Immersion, and the days of the week.

[Nimue]

Well, don't hate me, but in Tamriel I believe it's:

• Morndas.
• Tirdas.
• Middas.
• Turdas.
• Fredas.
• Loredas.
• Sundas.

Sounds similar to me and I loved it, actually, because it helped me know what day it was. Not like it mattered much in the grand scheme of things but for immersion it's nice.

Another lesson to be learned: be careful when creating fantasy words, or some immature people (me) will chuckle at “Turd-ass” every time they play Skyrim.

This is something that you can easily skirt around. Skyrim needs definitive days to mark the passage of time in-game, but if you’re writing in a sufficiently archaic world, you don’t really need to mention the day of the week unless you have a plot that depends on a close schedule, or a regimented setting like a monastery or university. It’s easy to just refer to “two days ago” or “five days hence” rather than naming the day. And unless you’ve separately explained the days of the week, “next Odinsday” actually gives the reader less information than “five days hence.” However...it does give a realistic texture to the world. Pros and cons. Personally, I wouldn’t use the English days of the week unless your world has a) Nordic gods and b) Anglicization. Same for the names of months, which have their roots in Latin numbers and Roman emperors. And months are perhaps more necessary for world-building, given that it’s likely you’ll need to refer to broad swathes of time. Could just get away with talking about the seasons, I suppose.

I have a week from my old project I’m going to try to adapt to the new one, but I’ll have to change some of the word influences. Super basic, just mapping times of day onto the week:

dawnsday
mornday
nonesday
settday
evenday
nuittday
restday

Pull in references to sennights and fortnights, and you can get any day of the year. Dawnsday of the first sennight of the Fisherman’s Moon. Using a strictly lunar calendar has its challenges, though. There’s an extra month that needs to be thrown in here or there, and I’m still not entirely sure about the weeks shifting. I’d be fairly superficial, but part of the plot depends on the equinoxes and solstices...

 

[Svrtnsse]

[...]Using a strictly lunar calendar has its challenges, though. There’s an extra month that needs to be thrown in here or there, and I’m still not entirely sure about the weeks shifting. I’d be fairly superficial, but part of the plot depends on the equinoxes and solstices...

Or you can just say that the lunar cycle is exactly as long as it needs to be for there not to be any drift.

 

[Heliotrope]

Another lesson to be learned: be careful when creating fantasy words, or some immature people (me) will chuckle at “Turd-ass” every time they play Skyrim.

...

Oh thank God I'm not the only one who thought of this. I guess I am just that immature....

 

[Chessie2]

I've actually never thought about it. Then again I paid more attention to the months than I did the days.

 

[Ban]

I've put hundreds of hours into the elder scrolls games and not at one point did I see Turd-Ass. I feel a bit hollow inside for being able to miss that...

 

[Nimue]

Really...really you should count yourself lucky. It was a bit of a boot to the immersion every time I saw it (probably not what Svrt was thinking when he titled this thread).

 

[skip.knox]

I do so love the liquor days. That really needs to be extended to include the months--maybe cocktails?

Colleen McCullough used the Roman week in her Masters of Rome books. Nundinae. The Romans had a nine-day week. She used it for saying things like an event would happen three weeks from today, or the like. While I appreciated what she was doing, I found it distracting because I was always doing a recalc in my head. Took me away from the story by a step or two. After a while (there's something like seven books in the series), I simply stopped caring and nundinae became "some while after tomorrow" in my head.

 

[Heliotrope]

^^^ This is what happens to me too when a writer gets too detailed with the world. I stop really paying attention to it. It has no real meaning to me other than "some time in the future" or "a while ago". The same goes for when writers get fancy with fantasy names, especially if they have a bunch of apostrophes or hyphens. I just read the first two letters and think "beard guy", "short guy", or "warrior lady" and I don't even attempt to learn the names.

 

[pmmg]

Yeah, I make an effort to pronounce names in my head, but if they prove too difficult, they just become that character who whose name starts with an F, or that one who starts with a C. Which is a shame, I sure the name mattered to someone.

 

[Nimue]

For me personally, detailing a calendar is just for me, the person writing in the world. I gotta make sure my full moons and solstices line up. But I’d never write the story so that somebody has to think in terms of that calendar to make sense of what’s going on. It’s texture for the setting, and that’s the amount of emphasis that should be put on it.

There are exceptions, of course...if something is really fantastic and plot important, you want to make the reader think about it. But for most fantasy stories, it’s just an occasional mention that makes the world feel like real people live there, moving through time and marking the days.

 

[Svrtnsse]

Main MC's name is Roy. It's not too complicated is it? /worriedface

 

[skip.knox]

I recommend avoiding Russian novels *heh*

I had a devil of a time with War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, etc. I think it's a testament to the strength of the writing that the author kept me around. I even read War and Peace aloud to my wife. It actually helped a bit, especially with dealing with all the variants of a single name (formal, familial, pet name).

Names that don't work linguistically do bother me. But I'm willing to ride with the author on complicated names, especially if it's main characters, because I'm going to encounter those names often enough. I think an author undercuts himself, though, with the lore infodump prologues. Those often contain a blizzard of names. Make them complex, and then don't refer to them again for many chapters, if ever, and they just get dumped on the trash heap of indifferent memory.

Not to thread-jump, but I would take this as a concrete bit of learning by reading. I really have looked at how authors name characters, places, objects, etc., with particular attention at what works and does not work for me. That's how I noticed the above. Of course, this is going to vary by reader, so all I can do as an author is please myself first, then argue with my editor.

 

[Heliotrope]

Main MC's name is Roy. It's not too complicated is it? /worriedface

lol

 

[skip.knox]

Main MC's name is Roy. It's not too complicated is it? /worriedface

Is that Roy or Roi? Are you trying to imply kingship here? Is he sometimes called The Roy (Leroy)? Have you considered switching to Rex?

Oh the depths and layers of Roy...

 

[Devor]

Roy is the same name as the lead in Order of the Stick, I'm going to have a hard time giving your character a unique identity....

 

[Svrtnsse]

Is that Roy or Roi? Are you trying to imply kingship here? Is he sometimes called The Roy (Leroy)? Have you considered switching to Rex?

Oh the depths and layers of Roy...

That's Roy with a capital R followed by o and then y, both in lower case.

The surname and nickname is where it gets complicated, but they're less relevant to the character. I'll illustrate:

Raoul’s face brightened up. “Wait, I get it.” He turned to Paivi with a big smile on his face. “This is Roy van Waldenberger isn’t it? He’s really famous.”

“No…” Toini frowned. That wasn’t his name.

“Yes, that’s him.” Paivi nodded. “Three times world champion. He changed his surname.”

“Why? What’s wrong with Stugknutsson?”

 

[pmmg]

Roy...eh...hmmmm... I'll work on getting it right. buy it might be less confusing if you did not have a silent 'y' on the end....

I read crime and punishment, and yes, the names take some working through, but I managed it.

 

[Heliotrope]

There was a Scooby Doo Episode once with this guy Rick (but you couldn't pronounce it)...

(my kid loves Scooby Doo)

 

[Devor]

My opinion earlier mostly still stands, just avoid the issue. There's too much new-name-overload for a small amount of immersion.

But somebody mentioned the months earlier, and it got me thinking...

Most kingdoms are made up of smaller ones - or at least smaller regions. Like how England is made from the Kingdoms of Wessex and Northumbria and others. Or how Westeros has the seven kingdoms, which each have their dozen-ish lords.

So what if you dedicated a month to each region? Like, the Month of Wessex, or Wessember, or some better-worded title. You could even have a festival that moves to the appropriate region each month, and a king's delegation that focuses on bettering that region. It would serve to celebrate the kingdom while marking the time.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

That would break immersion for me, if a fantasy character referenced Friday night or something. In my WIP i'm doing my best to avoid it.

I have a similar problem with saying things like January or 6:00. Who knows if any measure of time would be the same as ours? I don't want to come up with a whole other system to make my readers memorize, so I sidestep it.