Archive for the ‘Meniscus: The Knife’ Category
Meniscus: The Knife
If you have been waiting to get a paperback copy of Meniscus: The Knife and find out all about Tagret’s quest to find Rist, the book is available now at Westminster Books, Fredericton. Signed copies! Both paperback and ebook are also available through Amazon, just click here.
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All my best!
Jane (a.k.a. Alexandra) Tims
Meniscus: The Knife … now in paperback and e-book
If you have been reading my Meniscus Series (science fiction adventure), you will be wondering what happened to Tagret and Rist after they said goodbye in Meniscus: Encounter with the Emenpod.
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The sequel is now available! Meniscus: The Knife tells the story of Tagret’s quest to find Rist before he is captured and killed by the Brotherhood.
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The book is available at Amazon (click here) as both paperback and e-book. If you live in the Fredericton area, I will have author copies in a week, so contact me to arrange delivery!
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Every story in the Meniscus Series takes the reader to new places and introduces new characters. The books also take the Humans of Themble Hill a little further in their journey. Every book has a glossary, a dictionary of Gel-Speak words, a description of characters, maps to follow the characters in their adventures and my original illustrations.
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Here is a map showing Tagret’s journey to The Knife and the city of Nebul-nan:
And a view of the strange, half-inundated city of Nebul-nan:
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Hope you enjoy my book!
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All my best,
stay safe!
Alexandra Tims (a.k.a. Jane)
next book in the Meniscus Series: the Gel-head dictionary
From the beginning, I have included an alien language dictionary at the end of my science fiction books. Gel-speak is the common language on the planet Meniscus. Many of my Human characters speak a little Gel-speak; the genetically-altered Humans, the Slain, speak it fluently. In each book, there are lines of Gel-speak, usually translated, occasionally not.
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The Gel-speak language originates with the Gel-heads, the most maligned of the aliens on Meniscus. The intelligent Dock-winders also have a language but it is not spoken in the presence of other species.
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By the eighth book, I have added to the dictionary until there are 170 words.
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The Gel-speak language has a grammar, or set of rules governing the words and their order. There are verbs and nouns, articles and adjectives. The Gel-speak language includes many of the same sounds as English and includes a ‘click’ at the end of certain words. Any linguists among you are now laughing.
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So, with the dictionary, you can count in Gel-speak to five:
u-hath – one
ull – two
undel – three
urth – four
v-hath – five
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Gel-speak words have ‘roots’ and build on one-another. For example, here are words associated with the female gender:
ora – light
ora-nee – home
ora-nell – female
ora-nell-elan – mother
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or, with the idea of sharing a hearth:
parelan – family
parennel – friend
pargath – hearth
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OK linguists, you can stop laughing now. This is fiction, after all.
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Want a look at the entire dictionary? Have a look at the books in the Meniscus Series, beginning here.
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All my best,
staying home (ora-nee),
and staying in my two-family (ull-paralan) bubble,
Jane
next book in the Meniscus Series: the illustrations
For the last two days, I have been in a drawing mood. Not many authors illustrate their books (not including those who work on graphic novels), but I love this part of the process.
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I have had lots of discussions with readers about the right and wrong of illustrating. Some think it takes away from the reader’s wonderful ability to imagine characters and scenes. Others think the illustrations take a reader deeper into the author’s intentions. As an author, I think drawings help get my ideas across. Since my books are told as narrative poetry, my words tend to be vary spare and I think of the drawings as extensions of the narrative.
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I include two types of drawings in my books: portraits of the characters and sketches of the action.
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The portraits are useful to me as a writer. They help fix the character’s face so the image does not migrate from book to book. I am really proud of the portraits and looking at them inspires my writing.
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I am also proud of some of my drawings of scenes from my books. When the drawing is close to the idea I want to portray, sometimes it suggests new details in the text. Some drawings are not so good but I rarely re-draw. Instead, I think of these as representative of the weirdness of planet Meniscus. It reminds me of a line from my favorite TV show Lost. Daniel Faraday, on his first visit to the island says,
The light… it’s strange out here, isn’t it? It’s kind of like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t scatter quite right.”
On Meniscus, the pencil doesn’t behave quite right.
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In every book, there are 23 +/- 4 drawings. Some are portraits or repeats of earlier scenes. Today, I did two drawings, both unique to Meniscus: The Knife.
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All my best,
staying home
and staying in my two-family bubble,
Jane
next book in the Meniscus Series: the Cast of Characters
Other writers often ask me about the use of a beta reader. Of course, I value their input and listen carefully to any suggestions about the book they have just read for me. In a series like Meniscus, the suggestions of the beta reader often help me more with the next book. Sometimes the suggestion has to do with the storyline or a particular character. Sometimes it is a suggestion that becomes integral to the whole series.
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When she read Book Two of the Series, Meniscus: South from Sintha, my beta reader Carol suggested adding a short description of each character in a compendium at the end of each book. I began to do this for the next book and now every book has a Cast of Characters.
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Since some of my characters are aliens, I group the characters as Humans, Argenops (benevolent furry creatures), Dock-winders (self-serving overlords), Gel-heads (unlikeable minions), and Others (animal companions and other sentient aliens).
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In the Cast of Characters I include information on the character’s role in the story, the character’s age, where the character lived on Earth, what they were doing when the Dock-winders harvested them, what Earth year they were taken, their occupation on Earth, their occupation on Meniscus and sometimes their motivation, faults or wants.
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Here is an example, a character description of Zachary, a carpenter and an important citizen of Themble Hill:
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Sometimes I wish I could change the character description a bit to suit the story, but I try not to do that. I also include all of the characters mentioned in all of the books to date although they may not appear in the current book. So far, I have 41 characters, major and minor, who have appeared in the various books.
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All my best,
staying home and keeping in my two-family bubble,
Jane
next book in the Meniscus Series: the maps
One day in 2016, when I was first deciding how I would put the Meniscus books together, I puzzled over how I would make the maps I wanted to include in each book.
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At first, I wanted to produce hand-drawn maps, re-drawing each map and making erasures and changes as each book advanced the story. Every book would need adjustments to the map and a new dotted ‘trail’ to show the path my characters followed.
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The idea of hand-drawn maps ended when I found out how boring it would be to draw the 300 trees in the Themble Wood.
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I didn’t know a thing about digital image creation. So I went on line and found GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program … what a great place to learn the craft of making maps! https://www.gimp.org/
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Now, four years later, I have not needed to move from GIMP. First I learned how to make trees …. in quantity and with shadows! There are three kinds of tree on Meniscus: grammid, yarnel and banyan:
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Once I had trees all across my maps, I added the geological features I knew were essential for world-building: in the first book of the Meniscus Series I wanted (left to right) a gully, a line of huge burrows, a fault (and high associated cliff), a hill and a large water feature (a churn).
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I also knew I wanted towns and cities, as well as the roads between them:
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I also add trails to show where my characters travel during the book.
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GIMP has met every need. And my maps can change with time; all I do is turn various layers on and off, creating new combinations of features and paths.
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Here is one of the maps for my next book Meniscus: The Knife:
The dotted line (– . — . — . –) shows Tagret’s path as she goes on her quest to rescue Rist.
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All my best,
staying home and in my two-family bubble,
Jane
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