Sunday, December 18, 2011

Star Scrapers

I was going to have a nice, background-building post set up, explaining a bit more of the important details that needed to be known before my world could be fully understood--perhaps an explanation of the Elu, the most important intelligent lifeforms on Gavanna, or a description of the life of Gavanna and how it's linked to Earth life (the astute reader of Cute 'n Fluffy will have noted that Screfflings look rather suspiciously Terran for a supposedly alien critter on an alien world, and there's an excellent reason for that, M.O.T.L.), or a more focused description of Oblu and its bizarre beasties.   These would all be sensible and helpful subjects to cover.

But then I wrote a paragraph or two covering the arrival of humans on Gavanna (yes, they show up.  No, they're not native.  No, I'm not saying more on the subject right now) and their first impression of the world, and then I felt a burning need to illustrate part of the scene, and then three hours vanished rather alarmingly.  So today you'll get a short excerpt that may never find its way into any one of my stories, and a short lecture on the oddities of xenogeology.  Onward!

Friday, December 2, 2011

Xenoastronomy

Hey now, would you look at that!  I'm not dead, and neither is the blog!  My apologies for the long hiatus, but...well, the ends of classes and mountains of grading demanded my attention, and they were extraordinarily persuasive.

Anyway.  In what will, I suspect, be a recurring pattern, I think I'll need to renege on my earlier decision to simply barrel on ahead with infodumps regardless of backstory; the background of my world is so tightly wound into all the foreground details that it's often impossible for me to separate them.  It seems best, then, to take the King of Hearts' sage advice and begin at the beginning, go on until I get to the end, and then stop.  From the very beginning, then...