I have an idea, but it’s hard to explain. It’s about heat and life and stuff.

And, after a few days of being stagnant in the keeping-up-with-blogging department, I feel as though that is precisely what I should ramble about today: my difficulty explaining things.

The idea that I had been struggling with trying to share has lead to a deeper vice of mine, and that is that I struggle with describing things that are of a somewhat unfamiliar nature, period. If it were up to me to describe what snow looked and felt like to members of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon in order to not be cooked alive (for whatever reason), I’d be screwed. Doesn’t matter how well acquainted I am with the concept, it’s others whom I must enlighten.

So, when I want to write a book that’s intended to be chock full of interesting, weird, abstract concepts, and each of those concepts reinforce other strange ones, I am forced to go at it from a developmental approach: Start with the basics, establish a foundation, then build up.

The reason I find this difficult is because I want the reader to be plunged right in. I want to throw a reasonably diverse mixture of both familiar and unfamiliar ideas at them from the outset, so that way, there’d be things they can latch on to, and there’d be things they’re left wondering about.

From there, I fully intend on developing those unfamiliar threads in such a way that they gradually evolve in the reader’s mind, like a jigsaw puzzle slowly coming together, until they eventually become something they find intimately familiar. And/or, in the weaving of other concepts and threads, I will put a foundation together in such a way that all of the unfamiliar bits (which, to be fair, I would only mete out a reasonably little at a time) become instantly clear all at once, as though the reader were given the cipher for a crucial code they’ve been unable to solve for a long time.

So, my idea involving heat and life and stuff could be an unknown concept that instantly pops when the right information comes along, or one that slowly evolves over time, or, more likely, one that’s best left alone until the right fundamental principles that the universe of the story happens to abide by are first established. But therein lies another difficulty: it seems to me almost that all of the story’s universe’s fundamental principles are, themselves, unfamiliar and abstract.

So.

What does my story, Elyen, have in common with anything a human from Earth alive shortly after the turn of the 21st century might find familiar?

– The main characters are usually humanoid, so there’s often strong physical resemblance
– There are, more often than not, weather events that are similar to what we might expect here on earth
– Though the grander setting is nothing at all like Earth, from the perspective of a given humanoid character on the ground, the existence of mountains, bodies of water, forests, plains, desserts, etc., are all Earth-like enough for most readers to connect with
– Fantastic technologies exist which should be explainable in a way that fans of Sci-fi would have little difficulty appreciating
– Various forms of magic exist that fans of Fantasy will have little trouble understanding

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s just a cursory list for now. Here’s a list of some of the concepts I’m toying with which, I believe, are less common and therefore much trickier (but not impossible) to explain:

– “The Singularity” is the name of a type of major event that happens at various points throughout the history of the people of the story (yes, as in, there’s been more than one such event in Drendain history)
– Drendast is the name of the planet most of the events of the story takes place on. Drendast is a mega Aether-world, so large that it has multiple stars the size of Earth’s sun revolving around it, and not the other way around
– Most of the characters and beings on Drendast are photovores, naturally evolved [or, in some cases, genetically engineered] to subsist solely on the nearly perpetual light from the planet’s suns
– Physics on an Aether-world like Drendast are conveniently exotic. ‘Anomalies’, such as tri-pole magnetism, are taken for granted here
– The overarching philosophy behind the story incorporates, among other things, an offshoot of Taoism, which, if I understand anything at all about, only proves to me that I understand nothing at all
– Drendast happens to serve as a kind of ‘hub’ within it’s local multiverse, bridging connections via Conduits (think wormholes and you’ve basically got it) between universes both near and far.

And there’s loads and loads more concepts besides that.

The point is that I don’t always know where to start when it comes time to describe something. When I want to talk about a race of beings based on heat (rather than, say, carbon), I soon find myself struggling to explain their environment and behaviour, both of which involve (from the what I assume is a typical human perspective) altered states of reality, vaguely spiritual themes, Immersion (another very key concept I’m aiming to expound upon in the near future), and so on and so forth. Not easy.

Suddenly, explaining just one thing (what this race of heat-based beings are all about) is no longer just one thing, but many things, each of which are equally tricky.

I’m long winded. I’m still new to this whole blogging thing, and I don’t think I’ve quite figured out the most appropriate and tasteful format for presenting ideas, especially in terms of length, so, my biggest concern is not going on and on forever. To this end, I think I’m gonna start explaining concepts in parts. Starting after this blog, if I want to share a complex idea, expect to see it presented in chunks.

Or maybe I can do up a sort of wiki reference page, since I’m almost certain to reference earlier blog entries when presenting new ones related to Elyen. Something for me to look into. Anyways, that’d be all for now.