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No dumbing-down necessary, but I will add some diagrams so that my words make more sense. Not being an astronomer myself, I know these things can be hard to visualize sometimes. (As a side note, there actually are some real astronomers/astrophysicists here on 17S including Peter. So if one of them decides to weigh in, you may get a more exact explanation.) Seen from the side, your system looks something like this (obviously not to scale). There are two possibilities here. Either the planet's axis is perpendicular to the orbital plane [A], or it is tilted some . If the axis is perpendicular, then as the planet rotates the suns will pass right over the equator all the time. If you are on the surface of the planet and look up at the sky, the paths of the two suns could be traced to follow the two arrows in this diagram. From what you've said so far, this is probably the way your system is set up. If so, no need to complicate things further. If the axis is in fact tilted, and we look down on the system, "North" can be pointing in any direction relative to the two suns. Now, that direction could be constant. For example, in addition to always pointing the same face towards Earth, our moon also always has its "North" pointing the same direction relative to us. That means that even though Earth doesn't pass directly overhead when you stand on the Moon's equator, it does always follow the same path in the sky. So, even if you decide you want some axial tilt to your planet, you could still choose to have the path of the suns remain constant. However, in this scenario sun#1 and sun#2 will not share the same path. Basically you would be picking one configuration out of the possibilities described below. It is very common, if there is axial tilt, for that axis to "precess" relative to the overall system. That's just the word we use for "rotate" in this case, since lots of things are rotating and it can quickly become confusing if you don't have special words like "orbit" to describe this kind or rotating instead of that kind. If you think of a spinning top that has some wobble to it, the top end of it will move around in a circle, sometimes slowly sometimes quickly. In fact, spinning things almost always precess. In the above example with the moon, it just happens to precess at exactly the same rate that it orbits the earth, so that there is no net change (very similar to the tidal locking that keeps the same face pointed at us). The Earth, as you know, has a tilted axis that precesses relative to the sun, which gives us our seasons. If your planet behaved similarly relative to its two suns, you would get something like this as it moved between the positions noted in the top-down image as 1-4. Hopefully that helps. :-)

I have that problem if the URL I am using is one to (for example) Google Drive, where the link is simply a string of characters and does not contain an explicit image file extension like .jpg or .gif at the end. Finding a way to get a direct url to the image solves it for me. The problem is that the "sharing link" provided is actually to the dynamic image viewer that Google etc. use, not to the image itself. After you share the image, right click on it (or ctl+click for Mac) and select "copy Image URL" for the link to use, or select "open image in new tab/window" then copy the URL from the address bar.

These are my favorites so far. :-) Cosmere: Yo mama so fat, when she swims the trappers think she's Patji. Not Cosmere: I think yo mama is an Epic. Ain't no way that Ugly is natural. If I ever go to Nebrask, I want yo mama with me. She sweat enough to wash away all the chalklings.

Some of my favorite writing has been when I get to include creation myths. Sometimes they contain more truth for the characters than for me, but I think it is in their nature to find something beautiful behind the mundane. (Or, in certain genres, frightening/horrific, but I don't write in those.) I have to say that my favorite part of this piece is the voice given to the Universe. It communicates a lot about the person relaying the story.

Looks like I missed the poll, but I still want to chime in: It doesn't matter what you read, as long as you continue the Meme-a-Chapter updates. I have really enjoyed those. (For the record, I think that my next-book vote would depend on what you love most about Sanderson's books. Plot twists and cool magic with action scenes? Mistborn trilogy wins. Exploring a world with tons of hints to theorize about? WoR for sure. I agree with the votes to wait on Elantris until the new edition comes out.)

If I understand you correctly, the planet is located at the L1 point of the two stars. I guess I was extrapolating an additional effect on top your description, which may or may not factor into the system you've designed. If the planet is like earth in that its axis of rotation is not perpendicular to the (two sun's) orbital plane, then the suns will occupy distinct arcs in the sky for a given observer on the surface of the planet. I assume that, even in the absence of any movement relative to the two suns, the planet's axis will still precess. If so, this will result in a regular ("year-long") cycle in which the north pole points towards one star, then the other, and back again. This would result in earth-like seasonal variations, except that with diametrically opposing suns one would be in summer mode (longer days in the northern hemisphere) when the other is in winter mode (longer days in the southern hemisphere). These disparate seasons would, presumably, even each other out and therefore result in no net change in average temperature. If the axis is oblique, the two suns would be unmistakably unique, so I guess your initial description of it seeming to the residents as though they might be the same implies that there is no axial tilt, and the above would not apply. If there is axial tilt, and it precesses, I can imagine some fascinating cultural elements, such as mythology of the two dieties exchanging places in the sky... Having mentioned that, it also occurs to me that it could be particularly interesting to describe philosophy/religion on a world that is, in fact, the center of everything. The suns orbit us; we are immobile, therefore we are the fulcrum of the universe! (Not having read your work yet, I don't know if you already incorporate any or all of these things. I suspect you have thought of yet cooler things to include.)

My family has called that "Hanitizer" for a long time, which thanks to this thread now strikes me as having great Epic potential.

Thanks so much to all of you for the recommendations! And Nait, thank you for the analysis. That is a helpful explanation. The only problem now is that my To Read list has about doubled in length, and my reading time is dwindling with some work deadlines... Do any of you have access to a time machine? Or a bendalloy misting?

Yes, number two (or three? Been a while since i read those) with the batteries. Delightful gets the credit.

Can your friends pull this out of their little hats?(Yes)

Not inception. The prisoner/slave offers to fulfill three tasks in pursuit of those goals, but only two are required.

A prisoner helps a wastrel overturn a high government official and insinuate himself with the governing family in exchange for his freedom.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

I just learned, from the excellent (yet frustratingly slow-to-update) webcomic Drive, about the Ming dynasty's military secret police called the Jinyiwei. One of my stories is set in a magical alternate Ming-era China, and this fits well with the political intrigue I've been trying to include. First, I want to point out that all kinds of bizarre things happen in biology, and the number of non-Earth ecosystems we've observed is still fairly low. So I bet your readers will buy into whatever you go with, provided you either give a plausible reason for it or somehow point out "this is weird and we don't know why." So feel free to extrapolate as much or as little as you like from what happens here. For the growing season, since there is no cycle, I would look at rain forests or other places where the climate is pretty constant year round. Taller is not necessarily the result, but well could be. One thing that happens in ecosystems where energy is abundant is you get lots of different kinds of species filling lots of niches, and many of them grow very quickly to try to fill space before they get crowded out. For the constant daylight piece, there would be some differences for sure, and I suppose that taller/faster growth would be one probable effect. Earth plants generally partition their photosynthesis into "light reactions" and "dark reactions" so that they can gather as much energy as possible during daylight and then do the rest of the chemistry on their own time when the sun isn't around. Because of that, constant light can harm some types of plants, while others (e.g. tomatoes) are fine with it, depending on how they deal with chemical intermediates and how tightly regulated their circadian rhythms are. (If you are interested, here are a few links to scientific treatments of the subject. If any of those look helpful but are stuck behind a paywall for you, PM me.) More useful to you would probably be research into the types of plants that live in or near the arctic circles. Those will deal with continuous light for a portion of the year, and will probably be similar in that aspect to the plants on your planet. It occurs to me to ask: is there no seasonal cycle because there is no axis tilt or because the effect of the tilt is cancelled out by the two-sun effect? (i.e. at high latitudes one sun is high in the sky for summer when the other is low on the horizon for winter.) This could be a fascinating cycle of its own to explore. I think this would depend a lot on the distance and duration/frequency of the lightning. As I'm sure you know, there is a lot of variation in the length of a lightning strike. Some can be over almost immediately, others last upwards of a second. And sometimes multiple strikes comes in quick succession. The more important question, though, is which way are you facing? If you are looking at the floor/wall, all the colors should be projected from the window, and if the strike is long enough your eye should have time to make sense of the shapes/patterns (if any). If it is a short strike then a burst of color may be all you see, especially if you get multiple strikes coming from different directions, which would project the image onto different locations. If you are looking at the window, however, you will probably only notice those pieces of glass behind which the lightning is appears. (If it is close enough to light up the whole window, you may need to pray more, or pick a different deity's church.)

Yay! ThirdGen Wins!

Is there a way to access polls via the mobile site? I've been using my phone more and more recently, and haven't found a way to submit a vote without switching to the full site.

A group of escaped captives help a late friend's family. The group's hideout is subsequently attacked and destroyed, killing two of them.

Matilda

My question was about whether a gemstone that is not one of the 10 polestones could hold stormlight. I take it as confirmed (e.g. from the quote you posted) that they couldn't function in fabrials (where spren trapping is involved, and/or they are filtering for specific effects), but I can't decide whether having the wrong color/makeup would prevent them from simply becoming infused. Has anyone asked about non-polestones?

My reading of that quote is that color is important specifically for the transformation surge, i.e. soulcasting, but not for surgebinding in general. The stormlight in a gem may be tied up in its identity enough to resist color draining as Weiry suggests. We know from Well of Ascension that masking metal from iron/steel can be as simple as putting it in your mouth so it is now "inside" you, so I would not be surprised if a little Stormlight in a gem is enough to protect its color from being accessed by awakening. Personally, though, I am not convinced that a successfully altered gem would lose its stored light. Color doesn't seem essential to that task to me. Do we have WoB about anything regarding non-polestone gems on Roshar? If the gem were part of a fabrial, with a trapped spren, then you have a gem-type specific interaction and the spren would be released.

First, I want to say that I have also been there. For the most part these issues are an emotional state for me. People can tell me "your work is great" or "it doesn't matter if it's terrible" but it takes me believing it to actually make a difference. So I hope our encouragement is helpful! There has already been some good advice on the "is-it good-enough" concerns, and I can say from my experience that those issues don't go away, you just get better at dealing with them--my tolerance for lousy drafts goes up when I learn that I really can fix it later. (I probably could have benefited from the "Don't talk about writing" advice. That's one I wish I'd heard before.) What I want to address is the point that stopped me from writing for a while: the "do-I-have-anything-worth-saying" concern. That can be at least as debilitating as worrying about the artistic quality. My experience: Though I enjoy writing stories, I am more of a poet than a novelist. There was a period when I thought that the message of a work (any medium) was what gave it real importance, and I started to despise my own poetry because it was usually just an exploration of images, or a juxtaposition of rhythms and sounds. Basically fluff. I stopped writing for a while because I didn't have anything I wanted to say with my poems. I have since become a firm believer in the value of art for art's sake, both for the creator and for the audience, and I think it is important, perhaps crucial, that "superfluous fluff" is made and experienced. Some of my favorite poems, looking back, are the ones that are fun just for the sake of being fun. Trying to relate an important emotion or idea can make for good poetry too, but in many ways that's harder. In the Firefight tour Brandon's pre-signing talk was about the forms that creativity takes and that the value of writing for the writer. I recommend going back and watching one of those videos or reading the transcripts. I agree with him that the act of writing changes the writer by their engagement with the material. I know that writing a novel (I am tempted to count it as three since it has gone through such dramatic revisions to try to fix things that still don't work very well) has been a benefit to me in multiple ways. Perhaps most importantly, I take pride in the parts that turned out well--it's an emotional boost to have created something good, even if it's a small part of what I set out to do. The process also changed my approach to works I read, appreciating some things more than I did before, and being more critical of other things. I also had a co-author on that particular work, and I learned a lot about working with someone with creative differences, giving and receiving feedback, and feeling ownership of ideas. A related aspect that you alluded to was "is my contribution worth adding." The answer should be yes, even if your audience is just yourself. But if you are excited to explore more space in something that has already been well covered, that is an indication that others likely will be too. What you said about cleverly stealing something you thought nobody else had read reminds me exactly of several junior-high creative writing projects I did. But I am sure that the act of writing those, and my recognition of why the product was pretty terrible, inform a lot of my writing now (such as it is). And since I haven't made time to write at all recently, I'm not getting better. To sum up, regardless of quality or gravity or originality, writing is definitely worthwhile. I have more to say on that if you need more convincing, but this is already a long post, so I'll sign off with a "good luck!"

While that's certainly not the case for all fruit, it is a very plausible scenario for certain types, which could be the ones that taste best/ferment well. And since this is a planet with new rules, I would definitely accept that explanation in a story. As a biologist fact checker, I would be much more concerned about what you do with sleep cycles. Constant light will make for some very different behaviors and ecological rhythms, both in plants and animals. Your approach to this will change based on whether life here is native, transplanted, or both. (Sounds native from your description.) EDIT: another science quibble. You may want to check one more aspect of the astronomy. My understanding is that due to atmospheric refraction, our rising or setting sun appears about 1 sun-width higher in the sky that it would assuming direct line-of-sight. That makes me think that with your setup there can't be two suns that never appear in the sky together. They would always both be visible at the transition between "day1" and "day2". So it may not have required recent science to know that it's not a single sun. I doubt that makes much difference to your setting, though.

Thanks for the great suggestions! That list will be very helpful. Part of this is simply interest in expanding my reading experience, so even if some of these don't turn out to be exactly the genre I'm looking for I suspect I will still enjoy them. The other half of my reason for investigating magical realism is that I have a story idea that I've tried in two different settings, and neither of them worked very well because they made mystical elements too systematic and explainable. I think it would fit really well in this category, though, so I want to do research on the tone and tropes of this part of fantasy. @Kasimir: I have read Death With Interruptions by Saramago, and I'm interested in trying more of his work. Do you have any particular titles you recommend? (on their own merits, not necessarily for fitting my criteria above). Similarly, I've only read one of Guy Gavriel Kay's books (Under Heaven), but was very impressed. Your suggestions are well taken there. I don't know any of the others you mentioned but I will be sure to look them up. Thanks again! @JUBBA: I'm superficially familiar with King, but haven't actually read any of his books. Do you have a favorite or two that you would recommend starting with? (i.e. personal favorite, not necessarily one that best matches my definition)

Thanks for responding, and it is possible that I have read (and even enjoyed) a book or two by Sanderson. However, at least by how I'm intending the term, those books don't fall under "magical realism". Having a fully-realized world or realistic interactions of economics, culture, religion, characters, etc. aren't part of the definition. A secondary world (different planet/ecology/culture) immediately disqualifies the Cosmere, Rithmatist, and the short stories (though the 1980s Era Mistborn might be similar to what I'm looking for). Alcatraz is an example of the "hidden world" version of magic, where it's there in our world but nobody mundane knows about it. Steelheart is much closer, but looking at what changes with the advent of the supernatural (there were no Epics before Calamity, and afterward everything was different). A "magical realism" version would be more along the lines of me going to work and finding my office-mate has telekinesis. (She could have an evil Epic personality, or she could just helpfully lift things off tall shelves, depending on the story to be told.) It is something that doesn't fit in our world but doesn't break it either.

That last bit came across rather harshly, HalfShard. Let's try to keep the forum welcoming to people with varying levels of cosmere-awareness. I know that when I first came to the forums I asked some very "obvious" questions and made speculations that had already been confirmed (or, more often, disproved)... even after trying to look things up. I've also noticed that finding previous discussions is much easier now that I am more familiar with the terminology of the site and know the sort of search terms to use. Even so, finding quotes from topics I remember being part of is still difficult sometimes. If someone is asking the question or proposing a theory, it's because it is new to them. I like to see that validated rather than shut down.