I did manage to edit the first 4 chapters of Darwin & the Halfling Hunt. Just happened to get completed on Thursday when I took a day off from work for a few doctor visits. This story moves faster than I remembered, but the whole thing revolves around Darwin being chased across a continent, ocean, and more. Throughout, he has to complete a special quest alongside some unique new allies. One had a secret that is made obvious from the start, but only if people read Legends of Windemere. These series are supposed to be connected, so I need to have connections. With any luck, I can get more editing done this week once the break starts.
Speaking of Legends of Windemere, I noticed a few reviews disappear. Good to see I can’t gain any new ones, but the old ones can vanish. Think a few vanished on all of my books too. At this point, it isn’t even kicking me when I’m down. More like poking a corpse since I can’t get any momentum. At least I’m having fun editing when I have the energy.
That’s the health issue going on too. The weather going from warm to cold didn’t help, but there’s been odd timings for about a year. As soon as I reach a weekend or break, I wake up feeling like I’m about to die. Lethargy, headaches, body aches, funky blood oxygen levels, fatigue, vertigo, and the list goes on. Since I got myself tested for a few things recently, I realized this round wasn’t caused by a disease. I stumbled onto the concept of ‘leisure sickness’, which is supposedly when a person under a lot of stress gets a day to relax and their body takes on illness symptoms. Basically, the adrenaline being used to get through work/life stresses goes away and the body realizes its in bad shape. The person can even catch real diseases because their immune system might just plunge into the red zone. Definitely sounds like what keeps happening to me and why I’m not as productive on weekends as I used to be.
Work has been crazy in a way that I can’t explain. Definitely ending most days dragging myself back home. Last week and this week had special events too, which throws our kids off at times. Next week is only 3 days before Easter Break. I’m sure that’s going to be rather chaotic at times. At least it’s only 3 days, so I should be able to muscle through the whole thing. I’m signing up to help with a special basketball team as TA support in April and May, which means even more mayhem. Guess my editing will take place primarily over the summer at this rate.
Nothing else of major importance happened this week. I think. My son and I used our time to watch the original 2 Ghostbusters movies and ‘Afterlife’ in order to prepare for ‘Frozen Empire’ tonight. Been a long time since we went to the movies, so we’re both excited. I’m also nearing the end of ‘Resident Alien’ Season 2 on Netflix. That’s a fun show, but it took me a while to really get into it. For some reason, I’m enjoying season 2 more and I think it’s because the alien gets to be more mouthy with the humans. It’s funnier. Not a popular opinion from what I’ve seen though.
With the break coming up, I’m hoping to relax and get some work done. Thursday is an outing into NYC to meet up with friends. Might end up being a birthday thing on some level for me since that’s coming up. After that, I hope to get more editing done since it’s supposed to be cold. If I can get a minimum of 7 chapters edited then I’ll be making great progress. Darwin & the Halfling Hunt has 19 chapters and getting the remaining number into single digits would be great. Maybe get all of the May blog posts done too and pick another anime to watch. I want to pick a shorter anime because ‘Great Teacher Onizuka’ debuts on Netflix on April 1st. Doubt that sentence makes sense to most people reading this.
Only other thing this week had was a rice bowl failure. Broccoli did not work because it got too mushy. It’ll be on the ‘no’ list with sugar snap peas. So, the only rice bowl combos that are working are edamame, roasted corn, pickled baby corn, and pineapple with the constants of tofu and pickled ginger. I can’t think of anything else to try, but maybe it’s enough. I’m doing these more than the salads because the yield is less and I keep having short work weeks. I mean, it’s a 3 day, 4 day, 4 day, 5 day, and then spring break. Kind of wild.
Goals of the week?
Ghostbusters, Pokemon Go, and relaxing with son this weekend.
Edit more Darwin & the Halfling Hunt
Get May blog posts done.
Guess work should be on the list.
Thursday outing with friends. I heard Chinatown mentioned.
Finish watching ‘Resident Alien’.
Start watching something else.
Try to stay warm since winter decided to stick around.
Work on a puzzle when need a break from screen or page.
What you see above is a real plant from mythology? Okay, that sentence didn’t make the most amount of sense. The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary comes from Central Asia. Its fruit was a sheep, which would graze on the area around the plant. Both would die when there was no more foliage to eat. The dead lamb could be eaten and its blood was sweet like honey. The wool could be used like cotton, which might be the origin of this legend.
So, you can see that fictional flora can be pretty strange. They aren’t as rigid as one may think and can be mixed with fauna. So, why not have some fun with the concept.
Would you create a deadly or helpful fictional plant?
What would it do?
Do you think putting some attention to plant life can help even an Earth-based book?
The lonely man watches
As the crowded man plays
With parents, wife, and child
He envies the connections
That he lacks within his life
He wanders off alone
With time he wants to share
The crowded man watches
As the lonely man relaxes
With no one to invade his space
He envies the quiet solitude
That he can never find at home
He is dragged away by them
With no time to call his own
I’m probably being fairly ambitious thinking I can come up with 7 decent tips. I mean, we’re talking about plants here. So, let’s just dive into it with the most obvious thing:
RESEARCH! I say this a lot and people point out that it’s a ‘duh’. Yet, I know many people who don’t bother researching things. They think they know all they need from basic science, television, reading, or personal experience. You might have a good foundation here, but you should still look for more when you want to get into the specifics. For example, look into the different categories of plants in order to get a variety of flora. This is where a person can learn about spores and budding, which I’ve learned that many people are unfamiliar with.
As stated on Monday, they don’t always have to be carnivorous. I think humans have a fear of getting eaten by something that wouldn’t normally eat us. The thought of a plant munching on a person is creepy, especially if you consider that they wouldn’t have an animal-like stomach. Still, this has been done a lot and doesn’t get much of a reaction. There are a variety of alterations you can do to make a plant deadly without having it be Audrey II.
Plants are more likely to be poisonous than carnivorous. Being an organism that doesn’t move, they have to develop defenses that don’t require movement. Ingested and contact are real world methods for plants to poison fauna. Fiction always you to play around with this concept, which many people will understand. Dangerous pollen would fall into this situation as well.
Remember that plants are always around. You will be more likely to see a plant first than an animal when looking around. This is because many animals rely on plants for shelter and food. Why is this important? It means that you can fit in unique flora at any interval. There is nothing weird about the characters noticing strange flowers or coming across a bizarre tree. Ignoring plant-life when describing a scene is cutting out a major part of the world. Readers will fill in the gaps with real plants, but that might not be what you want. If you desire a specific plant style then put it in.
There’s also plant-life in the ocean. I only say this because I recently ran into someone who claimed there weren’t any plants there. Aside from seaweed, you also have algae, which counts as flora. While algae isn’t that great for creating a mood or setting, you can bring attention to it. Maybe it has magical or toxic properties. As usual, you can play around with this, especially if you want to give ocean-traveling adventurers a wild fright.
Consider how a plant spreads its seeds, pollen, or spores when designing it. If one uses the wind then their seeds will have ways to ride the currents. For example, the helicopter ones we see on maples. Other methods are burred seeds that can hook onto animals, ones that spread through ingestion/excretion, parasitism, and general pollination. There can be unique ways that you come up as well, which will help determine various features of the plant.
Yes, we know having a plant scream when cut can be shocking or funny. Talking flora in general can be a welcomed respite from talking fauna. Still, it can get overdone fairly quickly. At least, I think so.
This book tends to get lost in the shuffle at times. Curse of the Dark Wind didn’t introduce any new, long-standing characters. Part of this might have been because this was when the game started crumbling. So, I was struggling to move from the ‘real’ events to things I was making up. Of course, it was when Luke Callindor was going to be the central focus . . . Kind of.
This story involves a demonic curse infecting the wind of an area and poisoning all air-based creatures. Due to part of Luke’s powers, he starts succumbing to the Dark Wind and the other champions struggle to keep him alive. The is made more difficult by him having to continue traveling and being the one who has to purify the temple. I did enjoy having his friends having to find newer and stronger ways to bolster his energy. For some reason, I really had a habit of debilitating Luke and making his friends save him from whatever has him at death’s door. 3 of the 15 books revolve around rescuing Luke and he needs some major saving in several of the others. Can a main hero also be a damsel in distress?
Fizzle got to rise in importance in Curse of the Dark Windas well. Prior to this, he was mostly a mascot and I had him hibernate through one story. Part of this was because he was just there in the game and the DM would have him do stuff to show off his knowledge of game system. In the book, Fizzle needed a bigger purpose and he became a protector of the champions. Since I had left him out of so many outlines, I had to revamp everything to give him bigger roles. This would include the occasional scene with very little dialog where Fizzle is doing something on his own. I think this book really solidified the bond between Luke and Fizzle too. At this point, Fizzle was the only remaining member of Luke’s original group of friends.
Character development was really the big thing here. So, all of the locations were fun and spontaneous. My focus was really on getting the champions and their allies to grow. I pushed the Luke/Sari relationship further, which some people didn’t like. It was odd that some complained about the sex in the book when I didn’t write any sex scenes. I mean, you know what happened since they were either making out at the end of a scene or they were resting in bed in a way that you knew what happened. Not much I can do on that front since I had to make it clear that this relationship was moving forward and working off lust a bit. Honestly, that wasn’t even a big thing beyond her having to fight to protect a dying Luke at one point.
Would I change anything about Curse of the Dark Wind? No. I really like that I gave everyone a moment to shine. While the story was about Luke, all of the other characters got some spotlight. It wasn’t always action stuff, but I got to show how much it hurt for one of their own to be in pain. As much as this book ends up getting lost in the shuffle for not being as huge in plot impact as the others, I think this is probably the best one I wrote in terms of character development.
Let’s see the questions:
How far would you go to help save a friend?
Do you think relationship’s based more on lust than love can be healthy?
What would you name a cave that created the area’s wind patterns?
I realized that I’ve talked a lot about designing monsters over the years. Always a focus on the animals though. A plant-based creature might show up at times, but there are still animalistic characteristics. This seems wrong. An environment is composed of fauna AND flora. So, I want to spend a week thinking about plants.
First, I want to make it clear that I’m not only talking about monstrous plants. This can move than that. You have fairly mundane plants in a fictional world that still serve a purpose. Flowers of unique colors, magical medicinal herbs, strange trees, and the like add to a fantasy world. This gives it a special environment and not a carbon copy of Earth, which some readers might find unbelievable. This can be a plot essential item or part of the exposition when introducing a new area, which is why you don’t always have to think ‘monster’.
We really do overlook plants when doing fiction, but I’m realizing how foolish that could be. It doesn’t hurt a story by minimizing their importance, but there is an amazing facet that can be utilized. For example, a non-Earth or alternate Earth will have some type of medical field. Like in our world, many medicines come from plants, especially when you go back in human history. We worked with what we had, so why can’t the same be done in fiction? If magic exists then it’s not unheard of for there to be plants with special powers, which ancient civilizations could stumble onto. Same can be said in regards to eating (fruits and veggies), building material (log cabins), and whatever else we use plant materials for.
Of course, we still like having plants that attack and kill people. Many people go for the toothy carnivores like Audrey II up there. I’ve seen some pretty cool ones that are dangerous without biting though. Vines that constrict and suck a person dry. Flowers that will sprout from the skin and control its host like a parasite. Poisonous fumes or needles are rather popular in fiction. You have the good old mimic and replace a person or animal too. All of these are viable twists on plant life when you want to create a monster that isn’t an animal.
There’s an extra benefit to plant monsters too. Unlike animals, they don’t always have a central brain or heart. This means, they are harder to kill. Hacking away with a sword can still work, but it will take time. Not like there’s a head to chop off. Arrows won’t be very good without a vital spot to hit. Magic and bludgeoning would be the way to go, which makes it a greater challenge for any heroes who lack those options. It makes senses too because the majority of monsters will end up being animal-based. A hero might not prepare for a plant-based one. Not like everyone will have a fireball or stick of dynamite on hand just in case.
This is something that I really want to explore more in Windemere. I’ve used unusual plants a few times, but not enough for me to really delve into this. One of my future ideas was a short story collection involving the caretaker of a hidden garden. This would be a place with unusual plants created by the gods, which can’t exist anywhere else or need to be released under specific conditions. I should revisit that concept and see if I can flush it out more. Possibly a lot of potential there, which I wasn’t paying attention to until now.
Don’t think I’ve ever done a St. Patrick’s Day post. Since life is still driving me too crazy to do enough research for a good animal post, I’m going to do another holiday. Enjoy.
By the way, I don’t really know much about this holiday. Someone I knew claimed to be Irish and talked about this holiday being important, but they only did Irish soda bread and corned beef with cabbage. That feels like an Americanization of something. What does happen on this holiday?
Legends of Windemere 