It's Been Fun
Entry posted by Pagerunner
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Here we are: the finish line. I've completed my review of all of Brandon's TWG posts. I decided not to review Peter's at this time; the one thing I knew I wanted to find was the Dragonsteel excerpt that Peter had posted there once, but it was part of the recently released chapters, so I don't feel the need to dig for it anymore. That closes out the last thing I wanted to review of Brandon's social media; I haven't gotten it all into Arcanum yet (the new WoB Archive, in case any of you haven't heard), but I plan on getting it in before release. You'll be able to see everything I found from looking at the Blog, TWG, and old Twitter events, come November 8th. But that's still a week and a half away, which means today, I'll start with one of my new WoBs, instead of putting it at the end. This is a bit of workshopping Brandon did for an Elantris sequel name:
QuoteOkay, so here's the thing. I want to write a sequel to ELANTRIS someday--or, at least, I want to leave myself open to the possibility.
The first book is named after the city of Elantris, where most of the action takes place. The sequel, set ten years after the first book, will take place in the capitol city of the prime antagonists in the series. For cohesion, this book should probably be named after that city.
So, here's the problem. Usually I have months and months to settle on a book title, and I'm usually pretty happy with what I get. However, I don't have an opportunity to write the book this time before I name it. I mention the city that will be the title of the next book several times in ELANTRIS. I have to make certain I really like this city name now, since I'll probably name a book after it sometime in the future.
So, I've been digging for ideas. The country the book will take place in is called 'Fjorden.' As you might guess from that name, the dialectical genre of the culture is a Scandinavian spin-off. (It's kind of a guttural Norse--Scandinavian with some harsh Germanic sounds thrown in.)
Other words in the language:
Hrathen
Dilaf
Arteth
Dakhor
Grondkest
Svorden
I need a name for the new city that would work well as a book title (i.e., it needs to be fairly easy to pronounce, and needs to sound cool) but that still fits with the linguistic style of the region.
Here are some I've come up with so far. What do you think of these? Which is your favorite? Which don't you like?
Zinareth
Widor
Velding
Klynair
Valinrath
Skaln
Vallensha
Vallinor
That's the opening post, but there's quite a bit more discussion of it in this old TWG thead. This gives you a hint of what the fandom was like back in the day before Brandon was published. Pretty jealous, aren't you?
Closing Thoughts
I think this was a very valuable project, both for me personally (I learned a bunch of old WoBs, and managed to get myself onto the Arcanum team) and for the community (especially since I was able to get all the old Reddit stuff out a couple of months back). Definitely glad I did it.
As far as the actual database I created... Arcanum is explicitly not a database. It works mainly on its search engine, with tags designed primarily to support that. I still feel pretty strongly that a relational database, with properly applied tag intersections, is something that would close a lot of gaps and help with both casual research and focused searches. I'm not able to work directly with Arcanum... but I can actually tweak my existing Microsoft Access structure to use Arcanum event numbers and entry numbers, and then tinker on my own with some of the areas I think Arcanum can be improved on. Stuff like superseded WoBs, excluding writing advice, sorting by series, curated lists... I've got a whole bunch of ideas I think would be neat. It wouldn't be terribly practical, since I wouldn't have any of the actual WoB text there, but I think it would be a fun project to keep on the back burner. And an excuse to go through all the Arcanum WoBs and transcriptions, which would be fun to do anyways.
If I ever get anything serious rolling with that, I might reopen this blog. But for now, my WoB Database is officially closed. Hope you enjoyed the ride.
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