Seasons

happy birthday shady.

HBdTU!

The number of languages Tolkien knew, or was familiar with, is probably in the double digits. In the intro to the whole thing he says that the Hobbit and Ring Trilogy had its basis in linguistics. And here is the tansition between what I know and what I might be making up: He and his fellow aesthetes used to hang out in a certain pub where much of the Ring was written, the initial impetus was Tolkien trying to imagine a linguistic journey from England(?) through the Germanic lowlands etc to Scandanavia. Something like that. Some editions of LotR have this in the intro.

The great thing about his books is there's a detailed history behind everything.

Ok, for anyone who's interested (or desperate), I've put some pics on my webpage. Yay to not having them on my ex's page anymore! *chugs a beer or something*

oh dear! You mean the ones of that thing out of the freezer, Onyx? (Btw, nice pictures of you)

Well, the thing from the freezer was recent, and I don't think my ex would've consented to have it displayed on his page anyway.

Kirby,

I've done some of that. But they aren't so much failed as unfinished manuscripts.

I'm just hoping "let it melt in the sink" is not a euphemism for something else.

I've got "unfinished" manuscripts that I started 40 years ago.

Many many moons ago (prolly 10 years ago by now) I started this story that begins with 2 brothers coming home to find out their town was destroyed, presumably by some evil wizard. Having lost the disk it was on, I don't remember much of what happened after that, except for the part where their wizard friend takes them to a temple and they try to look up a goddess's dress. I did manage to write 70 pages or so of it, and I thought it was pretty cool at the time although now I'd probably call it a piece of shit.

Some time after that, I wrote a little thingy about a wizard's apprentice going to his master's house while the wizard was away, and recieving a message meant for the wizard about strange creatures attacking the city of mages. The wizard comes home and they talk about it for a while, then go to the local bar to discuss it with another wizard who happens to be a bartender. (They meet a man who's a couple thousand years old and used to be an underling of this bitch who killed people and collected their blood and such, but they don't realize it.) Later, sitting at home in a rowdily drunken state, they hear a banging on the door. Come to find out, the wizard from the bar is being chased by the 2000 year old maniac. Never did get any farther than that, but I sat there for the longest time planning really complicated histories and such, trying to figure out who was doing what where at the same time someone was doing something else elsewhere.

Here a while back, I got the bright idea to have these stories take place in the same world, the second several thousand years after the first. Which would be ok if I could ever manage to finish one or the other of them. I've tried repeatedly though and it just doesn't wanna work. I think I know too damn much about that world to be able to write decently about it. It's annoying as hell.

You have to write many many large pieces of shit before you can write something decent. Be patient.