Faaro Lovell and the Five Seasons of Geath

So... This post is me procrastinating. See? Procrastination. And a little bit more procrastination. Here have some more procrastination! Would you like it chilled or lukewarm?

Maybe it's also an update on the novel. I'll consider posting a tidbit if my reader minions are desperate enough.

Currently, my word-counting-majiggy reads a pleasing 12,000 squiggles of brain matter. I've been up till around three in the morning of late completing this thought-to-screen-pasting. It has caused me to become half nocturnal. I go to bed at three and wake up at noon.

I was planning and writing away happily the night before last when I suddenly had a need to name my villain. In the end, I decided to go with the name Faaro Lovell. Faaro was from a random, evil-sounding name generator. I liked it because it sounds like 'pharaoh', so brings to mind thoughts of immense power. Lovell is an old English surname meaning crafty beast. So, as you can probably guess by the name, Faaro Lovell is a crafty, power-hungry bad guy. I'm not going to give any more away just yet, other than the fact that he wears those awesome antique glasses with the round, coloured lenses.

Tonight I decided I needed to do a little bit of world building. Eleven pages of it apparently. I found a list of questions online designed to make you think about all of the aspects of a fantasy world and filled them in. I discovered that the country our characters live in, Geath, neighbours an ocean, a frozen wilderness, a country very much like itself to the west called Faal and an arid, dragon-filled country to the south named Asreal.

Geath has a pantheon of gods, and its biggest annual celebration is on the eve of their Winter, Neve, and the dawn of their Spring, Vida. In this festival, Cao'vida, they celebrate the gods of chaos and death until midnight on the last day of Neve, and then celebrate the gods of creation and life on the dawn of Vida. There are also three other seasons. Calor (Summer), Decadencia (Autumn) and Auga (The great wet season between Vida and Calor).

Geath is mostly a medieval society, with elements of steampunk/Victorian Era thrown in. Chimeras are cat-rabbit-deer creatures that are kept as pets and unicorns are evil, scary beasts. Why else would they have such a vicious horn after all? Read Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies if you don't believe me. That is one nasty unicorn.

But with more teeth.