible or if they are fantasy apostrophes.

How is it as a conlang, looked at now?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The apostrophes could just as easily be hyphens; they're orthographic glue for the grammatical components.

I haven't re-read the grammar in depth (that's a computer file), but I think it's a decent if unimaginative Indo-European-based system. With cleanup, it could work.

[sovay]

I haven't re-read the grammar in depth (that's a computer file), but I think it's a decent if unimaginative Indo-European-based system. With cleanup, it could work.

That's pretty cool.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

The letter "h" is why I decided to not even bother trying to learn Irish.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It might not have fixed the problem for you (since the phonetics are still a mess), but there's a variant orthography that uses an overdot to mark lenition instead of a following h. For my own curiosity, I rewrote that text to suit:

Tíolaic’inn cen

eaċtread t’iliṫ tdeaḃíu
ceid tasteal’siad aseo
éis misiuil’siad é conuirtiṫiḋ
isin caiṫ’gaḃain’siadiṙ
fara raoneiḋ cen rannaṫeiḋ

Fóire ṙiai cosin’siad liate
bronn’iade cenaṫ aiṫeḋé crínnaċeiḋ
élaineí h’isini óṁead h’eseandai

Déarté éis siṫé.

If I ever resurrect this, I might go that route. (But I'll probably tone down my use of both lenition and acute accents so we don't approach Vietnamese levels of diacritic density.)