How Small, Personal Biases can Shape Society

I ran across this simulation called "A Parable of the Polygons." In a nutshell, it demonstrates how an integrated society can become increasingly segregated over time if individuals harbor even a small amounts of personal bias towards living near their own kind.

http://ncase.me/polygons/

It's fun to play around with the numbers. One thing that's interesting is that once segregation occurs, an elimination of bias doesn't result in greater mixing. I'd love to see a version of this with more "shapes" and where the bias can be manipulated to be different for some "shapes" than others.

While this demonstration focuses on physical proximity, it's possible that something similar could happen with regards to the choices people make about the books they want to read (both with regards to the gender or race of the authors or of the characters therein).

Article About Women in Epic Fantasy

This article is by Kate Elliott, and it is on Tor.com. It's as excellent as her previous writing on this topic.

Writing Women Characters into Epic Fantasy Without Quotas

Why Are the Little Differences So Hard to Imagine in Fantasy?

A fellow writer recently asked (on an online fantasy site) how people had sex in the olden days, when most people lived in one room cottages or huts. Surely the presence of a couple's children, in the same room, or perhaps even the same bed, would have put a damper on things, he reasoned.

As someone who grew up loving the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, there as a point (sometime around my own pre-adolescent period, probably) when I wondered something similar. How did Ma and Pa have sex when Laura, Mary, and Carrie were sleeping in the same one-room cabin on the prairie?

The answer, of course, is that people in different times and places did not (or do not) share our modern, post-Victorian sensibilities about having sex in front of the children. They probably waited until they thought the kids were asleep and had at it. And maybe, when the weather was fine, couples found ways to steal moments alone together in barns, thickets, haystacks, even churches.

Nowadays, many people think it's immodest, or even potentially harmful, for kids to overhear, let alone see, their parents making the beast with two backs. That attitude has hardly been the norm throughout history. Parents probably didn't sit down with their kids and  have "the talk" back then. Kids simply learned about sex via osmosis (and of course, most people in agrarian, nomadic, or hunter-gatherer societies were around animals a lot while growing up, so they almost certainly made the connection there too).

This article does a great job of discussing sex in the middle ages. In fact, people really weren't as prudish back then as many suppose.

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/02/14/sex-in-the-middle-ages/

In spite of what some people have been insisting (in light of the recent SCOTUS ruling legalizing and legitimizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states), sexual morality is a very fluid and variable thing across history and cultures.

This question got me to thinking, though. There are numerous fantasy novels that show people living in societies with attitudes where the big things--slavery, torture, sexism, public executions, a rigid class or caste structure--are very different from ours. Yet the things that we have trouble envisioning as writers and readers are often the little, everyday differences (like people mostly living in a single room and parents thinking nothing about having sex while their kids are present).

Imagine a romance or fantasy novel with a love scene where the couple is holding back their cries of passion so they don't awaken their toddler, who is sleeping in the bed with them.

Another example of a fact that freaked me out when I learned (sometime around middle school age, I think) it was that women didn't wear underpants under their dresses until fairly recently. The thought of walking around all day with one's most personal and vulnerable parts open from below, gave me the heebie jeebies.

Fragonard's The Swing: What is this fellow looking at?

Of course, I've since figured out that those heavy skirts and petticoats were unlikely to blow up or reveal one's nether regions, even when it was windy or their owner climbing ladders, but it still feels a bit odd to me. On the plus side, the idea that brassieres didn't exist before the 20th century turns out to be untrue.

One thing that's very hard to relate to is differing attitudes about personal hygiene. I admit I was very relieved to learn that all those tales about how no one ever bathed in the olden days were rather exaggerated (though, interestingly, westerners were at their most foul during the early modern era, not the middle ages), and in fact, clothes washing and periodic bathing have been the norm throughout history, even if people didn't always live up to modern standards of cleanliness.

Given how itchy and stinky I am after just a couple days of days camping, I'll admit that a character who bathes but once a year and never cleans his/her teeth is harder for me to relate to than an assassin who kills people for a living. Brent Week's Durzo Bint? I had more problem with his garlic-chewing habit (I have a very low tolerance for garlic, even in food, and the smell of it on someone's breath makes me physcially ill) than I did his talent for slaughter. No fangirl crush on that character!

And speaking of bathing, anything resembling the Japanese tradition of families bathing together doesn't seem to be something that comes up terribly often in fantasy novels. I suspect that many modern authors have too much trouble stepping away from the notion that nakedness is an inherently sexual condition.

A print of this painting hangs in my hall bathroom.

Another social convention that few modern fantasy writers explore in their worlds are communal latrines. Outside of boot camp, modern western bathrooms tend to have locking doors or screens around the toilets, at least. Yet the Romans had communal latrines and public piss pots where people of both genders "went" in front of one another, and even socialized whilst they did. Especially revolting to me, however, is the concept of the shared sponges.

Toilets are definitely one of those intimate, everyday things with which we like to take for granted. Anyone who has been camping, or traveled in a country where facilities are designed differently, knows how disconcerting it is to adapt to a different way of answering nature's call.

Moving to the other end of the alimentary canal, I also have a hard time getting my head around the idea that toothbrushes seem to be a very recent invention (though unsurprisingly, the Chinese might have had something similar). However, people did indeed have ways of cleaning their teeth in the old days, and some research suggests that tooth cleaning sticks made from some kinds of trees or shrubs do an excellent job of promoting gingival health.

Habits of grooming or beauty aesthetics that are different from ours can be a jolt also. It's hard for me to imagine being attracted to a man with a tonsure, for instance, though those have existed in various times and places in history (and not just for monks). And when I saw the Kurosawa movie Ran many years ago, I was put off by the way the women plucked their brows to nothing and drew fake ones in way above their natural position. These looked odd to me. It's another one of those "small things" that wouldn't be very comfortable for me to imagine in a protagonist in a fantasy novel.

There are plenty of other "little things" that have changed throughout history and that vary between cultures. Taboos, habits of personal hygiene and grooming, even table manners (like using fingers to eat instead of utensils). Even though it can be a bit uncomfortable, I think authors sometimes miss opportunities to use these kinds of small differences as a means of reminding their readers that their characters aren't simply modern people wearing costumes. It's challenging, though, because for some readers, the ability to connect emotionally, even romantically, with a character is an important part of the experience of reading.

Feel free to comment and chime in on some of your own blind spots about history. What kinds of small, everyday differences have you tried to incorporate into a fantasy culture? Which ones put you off so much it's hard to relate to a character who practices them?

Writing Stories Set in Societies That Aren't Ours

 Writing from the point of view of someone who isn't like oneself. This is an issue faced by most fiction writers, of course. Most of us don't want to write stories with different versions of ourselves over and over and over. But writers of historical and speculative fiction have a special problem: they're writing in settings where the characters are likely to have very different sensibilities from modern readers.

Writers of historical fiction have a more restrictive situation, since they're constrained by what we actually know about a period of history. If your novel is set in ancient Rome, or the antebellum South, you have to have slavery. And attitudes about everything from the role and status of women, treatment of children, treatment of animals, pluralism, class/castes etc. varied greatly with time and place, but they were usually quite different from our modern sensibilities. Fantasy writers have more leeway, as they can construct worlds and societies that are different from history. But it's still unlikely that the attitudes held by characters in a different society are going to mirror ours in all, or even most respects.

This leads to some questions about both world building and characterization. How do you portray your world and character in a way that's plausible, internally consistent and different without alienating modern readers?

The answer is complex.

First of all, one should do meticulous homework. This is vital when writing in a real-world setting, but it's important for writers who creates fictional worlds too. One shouldn't rely on what "everyone" knows about a given time and place. Some conventional wisdom is wrong, and even carefully researched history often ignores the perspectives or contributions of marginalized people unless you really dig for them.

On a lighter note, many modern readers assume that Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter represents an accurate view of 19th century German morality regarding child rearing, but in fact, the stories were very tongue in cheek, and cutting children's thumbs off was no more acceptable then than it is now. Hoffmann was an interesting mix of qualities, in fact, with some attitudes that were very ahead of his time, and some that weren't.

Secondly, people living in a given place and time aren't monolithic. History tends to focus on averages and blur distinctions between groups and individuals. I've often wondered how historians (let alone pop culture) of the future might portray the attitudes and norms of Americans during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I can think of several social issues that are currently very much in contention. Presenting an "average" way everyone thinks about them is impossible, even for modern pollsters. Anyone who has been in a conversation with friends and family (let alone online) about the divisive, or even not-so-divisive, issues of the day knows this.

Results from 2010 Gallup Poll shows how divided modern people are on many issues. The gap between what people say they believe and how they actually behave may be even wider on some of these issues, at least.

 People hold a wide variety of views and these views are even sometimes inconsistent or self-contradictory. Societal baselines change over time, but that doesn't mean no one in the past overlapped with modern views. Imagine a hypothetical future where nearly everyone (except an occasional depraved weirdo) is vegetarian and it's illegal to spank one's kids. Will writers of historical fiction insist that it's unrealistic to portray any early 21st century Americans as being anti-spanking or as vegetarians simply because the average person living in our times eats meat and hits their kids? And even more tellingly, would they insist on presenting everyone who eats meat and practices corporal punishment as having the exact same approach to or attitude about their own behavior?

Thirdly, one must consider who you are writing your story for, or to put it another way, what the purpose of your story is.

--Is it simply to entertain the reader by transporting them to an "exotic," yet still relatable time and place, a setting that's foreign yet fun? This is often referred to as "escapist" fiction. Some readers of historical romance, or fantasy want to enter a fairy tale (and not one that resembles the original darker versions of fairy tales either). Writers of grittier or more "realistic" fiction may poo poo this, but I don't think it's necessarily wrong.

--Is it to indulge a power fantasy that one might have about living in a world where their kind of person has a level of autonomy, acceptance, and control they probably lacked in real history, or might even lack in the world today? Another kind of escapism, I suppose.

--Is it to subtly explore a different perspective or world view in a critical way (or in a way that shines a light on our own)?

--Is it to create a "what if" scenario, an alternative world where history unfolded differently because of the speculative story elements?

--Is it to give the reader a chance to see what it would have been like, possibly, to be an outlier in a historical setting (for instance, to be an abolitionist in the antebellum South or a pioneering feminist during the Early Modern Era)?

--Is it simply there to show the reader how things really were once upon a time (maybe so that they're damned glad they don't live in the story world)?

--Is it to immerse the reader in a different world view or set of sensibilities and do it so seamlessly that they internalize them for the duration of the story?

--Is it to create characters that the reader can like and relate to on a visceral level?

None of these reasons is necessarily wrong, and not all are mutually exclusive, but goals and target audience will determine how a writer approaches a story with characters who have sensibilities that might be repellent to most characters. The thing to keep in mind is that no approach is likely to appeal to all readers. Their own experiences in life, and who they are, will determine what they're comfortable reading.

I have more thoughts on this issue, but I think this is a good stopping place for today.

Some Medieval Myths

First and foremost, I want to emphasize that most of the fantasy novels out there are not, strictly speaking, taking place in the middle ages. Lord of the Rings, for instance, incorporated elements of "Merry England" into the shire, Anglo-Saxon culture into the Rohirrim, Norse mythology into his dwarves, and classical society into Gondor. Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy, for all that it lacks firearms, takes place in a world that bears more resemblance to the Renaissance, with its emerging class struggles and its brutal inquisition. And his Empire's military rank structure and the description of its officer's uniforms definitely conjure up images of the 18th century.

Part of the fun of fantasy is the ability to mix and match elements from different settings and cultures. And of course, the presence of the fantasy elements themselves (magic, active gods and so on) will cause even an alternative history to differ from the real one.

But inevitably, readers of fantasy will assume that the setting is medieval European, and sometimes writers will get comments about what is and isn't realistic about their world building based on misconceptions people have about the middle ages. I've got a long list of these notions, and it would take far too much space to cover them all this week, but I'll cover a few of them today.

1. Forty was a ripe old age.

I think this notion stems from the fact that average life expectancies were much lower in the middle ages than in modern times. Of course, life expectancies in general were much lower before the middle part of the 20th century, and in the middle ages, actual life expectancies varied somewhat by period (they certainly plummeted during the Black Death), location, social class, gender and so on. But the average life expectancy for a baby born in Medieval Europe was probably somewhere around thirty. This makes sense when you consider the high rates of infant mortality. Between 30%-50% ofchildren did not survive to their fifth birthdays.

But if you calculate the life expectancies of people who survived their childhood, the odds of making it to middle age and beyond improved considerably, even in ancient times. Of course, infectious disease, war, childbirth complications, accidents, and famine, claimed far more lives than they do in modern times. But this is not the same thing as saying someone in their forties was the equivalent of someone in their seventies or eighties today.

Or to put it another way, a high percentage of the people who perished before they were in their sixties or seventies did not die of the kinds of diseases we associate with old age today (heart disease, strokes, cancer, diabetes and so on).

There are many difficulties with obtaining accurate morbidity and mortality statistics for pre-industrial societies, but it's unlikely that people older than fifty were rarities throughout most of the middle ages.

2. No one ever bathed, washed their clothes, or cleaned their teeth.

When I was in school, my history teacher told me that medieval Europeans had only three baths in their entire lifetimes: when they were born, when they were baptized, and when they died. It's also stated sometimes that people only bathed once a year. This is simply untrue.

Obviously, medieval Europeans (along with pretty much everyone else prior to the 19th century) lacked access to hot running water and a microbial theory of disease. But they did understand the basics of hygiene. They knew it was important to wash their hands and faces before eating, and health manuals extolled people to get rid of dirt and grime on their persons.

There were public baths and bathing sites in many European towns. Interestingly, bath houses were often mixed gender, and the Medieval Church condemned their use for social purposes but didn't condemn their use for cleanliness. People in the middle ages may have bathed more than any of their descendents did until the 19th century at least.

 As for clothes washing, people tended to brush their woolen outer garments instead of washing them, but they did wash their linen shifts, shirts, smocks and aprons. This site has a wealth of information about clothes washing in the middle ages.

People in the middle ages also spent time caring for their teeth and trying to combat bad breath. People often used tooth cleaning sticks or rubbed their teeth with cloths and mild abrasives, and used a variety of herbs and rinses to try and freshen their breath.

3. Girls were nearly always married and having babies by their early teens.

This is an assertion that has puzzled me for a long time, since it makes little sense to marry before one is likely to conceive or survive childbirth.

I read in Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's book Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection that women reach menarche (first menses) much later, on average, in pre-industrial societies, and that there is a three year sub fertile period following menarche. If medieval girls didn't tend to start menstruating until their mid teens, and they weren't fully fertile until their later teens, or even early twenties, what would be the point of marrying 12-14 year old girls?

However, the legal age of marriage was as young as 12 in many places (and girls are sometimes married this young in modern times too), and there are certainly records of girls (and more rarely boys) becoming parents at very young ages, at least in noble families. This suggests that 12 has been at the lower end, at least, of menarche for girls throughout history.

Obviously, age of menarche has always varied around a mean, and factors like available energy, body fat composition, and socioeconomic status influence, and maybe even childhood experiences, will influence it. So there were certainly some girls who reached puberty earlier than average for their era, and earlier puberty may have been more common in the upper classes (where most of the recorded examples of early marriage come from). It's also important to note that legal marriages weren't always consummated right away. But there were many nobles and royals who did not marry for the first time until they were in their later teens or twenties. And the average age of first marriage was likely later for commoners (who were not marrying for political reasons).

This blog by Silvia Moreno-Garcia "The Trouble with Juliet," examines some of the available data about marriage ages at different times and places in the middle ages and provides evidence that refutes the notion that it was commonplace for pre and young teen girls to be married and bedded in the middle ages.

4. There were no people of color in medieval Europe.

This is often given as an excuse for omitting characters, or even any mention, of people with ancestry outside of Europe in either historic fiction or fantasy set in medieval-Europe like settings. In fact, Europe was far less isolated from the rest of the world than we like to think. Moreover, modern notions about race and racial segregation (including intermarriage) are much more modern than most people suppose.

One of the black gondoliers

 who worked in Venice during the 1300s-1600s

Malisha Dewalt's tumblr blog is dedicated to artwork that features people of color in medieval Europe. In addition to the influence of the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula, and the presence of people from the Middle East in Southern Europe, there is evidence that there were at least a few people of African descent in medieval Britain.

What does this mean? For one thing, writers of historical fiction should take this into account when they depict medieval societies as being 100% white. And fantasy writers shouldn't assume that a society at a similar level of technology as the European middle ages would be lacking in racial or cultural diversity either.

5. Armor and weapons were so cumbersome and heavy that only the brawniest of men could wear/use them.

Actually, a full suit of plate armor only weighed around 45-55 pounds, which is in the same neighborhood as a soldier's kit today. This is hardly light, but since the armor was distributed evenly across the knight's body, it was actually easier to carry than a backpack. A treadmill study that placed volunteers in plate armor did discover

Full Plate Armor 1548-1569, Wikipedia

some interesting issues. Obviously, plate armor was hot, and it limited breathing. But it is a myth that plate armor was so heavy that knights couldn't walk in it and had to be winched onto their horses.

Plate armor was also elaborately jointed to allow full mobility.

They actually had plate armor for children (probably ceremonial, rather than utilitarian), and Joan of Arc reportedly had a suit of armor commissioned for her.

There are also many misconceptions surrounding medieval swords. One is that they were crude weapons that only allowed their wielders to hack at their opponents. Another was that they were extremely heavy (some people say in excess of 15 pounds) so that only the strongest warriors could lift them. Actually, medieval sword fighting was complex and involved cutting, thrusting and parrying. And medieval arming swords typically weighed between 2-4 pounds, not that much more than a modern fencing epee. Even William Wallace's claymore (a large, two-handed weapon) only weighs around 6 pounds 

These are only a few of the less than factual notions that people have about the European middle ages. There are plenty of others floating around. What are some others you'd like to see addressed?

More fun with maps

It's a well-known fact that while world building is essential when one is writing fantasy or science fiction, it can be an addictive time sink that prevents you from ever finishing anything. Still, mapping is so much fun, I've been messing around with my novels' world lately.

I used Campaign Cartographer 3(from ProFantasy Software) to make these maps of Rilinda, the continent where the places in my novel in progress (Umbral Heretic) and its sequel (tentatively titled Umbral Hunter) are located, but I'm still playing around with scale. I want Sa Tarkil, the capital of Vestala to be at about the same latitude as Seattle and to have a similar climate. However, I want Minua in the southwestern part of the continent to be more subtropical/Mediterranean. However, I want things to be close enough together so that sea voyages in pre age of sail ships (more or less equivalent to galleons) to be able to get between the ports in a reasonable amount of time. Naming is still a work in progress, and I've focused mostly on locales that will actually be germane to the stories I'm working on right now. I'm shooting for most of the names in Vestala and Altua to be literal, but with a sprinkling of "Old Empire" and "Tundish" language ones as well.

Rilinda: To the south and below the equator lies the continent of Sunabera, where Yawandi (Akello's home) is located.

Here's a more zoomed in view of northern Rilinda.

And here's a shot of just the northwestern portion--Vestala (where most of Umbral Heretic takes place) and the northern portion of Altua (where Jarrod and Danior are from). Ruu is from Temmevhode originally (a Zeryan city state), and Alana's family is from Minua to the south of Altua.

Father's Port is the capital of Altua, and is where the Luminarium and Citadel of light are located. Jarrod's home village is northeast of this city, near the border with Vestala. Tesk (and Captain Gilson) are from the North Hills.

I haven't filled in the smaller villages and features yet. I'm having a great deal of difficulty parsing the instructions in CC that allow me to capture a small section of my map and paste it into a new map with a smaller scale for more detail. I'm also having trouble figuring out how to do the same in reverse, so I can place my continent on a world map. I don't think there's any way to do create meridians with CC, or to do a projection (Mercator or some such) that takes into account the meridians, unfortunately. It would be really cool to find a SF/F map making program that lets you map your world on an actual globe, but I guess there's not enough demand to make one marketable.

I have the city mapper from CC, though I'm having some difficulty with some of its features, but I'm hoping a map of Sa Tarkil (where much of the novel actually takes place) will be possible in the future.

What Kind of World?

There are many different subgenres of fantasy fiction, but in my experience, one of the major divisions is whether the stories take place in something that is recognizably our own world, or a secondary (made up) world. Real-world fantasy can take place in contemporary settings (as do most works of urban fantasy), historic settings or mythic settings (like Arthurian Britain or Olympian Greece), and of course different writers embrace these settings with different degrees of historic rigor or realism. There are also portal worlds, which are secondary but connected to our own in some way (as the Chronicles of Narnia) and "Wainscot" worlds, where a hidden magical society with its own rules is tucked away, hidden from the perceptions of the non magical (The Harry Potter books  and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere are examples of this).

But for many readers, the epitome of fantasy lies in secondary worlds that are not connected to our own. In these tales, the protagonists are born, live and die with no knowledge of the Earth and its history or gods. When I decided I wanted to get serious about fantasy writing a few years ago, it never occurred to me to write anything else. Many of my favorite fantasy novels were of this type, and the concept of making up my own world, with its own history, culture and rules was too exciting to pass up.

My current projects take place in a secondary world. The task creating a fleshed-out and internally consistent world with cultures, geography, religions, government, magic systems, ecology and technology that don't feel like they were drawn randomly from an epic fantasy hat is harder than it looks, however. As I try to polish my first novel for submission and smooth out the rough edges, I'm having a lot of those "if I only knew such and such when I started" moments.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is where my world actually came from. I'm not a fan of the old convention of writing a long, info-dumpy prologue that details the origins and history of my world. I also don't like those long "omniscient" outtakes that some writers insert into narrative. My story is written in limited third, and I'm being strict with it in that I'm not telling or showing the reader anything my pov characters don't know or wouldn't think.

But this doesn't mean that I shouldn't know why things are the way they are. Even if my characters have no idea about their world's true history, or even have wrong assumptions about it, the nature of their world will shape their views and perceptions in some way. And there will be little hints about the origins and history of their world in various aspects of its biology and geography.

I've been thinking about the different ways a world can (in a fantasy sense) come to exist, and I've come up with three broad categories.

1. A naturalistic or evolved world like our own. Such a world (if reasonably Earthlike) would be billions of years old and would have a history of complex life that goes back hundreds of millions of years. There may be magic and gods and fantastic creatures or beings, but they're aspects of this natural world. If a god or gods created it, they'd be like the deist's god--setting things up at the beginning and letting them run according to the rules. Perhaps the gods even evolve and change with the world. The people who live in the world may well be unaware of its true nature (just as we were unaware of the true nature of our own for much of its history, and indeed, many still are). They may believe in gods that don't exist, or completely misunderstand the god or gods that do exist.

There are certain things that one expects to see in an evolved world: fossils and fossil fuels (like coal), homologies between the body parts of different types of organism, sensible biogeographical distribution of plants and animals, ethnicities and cultures that fit in with what we understand about the effects of biogeography on human micro-evolution. Of course, if your world isn't very much like Earth, things can get interesting here. But in general, the author might approach things more the way a science fiction writer might, though the presence of magic and interactive gods does make it possible for some bizarre incongruities to exist (say dragons exist and were created by a long-ago wizard as a bioweapon).

2. A created world. This is a world where the reality is as many myths and legends from our own history have asserted--there is a god or gods who made the world, probably just a few thousand years ago, though it could be older, and it hasn't changed much since (barring god-created or magical cataclysms). The world doesn't "have" to be made by gods, of course. It could be the creation of technology or magic wielded by mortals. But it's implicit somehow that there really is a creator and that humans (and other intelligent and non-intelligent species) have been around in pretty much their present form all along.

While the people in an evolved world might believe they live in a created world, there will be some things one with a more scientific mind set might expect to see in a created world that would not be present in a naturalistic one. Most notably, there would be matters of geography, species distribution and homologies between different kinds of creatures (fantastic and otherwise). In a created world, there's no reason why fantastic creatures would need to have internal structures that made it clear they evolved from the same ancestors as other animals with backbones. There is also no need for there to be fossils, there likely wouldn't be coal or petroleum (although the gods might have something analogous that they gifted people with) and so on.

3. An invaded world. In essence a portal world where someone or something came from somewhere else in the recent or distant past and either mostly supplanted the original denizens of either an evolved or created world, or are a thorn in the side of said denizens. This can be the "real" reason there are mixtures of fantastic and mundane creatures and beings where some seem to follow predicable evolutionary patterns and others don't. This is a portal world, maybe, where the portal is now closed or vanished.

I think most traditional fantasy falls into the second category. A god or gods *really* did create the world, and this reality is reflected in the beliefs of at least one group of people on the world (though possible through a glass, darkly). Tolkien's and Lewis's worlds are certainly like this, and it was strongly implied that Earthsea was (Ged knew that Segoy raised the islands from the sea and created the dragons first, though we never learn how Ged knew this).

Often it's not completely clear which of these models the author had in mind, unless some unambiguous "truth" is revealed to the characters. In fantasy, it's not necessary to really understand all the whys and wherefores. Indeed, trying to drop them into a story can be klunky or heavy handed. As a reader, I don't know why George RR Martin's world, for instance, has its strange seasonal cycle (though I've wondered if it's because it has a really bizarre axial wobble paired with a very active and varied sunspot cycle). I don't really need to know why to enjoy the story.

However, if you know the reason for things being the way they are, you can incorporate this knowledge in ways that will make your world building more internally consistent. Even if my readers (and characters) never know for sure where their world came from, I do.

Happy Longest Night to everyone, and I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas (or Yuletide, or Solstice, or winter holiday).

Fun With Campaign Cartographer

When I started writing fantasy again a couple of years ago, I purchased a mapping program called Campaign Cartographer. It's a very complicated program with a pretty steep learning curve. If you follow their basic tutorial, you'll learn to make a basic map, but many of the things about their interface, including much of the terminology for different components of the program, are non intuitive for someone like me (no background in graphic design or anything).

Still, it's loads of fun, and there's a pretty helpful online forum where you can get advice about various aspects of the program. The things that are still stymieing me are the issue related to scaling. I'd love to have a fairly non-detailed world level map where I could zoom into various portions to create more detailed landscapes. But this has eluded me thus far. Also, the city builder module has been a challenge. I purchased this because I thought it would be cool to make more zoomed in maps of a couple of the cities in my world.

It's probably overkill for a writer who just wants some to-scale maps of places in her world, such as what one often sees inset inside the first pages of a fantasy novel. I think the program is more designed for gamers (as the name suggests).

There's also the problem with world building being a potential source of procrastination, and world building being about far more than mapping. I don't agree with some writers who say mapping's a complete waste of time. I'm a visual person, and it is pretty helpful for me to have a sense for how long it will take to travel somewhere, or for what the terrain and landscape might be like in a given region. I've created the nations of Tarkilem (where most of Umbral Heretic occurs) and Andur with a given history and cultures in mind, but the act of setting them down on a map tells me where places need to be within each place in order to allow the story to unfold the way it does. I'll likely need to get some more details down for the countries called Minua and Zeryah and for the continent and lands within Sunabera to the south for the rest of what I currently envision for the series. There's another continent (Roksana) which is mentioned in passing during a scene in the novel.

However, unlike Tolkien, who had his whole world its history so completely in place by the time he wrote Lord of the Rings, that he knew where and what every single reference in his story (save the cats of Queen Berúthiel) fit into the whole, I've left a lot blank for the time being. Actually, I don't want to rope myself, or any future stories I might want to tell in this world, into anything too firmly. I know all too well the kind of flack writers can get when even little things that were hinted at or revealed in earlier books are contradicted in later ones.

So this map represents Northern Tarkilem, the part that is home to the North Hills (Tesk's home village is called Hallerby as it stands right now) and Sa Tarkil (the capital and where much of the story takes place). Another couple hundred miles to the south lies Andur, Jarrod's homeland, and to the East over the mountains lies Zeryah, Ruu's homeland. Tundenholme lies to the north of the North Hills, though this place doesn't come into the story. I'm still tweaking place names to try to get them a bit more aligned with some coherent linguistics. I don't have the expertise in languages to make up my own conlangs and have them sound like anything but random and strange, so I'm borrowing patterns and names from existing languages.

Still working on getting all the fonts large enough to read when the map is smaller than it appears in the program itself.

Female Warriors in Fantasy

Linking this interesting article on the social conditions that might lead to a fantasy society that has a greater proportion of female warriors than our own history has produced. With my own worldbuilding I went with the relatively ubiquitous (if limited) magic approach and took the tack that healing talent led to lower infant and maternal mortality rates, so women in general were not as tied to the role of childbearing for their entire adult lives.

The author of this article discusses this, along with some other approaches, that could also work for setting up a more egalitarian society.

http://worldweaverpress.com/2013/05/28/female-warriors-in-fantasy/#comment-1579