Bibliomancy Method of Choosing Quotations.

Frank Herbert, author of the Dune saga, and one of my heroes, started each chapter of his inspired and inspiring novels with a quotation from a source he made up himself.  Ass an homage to this series, in my Takuhi trilogy, I started making up my own “sources” and quotations.  But somewhere around the 16th chapter of Takuhi’s Daydream, my quotation well ran dry.  Then it occurred to me: Shakespeare is in the public domain.  Why no do a bit of bibliomancy?

Bibliomancy, for those of you who don’t know is the divinatory practice --mancy denotes method of divination.  Biblio--for book. Biblio-- comes from Byblos, a Phoenician/Ledanese city that has been occupied from 7500 BCE to the present day under an Arabic name was known throughout the ancient world for its parchments and papyrus, in short, supplying everything you needed to create books, or scrolls as they were shaped in ancient times. Books as we know them today or codices did not come out until much later.  Biblioteca, Spanish for library.  

Most often bibliomancy is done with a Bible.  Those who are Muslim can also use a Quran. Mormons could use the Book of Mormon.  The essence of doing bibliomancy is to pick a page at random, and without looking select a passage or verse.  Since I am not an adherent of any Abrahamic religion, I selected the works of Shakespeare. Thee is a funny story about using the Bible for advice when at a critical crossroads, indecisive about what to do.  A desperate minister used his Bible for such advice. The passage he came to was “Judas went and hanged himself.” “No! No! That can’t be right!” He selected another verse. “Go thou and do likewise.”

Accordingly, I opened the works of my old friend the Bard to a random page.  I ran my finger down the page without looking, and stopped. It was a line by John Falstaff, a man who I guess was an historic figure, although I had always figured him to be a character made up by Will himself.  I copied the quotation to the beginning of the chapter. I did it again for the next chapter and the next. I am now at Chapter 24, and considering moving to a book of Irish faery tales I received from my daughter for Yule.  This kind of bibliomancy can be used in many ways, but as the minister discovered to his horror, not to be followed in one’s subsequent actions. After all, you might end up with the suicide scene near the end of Romeo and Juliet.

Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up next month, and already I have signed up and declared my project.  How many of you, O dear readers, are participating? It’s sure to be a fun time for all. If we are quarantined, thanks to this virus everyone is panicking over, we are sure to get a lot of writing done.

Designing Names for Aliens Using Letter Tiles

You all play Scrabble, right?  Well, did you ever do anything with the letter tiles that the inventors of the game didn’t plan on?  I used a character naming generator site to name my characters. The names all sounded like they’d belong to your neighbors down the block.  I needed names that you would know just by looking at them that they are not of this Earth. I had started with small paper letters, but they were too small.  Once you hit forty, you start being afflicted by what optometrists and ophthalmologists quaintly call presbyopia, or elder eye. I acquired my first pair of bifocals and started wearing them constantly, from the time I opened my eyes in the morning, until I retired for the night, with breaks taken out for showers, naps, and putting the hair around my face in curlers.  

One day I was idly clicking through Amazon when it hit me.  I started looking for Scrabble games, then just the letter tiles by themselves.  .I could get a set with the last few dollars of the gift card my daughter had sent me as a combined Xmas and birthday gift.  To make a long story short, I ordered a set of 100, and 2 of those tile holders. When they arrived, I took a handful of letters out of the bag, and arranged them facedown on the holder.  Abdioueat. Looks Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Or maybe Native American. But sprinkle a couple apostrophes in there, and you get , Abdi’ou’eat Starts to look pretty alien doesn’t it, and if you are an ethnographer or a Kulturologist, you discover that this is the name of the chief of a hilltop village/tribe.  Never mind how you would pronounce it, unless you are reading it aloud. Now, I suppose you could cheat and change the letters around, breaking up that string of vowels with the few consonants provided. It starts to look more like this:. Baouteidai .Use your faithful apostrophes, and it starts to look more like this: Bao’ute’idai .  The ‘can stand for letters or sounds not present in our English/Roman alphabet, much like the clicks and pops in the X’hosa language of Africa. Don’t consider yourself limited to just apostrophes. The `or ~ can be used to represent other sounds not present in our alphabet. Ba’ou`teid~ai starts to look pretty exotic, doesn’t it? Pronounce it how you Will, you’re the author, after all. 

With these tools, you can come up with . people’s names, place names, and even your own alien language.  It’ll probably never compete with Klingon, but your only limit is your own imagination, and isn’t that what you’re using to write your own novel/novella/story anyway? I’ll be using this system while plugging any holes in Takuhi’s Daydream as I edit and revise it, and during April as I complete my intergalactic novel during Camp NaNoWriMo.  Patricia says she’s going to release each installment of the Takuhi trilogy one at a time, once I complete Takuhi’s Daydream, so be looking for those to come out on your favorite platform.