For athenais and marikochan, things that drive me crazy in conlangs. More like conlang representations in fiction; most of the serious conlangers I know are way better at conlanging and linguistics than I am. In no particular order:

1. "Languages" that are relexifications of English--exact same structure as English, just swap out the words one-to-one. That's not a language, that's a sporkin' code. Alternately, relexification of another language, except I'd of course be less likely to catch it. (I suspect if the author knew English and another language s/he would be less likely to make this mistake?)

2. If used improperly, "alien" languages that actually are some Earth-language. I believe Cherryh's Faded Sun books used Tuareg, which kinda annoyed me when I found out. (I verified that at least some of the language elements were from Tuareg. Roar.) On the other hand, if you want to give a culture the flavor, especially in fantasy, I can deal, e.g. the French in Jacqueline Carey's KUSHIEL books. (I actually quit in the middle of the first one, I'm afraid. I got bored.)

3. In transliteration, indiscriminate use of apostrophes. (I actually used to collect different ways of using the ubiquitous apostrophe.) Mercedes Lackey uses apostrophes for--was it glottal stops, in the Shin'a'in language? Or morpheme boundaries? Dammit, it's been too long since I read the VOWS? OATHS? AND HONOR books, the Tarma/Kethry ones. In a similar vein, sticking in unpronounceable xxqw;asd;fl things is really. really. annoying. Especially if you're me and you need to be able to "hear" the name in your head or you stumble over it even reading silently. If you have to compromise on your transliteration system, for godsake make it human readable and stick it in the appendix, or on your website, or whatever.

4. The assumption, in a sufficiently large scope of setting, that there is One True Alien Language. Language monocultures. Roar. (This drives me nuts with music, too, which I'll get to if I ever get around to posting my final Norwescon notes, the panel on "When a Song Is Your Story.") I mean, dialects, people. Regional vocabularies, accents and pronunciation, differing socioeconomic statuses, how many dialects are documented in freakin' London alone? What's more, if you're going into depth on this front, these dialects could have social consequences, even minor ones. ("He sounds like a hick.") Not to mention generational change. Related to this, "Common" can piss me off if it's authorial laziness. If you have a lingua franca or a pidgin/creole, that's perfectly legitimate. But the "oh, everyone speaks Common"--sigh. (On the other hand, Suzette Haden Elgin's "We Have Always Spoken Panglish" plays brilliantly with that, and ethical questions of linguistics research and cultural extinction.)

5. When the names seem to bear no relation to the phonology of the purported local language(s), unless there's some explanation (entrepôt, cultural invasion/diffusion, conquerors coming through). (Actually, Robin Hobb's ASSASSIN trilogy does something kinda neat with names along these lines.)

6. Really weirdly inconsistent phonologies--I mean really; it's rare to find a phonological system that is "ideal" or "complete" (really conlangy people probably know what I'm referring to; I'll refrain from the more technical discussion). But it helps to have a clue.

7. Is it just me or do authors tend to portray the Other Languages as More Complicated, especially when it comes to honorific-type stuff? Or is that my sample? ("More complicated" is so relative anyway. Human children all over the sporkin' world learn to speak their mother tongues just fine, so this isn't so much a matter of "innate" difficulty.)

8. Random magical incantations. Dammit, if you're gonna put 'em in there, I want there to be a system. Or hints of one. (I always wondered about Shirak and the other one--Raistlin's staff, DRAGONLANCE.)

9. Getting into constructed scripts, when they're always written left-to-right, horizontally. (Naracze is written vertically, dammit. They use ink-calligraphy; brush-strokes flow more naturally that way.) Can anyone think of a sf/f book not set in the classical/ancient Mediterranean world that uses boustrophedon? And you seem to see "ideographs" (possible, but Chinese writing uses logographs, idiots, GET IT RIGHT), alphabets, and syllabaries the most frequently. I find myself longing for a sly mention of an abjad. Or cuneiform. Warg.

Please note that I don't think all writers need to go into the detailed conlinguistics of their worlds. But if they are going to put stuff in, I wish it'd more frequently be gotten right. (Delany's Babel-17 was awful in that regard. Including the simple factual/terminological errors, which I'd cite if I had a copy on hand right now.)

On the other hand? I like the hints of algebra/number theory in the conlinguistics of the atevi language in Cherryh's FOREIGNER series, I really do. I'd pay $$ to see a grammar of the thing, to the extent one might exist. (It seems to me that she has a decent amount of it worked out.) *wistful* (And no, I haven't read anything by Suzette Haden Elgin other than "We Have Always Spoken Panglish." Don't hurt me; there are so many books/stories and only so much time. Hell, I didn't even bother turning in my Nebula ballot.)

Actually, I think most of my complaints could be subsumed under the brilliant, if perhaps slightly overly Sapir-Whorf- and Chomsky-focused Aliens and Linguists by Walter Meyer. Out of print. Find it anyway; it rocks.

---

For coffeeandink: writing poetry vs. writing prose. For me, anyway.

The line slides. It didn't always; they used to be distinct shapes in my head. As time goes by, music and prose and poetry slide together in my head, back and forth. I have an idea in my head, some phrase, and it Schrödingers between forms.

I used to write pages of gawdawful doggerel, rhymes and rhymes. It's bad when this is how you learn shiny new words, because you've dog-eared the miniature Webster's rhyming dictionary. I had to learn the hard way that words you have to dredge out of a rhyming dictionary are usually Not the Way to Go; that you have to pick them for a purpose, because they sound right, because they're part of that tide or flood into a new one altogether. (Um. I should stop using metaphors. They always get me into trouble.) I'm sharing this, so you know, as a BAD example:

I am dying of the tears
That drown my heart
As we do part
In winter cold.
Death is cruel
And sleep is blind,
And now I find
That love is old.

Cliches, cliches, cliches. Nonspecificity; speaking in the abstract; I'll stop there. You can have fun analyzing the suckage in this one.

And then there were the gawdawful stories. I really would share an example, but most of the crap is safely IABIK. My prose models early on were Simon R. Green and Piers Anthony. There are virtues to their styles, but those virtues were not mine. I attempted very clear, prosaic prose, the prosiest prose could get.

Poetry and prose lived in their own boxes, never the twain to meet. (Okay, don't hurt me. Too hard. Meep.)

Then, in high school, two things happened. I discovered Zelazny and (re)discovered McKillip, who then became my prose models. (I took it too far. I can now turn out pretty and completely sporkin' incomprehensible phrases. Sigh.) And I started experimenting with free verse, or less doggerel Hallmark-card rhyme schemes (Sidney Lanier..."The Marshes of Glynn," oh). The two modes started leaking into each other.

Later there was "Echoes Down an Endless Hall," which started llfe (...you're all bored of this anecdote, I'm sure) as a harmonica/recorders trio. The story's plot and character development are actually structured around theme-and-variations. (Someday I must try sonata-allegro form! Or a passacaglia [warning: the page's cream text on textured grey background is somewhat unfortunate for its readability]. Or something.) And then "Alas, Lirette," structured around this putative ballad; here's the first stanza:

When last you lingered by the burning city,
When you saw my eyes were parched of pity,
I thought that you surely should depart--
I thought I no longer held your heart.

This isn't as thoroughly awful as the first example, and I'm still *shuffles feet* fond of "parched of pity," but in retrospect I'm really, really surprised GVG didn't make me take out the thing and replace it with some other framing device. (There are five stanzas. I can only say that I had Gordon R. Dickson's "Soldier, Ask Not" on the brain. And yes, the thing has a melody. Don't ask.)

The very weird thing, at this point, is that I find myself using poetic devices in the prose. (And often having to trim it.) Alliteration, assonance. Sometimes I pause for a second in composing a sentence to find a prettier way to say it. (I should really break this habit.) Sometimes it just flows out without much effort on my part. I am not good at description, especially visual description. If you ask me to get real specific in depth, I start to flounder. So in a way this is a form of laziness: I pick out a couple telling details, something the reader's inner eye can focus on, pinpoint-sharp; and then I retreat into metaphors. Assuming I'm doing my job, the reader is fundamentally working with me; if I give her an opening, she'll construct the movie in her head, if that's how she reads. Let me give you a glimpse, I say; let me whisper into your ear, and suggest, and you'll see what you need to see in the way you want to see it.

I will say that, while I may overdo this, I'm doing it for a purpose. I read my work out loud, or passages of it anyway. It has to taste right in my mouth. And this goes as well for the essays at this point, actually. Sometimes I think I'm trying too hard, that I should open my hands and let the words fall as they will, just words, just sentences, just strings of meaning without the embellishment. It's also very hard to stop, though. I do words. I can't not do them. They will take on some shape in the mouth; so I might as well control it. Er, even when I'm rambling in very nonpoetic fashion in the weblog. *moue*

I think rhetoric also falls in here somewhere. Not that I'm great at speeches, extemporaneous or otherwise (that is to say, I can hold a crowd to some degree if I'm allowed to bring in humor, but I don't usually want to have to), but reading almost the entire 600 abridged pages of Churchill's speeches OUT LOUD to the lizard gave me an even greater feel for how to use the sounds of words to set mood, pace, tension. I mean, here's the overabused example, from the Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat speech:

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope.

"many, many long months"--the repetition itself lengthens the duration, to emphasize; the alliteration pairing "struggle" and "suffering." The grouping of concepts: "by sea, land and air"; "might" and "strength"; "war and "tyranny" and "crime." And after that long impassionate sentence, "It is to wage war..." he punctuates it with "That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim?" Short sentences, after the riverine flow of the previous one; except for "policy," all monosyllables, like hammer-blows. (I was actually awed by the extent and effectiveness of the monosyllable short sentence technique in his [abridged] corpus.) Repetitions again of "victory" and "survival" and "British Empire"; the way he glides from one to the next to the next, connecting these ideas in the listeners' ears. Dude. I'll stop there. I get overwhelmed, even teary-eyed, reading Churchill.

(This is Yoon's cockamamie first-pass analysis. I am SURE that real students of rhetoric have combed this thing over until it's bald. Even a Yoon can get something out of cockamamie analysis, though.)

And so I use words and rhythms for emphasis, even/especially in the prose. I feel embarrassed sharing examples, because I'm afraid that they actually suck, but maybe you can see why the suck, what works and what doesn't, what I was trying for and fell short of, maybe it's informative in that way. I can but hope. From the (rough draft) Perilous Gard essay: "When Kate wakes up in the Perilous Gard, freed of Fairy, she finds that the images of her world have been inverted." Assonance: "Kate wakes," "images" and "inverted." Alliteration: "freed," "Fairy." Linking words. Admittedly no genius, here. I really want to do the hammer-stroke monosyllables in a row, but am generally being too verbose to carry it off. *embarrassed again*

Poetry is a little different; and ironically enough, as the prose grows more *wince* baroque and in danger of coloring itself purple, the poetry becomes more and more sparse. Distilled. I don't write long poems; I haven't the attention span. (I envy those who can.) Each word counts for more--the shortest story I can make work is, say, around 500 words. Usually more. A poem will run, what, 20 to 100 words. Each word counts for more, its rhythm and hiss and silhouette on the page. (See, I just deleted "shape" and put in "silhouette." Why? I don't know. It felt right.) I am not writing a tapestry; it is a sharp sweet curve of thread, itself. Their selves, the words.

I feel like writing a poem, writing one that I'm seriously working on and not forcing myself to dash off as a daily exercise (which I suck at keeping to, actually; whoops), takes the mental effort of a short story, in some ways. There is such a sharp image to convey in so few words. An emotion, a sideways dream. And the shape on the page, where the line breaks fall, this matters much more. You can paragraph things, and have chapters/sections, in a story; but you don't (generally?) get to mess with the line-level stuff. And that's okay; to have to read an entire novel that way, where the focus is not so intent upon the very individual words, would be exhausting. (Um, I'm going to skirt around epic poetry with the convenient excuse that after the 40+-page Spenser-inspired quasi-saga, I gave up writing that, so it's outside my process.)

And yes, I do list words-that-rhyme or words-that-alliterate in the margin, testing possibilities. Branching, different paths, random walk, I don't know. My brain is a weird space. Needle, needle. One short sharp jab. No tapestry.

I think I am ceasing to make sense, so I will stop. *extremely nervous* I hope the real poets who might glance at this won't flog me too hard.

---

limyaael's Army rant YES YES YES I'M NOT ALONE!!!

) Food. Many authors quote the statement that an army travels on its stomach, but few authors do anything with it. Where are the supply wagons, the long lines of cattle that surely must be slaughtered to provide all the meat that everyone seems to be eating, the cooks that prepare the stew or broth or salads? Where are the forage parties that bring in food from the surrounding area, if the army doesn't bother with supply wagons? Where are the eventual replacements for the bottomless bags of dried rations that soldiers in other fantasy armies carry with them?

I whine about this. *squirm* Even though I own Engels' Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army and still haven't read it. (I'm saving it for when I'm actively working on Paper Knives, I guess.)

oyceter on Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis 2; I really liked Persepolis.

While Persepolis was on a childhood spent in post-1979 Iran, Persepolis 2 is the story of Satrapi's teenage years in Europe and her return to Iran. I feel rather bad saying that I liked the first book better because of the intertwining of the personal and the political, of the view it gave me of living in Iran at that time. The second book is still interesting, but once Satrapi leaves Iran, the book is much more about her personal life and assorted teenage bad decisions. Part of the book also covers her return to Iran, which could have been interesting from a third-culture kid POV. While she does go somewhat into the reverse culture shock of finally going back to the country you were raised in, but different because of your experiences abroad (something I have great personal interest in), it's really not the focus of the book. The first book wasn't explicitly focused on the political situation in Iran, but it was very explicit on the impact that the political can have on the personal, and it humanized what was going on there at the time, which is one of the reasons I liked it so much. Well, that and Satrapi's often bizarre and morbid sense of humor.

Also on Elizabeth Wein's A Coalition of Lions.

untrue_accounts' Journeys End [Buffy-fic, S3 Wishverse--AU?]. Buffy and Wesley. Ohhhhh. And No Oceans Left [Angel-fic, post-4.1, Wesley/Justine] is so very wrong, and brutal like scour. Truly and Forever [Buffy-fic, spoilers? for "Seeing Red"] is truly chilling-beautiful, with a slow ominous cadence.