Yrae Chronicles

I've been thinking a lot about writing lately without actually doing any of it, so allow me a ramble to maybe get myself back into maybe writing some real story this weekend.

Way back when I started with Silent Harmony I remember doing those character surveys and always got stumped by the question of 'Which animal do you associate with him/her?' I always thought that was a silly thing. I've never associated real people with animals before, why would I do that with my characters? Just make them real people. And so I did. Later on, probably five or six years ago, I read some article about associating characters with animals and how it can bring more life to how you write them. Not by constantly likening them to the animal (She was like a cat, aloof and independent, only willing to let you give her attention when she decreed it, that kind of thing) but just by using verbs that you'd normally use to describe the animal. Why say 'she reminded him of a cat' when you can say she prowls, she hisses, she yowls, she purrs, she curls up?

It's something I'll certainly want to do in the rewrite, make the associations that I've slowly started realising with the top four and applying them more consciously. The more recent additions--Shizaaqa and Assili especially--have their animals set. Nimay, Yamin and Nol are a little trickier.

Shizaaqa is lithe and slender. Her eyes are piercing and her voice hypnotising. I use words with the letter 's' in them a lot when describing her, and not just because she's Kazinian. She's dangerous, poisonous. She rears up in anger and settles sinuously back in her throne. She doesn't walk; she glides, she snakes, she sways. Just these descriptors sprinkled here and there, not so obvious that I'm screaming SHE'S A SNAKE but enough to get the imagery going.

Assili, despite trying ever so hard to be her mother, is not a snake. Assili's gauze flutters, her hands flit, she tries to hide it but she hops in excitement. She darts and tilts her head to the side when she's listening. But most of Assili's character comes in her voice, I think. It's a tittering sing-song speckled with twitters and chirps and tweets. It's an ear-piercing screech or a squawk; never a cry or a yell. Lot of onomatopoeia in the language surrounding Assili, short, staccato words. She hops, she struts, she preens, she flies. She also loves birds and birdsong, and Shizaaqa's private nickname for her was Golden-capped Honeyeater, but those are pretty explicit and not really what I'm on about here. I'm talking about the language you use to talk about them.

Flannel Flower's fingers curl and dance like a spider's legs. She's silent, she creeps, she watches, she strikes. She's also completely batshit insane so I'm not sure how much of the arachnid feel comes across with her.

Yan? Yan's the wind. Yan is death. Yes, he has the giant bat wings, but a flitty little bat with a high-pitched squeak he is not. His voice is dry and sandy and dead. He's cold, he avoids human contact, he's just profoundly uncomfortable to be nearby but those who don't know him can't quite put their finger on why. He swishes, he glides, he picks and needles. May not be an animal, but all Yan's language comes from the wind and death. Cos. He dead.

Nimay is unsurprisingly evolving into a bird of prey. Quite unlike Assili's little songbird, she's predatory, she circles, she's always watching, waiting. She glides, she arches her neck, she strikes, she digs her claws in. She doesn't run, she flies, but I do have to be careful with that one given that she literally can fly and the imagery might go the wrong way there.

Yamin I'm not sure on. Something will come up. She's always been the hardest to pin down.

Nol I haven't actually written into things yet, but I'm thinking horse maybe? Still doesn't quite fit. Bolting, cantering, galloping; huffing and... whinnying and screaming not so much. Nol doesn't whinny. Also never thought of him as graceful nor applied the word 'majestic' to him, despite royalty. Maybe not horse, then. Eh, like 'Min, we'll see what evolves.

Lynnlita, once she makes her appearance, will most certainly be a cat.

And that's the lot, for the moment. Now let's see about doing some actual writing :D

So I've uncovered something of a massive plot hole. Like, huge. Part of SH:Gold will involve long distance flying, so I figured that, after eleven years, I'd work out some cruising flight speeds for the girls. Googling has found this reasonably easily, using the average cruising speeds of migratory birds and the larger birds of prey, which is anywhere between 20kph and about 80kph. So, for the twins:

Cruising speed 50kph (or 30mph)
Top speed 90kph (or 55mph)

Also, I dunno what it is that makes birds able to stay aloft for hours, days, freaking MONTHS at a time, but the twins have that because magic, so they can stay aloft for as long as the plot requires them to. Be knackered by the end of it but that's their problem. So let's bring up the map and work some stuff out open up that gaping plot hole.

Flying for, let's be generous and say 10 hours a day. That's 500km. Even from the farthest northern reaches of Kazin, they would easily get them back to Ni-Yana in less than two days. The average large migratory bird generally covers 650-800km in a day, which is more. Even looking at the most piss-weak of migratory birds, they still manage about 160km a day, so again, they'd be home within the week.

Why the frig am I bothering with horses? =| Why all this 'OMG we must know what's happening in Ni-Yana!' stress? All the 'OMG we need to be at [place] before [thing happens] in a week!' Why has Nimay never decided 'Stuff it, I'll just fly there, back for dinner tomorrow boys'? I've always written it off as her being the general, doesn't want to leave her boys for an extended period of time. Except that two freaking days isn't an extended period of time.

Really all I can come up with to explain why she hasn't done this is that if I hadn't thought it was possible, maybe she hadn't, either. She's been able to fly for her entire remembered life, but she's never before had reason to test her long range capabilities. There's no point in reaching Kazin before the rest of the boys on a normal mission, and she wouldn't think of flying home early at the end because boooyyyyys she loves them. She knows flying is significantly faster than horses, but, like me, maybe she hasn't really considered just how much faster. Having never actually tested it before, maybe even she can't grasp that she could fly across two kingdoms in two days. Maybe, once the plot does call for it in Gold, she's just cruising along after a couple of hours and suddenly holy shit red sand why didn't I do this earlier? REGRET AND WASTED OPPORTUNITY AND SO ON.

Do you buy it? I'm not sure I do, but I can't think of another way around it. And if I can't, well, that's a shitload of take it back to the drawing board right there.

I scared.

Also Yan has the same flight speeds because I can't find squat on bat flight speeds and he's fifty times bigger than a bat anyway. So. Whatever. Damnit I was counting on him being weeks away, at least, when shit was going down in Ni-Yana. This is Not Cool.