Mundus Obumbrandus

It’s been suggested I talk a bit about one of the unusual ‘mundane’ races in our universe. And with my brain unable to give me a better topic to talk about, I shall talk about this instead.

The Dimidians

Perhaps I’ll start with what I mean exactly by “unusual ‘mundane’”. Within the context of the real world, these things would be fairly unusual, though they aren’t too terribly different from humans. Within the context of the World in Shadow, they are a fairly normal thing to see on a day-to-day basis.

Dimidians are an umbrella term for the various sub-species of humanoids found on the Alternate Earth. Essentially, they are humans that have certain animal features. Most often, this means that they have similar ears and a tail like the variety of animal they are kin to. Sometimes it can include eyes and a nose, or more in extreme cases. Their outward appearance reflects some heightened senses, but otherwise they are almost identical to their human cousins. They make up between 5 and 9% of the world’s population and live among humans without trouble, in most areas.

The origin of the Dimidians is murky at best. There are several theories on their origin, but sadly little edivdence of any is available.
One theory states that the Dimidians are not, in fact, humans at all, and all share a common ancestor that ended up following a parallel evolutionary course as humans. The propenents of these claims use them to throw the Dimidian’s status as people into question and is still the most widely accepted theory of their origin.
Another theory states that they are a product of an extra-terrestrial experiment to combine the best parts of the most promising species on the planet into one creature. The main downfall of this theory is that the people who most believe in it also are the ones that are ostracized for their beliefs in aliens capable of performing such experiments.
A third theory, held among the magic users of AltEarth, is that several thousand years ago, shamans attempted to give their peoples a better chance to survive by magically enhancing themselves and their communities with magics. The communities were given some animalistic traits, such as sharper eyesight, hearing and smell in order to make them more efficient at gathering food to survive. Some more recent magic users have attempted to duplicate these rituals, but with limited success.

Dimidians are an unusual part of the world that we have created and will appear in some of the stories that we are writing and will write in the future. I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into the World in Shadow.

The terrible retcon.

Yup, today’s subject is retconning. When you write a series of stories – or books, even – that feature the same characters, you may well develop new ideas. You may look back and say to yourself: “I can’t believe I ever wrote such schlock. I wish I could go back and get a do-over. I can think of a million ways to make this story better.”

How powerful is the temptation, when writing the next instalment in the series, to do some retconning? To invalidate previous writings and present your bold new vision of your creation? Speaking for myself, I’ve been fortunate in that I tend to still like what I wrote a while ago later. That, and I know that retconning is a very dangerous thing to do.

When you retcon, you are in danger of destroying the whole continuity you spent so much time creating. That, and the enjoyment of your reading audience. Remember them, the audience? I know an author should write for themselves, first. But it behooves us to always remember that you are writing so that other people can read. Tick them off too much, and they’ll stop reading. That kind of takes the point out of the whole activity, unless you have no intention of continuing to be published.

Well. There are techniques that resemble retconning, but are not nearly so destructive. Showing the same events the audience has read about from a different angle can be very effective. An example.

Say that the first story or book tells the tale of a band of heroic adventurers, who fight their way through Goblin-infested land to reach the castle of the Duke of Doom, a man known to associate with monsters.

A later story could tell the story of a land of peaceful Goblin-settlers thrown into chaos and horror when a band of murderers appears out of nowhere and slaughters its way through the countryside in order to reach and assassinate the beloved Duke, founder of the Goblin lands. It’s interesting, it may bring the readers to view the story world in a new way – and if you do it well, you don’t need to contradict your previous work even once.

Don’t retcon. Don’t deconstruct your old work because you have new ideas. That’s what writing new and unrelated stories is for. Shaking things up is fine, breaking them and reassembling the pieces is not. I say this not just as an aspiring author, but as a fervent reader. Don’t. o_o

You might have noticed that the site looks … different. We upgraded to WordPress version 3 last week for its many new features and bug squashings. More customization, less interface oddness, and of course the many exploding plugins and themes that go with it. The theme we had been using doesn’t agree with some of the new features, and was difficult to customize without all my changes going away when a new version got released. So, despite it being wonderfully dark and mysterious, we had to let it go.

HTML and CSS is on the list of things that I can do, however, on the list of things I like to do, several things are ahead of it. On the list of things I need to get done, it’s practically at the bottom. Since the new version got released only a couple weeks ago, there aren’t really a whole lot of attractive themes suitable for us that support the new features, and since we don’t have our anthology available yet, it’s been a low priority. Once we get the final go-ahead from our publishers on the anthology, I’ll put the time in to find or make an appropriate theme. This is where I have to draw the line for now. Until then, enjoy the new clean (and highly customizable!) site.