It has been exactly one month since my last post.  And, I normally endeavor to produce more output that that.  The truth is that instead of on my blog, I’ve been working on something else.

In 2005, I was coming off the high of watching the Lord of the Rings, as well as other movies, and had at the time rekindled an interest in Dungeons & Dragons.  It was cut pretty short by the announcement that my mom had cancer, and a lot of time and emotion was wrapped up in that.  During that time, however, I had posed to myself a question.  Given my love for the fantasy genre, my skill at crafting playable fantasy pen-and-paper scenarios, and my penchant for language learning, I wondered: what would it take to make a world?

I started putting down ideas.  As things popped into my head, whether inspired by real life or just Out Of The Blue, they all went into a file.  Along with this came a concept for a language – nothing revolutionary; all the rules are in other extant languages.  But, this one would be special – it would be for a specific world, and *I* would have created it.  So, I copied an elvish (Tolkien’s) word list from somewhere on the web, and removed all the elvish, leaving me with the words I could start translating (or, retro-lating, as I call it).  Those went into another file.  Then, I started to build a creation myth.  This provided me not only with a basis for the world, its cosmology, and its development, but also with more words to use.  This went into a file.  I got a fair amount done, but I put it away in late 2005.  Every once in a while, I would see it sitting on my flash drive when I opened my fitness files, updated my resume, or just had a random bit to save.  I would open it and say “someday…” I had no idea why I had done it, other than it felt good to be creating again.  But, restarting it didn’t feel compelling.  I wasn’t really in a creative place, and there sure wasn’t money involved.

Earlier this year, I started feeling creative again.  I wasn’t doing anything about it, though.  Reading, knocking a few ideas around for writing.  I then ran across a webcomic from one of my favorites: xkcd.  It’s geeky and witty, therefore I like it.  But, one in particular caught my attention; the artist had taken a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic and made a panel.  (see it here)  I thought about my world, and why it sat there on a flash drive, and if whether one day I would regret wasting my time on it, or regret not extracting it from my imagination.  I opened it, and once again, the ideas began to flow.

So, I have eight continents to fill, along with the climate, flora, fauna, geography, and all the other bits and pieces that make a world much more than a watery ball of stone.

In the Night Before the making of All Things, the Awalonae awakened. And when They awoke, They looked about and saw that there was nothing. So the Awalonae said let Us make a place for Us to live.

the opening lines of the Ferihewal