#ladybugslibrary

Ladybug’s Library Book Review: ‘The Falling Machine’ by Andrew P. Mayer.  Visit blog, to read review.

As the title clearly stats: I am feeling extra geeky right now.  Why? Because I have recently rediscovered one of my earliest hobbies (though at the time I didn’t know it had a name besides ‘craziness’)....... conlang.  For those that don’t know what ‘conlang’ is it is the art of constructed language ( i.e. all those crazy geeks that thought it would be fun to create their own language).  Yup, I was, and still am, one of them.  I have always had an interest in other languages.  To the point that I actually collect other (natural and fictional) alphabets.  My collection includes normal languages such as Cyrillic, Old Gaelic, various forms of Runic and Futhark, and even Cuneiform; but also Klingon, Romulan, Borg, Tengwar (for Quenya, Sindarin, and Mode of Beleriand), D’Ni, and several of my own invention.  Yup, I liked alphabets so much that I made several of my own. I then got the crazy idea (blame it on reading to much Tolkien) that, instead of just creating a new alphabet, it would be ‘so much fun’ to go the rest of the way and create a whole new language.  I worked on it for a while, but then regular life interfered and new hobbies emerged shoving this one into the background............  Until the other day when I was looking for books on font creation and came across this: ‘The Art of Language Creation’ by David J. Peterson.  I had already started back to work on the language (having some writing ideas that could actually use it) earlier this year, but it’s been off-and-on, however, after finding this book my interest in this is back with a vengeance!!  I’d already decided to use my language project as part of an alternative history/fantasy book project I’m working on, but now I have way more information than I’d had before about how to do it well! I know, as if wanting to learn Elvish (both Quenya and Sindarin) weren’t geeky enough, I had to go and jump the rest of the way off the geek cliff and decide to create my own.  Oh well! :D