[Ximero]

Hi, Kaylin! Glad to see you’re exercising your hand-drawing talent alongside your HM one. Keep up the good work!

[Ximero]

Hey, Kaylin

Liking the writerly piece you’ve started here, hope to read more of it. I would just like to draw your attention to the following:

“”I think -” Whatever Dan had been about to say was interrupted by a deafening high-pitched note that seemed to come from every direction at once.”

When you see it happen in your imagination, as it would in a movie, it’s a very dynamic scene. It’s a startling scene, i.e. quick and surprising, as shown by your use of the dash to suggest, well, the sudden interruption of the character’s speech. But when the narrator takes over to *tell* what’s happening, the tempo introduced by the dash is lost to the leisurely pace of the narratorial takeover, so to speak. For a better sense of what i’m saying, compare it with the following rewrite suggestion:

“I think — ” and a buzz blared in from everywhere.

To sum up:
1) *Show, don’t tell* (= let the characters live out their stories via action and dialogue, don’t have the narrator butt in to caption things for the reader. Unless of course you really want to make a (post-post-modern) point that particular way).
2) When it comes to adjectives and adverbs, *less is more* (or, as Einstein put it, “make things as simple as possible but no simpler”: when you’ve figured that one out, the Pulitzer should be halfway yours )

( 3) for some reason, people these days no longer appreciate alliteration -___- )

Excelsior!

[Ximero]

Ah, my bad. I quite like the Shadow and the Void (as defined above) existing in the Kairulaverse – together with the Eosi making it all way much more than a medieval-ish (at least pre-Industrial Rev.) fantasy (since it has some clearly sci-fi elements as well – so kudos for that). Also, way to go with the b&w circus, looking forward to seeing the series complete

[Ximero]

Voted! And thanks for the info links (we’re all lazy…) – though i would make the slight objection that (unless i’m not recalling it right) the Shadow is more like ‘the dark side of the Force’, or the dimension/plane that sustains it (which, scary and unknown as it may be, arguably could contain some (former?) beauty as well – cf. Jotunheim in ‘Thor’ ). So maybe pitting monsters against a force/dimension is a bit inconsistent. That said, though, i’d pay good money to see a battle between Eosi and Gloamglozers

[Ximero]

mwuhuhuhu :}

I’ll look forward to reading how it all plays out

[Ximero]

Hi, Kaylin Glad to see you’re still at it – i see the Kairula pages flourishing, and even attracting support from other artists, which is always great. So congratulations are in order! Meanwhile, i would like to ask you (but never mind if it leads you to spoil any plot twists or anything) whether the Shadow will be approached more in-depth. So far, i could only spot a cryptic (ominous, even ) reference to it as being the place where no one in his/her right mind should go, but i would indeed be curious as to what manner of beasts lurk therein. Would it all be a sort of Bizarro-Kairula, similar to the original but deformed in some way, or even an Anti-Kairula, or much much worse, some nook or cranny of the Abyss? Would humans (greedy as they ever are) try to tap into its frightful energies? Would some native mage / magic creature come back from it with a vengeance? Would the Shadow find some way of ‘spilling over’ onto Kairula (and Earth, via infected/-ing portals) as a sort of consuming contagion? etc. etc. (donating ideas, since i have no HM creation to donate as of yet)

[Ximero]

Thanks, Kaylin 🙂
Oh, and – of course -__- – *fond and *exoticism (though “exotism” is also a word :p)

@Zerogarth, that sentence there about the Moors isn’t finished because she is yet to come up with a satisfying name for the land, methinks.

[Ximero]

Yeah, i kinda know that feeling 🙂 Well if you’re very found of the sound of Kairula (as you indeed would be), you could perhaps just enter a visual change – either a pronunciation-unchanging spelling modification (“Kayrula”, “Kirula”), or doubling the ‘r’ or the ‘l’, having a double ‘o’ for the sake of exotism, or heck, even those lovely alien apostrophes 😀 – consider “K’irula” or “Kairul’la” or various others on the same ideas 😉

[Ximero]

Hi, Kaylin. Been outta touch due to “real life” (pfft) butting in again (but hey, i got my phd, so whoohoo 😀 and yay for being jobless…) *cough* anyway, wanted to congratulate you for the fine pieces of jewellery you created in that recent competition (the butterfly/fairy-wing-ish ones), they were some of my definite favourites in there 🙂 so keep up the good work.
I see you’ve also been getting some more stuff done on Kairula (will check the magic in a bit), so maybe you’d like to have a look at my recently created (second) collection on deviantArt – http://ximero.deviantart.com/ – where i intend to, time allowing, post some of the stuff i’ve been creating with HM (though the items i have there so far are just in Word). There’s also a link to a ‘fancier’ website specifically made for my card game based on the above, but that one is still very much under construction.

And speaking of websites, without wishing to make it rain on your parade, you should be aware of this: http://forums2.battleon.com/f/tm.asp?m=17500549 – i know it’s just a coincidence, but y’know, best to keep them clearly distinct (spelling tweaks or so), to prevent future legal entanglements.

Excelsior!
Ximero

[Ximero]

Hi, Kaylin 🙂
No worries, you’re not forgotten, nor is your work (just that “real life” tends to be a party-pooper like that sometimes and e.g. some of us need to finish their theses asap… i.e. by tomorrow OTL )
BUT
Good job on the Lupi – it’s a nice touch how the natural ones are more in control of themselves/their abilities and have more natural social interactions (the Dom/sub relationships – err… not like that :p), which is a cool wink at that good-ol’ “there are things man must not tamper with” (or Lupus, in this case). Now i just wonder what happens if, say, a berserking Fenris bites a dragon. (sorry if you’ve already made provisions for that and i’ve missed them).
As for the humans – cool, it seems Kairula’s southern continent (name?) is turning into a little bit of our Middle East (you got some Jews and Egyptians already – uh oh, Moses situation about to go down… – now more Arabs got through 🙂 someone’s gonna get all kinds of persecution complexes 😉 ). As for the Moorish settlement’s name, i’d suggest الخارجية الجنة ([el-Halujee al-jin’nah], unless my ears deceive me, “Foreign Paradise”). After all, they were fairly into earthly paradises, and the pronunciation manages to sneak in some ‘Jinn’ element, so 😉
Keep up the good work! ^^

p.s.: Yup, you’ve also inspired me with the wikipage, but i’m not sure it really works for me after all (not technologically, more like conceptually/stylistically. we’ll see). Plus i haven’t had much time to allot to that lately.

[Ximero]

Cool, thanks a lot, MB/GG! ^^

[Ximero]

Wow, i just noticed that alien helmet was in fact a meta-helmet, made out of Predator helmets. Awesome! :3
Owlman is epic *and* cute, while Te-no-me is truly eyecandy… Good stuff!

[Ximero]

Good stuff, Eyebrow 😉 Reminded me of Earthworm Jim – except craziER

[Ximero]

😀 Fair enough. It was just the mythology historian in me that couldn’t keep quiet on this one 😉

[Ximero]

Glad to have been of help with the Vikings 🙂

As for Transylvania, well it’s only known (in pop culture) as Vampire HQ because of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ novel of the late 19th century. Now Stoker simply did what most commercially successful fiction writers do, namely take a smattering of real-life data and wrap it around with thick layers of historic speculation, and especially his own sheer imagination (not dissing him, since i do that myself). He knew he needed a scary and seductive creature of the night, but more than anything else he needed a context to place it in. It was possibly by mere chance, his discovery of the Saxon chronicles about Vlad the Impaler aka “Dracul(e)a” before, say, those about ‘Bloody Countess’ Elizabeth Bathory, that the world now only thinks of Transylvania (and not Hungary, or Bohemia or various Slavic regions) when mentioning vampires (the genuine ones, not the sparkly ones). Plus, “Trans-sylvania”, “The Land beyond the Forests” in Latin, does sound much more, well, Gothic and dungeony than other geographic names around it 😉

But speaking of Latin, the year you found, 101, marks the beginning of the invasion by the Romans of what was the sizeable country of the Dacian tribes (called Getae by the Greeks), a land partly conquered, pillaged and reorganised after 2 consecutive wars (101-102 and 105-106 AD). By the mixture of Roman settlers with Dacian natives, you eventually got what today is known as the Romanian people (typically known as Wallachians in the Middle Ages), whose folklore does know of certain forms of vampirism (as does most of Eastern Europe), but wolves feature much more prominently therein, from your typical Moon-devouring werewolves (folk explanation for solar eclipses) to St. Andrew, the patron saint of Romania (yes, just like Scotland), being also the “guardian of the wolves”. Sure, there’s many animals that Romanians hold dear, and have historically fetishised, such as the aurochs (European buffalo) or various mountain eagles, but only wolves have their own saint (coincidentally… the patron saint of the entire country) and are most typically invoked in folk magic. And how would they not be, when, on one hand you had the Romans revering their Lupa Capitolina, surrogate mother for founder twins Romulus & Remus, while on the other, the Dacians with their infamous rattling battle-flag depicting a fantastic beast with a wolf’s head and a dragon/fish’s tail (it was shaped kinda like a windsock, so when the bearer ran with it in battle, the wind would cause it to roar, howl, etc., making it look rather frighteningly alive… you know, FX of the BC blockbusters…)

Okaaay… i’ve really been lecturing here *blush* But tl;dr: Transylvania would have been a Team Wolf, rather than a Team Vampire. But oh well, not ruling out overlaps, i guess 🙂 Er… hope this helped?

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