Writing activity for the 8th

[annathepiper]

Small progress through Chapter 19 of Lament, pretty much, since most of my day had to go to other activities. I’m on page 19 of 23 at this point, though, so if I apply myself I should be able to finish the word count reduction for this chapter tomorrow!

I’ve been continuing to mull Oscar’s story in the back of my brain, and while I don’t have a real core plot idea for it yet, I do have a couple of beginning ideas. One, it’s possible this story may be non-urban fantasy, by which I mean, contemporary fantasy NOT in an urban setting. It may be rural/small town, and specifically, coastal. Two, I’m keying off a remark solarbird made to me that has stuck with me: “tuba is piccolo for whales”. The idea here being that a tuba is one of the few mortal instruments that can dip down into the range of the deep, primal music I want to be part of the plot of this story. This implies that there will be Big Creatures involved with this story.

Possibly whales. Possibly dragons.

More on this as it happens, y’all!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Comments

[wrog]

One, it’s possible this story may be non-urban fantasy, by which I mean, contemporary fantasy NOT in an urban setting.

I vaguely recall a time when all fantasy was non-urban fantasy...

It may be rural/small town, and specifically, coastal.

Hm. Would this be Nova Scotia or Newfoundland? (ducking)

tuba is one of the few mortal instruments that can dip down into the range of the deep, primal music

problem is, once you get too much below the range of the tuba, you're in the realm where the individual wavefronts become distinguishable and it's not really sound anymore unless you're a creature that thinks/experiences-life at a much slower rate than human; which, I suppose, could indeed be the case for the Big Creatures, but then you need to be careful that these don't turn out to be Big and Stupid Creatures (I suppose they could make up for the slowness with more parallelism but hm...)
... it just bugs me when subsonics ("OMG it's below the range of human hearing!") are presented as some kind of magic when really it's just "whupwhupwhupwhupwhupwhupwhupwhupwhup..."

[annathepiper]

Man, I am WITH YOU on the "all fantasy USED to be non-urban fantasy" thing. I miss those days!

*snerk* No, this story is not set in Newfoundland. If nothing else on the grounds that I already have a visit to St. John's queued up for Faerie Blood's Book 3. ;)

Thanks for the sound commentary. These will not be Big and Stupid Creatures, whatever they are. As for the rest, it does give me a bit more food for thought as to where I wish to go.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Elephants are known to communicate over long distances through subsonics. Bizarrely, this was only realized recently, when a researcher noted that she could feel vibrations she couldn't hear, found mention of them in the literature but no explanation and few hypotheses of what they were for and decided to find out.

[annathepiper]

I'm aware of the elephant thing, yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm not about to write an elephant-based story, but this might inform my decisions about the creatures I will be writing about. Also, it ties in to wrog's comment above.