Blog lifecycles

It's sometimes frustrating that 95% of blogs are abandoned after their authors lose interest:

The home run scenario for blogging is incredibly alluring -- thousands of ravenous fans fawning over your next thought-provoking or comedic masterpiece -- but time and time again I fail to meet these expectations or manage them more appropriately. I enter the same cycle each time:

Blog Lifecycle
1) Euphoric moment of inspiration
2) Pseudo-maniacal and self-indulgent perusing of domains
3) Careful consideration of theme and design
4) The inaugural post - "Hello world!"
5) The 2-4 post honeymoon phase
6) Waning and changing interests
7) Feelings of desperation and apathy from low engagement
8) Inevitable abandonment :(

It turns out that this cycle may not be uncommon. Surveys have shown that 95% of blogs are abandoned within 120 days and 60-80% of them abandoned within the first month.

Panglott's Garden has been running for some two and a half years, mostly because I think of it as an infrequently- and irregularly-published public commonplace book of interest to few, more than a blog of the Twitter Age.

Conlanging is a great excuse to not write

Conlanging is perhaps the best excuse ever invented for NOT writing. Many of the people attracted to this hobby are science fiction or fantasy writers or other people who have reason to invent a detailed, verisimilistic fantasy world. Language can contribute to that in powerful ways; creating and using a coherent naming language or some phrases can help evoke a sense that the author is describing a dynamic, existant, alien world.

But it's very easy to go way overboard with this. Many writers spend as much or more time seeking excuses to avoid writing, because writing is hard. It's an inclination perfectly skewered by Merlin Mann's parody of distraction-free writing environments (via forkbombr via DF):

While some so-called environments that are less free of distraction may display one, three, or even more lines of text—all at the same time—we understand that if you could only achieve the theoretical removal of all theoretical distractions, you would finally be able to write something. And we want ū— to help you almost do that.

...We also understand that the only way to truly remove an unproductive distraction is to replace it with potentially dozens of more highly productive distractions.

That’s why ū— provides the theoretically serious writer with an incomparably powerful range of options, preferences, and customizations that can literally be tweaked forever without writing a single word—let alone half a character.

Conlanging may be similar to this kind of trap: A language is such a complicated thing that you can fiddle with how it handles voice, aspect, and morphology forever, rather than making a decision and going with it. Which is the perfect excuse not to spend the time working on plot, character, or dialogue.

Nonetheless, I certainly do wish that many more writers would pay more attention to the quality of their linguistic writing. Coherent naming languages would be an enormous improvement over the standard practice in science fiction of presenting gobbledygook as language (as Huttese) or sprinkling words with apostrophes, Qs, and Xs in order to exoticize weak linguistic writing (as Punctuation Shaker). The recent introduction of conlanging to film is a good step in this direction, be it neo-Sindarin or Na'vi.

Or David J. Petersen's Dothraki, created for the HBO tv adaptation of novelist and executive producer George R.R. Martin's "A Game of Thrones". I wasn't impressed by the quality of the linguistic writing on the show at first; the names were mostly warmed-over, exoticized English. When the first words of Dothraki dialogue was spoken, I was amazed because the sophistication of the linguistic writing there was so much higher than the rest of the show. And so it didn't surprise me to learn that the producers had hired someone besides Martin to write the Dothraki language and dialogue.

But it helps demonstrate how different these types of writing are: solid linguistic writing, as in a good naming language, is good for a fantasist. But conlanging is a more specialized, time-consuming, (and non-remunerative) type of artistic writing.

For re-reading of Nehwon

I always think of the Nehwon stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as coming from a much later fantasy tradition than the sword-and-sorcery of the 1930s pulps, since Fritz Leiber continued writing these stories through the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s. Several of the anthologies were published in 1968 (Swords in the Mist, Swords Against Wizardry, and The Swords of Lankhmar) and 1970 (Swords and Deviltry and Swords Against Death). Leiber created Fafhrd following the excesses of the rather inhuman Conan; Fafhrd may be a northern barbarian, but he is usually the more cautious and circumspect of the pair, with an uncanny singing voice.

My first reading of these stories was in the order that the anthologies have come to be arranged in: first, Swords and Deviltry (Vol. 1); then Swords against Death (Vol. 2); Swords in the Mist (Vol. 3); Swords Against Wizardry (Vol. 4); The Swords of Lankhmar (Vol. 5); Swords and Ice Magic (Vol. 6); and The Knight and Knave of Swords (Vol. 7). But this seems a faulty way to read them; it implies that the stories present a sustained fantasy narrative, when they rather are very episodic and diverse in tone and style.

I've been considering rereading these stories in order of original publication, skipping from book to book to learn of the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as they were revealed, in order to break up the illusory suggestion of a narrative flow. In a way, this approach also shows how old many of these stories are. For rough comparison, Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936; H.P. Lovecraft died in 1937; Clark Ashton Smith turned toward sculpture around 1935. Leiber and Harry Otto Fischer began constructing the world of Nehwon around 1937, and Leiber published the first Fafhrd/Mouser story in 1939.

So here follows a listing of the anthologized stories in order of original publication. It's not a bibliography exactly, but more like a cheatsheet for ordering the 36 stories in the anthologies. For example, "Scylla's Daughter", originally published in 1961, later became the first part of The Swords of Lankhmar. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the ISFDB Wiki, Galactic Central's magazine list of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Wikipedia were useful references.

• "The Jewels in the Forest" aka "Two Sought Adventure" (August 1939), Swords Against Death
• "The Bleak Shore" (November 1940), Swords Against Death
• "The Howling Tower" (June 1941), Swords Against Death
• "The Sunken Land" (February 1942), Swords Against Death
• "Thieves' House" (February 1943), Swords Against Death
• "Adept's Gambit" (1947), Swords in the Mist
• "Claws from the Night" aka "Dark Vengeance" (Fall 1951), Swords Against Death
• "The Seven Black Priests" (May 1953), Swords Against Death
• "Induction" (1957), Swords and Deviltry
• "Lean Times in Lankhmar" (November 1959), Swords in the Mist
• "When the Sea-King's Away" (May 1960), Swords in the Mist
• "The Unholy Grail" (October 1962), Swords and Deviltry
• "The Cloud of Hate" (May 1963), Swords in the Mist
• "Bazaar of the Bizarre" (August 1963), Swords Against Death
• "The Lords of Quarmall" (January and February 1964), Swords Against Wizardry
• "Stardock" (September 1965), Swords Against Wizardry
• "The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar" (August 1968), Swords Against Wizardry
• "Their Mistress, the Sea" (1968), Swords in the Mist
• "The Wrong Branch" (1968), Swords in the Mist
• "In the Witch's Tent" (1968), Swords Against Wizardry
The Swords of Lankhmar (1968)
• "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (March 1970), Swords and Deviltry
• "The Snow Women" (April 1970), Swords and Deviltry
• "The Circle Curse" (1970), Swords Against Death
• "The Price of Pain-Ease" (1970), Swords Against Death
• "The Sadness of the Executioner" (April 1973), Swords and Ice Magic
• "Trapped in the Shadowland" (November 1973), Swords and Ice Magic
• "The Bait" (December 1973), Swords and Ice Magic
• "Beauty and the Beasts" (January 1974), Swords and Ice Magic
• "Under the Thumbs of the Gods" (April 1975), Swords and Ice Magic
• "Trapped in the Sea of Stars" (September 1975), Swords and Ice Magic
• "The Frost Monstreme" (August 1976), Swords and Ice Magic
• "Rime Isle" (May and July 1977), Swords and Ice Magic
• "Sea Magic" (December 1977), The Knight and Knave of Swords
• "The Mer She" (December 1978), The Knight and Knave of Swords
• "The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars" (March 1983), The Knight and Knave of Swords
• "The Mouser Goes Below" (1988), The Knight and Knave of Swords

It was in issue 11 of "The Dragon" that "Sea Magic" appeared, a year after TSR published a Lankhmar board game. TSR included the Nehwon pantheon in 1980's Deities & Demigods and a Lankhmar campaign setting book for AD&D in 1985.

It's a pity, as well, that my cheap ibooks paperback editions from 2003 are already turning yellow and brittle with age. Hopefully the Dark Horse editions will be more durable.

EDIT
Further comparison: The Fellowship of the Ring was first published in 1954, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was first published in 1950.

I write like horror

A few moments ago I idly succumbed to the "I Write Like" meme going around on Facebook. I plugged the text of this old blog post into their analyzer and got this result:

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Horrors! I have never read Dan Brown. Because Geoffrey K. Pullum's hilarious review at Language Log has convinced me that he is a contemporary Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

I write like Dan Brown? This aggression will not stand, man! So I try again with the text of this blog post. The result?

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

An improvement, I suppose. Although it seems my writing remains likely to irritate the guys at LanguageLog, even if I don't share DFW's absurd prescriptivism.