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Post by waldenwriter on Mar 23, 2010 21:18:43 GMT -5
Yeah, Waldenwriter, if they hadn't split Lord of the Rings into three books, people might have been daunted at the size of the book, not to mention the heftiness of such a book. It sure would be hard to carry around. And I thought my Webster's Collegiate Dictionary-sized Lit Theory textbook was heavy! I can see why Tolkien wrote it as one long epic piece, but I'm glad they broke it up. It's like with Christopher Paolini; he ended up making the Eragon books a tetralogy (4-book series) rather than a trilogy because he realized book three was getting way too long (like 2,000 pages according to him). I'm still torn on whether or not I should change the names, since I've been calling these places the same thing for the past six years. It is definitely hard to make changes to something you've worked with for so long. It pains me to hear critiques of my current novel's protagonist sometimes considering I've been developing her for about three years. She has changed a lot - she was originally a character in an animated series I made up in my head called Lightning Girl: The Animated Series, based on a pair of superhero comic scripts I wrote in high school called Lightning Girl and Lightning Girl II: The Chaos of the Light and the Dark. When the comic didn't pan out (because I realized doing a comic script was kind of useless since I can't draw very well, and attempts to novelize the comic all failed), I decided to give her her own book, and so plans for Darkly Bound began. Version one, which never made it past a synopsis and a bad first chapter published in an issue of the anime/manga ezine Anime Angels (which I was writing for off-and-on at the time), actually had a romantic subplot with a character named Ryan as a love interest. This subplot was going to tie into The CYA Files, a novel I'm planning to write that is set in the same universe as Darkly Bound, with that book's protagonist Emily being Ryan's niece who comes to live with Avalon after she and her fellow Space Rangers are evacuated from the Venus Station. But I scrapped that in favor of the current version, though I kept the notebook with the original synopsis in it. But I definitely have taken into the consideration of the meaning as well as the aural quality. If i changed the names, I wouldn't change the meaning. It would for the purpose of being more true to the people who live in the area, but perhaps I am stressing over it for nothing as long as the readers can read it and get the meaning that's what matters. I think it might be interesting to see the different names people have for God among the different races. As long as you make it clear to the reader what the names are referring to, I think you'll be fine. I'm glad someone besides me knows the meaning of "aural"; I came across it in a description for a German language class in a college schedule long ago and have liked it since, but haven't used it because I always assumed people wouldn't know what it meant. I tend to pick names based on their sound as well; the villain of the storyline I'm currently working on for the fiction unit of my Creative Writing class is named Kharthanos. I noticed when handwriting a fleshed-out version of my main character's timeline that the name is really long (and three syllables). But it sounds cool. I seem to like that "Khar" sound; the surname of one of the characters in Darkly Bound is Kharthos. Thanks for your reply You're welcome!
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Post by j2starshine on Mar 23, 2010 22:43:02 GMT -5
Ryain, thanks for your comment. I think what you did with God's name is cool and sounds cool too. I hadn't even thought about the discussions between people groups... hmmmm... I'll have to think on that... Because I might have to explain why one group calls him father and another group calls him savior and so forth. Thanks :-) ~j2
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Post by j2starshine on Mar 23, 2010 22:58:33 GMT -5
Ah....waldenwriter, I didn't know what aural meant until I had read your post. Don't want you to be thinking I'm smarter than I actually am. ;-) I hope my protangonist is stronger for the critiques I have received, she was pretty flat and then she came across wishy-washy. I am at a point in my book that I want to know if this story is working, has promise, or I need to trash it and write something different. I welcome the critques, even though they sting a bit :-)
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ryain
Junior Member
Fantasy.... Fashion....
Posts: 90
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Post by ryain on Mar 24, 2010 9:56:52 GMT -5
Ryain, thanks for your comment. I think what you did with God's name is cool and sounds cool too. I hadn't even thought about the discussions between people groups... hmmmm... I'll have to think on that... Because I might have to explain why one group calls him father and another group calls him savior and so forth. Thanks :-) ~j2 Thanks for the comment! and Your welcome!
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Post by waldenwriter on Mar 26, 2010 23:20:23 GMT -5
Ah....waldenwriter, I didn't know what aural meant until I had read your post. Don't want you to be thinking I'm smarter than I actually am. ;-) Ah. My bad. *sweatdrop* I hope my protangonist is stronger for the critiques I have received, she was pretty flat and then she came across wishy-washy. I am at a point in my book that I want to know if this story is working, has promise, or I need to trash it and write something different. I welcome the critques, even though they sting a bit :-) I am trying to be that way about critiques as well. I used to be pretty thin-skinned in terms of being critiqued; I didn't even get through a heavily annotated and edited version of a manuscript of mine that one of my friends, also a writer, did because her comments sounded so negative. I thought I was getting better until the last workshop meeting I went to, where I read some poetry I was considering submitting for consideration for the upcoming student reading. This was the first time I had read original poetry in the club (I've been workshopping my current novel-in-progress with them). They called a poem I'd written reacting to reading I'd done for history class about the Treaty of Versailles negotiations "more like history notes than poetry" and negatively commented on my punctuation choices in both that poem and the second one. Both poems had been written on the spur of the moment, so I hadn't thought too much about form or punctuation. But the comments somehow really stung - maybe because I was already having a bad day because I was tired, I'd lost the lunchbag I got for Christmas, and I'd lost my wallet the day before and, while it had been found by somebody and reported found, I had made plans to go get it after the club meeting. Even so, I'd forgotten I still had that sensitivity; I thought I was over it. But then again, being a traditionalist in a club where all the officers are very avant-garde writers doesn't help much. I do hope I can make my protagonist better as well as a result of critiques. It's going to be hard though. Especially since I've been workshopping a novel, several times I get comments about things that aren't explained in a passage and that the critiquers think should be there. Usually these are things that I know will be revealed later in the novel (at a point I've written but haven't workshopped) so I generally have to say so in order not to spoil the plot.
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