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Published: 2013-08-09 01:00:33 +0000 UTC; Views: 3070; Favourites: 92; Downloads: 11
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Istaghavrae, before things took several turns for the worse.Tumblr .
You can also ask this character questions !
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Comments: 41
Are you guys going to continue this? We missΒ Istaghavrae so much!
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Hello!!!! 
This is kind of ( so- great , amazing! Β ) ^^
Keep up on keeping Istag'! People love you Β cheer up! Β
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And awww, he does appreciate it, even if he's a sad sack most of the time <3
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Your drider personnage is great
Great cheers!
See you , guys^^
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Yaelglo made me aware of this character with her own love for him.Β I like your drawing style and I look forward to seeing more of Istaghavrae as he comes along.
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hmm, I'm warming up to this character, fast
was he a Harem male, or a matron's son, to merit such jewlery and such a sad fate over death?
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Ooh I'm delighted to have someone else into the character! He is indeed a matron's son.
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poor thing, for this to have happened to him, he must have someone that held a grudge against him. either that or his house have fallen. either way, he was doomed into quite the miserable existance, as the driders I know from known literature range from ever hungry crazed beasts to quite the sane drow that know exactly what they have been deprived of. either way, he is the type of character I am drawn to
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You should really check out the askblog , you'd ask great questions and it'd be even more fun drawing the answers than just telling you.
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ooh, gladly
XD well, I happen to be raising my own child-of-paper-and-ink that has a really dark past, and he is drow. so I know what questions to ask.
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Ooh. I've been checking some of your stuff out too. Is there a good place to start on the fic?
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shadow's refuge? the first chapter XD (its an original world, btw. and my drow are a bit different. they have a different history.)
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Ah I think I saw a lot of shorts and things in your gallery, I wasn't sure if there was a special order to them.
And...yeah, mine are too. Don't take this the wrong way, but I kind of hate the canon? I mean clearly I love parts of it a lot, but it's just so steeped in ignorant fanboy sexism and racism. I pretty much went through the canon with a blowtorch, going, "Augh, no!" torching things and rebuilding as I went. The religion especially is completely redone, parts of it are unrecognizable.
Basically this is the result of me reading Salvatore's Dark Elf trilogy, and after throwing it at the wall repeatedly, coming back to pick up the pieces--the parts that were so good I actually read three of those goddamn awful books for any kernels of it.
So while there will most likely be places where we went in entirely different directions with it, changing it from the canon can only be an improvement IMO.
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yes, I have a few shorts. but my main work is shadow's refuge. mind you, its a work in progress and I need to redo several parts. but since its still in process I'm waiting before I do it.
well, I have a complete different view of the gods. in this work I kept the name Lolth, but my Lolth is different than the "allconniving evil bitch" most canon work goes with. there's still sexism, and drow are still feared. but mostly because of some things that happened in the history of the world, and it was not Lolth's intent. I'm going to make my plot fix most of it as we go. also, each drow city in my world has a diferent culture. so they come in many veriaties. the early chapters dont much show it though.
just remember when you read it: most drowesses are not bitches and not everything you see is the general behavior. XD
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Ah I should have clarified--my version has "sexism" in the form of misandry/"reverse-sexism" within a matriarchy--my goal was never to create an ideal or egalitarian society! This is also what canon tried to do--emphasis on "tried." My problem with that is that...we're so steeped in sexism and misogyny within our own culture that we can't even see it, and we transfer it invisibly onto the drow. ("We" being humans in general but mostly the dudebros over at WotC who were in way over their heads trying to handle something like this.) Unfortunately a lot of their biases show, and their drow ladies are mostly dominatrix sex fantasies, that still clearly exist for the male gaze. They misconstrue sexism as "men being mean to women," and flip it as "women being mean to men," but this just shows how deeply they misunderstand what it is to live as a marginalized person in an unequal society. It is not a few painful moments of meanness, but something that wears you down, makes you smaller, a slow, constant, normalized erosion. Their focus on women sacrificing male babies reveals a terror of women's reproductive power, of feminism and abortion, clearly exaggerated. They still focus the stories on the men, and on male themes like fatherhood, they fail to truly weaken the men, they make the men angry masculinists--which in turn shames women for tolerating sexism, for not all rising up, because they think they'd certainly never accept such "unfair" treatment! Which means that either women deserve it for not protesting enough, or men are just kind of better than women/deserve it less, you know? The women can still be reduced with slurs like "bitch." They're crazy, something used to invalidate women in our world, they're blind followers, they don't think for themselves, they get power by opening their legs to glabrezu, not from their own might. The way the drow are written in canon is STEEPED with misogyny mingled with lust for dominatrixes, and male martyr complexes.
When I say their story is sexist, I don't mean against men, I mean in the mundane against women way. My story is....revenge. It's a deconstruction and a venting of all my frustrations with real-world sexism. Having to take apart sexism piece by piece and put it back together on the other side has also made me more aware of all the sexism I was taking for granted. It's still an ongoing work. So in a weird, backwards way, when I write about drow men I'm writing about human femininity, when I write about drow women, I'm writing about human masculinity. I'm talking about things like oppression and rape culture and male gaze and sexual objectivity/subjectivity and toxic masculinity. But it's Bizarro World sexism. So some of my drow women are terrible people, but they're also complex, and the forces that shape them are explored...or they were when I was plotting things out, it's not actually in a finished, consumable format.
Wow I hope I haven't scared you away with that infodump. I'm really into sociology and politics, so those are things that definitely end up in my stories in one way or another, and I don't mean of the "court intrigue" variety, I mean like the intersection of class and sexism and how wealth perpetuates power and how power perpetuates abuse. But also subtle things like how boy drow use language differently, make eye contact less frequently, and so forth.
(can you tell I had a ton of fun with this and have done a lot of thinking on it)
It'll be good to see a different interpretation of Lolth, didn't she have some bullshit backstory in canon like being the elf patriarchal god's bitter and spiteful ex? And some more racist bullshit about how following the wrong gods made the drow dark. Soooo much hate.
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I think I love you.Β That's been my goal as well.Β I can't even write all the stuff I was thinking as a responds, as my mind is too blown right now.
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I was not scared off at all. I find it very interesting, and its very true. in general, I've found the canon drow to be very shallow. there are whole aspects of the culture that are not mentioned, the "evil" traits are very generalized and unanimous, there is only black and white. I like all the grey tones. I love the psychology behind the characters, the culture, the small details that bring a race to life. I'm not sure what Lolth's role in the canon universe was, but I didnt like it. she was too all-black. and the reason elves hate drow and so on, that was really vague and really shallow as well. I had to change that. my drow society will always be matriarchal. the females are the means for the survival of the race in a place where life is short and dangerous. what cruelty they practice is necessary. but due to events that I still havent mentioned in my story, they fell out of balance, and deteriorated.
in truth, I liked Drizzt, but I thought he was a pansy. he was too flat of a character. I love layered characters
I have many a strong female character. in fact.... I think I have more female characters than males, and most of them are stronger than my males. so I guess I do that as well. I compensate for the world I see around by creating someithng else in my mind. mind you, Averine is very dark, a world where slavery rules, for the moment.Β I add to it constantly, and since has her own drow and world, we have many debates over things similar to what you have written. we help each other shape our worlds diffferently than male-minded worlds.
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Yesssss so much agreed on the lack of moral complexity. I don't mind drow that do horrendous things. But humans do horrendous things. And then sometimes they do things so kind you could weep. It's a bit like how I hate in scifi how there'll be an "ice planet" and a "desert planet" and a "jungle planet," when Earth is an all-of-those planet, they're failing to make an ECOSYSTEM. That's the worldbuilding failing here--they're extrapolating a few traits, magnifying them, but not writing a true society. Not a place you could really believe in.
Drizzt...I didn't think he was a pansy. I WISHED he'd have been a pansy! (Side-note: the pansy is a symbol of intellectualism and the freethought movement--the belief that opinions should be based on logic rather than dogma or tradition. This is at least as old as Shakespeare--in Hamlet, Ophelia says, "There's pansies, that's for thoughts." The association of pansies with weakness is an interesting one. But taken at face value, I would have liked Drizzt to be weak, it would have been more interesting.) Coming from a culture that treated him as inferior, the lesser sex, perhaps more emotional, weaker, less able to stand on his own, I would have liked to see him struggle, I would have liked to see him cry, feel despair. My problem with Drizzt is that everything was too EASY for him. His morality came to him fully-formed, he never had to wrestle with any of it, he never had to work to find himself. He had the morality of a culture he'd never been exposed to, and he felt no true conflict about this, nor did he ever, even in the smallest way, accept the invisible cultural ideals he grew up steeped in. This, frankly, is bullshit. It's true that people are individuals, and an individual doesn't necessarily hold with the dominant ideology of their culture! But ideas have to come from SOMEWHERE, either from exposure to them or introspection, and Drizzt had neither, he just had magic Lawful Good daddy genes. That's so very lazy, and worse, it's boring. Besides that, even if it's true that individuals can break with their society's dominant ideology, they do accept invisible parts of it in insidious ways. He never did anything like that, he didn't even get homesick for small things like his bed or the food, things anyone would miss about their homeland, even if they hated it or were conflicted on it, it's just...you can't write about elves if you don't even know how PEOPLE work, Salvatore!
Also he was so ridiculously overpowered and special with the ~violet eyes~ and the magic panther and the l33t skillz, I just felt like...for all he did bemoan his ill fortune in prose the hue of his eyes, Salvatore wasn't willing enough to hurt him. And that's a problem.
I do see we think alike with the dark world full of cruelty and slavery. (man I just can't resist a woobie.) It's cool that you have someone to bounce ideas off of, I look forward to us all exploring each other's worlds!
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so true. I like diversity. I like when things make SENSE. I invest so much time inventing reasons to things in my world. I even invented a reason to why lolth is the spider goddess. why elves are called elves and drow drow, why they fight and so on. I'm a person of details and if things dont fit, I dont buy the story. and if I dont buy it, others wont as well.
as for Drizzt, I meant that he doesnt really develop. he keeps lamenting his past, keeps being burdened by guilt, keeps- so still. and when I've heard that at some point, WARNING SPOILER, he rides a unicorn, that's what broke me. I mean, really? really. everything in thesebooks is a stereotype.
mind you, all my drow have purple eyes. it has a reason. albinos and creatures that live in complete darkness have eyes with little to no color. the weakest natural color is blue, and red eyes are essentually a lack of color that allows the blood vessels at the back of the eye to show through the transperent iris, coloring it red. so, if drow have partly blue and partly see through iris, as it has beccome so weak in color, it would create shades of purple. so drow eye color should range between blue and red with all purples in the middle.Β see? I do research and ssearch for reasons XD
and as for hurting my characters, they are practically punchbags. at least some of them, poor things. I have a problem with killing them apparrently. but I try to get over the attachment. (not with much success)
lol, yup, a dark world is an interesting world. you get to explore the psychology behind the dark and twisted, as well as the light that can come from within such darkness. and I'm always happy to bounce ideas with other people. brainstorming feeds my creativity.
cant wait to hear more about your world and story!
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*nod* I have a bit of that too, though I think history in my world...depends on who you ask. I like to tell stories with very personal stakes and consequences consequences, though (as in, fighting for yourself/your friends rather than for the world), so I don't have much use for detailed history, just the general gist of it.
OH DRIZZT. That's so terrible it comes out around to fantastic again. I...I don't even know what to do with you, Drizzt.
And yeah, his emotions never felt very...real to me.
I wouldn't have minded his eyes if they'd all been purple? It was the OMG SPESHUL thing, like, no drow ever had purple eyes before! Which in itself isn't necessarily awful, like, I'm against a lot of the anti-Sue stuff that says you have to make your character boring. But it sort of lent itself to the idea that his MORALS were GENETIC, that he was just ~born good~, without any doubt or complexity or soul-searching to get there, and...that's boring, that's lazy, that's just bad writing, that doesn't help or inspire anyone, that actually hurts people, to think you're inherently born either a good person or a bad one--so if you're a good one, everything you do is good and you don't have to be mindful and you can get outraged whenever anyone calls you out, or you're a bad one and there's no hope and you might as well not try. Then again I think I've also got some backlash against "inherent specialness" because I was raised with so much of it (basically raised to value myself because of some inherent traits I believed I didn't have control over, they were just part of me) and it's taken me years to realize how toxic that was, how it made me underachieve because I was terrified of upsetting this "illusion" of my innate talent rather than being praised for effort. SORRY I HAVE FEELS ABOUT THIS. Besides that, having all your protagonist's traits be inherent is just terrible from a storytelling perspective, because, as you pointed out, they've got nowhere to go to grow.
So your characters' purple eyes don't hit that same button for me at all, if everyone has it then it's just a worldbuilding quirk, not like...a genetic morality?
My drow all have glowing red eyes as a side-effect of their darkvision, which is involuntary and always on. Their true eye color varies widely--since no one can see it, there's no selection pressure on it. (My drow don't live entirely without light, though! They burn oil and have mage light. Partially as a status symbol for the rich, partly for aesthetic appeal, since they need light to see color, and partly because they can't read well by darkvision.) So a drow's real eye color can only be seen if either there's a very bright light on their eyes, canceling out the red glow, or their nightvision is magically suppressed.
Oh be careful, I'll never stop rambling...XD
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XD well, my history too started as a set of individual stories. but my characters were my originals, beings created and adapted by me only. I vallued them not by race but by who they were. and yet they all fell into characterstics of "drow, elf, dawrf" and so on and I kept hearing the owrd "fanfic" thrown at me. my drtories were not a fanfic of anything. so I realized I needed to shaow more of my world and WHY my races and characters are different, and unique to me. I needed to make that clear because it made me angry. besides, there is a lot in my world that I wish to share, and in searching for reasons for certain things that started as fixed points, I expanded the cultural and historical background of tthe world.
poor drizzt. abused by his writer in the most horrible way. bey being made into a cardboard figure of characteristics. I really try to avoid that. that's why I edit my stories again and again. (should be going over SR again as there are changes I have to make, but I do meintenance in bouts XD)Β
I know! its kind of infuriating to read it, right? there are so few shades of gray! evil and good are not fixed points. and setting good and evil by races is the worst kind of racizm. Salvatora made Drizzt different to set him apart from his "evil" race, but truth is, he was probably not the only one born good. babies are not bad. no one is born bad. its how you raise them that makes them bad. this is why I have evil elves, good drow and everything in the middle in my world. to stop the reader from assuming anything. my characters assume, of course. prejudice is fun to play with, inside a story. but thet's all it is, prejudice. April and I actually had an RP where our two most powerful characters discussed it, once. we delved into the concept of good and evil and came to the conclusion it depends entirely on perspective.
hmm, so the red glow is a bit like the green glow of a cat's eyes? that comes from reflection, of course, but its the same idea. is the darkvision a natural trait with a natural eason? or is it magical inherent?
XD I ramble endlessly when you get me started about my world so we're even. (as proof, if you look at April's gallery, my comments to some of her story chapters are miles long. I harassed her endlessly. XD it ended up working for us both but still.
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I'm pretty big into fanfiction myself, so I don't mind the association with it at all--I've been reading it since 2001 and writing it since 2004. I do consider my work to be fanwork, because I didn't invent the drow, even if I did REinvent them, and it's all told with OCs. I borrow plenty of canon details--place names, bits of drow words (I do have a WIP project to reinvent the drow language, but that's a lot of work) and am generally building on an pre-existing universe. Having done a lot of writing, both fannish and original, I see it as more of a spectrum, with some fanworks being niche works that can only be understood within the context of canon, others (like this) being borderline original, and some original works being complete works of original worldbuilding, and others being highly derivative--responses to pop culture, using popular themes, or even fanworks of public domain things like folk tales or Shakespeare. I don't think there really is a line, but I can feel how much I'm borrowing and how much I'm adding. I enjoy both, and play around on all ends of the spectrum.
Basically, don't take "fanfic" as an insult, there's no shame in derivative works, in fact, prior to modern copyright, it was considered preferable! In the Middle Ages, no one wanted to read "original" works, it was all King Arthur fanfiction all the time. Writers and bards have borrowed from each other and built on each other's work since the dawn of time, there's never any shame in it, it's how human storytelling works.
And *nod* I do play with the "nature vs. nurture" thing. I do think people have some innate traits, but morality is not necessarily one of them. Like, people can be more predisposed towards aggression, but their life experiences will shape how they control or channel it. Aggression itself isn't a positive or negative trait. My drow culture is...an exaggeration in some ways of my frustrations with my own culture, with the culture of competition rather than collaboration, brutal expectations, the Prisoner's Dilemma played out on a wide scale, etc. Basically, I think people are as good as they can expect others in their society to be--because that's how good they can afford to be. This can self-perpetuate a culture of kindness or one of cruelty.
This might sound terrible, but I actually don't edit that much. I do the best I can on the first pass, do a second pass to fix minor things like wording and flow, and then generally leave it alone. If there are big mistakes, I try to correct it in future stories rather than spending forever tweaking the same story. I find I lose interest covering the same ground too many times, I like to keep moving and growing and trying new things. Plus stories can get fatigue like metal, there's a point where you have to trust yourself and let the story breathe. But some writers have a more edit-heavy process, and that's cool too. Don't worry about making Salvatore's mistakes either--you're not Salvatore, and you can't exist in relation to him, you only exist in relation to yourself. I try not to limit myself by being just a retort to another writer, even in the context of fanwork.
The darkvision glow is magical, rather than a physical trait, it's just something done unconsciously like breathing. If a drow lost their magic, they'd be effectively blinded. (I did have a different world with vampires that have a tapetum lucidum, though! I like them, but I wanted a sustained glow that would work even in an absence of light.) Surface elves can do it too, but they have to learn it and do it consciously.
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well, I didnt invent drow. neither do you. but neither did Salvatora, and most of the world seems to think he did. just like elves, they are a folk tale, something invented by long gone forefathers and it has many versions. and yet, whenever I write about drow I get the Drizzt followers and D&D people all over my neck for doing whetever I want with them. this is why, as part of the story, I changed all the race names. usualy I avoid doing that because it kinda seems like cheating. but since I invented them anew in both hisotry, custom and culture, and sometimes apppearence, I feel free to rename them. dont get me wrong, I still call elves elves and Drow Drow. but only as a common misspronouncication of their full names. I kept the "common" names in order to make people make the correlation. this way I'm not denying or disowning the fact that they originate from the common concept of the races, but I differentiate them from the mainstream because they ARE different.
in general, I dont mind fanfics. I even enjoy reading them. but the biggest problem is, you cant legally publish a fanfic as a book. not without paying the creator. so I try really hard to defend the originality of my work.
I love nature VS nurture! its really fun to play with. I have an elf maiden that's more drowess in nature than some drowesses I have (not as in evil. but as in..... commanding. surely in the bedroom XD)
I have a main character that can be precieved as both good and evil. I love making my character make mistakes. playing with their psychology is interesting. plus, sometimes, I vent my own frustration at daily life in this way. poor things XD
this is why dealing with slavery in fiction is so interestingm by the way. it brings out sides of characters that you never would have seen otherwise. it is a world where there are tough choiced and easy ones, and it is up to the person to decide which to take.
oh, that's alright. editing is just my quirk. my world is still hald scuffolding and tied together with fairy dust and spiderwebs and happy thoughts. I build it as I go, and I brainstorm often. mostly mid RP. so there are always things I change and things I need to add and concepts I need to insert. my process is hapazard and full of loops and U turns. I'm sure there are many better ways to do it. you are right about fatigue, though. this is why I write until it irritates me too much, then go back and edit in bouts. this way I let the old parts rest and focus on the new parts that need to be written.. and of course, I do shorts and one shots.
in the recent years I try not to think of Salvatora at all. ever since I met Ril, she and I have been feeding off each other's work,a nd so our concepts of drow became a sort of a dual loop with little outside sources. if I bother to check back, our concept had diverted well away from salvatora's, which is good.Β I just hate that he is thought to be the father of drow. because it is untrue.
that concept is really interesting. nightvision being a natural magical inherent means that they can essentually have any eye color, and that is neat. besides, it leaves to speculation how it developed. was it cast on the race at a great cost, or cast as a gift from the goddess, or developed over the years....
I didnt want a sustained glow, because I thought that drow should be able to hide themselves in the Deep. so the only glow their eyes have is a reflection of light. they have a superb night vision, slightly better than that of elves, but they rely on heat detection. that said, their world is not completely dark. they rely on phospherous plants and mushrooms that grow in the depths. these typs of flora have regulated pulses of light, that create cycles that simulaye day and night. the glow is very faint, and uses a slightly different spectrum of light than the normal one, but they see by it like we would see by broad daylight. they use heat vision almost solely in the tunnles and wild areas of he Deep. by the way, those mushrooms and mossses exist in reality. XD
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Um...drow were created by Gary Gygax for Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s and elaborated on by same in the 80s. The word "drow" itself is a variant of "trow," a Scottish word for troll, so in that it has its roots in folklore...but everything about an underground society of dark-skinned, white-haired, matriarchal elves is all Gygax and is ownedΒ by WotC. There are no "dark elves" in the way we understand them in folklore. This is why when drow became popular enough to steal, everyone filed the serial numbers off--Morrowind has the dunmer, countless stories have used dark elves in some form or renamed them, WoW has the night elves and blood elves.
It's human nature to build on the stories of others, and D&D is no exception. While they've tried to distance themselves from their roots, and change details, it's painfully obvious that it was designed as an interactive, Reply playable, tabletop version of Lord of the Rings. They didn't have the rights to that, but the early versions are pretty blatant ripoffs. Their elves (and many, many fantasy elves since) borrow a lot from Tolkien's elves. They stole orcs, too. (Orcs as Tolkien uses the word are his creation. Being a language nerd, there are some roots of it in Old English, but no one is fooling anyone if they claim to have gotten orcs independently from folklore.) Then there's hobbits, cough, ahem, I mean HALFLINGS, which Tolkien totally didn't invent--except that he did, and D&D had to stop calling their halflings hobbits after the first edition. And then there's stuff like the Ranger class, which totally wasn't fanboys wanting to play as Aragorn!
It doesn't stop there, either. The Final Fantasy series owes everything to Dungeons and Dragons. The first game is basically just a computerized version of it, that handles things like hit points and whatnot for you so you don't have to roll a lot of dice and keep track of numbers. It stayed a European-based fantasy world for several incarnations, despite being made in Japan. Final Fantasy 4 was the first to tell a real sweeping epic story with memorable characters, and even then, it stayed firmly grounded in European fantasy tropes--castles, European-style swords, knights in plate armor, names like Cecil and Rosa, Western-style dragons, etc. There's one "ninja," who funnily enough doesn't stand out, because D&D pretty much appropriated ninjas decades ago.
It wasn't until FF6 started experimenting with the nascent genre of cyberpunk that things started getting truly original, and the breakout hit FF7 cemented its legacy as a truly original thing. It's been pushing boundaries with every release ever since, reinventing itself every few years, and there's hardly anything in common with D&D now. Yet you can see the roots, in the iconic spells and character classes.
That's how the human mind works, that's how stories work, no story is truly "original," but rather they exist on a spectrum of originality. Copyright tries to impose ownership on ideas in a way that disrespects the way stories have always been told, and puts artificial limitations on it. But people get around it--more and more blatantly, in this era, with everyone knowing bestseller 50 Shades of Grey was a Twilight fanfiction originally.
That said, I'm not sure the goal of publishing is one that, um...entirely makes sense? Like, I know the moment we say we're writers, we get a ton of pressure--from family, teachers, friends, whoever--to publish that bad boy and make a ton of money on it. Except that's really difficult. And along the way, we start thinking of our story as a product, instead of something we make for joy--and that robs us of something. It's okay to have a story just for fun, just for roleplay and pleasure, to entertain yourself and your friends. Also...sprawling epics based on European-style roleplay fantasy worlds are really, really hard to publish. I know GRRM did it (I have no idea if he RPed in his world, but oh my GOD that man has no concept of pacing or structure, I do seriously wonder how he got published without some serious editing) but that can make it look, well, easier than it is?
Like, I think we get this idea of long, sprawling fantasy epics that don't necessarily have endings right away from Tolkien. And LotR was fantastic, not gonna lie. But it wasn't what we think it was. Because he wrote it as one book, he tried to get it published as one book, and they couldn't bind it. So it got broken up into six parts, then condensed into the trilogy we know and love. But he didn't set out to write six books, or three, he had one direct story, and as long-winded as he was about it, it was actually a pretty simple story. You can summarize LotR in a few sentences: "Little hobbit dude goes on a journey with some friends to destroy an evil ring in the volcano where it was made. The bad guys try to stop them and they get split up and caught in different parts of the war for the ring." Pretty much it. It remains a fairly simple story to its core, it's just detailed.
Which isn't to say that every story should be that simple (LotR was supposed to be like a folktale, so it lacks moral ambiguity, something certainly not every story should aspire towards) But...okay, editing can be a virtue, and I just said GRRM needed buckets of it. But generally what editing should do is streamline. Like, in your creative moments, you create all this complexity and awesomeness, right? But then you realize it's all over the place, the eye gets lost, the reader can't tell what you're trying to say. (As an example--I haven't actually read your stuff yet whoops sorry. Haven't had time/focus to sit down and read much of anything.) So you ask yourself, what are the core elements of this story, what needs to happen, how am I demonstrating the themes of this story in a clear way? And then you cut or remold everything that gets in the way. You can do this TOO much, oversimplify, make things boring or lifeless, and that's bad, you want some rough edges, you want it to feel real and not overprocessed. But editing should be about condensing a grand sprawling thing into a compact, efficient story, not about adding tons of details--that's the creative stage--or just changing everything from scratch, because that's just the creative stage cannibalizing itself. It runs out of room and it just eats its own creations to make some more. Which can be good, and can take you places you wouldn't have otherwise gone! Or it can get so derivative that it needs the context of previous generations the creation went through to be understood fully--something new readers wouldn't have. Or it can just be equal to its previous incarnations, and endlessly retread the same space without ever advancing. It's a useful creative tool, but also a trap a lot of new writers get caught in for years.
Sorry for all the unsolicited advice...I just know approximately a million writers who start out with some fan-project and get publishing in their heads and think they can file the serial numbers off and get rich and famous...which, technically, it IS possible to do, but it's a one-in-a-million shot, and that way lies the path of broken dreams and disillusionment. And generally I think projects where you're changing things to distance them from the original rather than because those things needed changing or they changed in an organic way are somewhat doomed, because you can't deny it was something about the original that drew you to it--and draws others to it. It reminds me of the Henry Jenkins quote I reblogged recently: βFandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didnβt fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didnβt frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.β You gotta make sure the things you're changing are the ones that frustrate you, not the ones that fascinated you!
Relatedly, you can legally publish WotC material without paying them--in fact, they pay YOU. That's how Salvatore did it--but the thing is, they have to approve of you doing it, and WotC is not currently accepting applications. They're also a bunch of prejudiced fanboys who are only interested in the male gaze--what a woman has to say about pretty drow boys in sexual slavery who aren't power fantasies for them and their friends wouldn't interest them. (Their loss, really...) They'd also have executive power over it--not something it would be any fun to let them have.
Basically what I'm trying to say here is that it's okay to be here because there's something about the drow that fascinated you. Gygax invented the drow, and Salvatore brought them to a large audience, and it's okay to acknowledge that they built that--and that what they built was both fascinating and frustrating! And it's okay to just write because you enjoy it. Writing for publishing is a very different kind of thing from writing for pleasure, it's not as fun, there's more letting other people change your work for you, writing to target audiences, working on making a finished product in a driven fashion so you're not working for less than minimum wage, rather than letting the rambling path take you wherever it will because you're in no rush. It's okay to prefer pleasure-writing because it's more leisurely and more fun, and not to expect it to be something it isn't. We're led to believe that if you "follow your passion" (write for pleasure) you'll instantly get a novel, and while it can happen that way sometimes, I do think novels are a lot more work and a lot less dream-chasing than we realize. The idea that if we just do what we love long enough we'll get paid for it is popular now, but I think that's actually quite rare.
wow I rambled a lot here...hope I didn't say anything stupid. >__<
The thing with the mushrooms is really neat!Β I like that! And it's always good to see some sort of science in fantasy.
And yep, though the magical glow is always red--other Underdark inhabitants have it too, deep gnomes and such. They can wear goggles for stealth, or close their eyes for the low-tech version of it--but it doesn't make much of a difference against other creatures with night vision, since they can all see each other pretty clearly. It only really comes up against surface dwellers, which is why it wasn't selected against. It's just an adaptation of their natural magic that arose from generations in the Underdark. It's faster and easier to modify magic they already had access to than to actually evolve a change to the structure of their eyes, so that's what happened.
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thanks for the big ups, Yaeli!
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* Β A Β *) love it so much ! alkΓ±sjdlkasjdlkaΒ Β
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I like the unusual lighting and a sense of movement in this one.Β Β Lovely colours too.
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Thank you! I had a lot of fun with it.
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