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(Sobering thought while rereading Lolita: I'm the same age as Humbert Humbert when he met Dolores Haze. Old enough to be a Creepy Older Guy. And here I still feel like a Creepy Younger Guy.)
I'm having fun working in a world without clocks (almost as much fun as keeping my similes period). No marked candles even -- no standard candles. But then, I've come to detest Fantasyland's candlemarks -- don't pretend your people have a modern, developed-world sense of timekeeping without a modern technology to create it. That's just bad worldbuilding, okay? So stop it. Now.
But I digress. I was writing about characters with a different sense of diurnal time: no minutes, no seconds. A day of eight canonical hours, pegged to the sun's transit. Without words to urgently subdivide the day, there's, well, less urgency. For lack of a better term, a third-world urgency. Except in one domain: tactical situations. In small battles, I'm finding myself aching for seconds and minutes: "Wait X for my squad to get in position, then start your diversionary attack." Instead, they have to work by response: "Wait till they turn towards my attack, then hit 'em from the rear." I've tried fudging this with "heartbeats," but it's fudging and I know it and will probably edit it out (possibly in favor of recitations of a standard prayer? must think).
What bad bits of fantasy worldbuilding bother you?
---L.
I'm having fun working in a world without clocks (almost as much fun as keeping my similes period). No marked candles even -- no standard candles. But then, I've come to detest Fantasyland's candlemarks -- don't pretend your people have a modern, developed-world sense of timekeeping without a modern technology to create it. That's just bad worldbuilding, okay? So stop it. Now.
But I digress. I was writing about characters with a different sense of diurnal time: no minutes, no seconds. A day of eight canonical hours, pegged to the sun's transit. Without words to urgently subdivide the day, there's, well, less urgency. For lack of a better term, a third-world urgency. Except in one domain: tactical situations. In small battles, I'm finding myself aching for seconds and minutes: "Wait X for my squad to get in position, then start your diversionary attack." Instead, they have to work by response: "Wait till they turn towards my attack, then hit 'em from the rear." I've tried fudging this with "heartbeats," but it's fudging and I know it and will probably edit it out (possibly in favor of recitations of a standard prayer? must think).
What bad bits of fantasy worldbuilding bother you?
---L.