Les Deux Cygnes

"Don't let mass shooting victims control the narrative with empathy" - Charlie Kirk

"Gun violence deaths are the cost of keeping our 2nd amendment rights" - Charlie Kirk

"I'd force my 10 year old daughter to give birth" - Charlie Kirk

"Children should watch executions" - Charlie Kirk

“I felt a quiet sense of power.”

By that, I mean the worldbuilding of a character.

Here's an example:

I have an immortal character who was born in Hejaz (part of what is now Saudi Arabia) a couple thousand years ago.

To write his character, here are some world (rather than personality) considerations I need to think about:

What is his relationship with Islam, a religion he pre-dates, particularly given his use of magic?

What languages does he speak? Does he still speak Old Hejazi, even though there are no other living speakers? When he speaks Arabic, does it sound odd or old-fashioned to modern Arabic speakers? He would have learned Koine Greek, so what does his Greek sound like now?

What is his relationship to the magic communities whose origins (and thus forms of magic) post-date his learning magic by over a thousand years?

Those are just a few examples, but they show the types of considerations that you might think of from a worldbuilding sense when creating a character.

How does your character fit within the world? How do their knowledge, background, history, and experiences result from and also impact the world? How would they have ended up where they are, and how would that be shaped by their world?

If they have unexpected skills or knowledge, how did they acquire them in the world they exist in? The answer for how I might know how to ride a horse (a thing I can't do) would be very different than the answer for a woman of my relative social status 150 years ago, but also the literal way of riding a horse would be different.

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

I've just gotten an email from a new "self-publishing platform" called Written (written.app), which is making suspiciously extravagant promises about the benefits they offer to authors. After further research, this is just "upload your book with us and we'll make it an NFT :)"

It’s so incredibly disturbing that they’ve filtered it out of the media and that people don’t care enough to demand it be covered. People treated it like a trend and aesthetified it to the point that an actual act of resistance means nothing now.