Story Ideas
Aug. 16th, 2010 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesI think I might be ripping off ![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-userinfo.gif)
limyaael, since I remember her mentioning something loosely like this. Hell, if we go with the general concept of extra-long seasons, well, George R R Martin has something to say about that.
But it was partially thinking about two things. One is Harvest Moon. In Harvest Moon, you have 30 days of spring, then, bam -- instant summer, all the spring crops still in the ground wilt, the wild plants, background music and general outdoorsness change. Conceptually I understand why this happens -- it's easier to program four seasons than early-mid-late (or even making every day slightly different), but it's kind of jarring, especially on the first of winter.
The second was thinking about language. We're not born speaking language, and I'm sure scientists argue back and forth about how much ground work we get from our genes. So it started wondering what a world would be like if we were born speaking and learning words was more a matter of learning the concepts. Especially if it was a language that changed in space and time, so our families wouldn't be able to understand us. How would parents talk to kids when it wasn't just the slang that changed, but even the basics of language -- or would they? And would anyone know how to learn a foreign language, since they never had to learn a first one.
So, my brain combined the two -- well, mostly. The second could still work as an interesting short story, if it gets a plot. What if humans lived in an area -- a valley, maybe -- where seasons lasted for generations (long enough that most people won't sire/bear children during their birth seasons, short enough that one can expect to survive four seasons). And humans -- or anything, plant or animal -- changed depending on what season they were born with -- a Springborn or Autumnborn person might look like a normal human (maybe call them Equinoxborn, but something less scientific might be better), while a Winterborn might look more like a yeti, and a Summerborn more... well, I'm picturing something almost like a taller, thinner version of Dobby from Harry Potter. (Those ears look wonderful for cooling -- no, I don't know why I'm going desert or savannah instead of jungle...)
So I started thinking about families. In most cases, children would be different enough that they wouldn't thrive with their parents, so the normal western nuclear family strikes me as a poor choice. The best I could see happening is a trio of Winterborn, Equinoxborn and Summerborn community living in separate places but linked via their children. If a season is 10-15 years, the time between cycles would be 40-60, which is enough to ensure that there will be people around to raise the next cycle. I started to think about Winterborn women journeying through summer to give birth or bring newborns to their new village...
... then I realized that wasn't where the story was. If Autumnborn and Springborn people were similar enough, and the time between seasons was right, they could live 'normally'... it's just they would go through 10-15 year stretches of births and 10-15 year stretches of letting the kids mature. And probably need some hella good birth control, but... if they had that, they might have a taboo against having a Winterborn or Summerborn child. Maybe not even have much contact, outside of the foundlings that Winter and Summerborn people drop off, because they can't afford to wait 40-60 years to have kids.
But someone is occasionally going to screw that up, and therein lies a story -- what's it like realizing your kid is going to be born alien and that the best thing to do is give it up for adoption (or try some of the plants designed to act as abortificants**)? And what's it like traveling to a place among aliens to give birth when you grow up in a single town? As well as the general world of living in a places where a season lasts for years* as we'd measure it.
Trick would be that I would have to write a pregnancy, and keep track of my geography.
Anyway, it can go with the SF/mystery/poly-romance novel and the MMORPG urban fantasy (which will probably never work -- I don't even play MMORPGs, and I don't want to encourage more addictive internet games.)
* No, I'm not going to explain it via astronomy. I could still keep a year-count by star cycles. (In other words, the time the Sun takes to go from rising in Aries, through the zodiac constellations, and back to Aries.), but it would be less important besides as a way to record a unit of time between a month and a season.
** Granted, because otherwise I don't have a story, 'MC has an abortion and lives on in her hometown' isn't going to happen unless it's added on 'then she gets pregnant again, and the village healer tells her that too many of those kind of herbs will start to affect her'. It's one of those things I want to mention, because it's not like abortion sprung out of the vacuum after Roe v. Wade, and in a society where you have taboo pregnancies, someone will work out what kind of herbs to slip into tea. (Or surgical approaches, but that's kind of messy without sterile procedures.) La, tangent.
limyaael, since I remember her mentioning something loosely like this. Hell, if we go with the general concept of extra-long seasons, well, George R R Martin has something to say about that. But it was partially thinking about two things. One is Harvest Moon. In Harvest Moon, you have 30 days of spring, then, bam -- instant summer, all the spring crops still in the ground wilt, the wild plants, background music and general outdoorsness change. Conceptually I understand why this happens -- it's easier to program four seasons than early-mid-late (or even making every day slightly different), but it's kind of jarring, especially on the first of winter.
The second was thinking about language. We're not born speaking language, and I'm sure scientists argue back and forth about how much ground work we get from our genes. So it started wondering what a world would be like if we were born speaking and learning words was more a matter of learning the concepts. Especially if it was a language that changed in space and time, so our families wouldn't be able to understand us. How would parents talk to kids when it wasn't just the slang that changed, but even the basics of language -- or would they? And would anyone know how to learn a foreign language, since they never had to learn a first one.
So, my brain combined the two -- well, mostly. The second could still work as an interesting short story, if it gets a plot. What if humans lived in an area -- a valley, maybe -- where seasons lasted for generations (long enough that most people won't sire/bear children during their birth seasons, short enough that one can expect to survive four seasons). And humans -- or anything, plant or animal -- changed depending on what season they were born with -- a Springborn or Autumnborn person might look like a normal human (maybe call them Equinoxborn, but something less scientific might be better), while a Winterborn might look more like a yeti, and a Summerborn more... well, I'm picturing something almost like a taller, thinner version of Dobby from Harry Potter. (Those ears look wonderful for cooling -- no, I don't know why I'm going desert or savannah instead of jungle...)
So I started thinking about families. In most cases, children would be different enough that they wouldn't thrive with their parents, so the normal western nuclear family strikes me as a poor choice. The best I could see happening is a trio of Winterborn, Equinoxborn and Summerborn community living in separate places but linked via their children. If a season is 10-15 years, the time between cycles would be 40-60, which is enough to ensure that there will be people around to raise the next cycle. I started to think about Winterborn women journeying through summer to give birth or bring newborns to their new village...
... then I realized that wasn't where the story was. If Autumnborn and Springborn people were similar enough, and the time between seasons was right, they could live 'normally'... it's just they would go through 10-15 year stretches of births and 10-15 year stretches of letting the kids mature. And probably need some hella good birth control, but... if they had that, they might have a taboo against having a Winterborn or Summerborn child. Maybe not even have much contact, outside of the foundlings that Winter and Summerborn people drop off, because they can't afford to wait 40-60 years to have kids.
But someone is occasionally going to screw that up, and therein lies a story -- what's it like realizing your kid is going to be born alien and that the best thing to do is give it up for adoption (or try some of the plants designed to act as abortificants**)? And what's it like traveling to a place among aliens to give birth when you grow up in a single town? As well as the general world of living in a places where a season lasts for years* as we'd measure it.
Trick would be that I would have to write a pregnancy, and keep track of my geography.
Anyway, it can go with the SF/mystery/poly-romance novel and the MMORPG urban fantasy (which will probably never work -- I don't even play MMORPGs, and I don't want to encourage more addictive internet games.)
* No, I'm not going to explain it via astronomy. I could still keep a year-count by star cycles. (In other words, the time the Sun takes to go from rising in Aries, through the zodiac constellations, and back to Aries.), but it would be less important besides as a way to record a unit of time between a month and a season.
** Granted, because otherwise I don't have a story, 'MC has an abortion and lives on in her hometown' isn't going to happen unless it's added on 'then she gets pregnant again, and the village healer tells her that too many of those kind of herbs will start to affect her'. It's one of those things I want to mention, because it's not like abortion sprung out of the vacuum after Roe v. Wade, and in a society where you have taboo pregnancies, someone will work out what kind of herbs to slip into tea. (Or surgical approaches, but that's kind of messy without sterile procedures.) La, tangent.
