Archive | July 22, 2011

Hee! (also help?)

Jul22

Hey, guys, I won the auction for [personal profile] recessional‘s worldbuilding help (sort of a frivolous purchase, I admit; there goes my yarn budget for August)…

…so what world do I want her help with? It shouldn’t be Reisassn, I think, because that’s a project I’m working on with Spouse!Man. That still leaves a lot of worlds!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/84239.html. You can comment here or there.

Wedding Plans, Reiassan, for Rix’s Prompt!

Jul22

This is a short story in response to rix_scadeau‘s commission in my Giraffe Sale: a continuation of Rin & Girey, after this story

Reiassan has a Landing Page – and on LJ.

“Lady! Lord! Are you here for the wedding?”

Rin had been caught up in coming home, equally caught up in watching how her prisoner reacted to this, the heart of her country. She hadn’t expected the question, although she supposed she should have. There were so many cousins, so many sisters and aunts, brothers and uncles and far more distant relatives. Someone was always getting married.

“No,” she told the children, smiling at them. Brightly dressed in their silk qitari, these were no urchins. School must have just let out. “I, we,” she caught herself quickly and hoped Girey hadn’t noticed, “are just home from the front. So tell me, who is getting married? What news have I missed?” She leaned forward, half-off her saddle, as eager for the gossip as they were to share it.

“Princess Elenerja,” blurted out a pretty girl almost old enough for weddings herself, earning her a glare and a bony elbow from what had to be her younger brother.

“Elen?” Rin sat back into her saddle, wondering if she’d misheard.

“She’s marrying a spice merchant from the border!” the brother blurted out. “Not even a lord.”

Girey was looking at her oddly; she mustered a smile for him. “So,” she said brightly, “I suppose we’re going to a wedding. You’ll get to see how we do things up north.”

“Elenerja?” he murmured. “I’ve heard that name before.”

“I should imagine so,” she answered quietly. “She’s fourth in line for the throne.”

“Aaah. So getting married is nothing all that surprising, is it? Or is this another one of those situations where you people do everything backwards, too? She’ll want her eighty-one heirs, too, won’t she?” He was, she noted, smiling, almost as if he was trying to coax a smile out of her, too.

She obliged him. “Not really eighty-one,” she demurred. “We’re fertile, but we’re not quite that fertile.”

“I don’t think you’d be able to find the time,” he admitted. “So the fourth in line is getting married,” he persisted, unwilling to be sidetracked. “And this surprises you. Why?”

She got her mount pointed in more or less the right direction again, it having gotten distracted by a tasty hanging plant, and frowned at him. He really wasn’t going to drop it. “She had – Elen, that is – she’d joined a priestly order of Tienebrah that didn’t go in for marriage or child-bearing or siring. She’s been part of the order since she was a young woman; if she’s stepped out of it now and is getting married, it means something in the political situation has changed recently.”

“And that worries you.” The road was wide here, and people got out of their way, so they were riding abreast, knees nearly touching.

“It worries me,” she agreed. She eyed him, wondering at his patience. He’d been asking her for the entire trip who are you when what he meant was what position do you hold?, and she’d avoided answering for just as long. “I want to know what she knows that I don’t.”

“To know what the political climate will be like?” he hazarded.

She shook her head. “More to know if someone is going to try to kill me any time soon.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/84023.html. You can comment here or there.

Instant Karma moment of awesome

Jul22

This weekend, T. and I were hiking down at Taughannock Falls State Park, as we are wont to do. We’d frozen half a water bottle full of water, as we are also wont to do, and then poured in water to fill, but this time, the half-liter of water really wasn’t enough for the day, and I was carrying around a half-liter of ice and wishing it to melt faster.

We’re in the habit of picking up a few piece of litter every time we go out walking, so I wasn’t thinking about it when I bent down to pick up the bottle of Poland Springs floating in the creek.

The entirely sealed, full, new bottle of Poland Springs Water.

Sometimes life is just fun.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/83787.html. You can comment here or there.

crowdfunding, writing, etc – posted in whole from Stryck – “Yes, This.”

Jul22

Originally posted by at crowdfunding, writing, etc

The Crowdfunding community is in the LJ spotlight this week. [inserted tag]

Anyway, some folks have commented how few patrons are participating. That’s sad, because patrons have two things that I, and many creators, really crave.

No, not money. Money is icing.

What I crave as a writer are ideas and feedback. I get ideas of my own, but in a slow and rare trickle when it’s just me. However, one person talking with me to start sparking from? I can spin a whole world out of somebody saying that they want to read about a villainous polar bear.

Patrons are vital. They provide the proteins that my little creative enzymes can take apart and put back together into stories and poems. Feedback provides a stock of more proteins, to make it grow. (Especially questions. Asking who or what something is? Oooh, amino acids on parade.)

So, patrons, you have a market, too. That idea nobody ever writes about? I bet there’s someone out there who’s staring at a blank page who would love to know what it is.

And once you cultivate an artist, they may start producing works just because they thought of you. I probably would have never written a short story about giant space rays if I didn’t know that one of my friends likes rays.