Friday Rants and Raves - April 25

[sarillia]

Happy Friday everyone! I haven't done this in a while but we're back. Hopefully you all have lots of good things to talk about , but I want to hear about the bad stuff too if you need someone to commiserate with. How has your writing life been lately?

Continuing with my ongoing presentation of the pictures in my "inspiration" collection, today we have James Skelton Smith's Courting the Moon.

Worldbuilding: when is it too much?

[serria]

I, along with a couple other members of this community, absolutely love world building. In stories that take place in non-Earth settings, I love developing cultures, religions, ecosystems - you name it. Part of the appeal is the freedom to be god without worrying about mucking up details, but mostly I just love the opportunity to be creative.

But as I write "original world" stories, I find myself struggling with a lexicon that's realistic to my world without being annoying. Here's an example: if characters in a fantasy world have a concept of named days/weeks, should they use Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.? How about January, February, and so forth? It would be strange for a culture that had no Roman or Germanic history to use names blatantly rooted in such, just as it might be for these characters to celebrate Christmas. Is it therefore more helpful to invent new named days and months, or does simply confuse the readers unnecessarily, and it is permissible to "translate" a fantasy world into common vernacular?

When does "changing names" go from being world building, to falling under "Call A Rabbit A 'Smeerp'" territory?

In the same ballpark, but more extreme, should the words that characters use, or I use in my narration, be subject to world realism? Is it strange to use the word "maudlin" when the word comes from Mary Magdalene? Okay, that's a radical example, but I think most readers would be thrown out of a story if a character stubbed his toe and shouted "Jesus Christ!", even though the expression is better understood than perhaps a fantasy counterpart - so where is the line between making language and the world understandable to readers, and retaining world realism?