things i do to avoid actually writing ("The Painted Sky")

[edenfalling]

I intended to write part two of The Painted Sky, a story in which Ekanu takes a vacation and has a kinda-sorta fling with a younger man, but was stumped when I realized I know nothing about silk painting. And the guy's an artist. And he paints her and stuff.

Bugger.

So I went off on a tangent and invented a syllabic writing system, with tonal and grammar marks, in which each word must be compressed into a square space exactly congruent in size to every other word. So it's like Chinese, but not. Because it's syllabic instead of word-conceptual-pictographic. Plus grammar marks like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Why I need to know this, I have no idea. But now I do.

I also know that Suyan (the language of Merin -- well, actually that would be Istae, specifically Istae hsüanh Sü'ien, the speech of the Eldest -- but that tends to get shortened to just Istae, speech, and Suyan is a corruption of Sü'ien that's used to identify the "purest" dialect) uses gendered nouns, and instead of a definite article, has a system of honorifics that attach to various words -- mostly nouns, but some verbs and modifiers.

I think I should just buckle down and look up silk painting methods via Google. *sigh* I know it'll be interesting, but it sounds so much like work!