Tag: fantasy

Volcanic Salamanders

The farther I travel from home, the more unique the creatures I locate become. When visiting the volcanic caves to the south on the mainland, I was introduced to these interesting creatures known as Volcanic Salamanders.

Their skin is a glistening white, making them quite difficult to spot amid the bright lava flows that they enjoy swimming through. They do, however, contrast nicely against the dark stones that jut out of the burning surface.

It was difficult to obtain a specimen for further examination due to what the locals call the silent death. I believe it is some sort of fume from the volcanic openings that is collected in the tight caves which is the deadly culprit.

Once obtained, I was surprised to find that these creatures that can walk through fire as a field were not just cool, but icy to the touch. The farmer assisting me told me of how his herd dog came to have a frozen tongue after attempting to eat one of them. If that is the case, it is little wonder the little things need all the heat they can find!

Other physical notes: they lie close to the ground, their legs splayed outwards more for swimming than walking, their eyes have a protective red film that seems to be a transparent heat shield, their faces are flat and wide, and their guts (as seen through their maw) appear to be full of swallowed magma. Most peculiarly, their teeth are very small and smooth.

With a diet of insects and fire berries that grow near the edge of their pools, I don’t find it too odd that their teeth would be smaller. However, there is something about how the smallest to the largest we could find all seem to possess the same variety: almost as if there was no difference between a juvenile and an adult. This seems unheard of, and there is a possibility that all the salamanders we see are prepubescent. Tales told by the local mention white dragons that emerge at a frequency of one every five years from the lava to expend heat into the air and to consume all it can. If true, it is possible this would be the adult form of a salamander.

Of final note, the salamanders do seem to require water in kind with every other species on the earth. After observing them for two days, I was able to ascertain how they were managing to get the liquid without plunging themselves into hypothermic shock by extinguishing their inner fires. Using their flat heads and backs, they are able to scoop or collect running water. Catching it by sucking in their flesh along their spines, the salamander will waddle back to their lava pools and wait. The heat turns the water to steam which the salamander is able to inhale without undue strain to its insides. Larger ones have been spotted making several trips and allowing smaller brethren to benefit from their labors.

I don’t know where life plans to take me next, but I do hope to return one day to see if the story of the dragon salamander is correct. Until then, I’ll continue to wander and record until I’ve seen all this world will show me.

Pixies

            Hello and welcome! Friday on my blog is for filling in stories about mythological creatures in my WIP universe. These will be delivered in character of a person who lives in universe and has been traveling around to different locations and examining the different species she locates while on her journey with the hope of creating better understanding and relations. I will even be providing hand drawn illustrations that stick to the impromptu journal entry style. Mostly because that’s where my talent as an artist peaks. I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading!

            I decided the first entry into this should be something I know plenty about, so I chose pixies. After all, the little ones are all over the garden and town. Most accept them as a part of life, albeit an occasionally nuisance one: though, I’m sorry to say that I’ve run into the occasional particularly curmudgeonly soul who goes out of his way to treat the poor creatures as if they were no more than the common horsefly. Perhaps a well learned exposition on the topic could make such a man think twice?

            Pixies were always my companions in youth, something that will surprise no one who knows of my rowdy ways. A beastly girl not adverse to trouble, for certain. My favorites were the water pixies with their iridescent blue-green wings with their waterproof scales. We would often get into tiffs with the blacksmith’s son who favored fire pixies and their red burning wings.

            Pixies, as I have found, do come in a kind for all of the fifteen known elements. Each kind a separate color and a different adjustment to their wings and, to a lesser extent, their physical forms. For example, metal pixies have their wings crafted of a strong metallic filament and often metallic patches ingrained into the external skin. It has been found as well that if two pixies of different kind mate, which does on rare occasion happen, their offspring will exhibit either one element of the parents or a shadow’s mix of the elements. There are no documented cases of partial mixing within pixies. This is thought, by many of the elders I’ve spoken to, to be because there is simply not that much room in a tiny pixie for such a dichotomy. This would seem to be supported by the pixie’s utter lack of ability to use traits outside of their own one element, unlike other creatures. However, it is also possible that it is simply because of the rarity of two different kin to intermarry as it only seems that their habitats intermingle when humans bring together a society.

            Physically, all pixies are humanoid with wings and come in male and female that average between three to five inches in height. In nature, it is easy to distinguish even from afar as males tend to be brighter while females are more vibrant. I suppose it is so the males can distract predators while females and young hide. It would seem animals too find it difficult to see pixies as much else than oddly shaped insects. In a mixed company, there can be some confusion. I have myself once mistaken a water male for an ice female and was not given an easy time forgetting it. My ear hurt for the rest of the day! Of final note, it is interesting to me that pixies are so unexpectedly strong no matter the element. A typical one can lift three to five times his mass while ones with a body trait have lifted entire people off the ground.

             Beyond appearances, pixies have been noted as possessing not only speech, but the capability to read and write. They also dress themselves and can, through instruction alone, learn tasks or follow orders. This places them well within the kingdom’s definition for personhood and I hope my dear friends will see soon the proper safeties afforded such a status. That would, however, open the door to loans, rent, and prosecution for some of their more heinous tricks: meaning there are some pixies who themselves are not too interested in the prospect.

Starting the Plot

Welcome back! I want to take a minute to thank everyone who has read my last piece. I was not expecting to see so many views in just a few days so early on!

In my last post, I talked about finding the Main Five of a story: the Character, Setting, Objective, Opponent, and Stakes. These are the foundational pieces of a story; you can’t build a novel, movie, game, or anything else without knowing the who, what, when, where, and why. Now that the foundation is set, where to go from here?

The simple answer is plot. The less simple question that follows it, how do you come up with the plot? Personally, I didn’t have a great deal of trouble with this step other than having far too many ideas for any sane person to work into a story. However, I’ve had friends who will know one or two things that they want to transpire in their final masterpiece but don’t know how to string them along and link them together coherently. Between some of my own trial and error and getting a few others involved, I think I have a good two-part suggestion for anyone facing similar struggles.

Premise and Synopsis

So the first step in part one is to create a premise and a synopsis to help guide you and keep you on track. That way, when you are pulling together the main plot points later you have a cut-and-dry guideline to keep you moving in the right direction. This way, unlike me in some early cases, you don’t wind up sobbing at the cutting table when you realize you’ve written three or four books at the same time and none of them are going anywhere near a coherent conclusion.

I found many different websites offering the premise and synopsis advice, which is where I came across the concept to mull over, but none of the ones I found had what I considered to be a satisfactory answer as to what these should encapsule. I knew they were supposed to be short (a sentence for the premise and a paragraph for the synopsis) but that was the primary advice. About your story and short… not so helpful as it would turn out.

Part of the problem may be me and my over-wordiness or my uncanny ability to get sidetracked into a spiraling cyclone of writing whenever I set my hand to the pen or keys. My sister has the opposite problem, as more of an artist than a writer, yet having the need to write the basics of a story so she can craft her comic around it, she doesn’t get nearly as overblown as I do: which is where I finally realized what the answer to the issue was. In trying to get my sister to write more than three words before coming back to ask again how to proceed, I introduced her to the premise and synopsis in the following way.

For your premise, write a sentence containing all five of your main five as they will be presented in your story. If your main character is Joe the paperboy, your setting is New York during the 1920’s, your objective is helping Joe’s mother with her cancer treatment, the opponent is the loan shark who works with one of the local mob bosses, and the stakes is Joe, his mom, and his dog will all die if he fails, your premise might look something like this:

Joe needs to help his mother pay for her cancer treatments but the local mafia’s loan shark wants more than a paperboy in 1920’s New York can afford, putting the lives of him, his mother, and their dog at stake.

Simple, right? “What about the synopsis, then?” you may ask. The best way to think of it is a paragraph detailing the relationship of each of the main five to the other. This will put you a step deeper in explaining your story while still limiting what you can put in it. This was a life saver for helping me to keep on track. Don’t worry about a love interest, don’t worry about the mentor, or anything else. Just stick to those main five in a small paragraph. Here’s another quick example of what I’m talking about.

Joe is a 15-year-old paperboy who lives in New York in the 1920’s. Joe’s mother has cancer and can’t afford her treatments on her small maid salary and Joe’s paperboy money. Against his mother’s warning, Joe goes to the local mafia to get a loan from their loan shark who just so happens to be the 20-year-old bully who has harassed Joe since he was three. The loan shark is a dangerous and evil man who wants to give the loan for 350% interest with only one year to pay it off. There is no way for him to pay it back, but Joe can’t stand the thought of losing his mother so he takes the deal. Now he has to pay off the loan quickly or the shark will kill him, his mother, and their dog for good measure.

That almost sounds like it could be on the back cover of a novel or movie, doesn’t it? And we only know five things with just a bit of added information to flesh out the idea. Now we can look at this for the rest of our drafting process to make sure our story stay’s on track. If we come up with a great idea for Joe to find a wife, but it won’t happen until he’s 18, that’s going in a sequel so put it aside. If you come up with a story about some of the mafia members who don’t really factor into that exact synopsis, their story belongs in a spinoff.

The Flurry

Step one of part one is complete, but I can’t very well leave it alone at that. Don’t worry, this next part is straightforward which is why I didn’t think this needed to be it’s own part or article. I’ve made the mistake of skipping this part, possibly because it’s often forgotten or assigned to a different stage of the process, but this is the best place for it in my personal experience.

After you have your premise and synopsis on paper, you probably have a great number of ideas buzzing around in your head. After all, before the antagonist was just a loan shark and now he’s a loan shark who has made your protagonist’s life miserable for twelve years. For that reason, it’s the best time to put those trains of thought to good use before they careen off the bridge of distraction into forgetfulness cavern or get turned around and wrecked in the tunnels of overthinking plot classifications.

That’s why for the second half of this tip I want you to do the exercise of many names at this point. Some call it brain storming, other info-dumping. I’ve heard it called the morning minutes, word vomit, and a litany of other monikers. It’s like icee-pops: everyone calls them something different. The concept is completely the same in all instances. You set a timer for five, ten, or fifteen minutes (the most you can tolerate in one sitting) and you write.

Take those five foundational stones and the premise and synopsis mortar that bind them together and write about them. Just ideas. Why is the loan shark a bully? How long has mom had cancer? Why does the loan shark hate dogs? Where is dad? Why didn’t Joe find a better solution to his problem? Whatever questions come to mind, answer them. Don’t worry about anything like the hero’s journey, or three act structures, or anything that will come later. Just write like you took fifteen minutes on the first question and have fifteen minutes to answer the last three.

That is part one of the two part plot point outline: premise, synopsis, flurry of writing. The next article on Monday will pull together what to do from that point. Yes, I did say Monday and that is because Fridays are my days for building up my bestiary! I’ve always loved mythical creatures and as a fantasy author my works do and will include so many of them! I want to have a place to display my takes on these myths and legends, and will likely include other fantasy elements later on like my plants, races, languages, worlds, and the like.

Thank you again for reading! I hope to see you around and to pass on more of my writing tips and stories.

Getting Started

Hello and welcome to my writing blog. I’m excited to start this project, putting myself and my ideas out for the world to see! My goal is to post at least three articles a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ll be doing a monthly book review, starting with some classics from my childhood before branching out into newer works hopefully by other small authors like myself. I also plan to have discussions about topics in books and writing, as well as snippets from my own works. My own works will mostly be a bestiary of the different mythical creatures and fantasy races in my stories.

Hope you all enjoy!