There’s a competition on Royal Road. For shorter fictions from the prompt “Uncharted Waters”. I decided this was a perfect prompt to write a story to introduce the world to my Sky Pirates of the Dune Sea setting. That’s me. You say water and I think of a story set in the heart of a giant desert.
The first part is up already. Most of it’s not written yet so this is kind of like dictating a story while crossing a high wire. Also I’m moving house this week. So it’s like dictating a story while crossing a high wire in a strong wind while people watch and shout “Fall!” at you.
Okay it’s not quite like that. There’s very little risk of death or serious injury. No more than the regular risk of death or serious injury that haunts me as a potter around my house. Anyway, I give you the cover image of my new work. It’s more of a placeholder than the cover image of Kindness of Ravens but I’m still fairly pleased with it.
The Waters of the Dune Sea
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Technology has been such a boon for writers. In a single lifetime we’ve seen multiple hurdles between the writer and success either completely destroyed or considerably lowered.
When I first thought of writing as a career the typewriter was still king, though it was increasingly an electric typewriter, and there were already dedicated word processors, and even a few early adopters writing on computers. Being a writer meant going through a lot of paper. Querying meant paying to send a precious physical copy of your novel through the post. Backing up your work required carbon paper or access to a photocopier.
That era lasted longer than you think. Even once it became common for writers to own computers or high end word processors we had to be aware that dot matrix printer outs were not acceptable for the finished manuscript. We had to shell out for other printers which were invariably noisier, less flexible or more expensive. We had to know that because it wasn’t acceptable to submit a floppy disk and even if you could work out how to email a whole novel no agent or publisher would look at it.
Now we live at a time when you can, if you really need to, write a novel on a mobile phone and send it to an agent or publisher using a coffee shop’s free wifi. The only upfront cost is the phone and a maybe a couple of quid for the writing app.
And yet I’m still looking for the perfect solution to some of my writing problems. I write most of my novels using a program called Scrivener. It’s very useful for structuring and outlining and for writing the earlier drafts. It can back up to Dropbox automatically and I can work on the same file using my PC and my iPad (though not at the same time). It’s very reasonably priced and it’s even cheaper if you win NaNoWriMo. The one place where it falls down is when it comes to collaboration. You can’t have the same Scrivener project open on two different devices simultaneously. That means it’s harder to work on something as a team and it’s less useful for sharing with beta readers and editors.
When I get to the beta stage I compile the Scrivener project as an RTF or a word document and then open it in Google Docs. Google Docs is great for collaboration. You can have multiple people typing on the same document at the same time. Where it falls down is in organising the parts of a project. With a really big project like a long novel or a Tabletop RPG book you only have two options. Keep the whole thing in a single, unwieldy file, or break it up into parts and then risk getting confused about the order of things.
What I need is something that allows me to build a project file full of discrete scenes, notes, timelines, research and also to have two or more people working on it simultaneously. If I can easily turn the separate scenes into a single narrative document for beta readers to look at that would be great. If it can export to a Microsoft word doc for sending to agents that would be excellent.
Maybe you’re wondering why I need that? Well, I have two projects in mind that are going to require a certain level of collaboration. In both cases I’m going to be doing most of the actual typing but I’m going to need input from other people.
One is a very complicated heist narrative that requires a lot of world building. I’ve already mentioned that in This is Not a Project File. The nature of the narrative will require some non-linear storytelling. A lot of things will be happening simultaneously and these things will be linked to events in the past that will need to be fit into the narrative somewhere. Therefore I need to be able to write in a lot of little scenes that I can move around easily. That’s the sort of writing that Scrivener works well with. But I also need a detailed timeline and Scrivener doesn’t have one of those built in. I can always produce one using different software and then import it into Scrivener as an image. But what I can’t do is allow my collaborator into the Scrivener project file to work on the world building and background stuff unless I first close Scrivener on my computer and then go and do something else instead.
The other thing that I’m thinking about is at the extremely early stages and I hesitate to even mention it. Partly because it’s such a cliche. But I am exploring the idea of doing a podcast. A fiction podcast. It will tell a bunch of linked stories but doing the idea justice is beyond what I can do alone. I have friends that I can call upon to get involved. But first I have to solve the problem of workflow. How can we work together?
There’s a part of me that thinks that it’s ridiculous that I’m having any trouble with this. In previous generations people collaborated by letter. They sent each other handwritten maps and timelines. They typed stuff up on flimsy carbon copy sheets so they could pass their work around. If they were suddenly struck by a brilliant plot idea they might even send it via telegram. I have the luxury of text and email to keep in touch with my creative friends.
As things stand I have no solution in mind. I’m open to suggestions but I suspect that I’m going to end up cobbling something together out of multiple programs and web apps.
Colin Smith / Lochnagar – Mountain and Corrie Lochan.
I love names. However I’m aware that I’m not very good at them. The names of my stories are a bit hit and miss, and it’s a part of world-building where I feel I have a lot of room for improvement.
In fiction the names of things are an excellent place for environmental storytelling and stealth lore dumping. In the real world names can carry all sorts of meaning. A place name can seem offensive until you research the origin, and find out that the name comes from some completely wholesome, long obsolete word. Or it can seem bland, but have some epic or terrible tale tied to it.
You can walk down a street every day for years, and only be dimly aware that the street name sounds like a surname. You just assume that it’s named after some local worthy, or the landowner who commissioned the first buildings, or some business that was once a local landmark. Then one day you find out that it’s named after a slave trader, or a war criminal, or a man posthumously revealed to be a rapist, and it doesn’t feel like the same street anymore.
And then there’s how they sound, and how that sound changes over time. In Scotland we have a lot of place names that are accidental shibboleths. Cults, Maryculter and Alford are all places in Aberdeenshire. Guess which ones have a silent L. If you have trouble with the CH in loch and the R in Aberdeen you’re going to struggle with Garioch. Particularly since it’s pronounced ‘Geerie’. You have to be pretty Scottish to pronounce Aberchirder correctly. You have to be really local to know everyone actually calls it Foggyloan or Foggy.
So let’s talk about why there’s a mountain called Lochnagar when everyone knows that loch means lake. When I was growing up my Uncle John told me that it wasn’t the real name. He said that the real name was so rude that someone invented that name out of embarrassment when Queen Victoria asked what the mountain was called and they didn’t want to explain the real name.
When I was ten that seemed like a perfectly reasonable explanation and I barely thought about it for years. Until I mentioned it to my spouse and realised that I’d never heard that from anyone other than my Uncle John. So I looked it up and, well, there’s no mention of Queen Victoria but…
The English language name is listed as Lochnagar and the Gaelic as Beinn Chìochan. My first thought on reading that was that Chiochan would be a bugger for any non gaelic speaker to pronounce so maybe that’s why the change.
Then I read, “Technically, the English name is a misunderstanding, being named after Lochan na Gaire, the ‘little loch of the noisy sound’, a loch to be found in the mountain’s northeast corrie.” So that made sense, someone misheard Lochan na Gaire as Lochnagar and they just went with it because the real Gaelic name is so hard to say. That made far more sense than that the real name was too rude for the Victorians.
Reading on I found this gem, “The summit itself may be referred to as Cac Càrn Beag”. Which means ‘small cairn of feces’, or in colloquial English, ‘little pile of shit’.
Oh. Well maybe they did find the name a bit rude. I wonder what Beinn Chìochan means?
Oh.
It means ‘mountain of breasts’.
You know what? If I were a 19th Century Ghillie and Queen Victoria pointed to what I knew to be Little Pile of Shit peak on Boob Mountain and asked what it was called I’d probably pretend she was pointing to the sun glinting off the small body of water near the peak and say “Lochan na Gaire, your Majesty. It means ‘little loch of the noisy sound’,” and then find something else to do before she could ask me why the mountain is named after a lake.
H.F. Calder, author and artist. 