Bomb Cyclones, Leaky Ceilings, and High Elves, Oh My!

Bomb Cyclones, Leaky Ceilings, and High Elves, Oh My!

Snow, Snow, and More Snow

            I live in Colorado so there was much to-do this week in regards to the “Bomb Cyclone”. Is it just me or does it seem like every year the names for our weather patterns become increasingly outrageous? I spent the last decade or so in New Jersey and I have heard more ridiculous names for storms and hurricanes than I can count. I guess some things don’t change no matter where you live!

            I will say, the wind was pretty outrageous. Snow was flying horizontally. It was wild. Next to my house there was little to no accumulation because the wind was blowing the snow into crazy piles. I have to be honest, I have no idea how much we really got. By midday I could no longer see out of my windows.

            While the power flickered a few times and there were a few internet outages, I consider myself lucky to have been safe and comfortable the whole storm. Even got to skype with my sister and my twin nephews. I hope anyone else who was in this storm’s path was safe too!

Is It A Roof Leak? A Pipe Leak? Or C O N D E N S A T I O N ?

            Thankfully for me it wound up being condensation. Imagine this: you wake up in your warm bed, afraid to move because it’s freezing outside your covers. All night long you dreamt of having a warm bath to relax and unwind. You get up. You live the dream. Then you drain the tub, rinse off, and actually get clean only to find that your bathroom fan is drip-drip-dripping on the floor, having created a huge mess while you bathed. That’s just what you want to deal with after getting clean, isn’t it?

            Well, I cleaned it up, put down a bucket to catch the water and talked to the roommate. Got it sorted out. I knew it wasn’t a pipe leaking since it didn’t get worse when the water was turned on. So, it either had to be the roof or condensation. In my case, it ended up being condensation. Hot pipes, hot air ducts, right beneath an ice-covered roof. Still going to have to deal with it but hey, at least our roof isn’t falling apart!

            This reminds me of that time water came pouring out of the smoke alarm in my father’s room. Ah, but I digress.

Let’s Talk World Building

            This is one of my favorite parts of writing a story: building the world the characters live in. Whether it’s defining history, origins, religion, creating races, and maps, it’s all good fun. (You could say I enjoy playing God a little bit here, but I like to refer to it as world building.) It’s funny really, the process I go through for creating greatly differs from story to story. For Cursed the details of each area of the world were less important than the history that created it. For The Aftermath the world is very important since the characters come from many walks of it and the culture is discussed frequently. Then there’s Black Roses where religion was the most important creation aspect. It’s funny how things vary.

            Over the next few weeks I hope to highlight the various races I’ve created for The Aftermath, just for fun. I talk about a few of them quite a bit on Twitter, but others I neglect a bit more. They’re all rich and interesting and I had a great time creating them. Depending on how this goes, I might go into more world building details for other stories (if anyone’s interested)! I’m also interested in hearing how you world build!

High Elves

            They consider themselves the most intelligent of all the elves living in Nemyron. They are also the most arrogant. Just before the fall of Nemyron, where a fallen God and his armies conquered the throne in Veloria, the home of the High Elves and center of the kingdom, the High Elves reigned supreme.

            Dynista was the largest and grandest city in all of Nemyron. Elves from every walk of life traveled there to attend their universities, to see King Amit and Queen Ekaterina, and to sell their wares. What the High Elves thought as their “pique” was in fact what led to their downfall. They’d become so arrogant and selfish that they thought they had conquered all of life’s great problems so they began to fixate on the little ones. They found themselves fighting over nothing and creating problems to solve.

            Growing bored with the finer things they became obsessed with lust and greed, unintentionally becoming more and more selfish.

            Religiously, many High Elves have found themselves beyond worshipping Gods that they were uncertain were even real. They found themselves ‘too intelligent’ to fall for such nonsense. In this case, they were very wrong, the Gods were real. While they found religious ceremonies to be a formal gathering and still attended, the stories were taken with a grain of salt.

            Appearance Wise High Elves have only blue, green, or red eyes, or light pastel colored hair. Women often wear their hair up in intricate styles with a ton of jewelry. Their skin tone greatly varies depending on where the High Elf in question was born. They are generally tall and move elegantly. While most races have a specific style of dress the High Elves do not. Their culture was so intermixed with the finest of all the others that their clothing wildly varies. Even after the war many can’t let go of the idea of having the finest of things.

            Skills the High Elves are known for are mostly their intellect and grace. However, these traits also led them to be lustful, greedy, naïve, over-confident, and apathetic. This is seen mostly in Queen Lolima throughout the story. All High Elves have a level of magic and it is mostly telekinetic, telepathic, speed, and air manipulation. Most High Elves who have combat experience only do so because of the Velorian Military. They specialize in a great many types of weapons since they are trained for war. There are few soldiers left after Dresdeth’s ten year reign. High Elves excelled in the arts: music, painting, and sculpture. Social standing was very important to them. It isn’t so much anymore.

            Veloria used to be known for its many imports, exports, and colleges. Now it is known for little since it suffered the greatest devastation beneath Dresdeth’s hand. In the west there are several ranches but most of Veloria is littered with liberated prisons from the war. Most of the wildlife has fled south to Leogshe, home of the Light Elves but there were once many birds, cows, chickens, ewes, dogs, cats, and lizards. Much of the architecture is destroyed now but it was very art nouveau before that. If you were to Google Edwardian, that would paint a good picture.

            I’ll stop here and put in some pictures of the High Elves from the story. There’s much more I could discuss, rituals, celebrations, social structure, policing, system of government, superstitions, traditions, right down to their favorite and least favorite foods. I even created historical figures for each race! The Aftermath’s world is important to its story and it was a blast creating all of this! If you guys like this kind of stuff then I’ll go back through each race and post information about their historical figures and traditions.

Sergiu, Warrior Hero

King Elpidios, Royal Guardian

Queen Lolima, Royal Guardian

Arnan, Destined Warrior

One Last Note!

            For those of you who are interested in Iron Clad and its edit, what do you think I should do with it? Should I take down the original story and post it again, should I just… post it again? I’m not sure, haha! Always happy to have your feedback and I hope you’re all having a lovely day.