Galaxies are one of those things that it’s easy to create a picture of. I remember in the 1970s all an artist needed was an airbrush, one or two pigments, and a fine paintbrush for depicting individual stars. When Photoshop and other painting programs came along, you could do the same thing with digital tools …
Category: Writing
Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/31/22: Monarch Portraits of Narnia (Narnia XLIII)
I’m going to do something different for this post of WW. I’m going to post AI-created portraits of randomly generated Narnian monarchs using StarryAI. (Starry-Eyed, get it?) These monarchs are intended to be used in Narnian fanfics, but they could be used in any work of fantasy fiction as well. First, Queen Thuma of the …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/24/22: Nymphs and Satyrs III (Narnia XLII)
Now we get to the fun part of this series of posts — the names! Lewis very kindly supplied a number of names for his major and minor faun characters, and they all ended with -us. Dumnus Girbius Mentius Nausus Nimienus Obentinus Orruns Oscuns Tumnus Urnus Voltinus Voluns Going by this, we can assume all …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/17/22: Nymphs and Satyrs II (Narnia XLI)
In this post I’ll talk about how Lewis wrote his fauns and satyrs, which are not the most child-friendly of mythological beasts. Are you ready? Because everything you think you know about them is wrong. First of all, the original satyrs of Greek myth did not have goat legs, horns, and tails. Those were attributes …
A Child of Charn, Part 2 [Narnia Fanfic]
Part 1 is here ———————————————————————————————————- A Child of Charn (cont.) “Come,” Anthen said, taking her arm and leading her out of the crowd. “The rest is just more of the same. It’s best if you don’t witness it.” There is more, Saffla thought numbly. More slaves, more creatures, more chariots and drummers and …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/10/22: Nymphs and Satyrs I (Narnia XL)
This is another of those posts that is informational rather than a set of randomly generated names. Say “mythological creatures” and “Narnia” and most people even with a passing knowledge of the series are likely to think of dryads, naiads, satyrs and fauns. (And centaurs, but for this post I’m going to stick with fauns …
A Child of Charn, Part 1 [Narnia Fanfic]
How bad was the Empire of Charn? Very, very, very bad. ———————————————————————————————————- A Child of Charn Her mother had told her not to go, but she wanted to see it. Saffla, a common farmers’ daughter of House Tricklewater, Goodworks Farming District Precinct VII of Sadelnon Province — which once, eons ago, had …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/3/22: Mythical Lions (Narnia XXXIX)
One thing the world has no shortage of are mythical creatures based on lions, as I showed in this post. This is likely the reason there are no manticores or chimerae in Narnia; they would have stolen Aslan’s thunder! There are even more bizarre lion monsters in the world of heraldry, but that’s for another …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 7/27/22: Other Mythical Creatures of Narnia (Narnia XXXVIII)
This week’s post is a little different. I’m running out of things in Narnia to name, so I’m going to post a list of possibilities for Narnia fanfic writers: Aside from those mentioned in the books, what other sorts of mythological creatures might have resided in Narnia? Lewis himself had a pretty catholic list of …
A Year and a Day [Narnia Fanfic]
(While I was writing about Queen Swanwhite a month ago I wondered just what it would mean to leave a reflection of yourself in whatever pool of water you looked into, a reflection that remained for a year after you were gone. The Queen might not care, or those who carried her legend. But for …