This one is definitely universal. I think people can use their own personalities for this as well. Just really curious how varied the answers will be, especially if people are going to be honest.
Scenario
You tell your friend that you have a crush on someone, but you’re too scared to ask them out. Totally normal. Your friend tries to give you confidence and keeps warning you that someone else might ask your crush out if you don’t act. Fear of rejection is met by being told that you can’t tell the future. You try to convince your braver friend to talk to your crush on your behalf. They hesitate, but agree under the rule that they can’t reveal your true feelings. All you can tell from now on is that your friend and crush are hanging out a lot, which was your plan.
Then, you notice they are getting closer. Finally confronting your friend, you find out they are dating your crush. It was your crush that asked your friend out. Your friend said yes because, after getting to know your crush, they found that they have a lot in common and developed feelings. They do seem happy together, but you still have your own feelings towards your crush.
How do you feel? What do you do? Is this a betrayal or a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom?
This is an old teaser for War of Nytefall: Ravenous, which had the Vengeance Hounds making an appearance. I had to change one thing here to block a spoiler, but that shouldn’t be an issue. The point was the display the banter between the trio.
The most popular post by a mile first appeared on April 24, 2019.
Fictional World Map (Created by Dan Meth)
Continuing the topic of naming locations, I’m going to do my best to come up with some useful and humorous tips. I only had to create one new place in War of Nytefall: Rivalry, so these are going to have to go outside of the new release. Apelios doesn’t really give me a lot to work with either. Here we go:
Make the location pronounceable. It may be funny to write one with only vowels or consonants, but you could lose a few readers if they can’t figure out how to say things. It can help to have a pronunciation guide or mark it during the first appearance, so this is more of a guideline.
Consider the terrain before you come up with the name. You can only get away with naming a desert city after water once or twice before the joke gets stale. The founders would have to be aware of these things too. A person who has lived in the clouds for eternity won’t have a good chance of knowing what a worm is, so they probably wouldn’t use it to name a town.
Use real world examples for your fictional ones to help get the creativity flowing. This can really help with natural territories. Rocky Mountains, Great Barrier Reef, Grand Canyon, and other locations in our world are fairly simplistic. You would be surprised how many places can be named by how they look. It can easily be chalked up to an ancient traveler being awed and not that creative.
If you name a place after a person then you need to come up with some history. It doesn’t have to be much. Could be how the person found the area or some great feat that they accomplished to earn the right. To relate this to the reader, you can have a local explain it briefly or have the characters read a sign about it. To avoid an info dump, you want to be brief or spread out the story.
As with monsters and characters, you can always use another language to come up with names. Consider something about them and then go to Google Translate. It can be related to the terrain, a historic event, their biggest export, or whatever makes this place stand out enough to be included in the story. Do keep in mind that people who actually speak the language will understand it, so try to keep it clean. Unless the joke is that the town is really a swear word.
Accept that people will mispronounce the fictional locations if they are made by letters being tossed together. Seriously, I’ve gotten Windemere, Windmere, WindEmere, Winemere, Winmere, Windermere, Windermore, and a few others. (For those who wonder, it’s Win-deh-mere. This probably doesn’t help.)
Don’t rely too much on common endings for locations such as -burg, -town, City, Village, etc. Only way to get away with using the same ending is if you build it into your world creation. In that case, you can NEVER stray from the pattern or the whole world will implode. The deaths of millions of fictional characters will be on your head, you monster.
I wanted to make a better title, but this week was so ridiculous. I recovered from last week’s cold and even did well walking around outside. Compression shirts and thermals were amazing, so I wasn’t even cold in the snow. Felt good enough to finish editing Darwin & the Demon Game and shrug off the ensuing sense of failure since I’m not publishing. Headed into the mid-term week with high hopes.
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Then, I started getting the sniffles on Tuesday and my voice was raspy by the evening. I didn’t have any of the big diseases, so it was a second, but different cold. Worst part is that I had to read a test on Wednesday, which shredded my throat. Drank enough honeyed tea to attract bees if it wasn’t so cold. It was painful, but I still went through with work because it was an ‘all hands on deck’ week and the only thing that was wrong was I lost my voice. Thing started coming back yesterday, so I’m doing better today. Oh, and I woke up twice with nose bleeds, but those were stoppered by the CPAP mask . . . Don’t even try to imagine what my mornings were like if you want to keep your food down.
All the grossness aside, I would call this an average week. I did finish the March posts and begin planning the April ones. April is Autism Awareness Month, so I’m going to be using Tuesdays for posts about that. Might re-post some old ones though. This is what I was thinking about while I was under the covers trying to warm up after being outside at night for Pokemon Go. The warm weather clothes still kicked butt, so it was really only my hands that had issues. Makes me feel good about my son and I going out today, but we’re still keeping hot chocolate in the car and returning every 30-40 minutes to warm up.
For writing, I didn’t get to start editing Darwin & the Beast Collector. I was going to do so at work when I wasn’t with my students, but the faculty lounge was too busy. I went into the classroom, but that just resulted in meetings with my fellow Life Skills workers. I got a little done on ‘Phi Beta Files’ when I managed to show up early, but that was really it for the week. Probably for the best because my broken voice was driving me nuts to the point where it was hard to focus on anything unless I was with my son or working with my students. I did have fun trying to answer questions through hand gestures, which the inquisitive student got a kick out of figuring out. Going to half-days is always stressful for our kids, but they all did great and I’m proud of them.
Only other thing I was doing was dodging political conversations and succeeded most of the time. My busted voice reminded me that I needed to conserve my words and not get into pointless debates. Hacking coughs and whispering in a painful stopped people from talking directly to me as well. Just not in the mood for the topic these days and probably won’t want to discuss it for a while.
This is a weekend with my son, so we’re going to relax. He studied hard and we know he passed two of his mid-terms. There’s a Pokemon event this afternoon and another running for the weekend. So, we’ll go to the malls and parks a bit using our cold weather gear if needed. Beyond that, we just want to play video games, watch a movie, and relax for the next week. It won’t be too bad since we have Wednesday off for Lunar New Year, but there are already a bunch of appointments rearing their heads.
I will definitely begin editing Darwin & the Beast Collector this week. Need to print out more of the book as well, which is a pain. I was going to try to print out a few chapters at a time to avoid using up the black ribbon. Yet, I feel like I need more than the first three chapters for this coming week. I’m nervous about this story because there were so many moving parts. Some creatures didn’t get named early on and I had trouble keeping track of them. The plot got changed a few times as I realized things were aiming in a different direction. I ended up altering the entire ending at the final moment as well, which might work, but I can’t be sure. There’s definitely going to be a lot of altering to do. Mostly, I can’t figure out if I should change a character to be more suspicious or leave them acting normal until the end. Have to make sure another ‘sign’ of things being weird is consistent too. Ugh, my head is hurting already.
So, goals of the week:
Pokemon Go with son!
Watch a James Bond movie with son!
Play more Lego Jurassic World with son!
Get extra sleep.
Start editing Darwin & the Beast Collector.
Schedule a few April posts.
Avoid getting a third cold.
Finish Gameboy collage puzzle.
Choose a new streaming show to watch.
Keep drinking hot tea and hot chocolate to stay warm.
I guess the quote above is what a literal death wish is. That would be an acceptance that life has an ending and you’re okay with that eventuality. Doesn’t sound like you’re wishing for death, which is how fiction tends to portray the term. Certainly sounds like a big shift in mentality.
So, I started thinking about this after watching an anime called ‘Bungo Stray Dogs’. The plot doesn’t matter for this topic since I want to focus on a character named Dazai. This guy is highly intelligent, fairly charming, and can negate the powers of others. He’s almost like a mentor to who I think is the main character. One of his biggest character traits is that he is a ‘suicide junkie’ and routinely tries to kill himself, which has others accusing him of having a death wish. They aren’t wrong.
Before I go further, I will explain why Dazai is like this. He is a character who wonders if there is any point in living. So, he tries to find a purpose, which started as an efficient killer for a mafia when he was younger. Now, he does this other thing where he wants to discover and experience the perfect death. Usually with a pretty girl who is willing to die as well and mean it. Always sounds like he would never go through with it because he doesn’t try to get himself killed in battle. I never really managed to fully wrap my head around this, which is why the death wish fascinated me.
Authors and readers have a lot of trouble with a character who wants to die. When writing it, we tend to make them highly depressed or even deranged. Living things have that built in fear of death, so we see the desire to die as a symptom of mental illness. An author may want readers to avoid connecting with these characters and see them as broken, so they try to push the personality to the dismal side of human nature. This can be done to the point where the character’s reasons for wanting to die are either lost in their actions or never revealed at all.
I would say that there’s a fear of going all in on a death wish character too. It’s fine if this translates to high action feats of heroism, which has the character survive or sacrifice themselves. The type of hero who ‘doesn’t care if they die as long as they save others or get the mission done’. This actually sounds closer to the real world death wish (acceptance) than the fiction one (desire for it) we tend to think of. Maybe this is why we find it easier to write this type of hero than the ones that truly want to do for no other reason than to cease living.
This might be why I found Dazai rather interesting. He kind of straddled the whole concept. He was okay with dying, but fought against it whenever it was forced upon him by an enemy. It was like the death wish was his way of controlling his existence. Maybe he was living the quote where he accepted death, but he was kind of going out of his way to find it during his downtime. There were moments where it really was played for dark comedy too, so that might have been a key factor. Still, it’s a staple of the character to try to die in his off-time, which is strange and seems unnatural.
Have I figured out how to write a death wish character? I don’t know. The version that has accepted that death is inevitable, but won’t go out of their way to die appeals to me. They will still fight to survive when their lives are threatened, but they know that their time will come. It sounds like a challenging balance to strike. One that many people might even relate to. I think I have a few characters in future books that I want to try this with too, so I should look more into it.
So, what do you think about the death wish concept? Both reality and fiction.
Legends of Windemere 