Gliding through these gorgeous isles, meet green sea turtles, “boat boys” who feed and outfit you, and history in turquoise.
View from Petit Rameau, Tobago Cays, in the Grenadines. MICHAELA URBAN
By: Eric Vohr, For The Inquirer
Unspoiled white-sand beaches, turquoise-blue waters, frolicking green sea turtles, and bays, lagoons, and reefs so idyllic you have to pinch yourself just to make sure…
Books!!!! I am all out of time order lately, haha. One of these, the one with white-and-gold endpapers, was mostly done before when l posted about After The Storm, but my cricut software had been giving me trouble. Well, I sorted that out, and also sorted out copies for the other coauthors as well!! I’ve been adjacent to these creators for… wow, many years at this point, and it’s so rewarding to be able to put hard copies of their work into their hands :D
text post meme part 4/? brought to you by the “I’ve written 20,000 words in the last three weeks mostly about Mitch” ENERGY RUSH. Boys……… boys with complicated relationships…….
Okay!!! A bit of time displacement in this last binderary post, because I made one copy of this book during the month of February, then finished a companion copy… last night. It’s still waiting on some cover decor, but cricut just updated, their program is confused and it just wiped my canvas when i tried to print, and I’ve been impatient to show this book off for weeks
After the Storm!!! I read this ebook when it first came out, I’ve been adjacent online to all the creators involved for… ooh, years by now, and it’s been in the back of my head as a potential bookbinding project for a long time, especially since it can be hard/expensive for self-published creators to get physical copies of their work. And I had this huge panel of gorgeous water fabric where I’d bought it while being pretty positive I had no projects where it would ever make sense, lmao
So…. Do you like post-apocalyptic worldbuilding that’s not all about gloom and despair? Are you intrigued by a society where visitors from other parts of formerly-america refer to it as a boat cult? Do you have a lot of affection for sci fi settings where ships/cities have their own AI and interface with human technicians to keep everything running smoothly? Do you want gene-modified humans of various intriguing flavors mixed in with a more usual baseline population? How do you feel about working through the aftermath of serious trauma and finding a home where you belong and people care about you and maybe incidentally romancing a couple of hot boys along the way? Do you want all this in fantastic prose, seasoned with beautiful illustrations?
Seriously, check this story out, I’m doing a very jumbled job of recommending it, but this whole project was a big reminder of how much I enjoyed all the characters. I remembered Rich was a doll, but I’d forgotten how wonderful Mitch was, I’d forgotten Rich’s sisters, and oh my god, TRIMMER, I love Trimmer so much. This book is so delightful, seriously, I really truly recommend it
Cultural worldbuilding tool: Give them an untranslatable word or or expression or a few. Even if this culture doesn’t have its own language, there can be a slang term, or final traces of a lost language that nobody fluently speaks anymore. But those few words have lingered, because they simply cannot be replaced with something else.
Like calling someone _____, which directly translates to “the chicken salesman”, but is actually an expression for a very specific kind of a con man. It’s a reference to an ancient play, in which the scammer in question first steals someone’s chickens, and then sells the victim their own chickens’ skulls back as a magical ward against chicken thieves. Most people who use the term don’t even know the origin, and fucking nobody has actually seen the play.
A single word that means “the weeks of after-image”, a word for that time in mourning, when the grief hasn’t set in yet, but you notice the ‘after-images’ of the deceased everywhere, silence where they used to make noise, their favourite tasks sitting undone.
One that can be translated to both “outlasting determination” and “survival spite”, though neither translation really satisfactorily expresses the feelings involved. It’s a common term for the phenomenon where two elderly people who fucking hate each other live into improbably long ages because both refuse to be the one who dies first.
i love doing untranslatable idioms. for instance, the kyri in my forge verse have an idiom where “painting your wagon” sorta means taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune, but can also refer to a death in the family, in an irreverent way, like ‘kicked the bucket’ or ‘bought the farm’. because it’s a tradition that if you inherit a wagon, or buy one that’s up for sale because its owner died – which is always real cheap, because of the work it takes to make it Not Haunted afterwards – you have to change its whole look. the old superstition is that the ghost won’t recognize it. which gives it some obscure additional meanings based on those superstitions.
so that’s confusing for outsiders, because even if they learn ‘paint the wagon’ as equivalent to ‘kick the bucket’, or as meaning like “bad things happening to that guy turned out lucky for me,” it’s still going to be confusing when someone up and says “eh you just gotta paint the wagon” when they mean like… not giving your new address to your crazy ex.
when the Michigan Fleet was first being founded, some exhausted babysitter decided to divide boys and girls into groups and assigned the boys a fish logo and girls a bird logo to pretend that wasn’t heteronormative. this iconography quickly spread to the nearby restrooms. then all the restrooms (heads/washrooms/whatever) on the entire airship carrier. by the time citizens got more boats to live on and dispersed across the lake, everyone had agreed without even talking about it that fish were masculine and birds were feminine.
forty or fifty years later, Fleet citizens say things like going fishing andlanding a manandhe’s a real catch andit was this long, i swear, when they’re talking about hooking up with guys.
it’s not exactly making up new terms, but it’s a lot of fun to open up a whole new realm of sly insinuations.
