Chris Howard's Writing Blog

Character study...Kass, Jill, Nic

This is turning out to be the most difficult thing I've ever painted.  I've always meant to do this, a character painting with all three sisters from SEABORN, Jillian (left), Kassandra (center), Nicole (right).  I've cut each of them out and posted them below.  A piece of the painting with all three sisters at the bottom.  I'm not even close to complete, and I've spent a good four hours painting so far.

Click for the larger view.

Kassandra:

Jillian:

Nicole Garcia:

An interview!

Thanks, Lori!  An interview I did with author Lori Devoti a couple weeks ago just went up on her site, and looks great--I'm a little blue, however, but that's just my author pic from the Juno Books site.

http://loridevoti.com/blog/2008/07/01/interview-urban-fantasy-author-chris-howard/

Fictional Maps ... one more time

And I'm certain this will not be the last.  I've posted at least three times on making maps for created worlds (see links below), one on the different kinds of maps I like to make, and two focused on how I make maps with watercolors and pencils.  The map on the left is one that I've been adding to over five years.  I had this idea for a roughly pentagon-walled city on the Atlantic's floor in 2003, and tonight I scanned--in two sections--my original 11x17 pencil drawing of the Nine-cities, Enneapolis, the Great City of the Seaborn--actually made up of nine cities inside massive walls, gates, protective shields, and a bunch of other stuff.

I love maps, love making them.  Click the pic for the large view.

http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2007/07/fictional-maps-.html
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2005/10/fictional_maps.html
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2006/06/fictional_map_m.html

Seaborn Notes

I have a character in Seaborn, Michael Henderson, who's a minor character with a background in science, and I've sort of left it up to him to try to explain how people can live and breathe under the sea.  He has the "curse" himself, all the abilities the Seaborn have.  He writes pages of notes, sketches the things he sees in the deep, imagines why things work the way they do with the Seaborn--all with a scientific mind.

I've written and drawn a bunch of stuff in the character of Michael Henderson, which started out as part of the worldbuilding exercises, and just kept going.  I wrote the chapter headings in Seaborn from Henderson's perspective, taken from his notes, his journal, his "conversations" with various notable characters. 

Here are some samples from my journal:

Seaborn Notes
Michael Henderson

I have been to the deep ocean, the Very Deep, and I have set my feet down in billion year old sand.  I have kicked through the dark with blind animals that change shape with their moods, with fish ten meters long that glide through the deep sea without fear--and only eat microscopic food, with arthropods made of glass, and creatures that defy classification, I have touched the bioluminescent lures of fanged ambush predators in the abyss, and I still have all of my fingers.   I have done all of this without equipment, without SCUBA, without feeling the pressure, or need for air.  I am no longer a surface human--or as the Seaborn, say--a surfacer, a Thinling.  I have become one of them.

I have experienced, l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs, Jacques Cousteau's "rapture of the deep," but not as the nitrogen narcosis that Cousteau described in Silent World.  Say, rather, that I have experienced the rapture of the unexpectedly normal in the most unexpected place on earth: the deep sea.

The Seaborn do not suffer from any of the affects of breathing compressed gases, for example the squeeze of barotrauma on descent, because presumably, these do not exist in effective amounts in their bodies.

SCUBA stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.  This is a device enabling surface-living humans to recreate, as near as possible, and within well-defined limits, everything the human respiratory system needs above the ocean surface, in the air.  While in the water, it appears that the Seaborn do not--or even need to--breathe in the same manner, possessing a different, possibly more advanced system for taking in the same gases and nutrients directly from seawater.  Out of the water, the lungs of a Seaborn human appear to function the same way as the lungs of any surface human. 

Lungs:  Alveoli are the small grape-bunch like structures that line the lungs and take up oxygen, CO2, Nitrogen--gases the human body needs to survive, with oxygen fueling so many of the processes.  The Alveoli are highly susceptible to damage from heavy substances like seawater, which really shouldn't be in the lungs.  Damage then leads to low blood oxygen levels (hypoxemia) , low tissue oxygen levels (hypoxia), and then death.  The alveolar-capillary membrane is a delicate, one cell thick membrane through which the gases we breathe are exchanged.  It appears to be the case that the Seaborn possess a more rigid surfactact--a sort of stiffening coat for the alveoli to prevent them from collapsing under the weight of heavier substances like water in the lungs.

Medieval Character Names

Good ones. Skott points to a great source of European names, what looks like a scan of an early census document at the Internet Archive:

http://textiplication.com/2008/06/06/where-have-you-been-all-my-life/

Syren Tears

Or, how do mermaids cry and sweat, and what it looks like in the water.  This is the second in a set of posts for those speculative fiction authors out there who have already--or are planning to--dive into a stories with humans/half-humans that live and breathe underwater.  (See the first, How do mermaids hear? on underwater acoustics).

Right off, I'll say if you're a mermaid and someone's trying to sell you the "never let them see you sweat" line, keep your money.

Let's start with an experiment.  Take a glass of fresh water, a glass of saltwater (mix in a few tablespoons of salt into 4oz/118ml of water), and with a teaspoon, pour the saltwater into the fresh a few drops at a time. What do you see?  The mixing of fluids of differing salinity affect the refraction, the way light comes through the fluid.  Where the two mix, there's a blurry swirl in the water.

I've tried to capture it here in these images.  The one on the left is the glass of freshwater, the right has some saltwater mixing in.  This also works in reverse.  Pour the freshwater water into the saltwater, and you get the same swirls and blurriness.

Close-ups of this:

What's happening here?  It's all about salinity, or the measure of total dissolved salts in water.  (Salts come in many flavors and compound varieties, but we don't need to go into that here).

The salinity of human tears, sweat, blood plasma, amniotic fluid are around 9PPT (parts per thousand) and seawater is around 35PPT  (These numbers vary, for example seawater sampled in the north Atlantic is less saline than water sampled from the Red Sea). 

What it comes down to is that even though we have much the same properties as seawater, we are, well, less salty.  When a mermaid cries, her tears take some time to blend into the saltier water around her eyes. She may have trouble seeing through a good fit of sobbing.

The lacrimation system, primarily used for cleaning and lubricating the eyes, includes the gland, reservoir, and canals that manage tear production in most land mammals.  Tears are salty, but they don't sting because our eyes are already accustomed to the salt content in the fluid that protects them.  This protective fluid for the eyes is actually a set of three different substances that make up the tear film, each layered on top of the other, the outermost lipid layer, aqueous layer, and a mucous layer. (For the different kinds of tears, basal, reflex, and weeping, see the Wikipedia article on this).

No sweat.

There are around 650 sweat glands in an average square inch of your skin, and although the mineral composition of sweat changes with the individual and the source of sweating, the blurring effect of mixing two fluids of differing salinity still applies.  In other words, you would be able to see a mermaid sweat, a thin blurry layer of water over her skin.

All of this assumes that your mermaids, mermen, selkies, nereids, people of the sea, have typical human skin and tear functions.

http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/mermaidshear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears
The concentration of sodium in thermal sweat, M. G. Bulmer and G. D. Forwell
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1363543

http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2008/03/the-sea---water.html

Think organic

Not in what you eat but what you write.  (Think Dr. Seuss).  So, I'm wondering about the world that fills the pages of what I'm writing right now, and I'm looking back at my last three Seaborn novels--and then I'm studying the Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom painting by Repin, and one of the thoughts that strikes me--rather sharply--is that many of us writers of fantasy fall into the worldbuilding groove of basing the fantastic on something very real, familiar…solid fortress walls of stone, cities made of towers.  Even when we take a few steps over the edge, and say, make our characters live in the trees, we tend to think of houses in the branches, flat level floors, rectangular windows, gabled rooflines--the familiar bolted on to the fantastic.

Is it because it's the simpler path?  Is it because we need to stick with something readers can reference--I mean we're already asking them to accept magic, faeries, things that live off human blood?  Could we lose our readers with a blind rush over the imaginative edge--into the absurd--readers scratching their heads a third of the way into your book, thinking, why can't the protag live in an ordinary house--you know, stucco, Spanish tile, etc.  Why does the author insist on dragging me through the character's "house"--some amorphous, self-propelled, windowless, floorless, jelly candy the size of a gymnasium with shifting walls the consistency of yogurt?   

Here's Repin's masterpiece, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876).  Click to view the larger version.

Back to Repin:  What I noticed right off is that here's this fantastic underwater world, and everybody's dressed like they've stepped out of a fête in Victorian England--with a few nice eastern touches to add an exotic element.  Where's the weird natural ocean feel?  Where are the spines, fins, bold coloring, bioluminescence, organic branching coralline growth of the world under the sea?

I did some doodling for this post.  Wouldn't a city under the sea look like this?

What do you think?  An author needs to hook readers with something of the familiar?  Or should an author sprint for the edge, not look back, readers be damned? Somewhere in the middle?

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Brainstorming with poetry

Let's set aside poetry the art form, rhythmical composition and elevating anyone's thoughts, and think of it in a purely structural way: poetry as action, description, mood, story, in a succinct form. 

Think of it as stylized sketching for writers.  Have you ever written poetry as a way to bring ideas together for a work of prose? 

There's a bunch of brainstorming (storystorming?) methods that I've tried successfully.  I have thumbed through the dictionary, pulling out appealing words, writing them down on a big piece of paper, stringing them together--just to see what is born out of them.  Sometimes nothing much, although--in my somewhat limited experience--exercises like this usually yield something, maybe not something special, but something worth paying attention to, something useful. 

I've used mindmapping software (mindjet.com, freemind) for word doodling, throwing down ideas, which amazingly--As Seen on TV!--grow into other ideas, and soon you have this spreading network of thought and action and characters and motives and "what if?" questions.  Really cool stuff.  I recommend at least goofing with these kinds of tools just see what you build.

But I've also found that writing poetry works for brainstorming story ideas, helps tie together a set of interesting words, a flow of ideas, and even more as a way to tell a story or backstory without burying me with too much to take in.  I also think writing poetry sends me in unexpected directions, helps open doors I wouldn't have even noticed with other methods.

The idea here is to get your story ideas down in a concise way, tell a story, fill in background, create a mood, write action, with a handful of descriptive lines.  It's also about taking some time to work with words, be creative, build impossibilities.

There's...um...only one problem with this post.

I wrote a poem a couple nights ago called The Wild Children that I kind of liked, and refined, played with it until I thought I should submit it somewhere rather than post it here.  So I did--we'll see if it goes anywhere.  Anyway, I wrote The Wild Children for one of my current book projects, a fantasy set in a post-virtual universe, where the world's human population has gone completely sim. 

What if there was an apocalypse and nobody came?

You can think of it as post-apocalyptic urban fantasy, only there wasn't an apocalypse, no judgment day, just the singularity, the hissing speed of progress pulling everyone into their nanobuilt V-pods housed in city-sized storage spheres of diamond with walls a meter thick.  Humanity vanishes off the face of the earth--or any planet we've colonized.

Humanity has gone total virtual, billions of us, living out our lives in pure simulative worlds--worlds without limit--without hunger, pain, limitless capacity for growth.  New generations of humans are born, grow and live forever without ever having a physical form--that they know of.  The virtual world is just that good.  But it doesn't really matter.  The story's not about them.

It's about the ones who were left behind. 

What about those who didn't make the go-virtual deadline, and now have to live out their physical lives in a depopulated world?  And is it really depopulated?  There's tech around, empty cities, nanoware that can provide benefits, but what about old world powers, things ignored by human progress, that lived at the borders of humanity, that lived in the forest, under the leaves, in the earth?  They were here before there were humans.  They just let us run our course--maybe even helped us along, and now they're free to roam the far ice reaches, the hundred-mile forests, the cracked pavement, empty office towers, the deep sea.

What about the humans who were left behind, generations of us, sharing our empty world with them?

There, that's my setting, and it all came out of some poetry brainstorming.

What do you do to help jump start your story ideas?  I've covered a few methods.  What have I missed?  Anyone else use poetry?

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How do mermaids hear?

Xpost from FFF:

Here's a slice of worldbuilding for your characters who live in water.  I've just completed a few novels and short stories with whole cultures that live, breathe, and function well under the surface of the ocean.  (The sequel to Seaborn just went to my editor).  In this post, I'm going to take a quick look at the sense of hearing in an aquatic environment, pulling from my own worldbuilding notes, as well as online science resources. (A few listed at the end).

There are things about every story's world that a fantasy author must consider and make real, because we can't expect our readers to throw all physical laws out when they hit page one. We can expect them to set some details aside for a while, but in general, gravity still works, summer's warm, winter's cold, and Kevlar stops bullets better than the three layers of human skin (Epidermis, dermis, and subcutaneous fat do not sound bullet stopping). This doesn't mean our readers won't accept the notion of bullet proof skin, but that we need to back that up with some explanation, and it has to seem real. (No, mermaids are not bullet proof--not any of the ones I know at any rate).

One more thing, just to make things clear: I'm not writing science fiction. Seaborn and the others are fantasy in a contemporary setting, using roughly the same set of rules across stories, using our world's physics, but with some cool enhancements.

So, if you're planning to write about mermaids, naiads, sirens, people from the sea, here are some things you may want to consider when they talk or sing or listen under the waves.

What are your requirements as an author, what's your world imposing on your characters?

I wanted characters to have the ability to live above the water as well as below it without any special physical changes. That's a lot for a reader to accept.

This is fantasy, so I can get away with saying something like, "living off the power of the sea" if I say it with enough solemnity, but that doesn't mean it's simply a hand wave and everything works.

Let's dive in:

Sound travels five times faster under the water than above it. Well and good, but it turns out that volume doesn't depend on the speed of sound, but rather on two things: what's called the "amplitude of sound waves" and--very importantly--on the capabilities of the listener. (Amplitude is basically the height of the sound wave, but let's don't get into that. Acoustics gets very technical and way past me very fast).

We're humans and we have ears on the sides of our heads, a sort of cone to focus the sound waves, and then we have eardrums and special bones in the middle ear that do the hearing.   This works well in the air.

In the ocean, mammals like dolphins have evolved over millions of years to rely on sound conduction through tissue and bone. It turns out that humans can do this as well--just not as well. As you know, we cannot hear an underwater sound while above the water--through the surface, but if we step into the waves up to our knees, suddenly we can. Not like cetaceans, but we have a limited ability to hear through our tissue and bones right out of the box. 

For hearing to really work--as good or better than cetaceans--for my Seaborn characters, they had to have some simple modifications to the jaw bone, a couple skull enhancements, but nothing that you or me would notice from the outside. Radiologists would freak! Readers can easily deal with minor mods.

Other weirdness in the water.

I have solutions for some of these, but if your characters are living in the sea, this is what they're going to have to deal with every day:

How far sound travels in water doesn't depend on how loud the sound is, but on tonality. Higher tonality sounds travel farther than lower tonality sounds. Pressure plays a significant role in speaking, singing, making noises underwater.

Navigating by sound is also a problem. Above the sea, you can close your eyes and find your way fairly easily just by listening--think of the Marco Polo game. You're blindfolded. You say "Marco." Players shout "Polo" off to your right. You turn in that direction to catch them. This works because sound travels slow enough in the air for your sense perception processing to calculate the difference between sound waves hitting your right ear before your left.

Underwater, things get a little fuzzy. Sound's traveling at five times the velocity of sound in air, and you can't tell where it's coming from simply by the difference in the rate it hits your ears. I do think having highly developed bone and tissue audio conductivity helps with this, but not certain.

Let's pretend that you can live underwater. Everything works--lungs, sight, hearing--and it's all going along swimmingly. The oceans are complex environments, with uniformity extending only so far. You won't be living on a plane--the surface of the earth, but in 3D space, hydrospace, and you could find yourself swimming between different sea consistencies, along currents, into water colder than ice, hotter than boiling water. It's a wild world down there.

And interfaces make listening a bitch. Sound bounces off the surface above you if you're in shallow water, reflecting it back at you, producing echoes, dead spots, and other anomalies. Then there are thermoclines, layers of differing temperature in the sea that also affect the way sound travels. Colder water is denser, which changes sound behavior when it hits or passes through one layer to another. In some cases the layer of warmer and colder water can be as audibly distinct as the interface between the sea's surface and the air. The ocean itself is a world of separate layered worlds.

I hope this enough to get things going.

Hearing seemed the clear one to start with, but there are many underwater paths to swim down after hearing. There are obvious ones, like seeing in total darkness--how does that work?-- and breathing a medium as thick as seawater, and not so obvious ones like eating or handling ingrained things like circadian rhythm. Some other post!

LINKS:
http://library.thinkquest.org/28170/36.html
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/tutorial/tutorial.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/08/0811_040811_whale_evolution.html

Seaborn site:  http://www.saltwaterwitch.com