Writing Prompt - Paradise Falls

Another day, another neat picture, another writing prompt. This one comes from one of my two readers, an article about the inspiration for Paradise Falls in the movie "Up."

I love the looming hunk of rock in the distance, and the clouds hovering over top of it (or they're just way in the background, hard to say). It looks very much to me like the place where the Mage Towers (working name) of the UFPE would be! So let's see, brainstorming or spate o' writing today?

It occurs to me that MC's love interest is a pretty under-developed character. I wrote a short scene with him once, but I wasn't quite happy with it. I think I fundamentally don't have as good a grasp on him as I have on MC and Bad Guy, so... character interview it is! Questions are copied and pasted from past interviews. I'm going to set this when UFPE v. 1 begins.

1. What do you do for a living?

I am a Quisan of the Amethyst.

2. Are any other people living with you? Who are they?

I have many fellow Quisans and Quisenes who inhabit the Teuirs. We are by and large solitary, and there are often days where I never exchange a word with one of them.

3. Tell me about your parents. How well do/did you get along with them

No Quis knows their parents for long. As soon as our talent is discovered, we are hurried off to the Teuirs. I remember one scene: my mother was returning from a long and fruitless day of fishing to find that my aunts had cleaned the house, cleaned me, and prepared a fragrant supper. I do not know they chose this occasion to act so generously toward us, but I have never smelled anything as aromatic as that food. I sometimes wonder where my father was during this scene, for I also remember hoping that he would not miss the delectable odor that wafted through our home.

4. What was your birth order? How many siblings did you have? Older? Younger?

When I left, I had no siblings, but I suspect that my parents had more children after I was gone.

5. Who else was in your family while you were growing up? How did you get along with them?

My mother's sisters frequently visited us in the evenings and on holidays. I remember them but dimly as a chattering, perfumed bunch who liked to sweep me into their midst for pillowy embraces that left me a little dizzy from the clash of scents they wore.

6. What were three things you liked to do when you were a child?

I liked to attend my mother as she fished, though I never had the patience to stay for long. I liked to be swept up by my aunts into a communal embrace. Once I arrived at the Teuirs, I liked to scramble to the bottom of the Great Table in order to gaze upward at the sight. It never fails to leave me in awe. The climb back up, and the amount of time the entire expedition takes, severely limited the amount of times I could partake in such a delight when I was fairly young. At that age, I could rarely maintain my enthusiasm long enough to reach the bottom, especially knowing how difficult the climb is. Still, I was now and then seized by the urge, and I never regretted it.

7. What were you afraid of when you were a child?

When I was first taken, I was so afraid that my parents would replace me with another child and forget about me that I often wept at the idea.

8. How did you respond to the physiological and psychological changes in your life as a teenager?

The Quis, especially with Quisans, counsel great meditation for the inner and outer turmoil of that period. Lessons with young Quis during that transition are very carefully monitored for dangerous outbursts. When one becomes flushed with tumultuous sensations, heavy exercise is also recommended. During this period, I descended and ascended the Grand Table dozens of times. The final ascent was always sufficient to cure me of whatever strange ardor had seized me.

9. What makes you happy now?

I enjoy my work with the young Quis. It is astonishing to watch them progress from lost children to peers, and it is astonishing to think that I too underwent such a change. The bulk of my time is taken up with teaching specialized courses of the Amethyst tradition, but I have also been appointed Special Counsellor to half a dozen Quisans who require additional guidance.

10. What is your greatest fear?

The appropriate Quis answer would invoke the Wars and the harbinger that ever lingers of another Rupture, but frankness is preferable to a facade of propriety. My first instinct is to say that my greatest fear is that I shall never discover anything more about the death of my dearest friend, but I realize that I have a fear greater than that - that one day I shall no longer care.

11. What would you change about yourself if you could?

The Quis always seek to better themselves, but they must also honor their creation. Another appropriate Quis response here, if that did not satisfy, would be - I would change the stubbornness that prevents me from knowing harmony. But so much I have I seen of the dangers of self-delusion that I shall attempt another honest answer, painful though it might be.

I would change... my dedication to my duties at the Great Table. I dream of haring away to seek the truth of (name)'s death, but even my dreams are shackled by a sense of duty heavier than iron.

12. What is it that you have never told anyone?

I have never told anyone that I dream of leaving here, but in the interests of an original response, I shall say that I have never told anyone the true circumstances surrounding the death of my dear professor, nor of the thought-link that existed between one of the Amethyst and myself. The Great Table and its quiet people harbor many secrets, without doubt to our detriment.

13. What do you want?

I want to find the truth, and I want to see the girl whose face appeared in a secret room.


I do have a better handle on Love Interest now though I couldn't remember any of the names of the characters he mentions. Oh well. I do like my names for the various Mage Tower aspects: "Quis" is the name of either the collective of mages or a hypothetical individual (a bit like "on" in French); "Quisan" is a male mage; "Quisene" is a female mage; "Teuirs" is the Towers built upon the tepui, and the Great Table is the name of the hunk of rock itself. "Quisan" and "quisene" I got from the French words for male and female cousins; I wanted the mages to have familial names for each other, but I wanted something a little different from the typical brother/sister, son/daughter convention. "Teuirs" is a twisting of the French word for tower. It turns out that foreign languages are wonderful for these kinds of made-up words!

So it's getting late, and if I want my eight hours of sleep, I must away. Good night!

Story Elements - desert mirage

First news first: the workshop group was extremely helpful with the Jemma story. I got some very useful feedback and I think overall a pretty positive reception. Two very interesting ideas I think I will use as I re-write and expand the story are: setting it the entire story during one (very long) day and interspersing it with news and ads all along, so the news story at the end is more fitting.

Tonight I was struggling to think of a topic and so requested outside assistance. What I received - from the blog's single blogspot subscribed follower - was "desert mirages" in the UFPE-world. I'm not entirely sure where to go with that, but the Elves of the Golden Downs certainly need more development, considering how important they are to the plot. In fact, something I never quite figured out is the fate of the Elves of the Golden Downs and how MC's mother met MC's father and (temporarily) escaped the doom of her people.

So I'm afraid I'll stray from the subject, but this is a key plot point I've never quite figured out. What I know is: the Elves of the Golden Down were decimated (perhaps in the older sense of th term) and a very few survivors are sequestered in a cave, sleeping an enchanted sort of sleep. They've become something of a legend among the other Elves, and MMC has made it his professed goal to wreak vengeance on those who did this to them. He's convinced his followers that humans are responsible, and so he wants to Destroy All Humans. He has something of a point; humans did push the Golden Elves out of their territory up into the mountains. But nothing to warrant genocide.

I also know that MC's mother escaped this enchantment or whatever it was to meet up with MC's father and have a romance. They also died, just after MC's birth. I'm thinking of drastically changing MMC2's character; he was written in the heat of NaNo, and even for an Ultimate Fantasy Parody, he's a bit much. I'm thinking of him because he relates to MC the fate of her parents, but that's probably unnecessary.

Anyway, Elves of the Golden Downs. Since beginning this blog and talking with certain people, I've made up the Secret Society, and they have to play a role in this enchantment. MMC probably isn't able to have a role in it, but I'm sure he knows more than he's letting on. I don't want to write it so that Secret Society created the enchantment for the sole reason of causing MC's birth. The mages also may have a role to play here; I haven't decide whose side they're on, if they're unilaterally on anyone's side. And what's the relationship between the mages and the Secret Society anyway?

Oh! The humans are pushing the Golden Elves out of their usual territory (that requires a post of its own, I fear), and the Elves are fleeing into the mountains, as noted. In a recent post, I realized that the Secret Society headquarters are in the mountains; maybe the Elves were getting too close to SS's mountain fastness. Maybe someone even found it - maybe MC's mother did! Oh wow, maybe she even nabbed something. Did MC inherit something from her mother? But how would she have gotten it? This is why MMC2's dubious power may actually come in handy, hmm.

This is very helpful. MC's mother was royalty among her people, but it's a well-worn fantasy trope to have princesses tramping around the wilderness. MC's mother would totally be that kind of princess, too. Anyway, she was tramping around and just happened to run into SS HQ (because security is shoddy) and ran off with an artifact. Why she did this... hmm. She was a trouble-making little princess, which I like; her memory gets hyped up among the Elves, but she was actually a little bit of a black sheep. Very nice.

So she causes trouble and then scoots back home. The SS storms in to the Elven refugee palace and demands to know what happens. Perhaps MC's mother's family suspects her, but of course they defend her. As things get very tense very quickly with SS, MC's mother... we'll say she's on her way to return it, hoping she can smoothe things over, when she spies a secret party of SS on a very bad mission. She runs away, and when she's missing, the Elves go nuts and suspect it was SS; there's a battle, and the poor refugee Elves are killed or sealed in a cave while the SS freaks out a little.

Hmm. This definitely will need some elaborating, but this was an incredibly useful post for me.

World Building - philosophy

I'm not yet feeling better, but as I wade through Hume for class, three things cross my mind. A) I wish I were doing something else right now. B) Though I can't spare much time, I wish I had a moment to spare to write a little something creative. C) I wonder which of the philosophers I've read the UFPE kingdom would like the best. These three thoughts led me, naturally enough, to take a break from Hume to write a bit here.

Once upon a time, I read a good couple dozen of these philosophers, but that was several years ago, and I only have the vaguest recollections of most of them. As this course progresses, I may change my mind about the Royal Family's philosophy of morality and government, but there's no guarantee I'll ever think to write about this particular angle of this universe again.

So far in this course we've read Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. It's a pretty scarce sample of all the philosophical variety of human history, but it provides a nice cornerstone for this post.

Hobbes: any Royal Family should like Hobbes for the easy justification he offers for any kind of government that is not actively murdering its citizens. Government, he says, is better than no government at all, so take what you can get and be happy you're not in a state of internecine war. All morality can be traced back to self-interest; people are better off if we've all agreed to honor our promises and if government is available to back up these promises with force.

So does the RF like this? The problem is that Hobbes provides a fairly bleak picture of human nature, and in a world where there are non-human sentient species, the leaders of the human race should want to glorify humanity more than Hobbes does. So Hobbes is out.

Locke: as one of the strongest influences on the American revolution, Locke's vision of government is a lot riskier for a government. If they're not doing what the people want them to do, the people have the right to opt out of the social contract and overthrow the bad leaders. On the other hand, Locke offers a useful take on property for any expansionist regime; once people mix their labor with inanimate objects, the objects become their property. And once labor is mixed with the objects, they gain a lot of value.

A Lockean philosophy would also place humans over the less industrial sentient species (namely Elves) and offer justification for the human expansion into Elven lands. This expansion is a key plot point for the backstory behind the UFPE. The problem with Locke comes in his political philosophy; he advocates for the separation of powers and claims that absolute monarchy cannot be legitimate.

Perhaps one could imagine a philosophy that combines Locke's view of property and Hobbes's view of government. That is, property is such a hugely important natural right that any government which protects it should be obeyed. This is simplifying both these men to a ridiculous degree, but I think it works for my purposes.

This leaves Hume, and I'm thinking of making Hume's view the heretic view. Maybe MC's One True Love is a closet Humean, eh? Hume is the ultimate skeptic: property is merely the result of the laws people create, and morality is nothing more than our feelings about certain kinds of motives people have. Or even if he does not embrace Hume's view on the specifics, I like the idea that skepticism is heretical in this society. And this intolerance of questioning could be a parallel to draw between the human Royal Family and the Bad Guy Nation.

This brings up more questions than I can address right now - what is the form of the human kingdom, anyway? Absolute monarchy? Constitutional monarchy with a council? Has this system been constant since its inception? Who developed the leading philosophy, anyway? Was it ever the heretical view?

As usual, the best answers produce more questions. Back to Hume.