Zach Watson
Author by choice, developer by career, historian by upbringing. Avid player of Warmachine, A Song of Ice and Fire, and Battletech, at least when I'm not lazing on my couch with video games, my wife, and a lazy corgi.
zachwatsonauthor.com
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 13: Laws on speech vary wildly depending on which nation you're in. Technically most have some variation of 'free speech', though with various limitations on speaking against the leadership usually find their way into the law books. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 13: The Ralson family views Maeve as a villain, but a dangerous one who they have to respect and deal with carefully. The Calliop family are... far less respectful in their views, and are convinced she's just a front for others. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- The night’s #painting progress.
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 12: Quirks... hmm. Well, the Calliop family have held a grudge against Elves for the last three centuries over the fact that the invaders forced their ancestors to work as common laborers alongside the plebs for a few years? #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 11: Monsters you say? Well the first two books have quite a few. Mostly of the undead variety. We've got a Dwarven Lich, an undead Centaur creation, an undead Giant used as an enormous killing machine... all good fun. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 9: I'm not really watching any new shows at the moment, pretty much just waiting on all of Andor to be out so that I can binge-watch it. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 11: Newspapers are a bit in the past, but online versions definitely exist. One of them springs up LK5, when an army is cut off, with a few enterprising souls trying to keep morale up with a mix of news, satire, and doujin style stories. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 10: Hand gestures are pretty common when even helmet-to-helmet comms are considered risky or are being jammed in military actions. The Thondians often use body language to accent their spoken words as well. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- Getting that #Corgi side-eye on her walk…
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 9: The DataNet is the interstellar version of the internet, strung together by FTL buoys that relay signals along a chain. This makes it possible to cut (if you can find them), and information isn't always up to date between star systems #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
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- Glad you enjoyed it. Honestly I've liked the Trik on the table more than I usually do on paper, though it's had a couple of games where it's just folded over and died. Still, think it's going to be a constant in Shyryss lists moving forward, though I'm less certain on the others.
- One of those work days that just makes you hate everything, draining away all hope, all energy, and any thoughts that you might do anything productive at night.
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 8: Most spies work by dead drops, either in the real word or in innocuous places on the DataNet. Each military has its own way of controlling data, but merc bands like the protagonists are usually pretty limited in what they can do. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 8: The Ralson family are extremely wealthy, influential in their Duchy's politics, and have a large number of sorcerers both within the family and as hired help. They're also arrogant, lost their heir, and hate not being in charge #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 7: Root words? "Trah" is the Caranat term for 'River', and tends to show up a lot. As a language heavily affected by their religion, "Ashahn", Aspect of Guidance & Storms, tends to see her name often used as a foundation as well. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 7: Maeve and Jena have an ongoing debate about werewolves. Maeve is convinced they're a myth, Jena is convinced she accidentally spent several weeks in a camp full of them when she was younger. Jury is still out on who is right. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- Nice walk along the lake with beautiful weather in #Wisconsin.
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 6: Here's an example of Caranat being written, in this case the name of one of the characters: Trenah'kolkris. While her formal name is literal, the former shows some of the differing alphabet: T-R-N-AH, with the unwritten 'E' as well. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 6: Maeve has a lot of fears. She's afraid she'll never get home. She's afraid of Longing, her demonic ally. She's afraid she'll be outed as an Elven mage. Afraid of the other demons, the other gods, afraid for her fellow elves... #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- Good to see the Brewers finally getting a Brewer-like win.
- I'm glad the Brewers managed to avoid being swept, but damn, I was really hoping for a steadier start to this season. This up and down, all over the place stuff is killing me. At least Winnipeg won last night, so my pick to win the Cup didn't get bounced in the first round for once.
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 5: Villain Fun Fact The Ralson family run the Merchant's Guild in Bayview with an iron fist, only barely bothering with a velvet glove when they're in foreign duchies to hide their ruthless approach to business and politics. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 5: Word snippet: Haesh, a Kelthi word meaning 'Valley', though it has other contexts that they don't talk about with aliens... even the ones who end up being called that. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 4: Nightmares? One advantage of contracting with a fallen deity is that you can have them control your dreams. While Longing tends to fill them with... well, longing, she at least makes sure there aren't any true nightmares. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- Tali has a bit of a crazy eye going tonight. #Corgi
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 4: Grammar Rules. Carant runs adjectives by just jamming words together, and tends to be a very literal language. Trahcon - Trah: River, Con: People This can lead to very long words, and some dialects take shortcuts as a result. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- End of the week #Khador model review for #Warmachine: The Jackal. I really wish this guy was better. He's got an art-bait model that looks awesome, and a few decent rules, but he's just so much less than the sum of his parts. #TabletopMiniatures #Steamforged #PrivateerPress #Painting
- Good painting progress this weekend. Razor, the Jackal, and an Avalanche all done. #Warmachine #Painting #TableTopMiniatures #Steamforged #PrivateerPress
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 3: Invented word or phrase? Harath'krem and Reyja'krem are likely the two most common. Kho'voik turns, the first translate literally as 'loyal warrior', the second as 'exiled warrior' 'Sworn Knight' and 'Ronin' are a bit more accurate. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 3: Fear During a discussion in the Godsplane, Maeve pushes a bit too hard, and sees the true form of the fallen goddess that she's been working with now and again through the Garrison books. It doesn't go well for her. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- An old #Corgi telling me she’s tired of supervising my work day. That it is past due for snacks and naptime.
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 2: Pronouns? Honestly I didn't really tinker with those much in this series. Think the closest I get is that alien gender roles can be very off compared to Human ones, or to other alien ones, which can leads to both jokes and arguments. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
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View full threadTrahcon women are the 'heavies'. Taller and stronger than the males, and far more numerous, most Trahcon societies condition them to solve problems directly, with force when needed, in order to get them handled as rapidly as possible. They're taught to be blunt, quick to react, and quick to anger.
- Trahcon men are the rogues. They're expected to approach issues indirectly, to prove their cleverness by coming up with sleek and elegant plans to bypass or contain problems. They adore rube goldberg machines, and are expect to very braggadocios about tricks and gambits that they've pulled off.
- Example; Trahcon don't have any concept of a 'housewife' or 'househusband', they don't do the 'nurturing' thing. Their children are raised communally, with very little care regarding whose kids are whose, and explicitly caring only about your own offspring is viewed as a psychological condition.
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 2: Authors that inspired me? As a fantasy geek, Tolkien has to be in there, and I was a huge Dragonlance fan, so Weis and Hickman as well. Love Butcher's Alera series, and Allston's Wraith Squadron books are still favorites. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- Because sometimes you just need writing music that's both tragic yet hopeful.
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- Entire trilogy’s soundtrack is on my writing playlist. It’s just so good.
- An old #Corgi just can’t help but show off her butt with a partial sploot.
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- Congrats on the book coming out! Looking forward to hearing more of the world building through these, see if it'll be something I'll want to add to my too-long to-read list.
- #MayWorldBuilders Day 1: Let's look at my knight books this month. Over the course of the series, Cieran learns Caranat (the main Trahcon tongue and lingua franca of the known galaxy), Higher & Lower Kho'voik, and the Kelthi's Valley & Daylight Tongues. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #ScienceFiction
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View full threadRandom example of Caranat: Caranat: Shara fi'krlzuv'co Voya Pronounced: Shah-ray fye-krel-zuv-sea-o Voya Literal: Is my-favorite-person Voya Actual: My favorite person is Voya. #ScienceFiction #conlanging #conlang
- I don't actually put them in the books much, mostly because it doesn't write out very well in English, but it's fun to come up with it, and at some point I do want to find a good way to get it into a novel set in the universe.
- Of these, I actually do have a vocabulary set for Caranat along with a decent little selection of words, plus a written alphabet. It's a rather terse verb-first language with 32 letters, not including an unwritten one ('e'), and it runs words together to describe them (to the frustration of many).
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- "Accidentally started writing". I'm going to steal that line to explain the random files I have all over my laptop lol.
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- Non-human protagonists?
- #FantasyIndiesMaytober Day 1: Hey, Zach Watson again, here to talk some more about my Garrison books. My current WIP is the Garrison's Corsair, the third in the series, and as you can guess from the name, my first attempt at a novel set on the high seas! #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- Middle of the week #Khador model review for #Warmachine: Kapitan Kovoskiy. She's in stiff competition with Ekatarina as my overall favorite of the Khadoran Warcasters, but she's definitely the better looking model of the two. #TabletopMiniatures #Steamforged #PrivateerPress #Painting
- #FantasyIndiesApril Day 30: Since 5th grade. That was when I first came up with the ideas that would, over decades, morph into my fleshed out Knight-verse stories. Back then it was awfully drawn comics in notebooks. Bad though it was, it got things started. #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
- #FantasyIndiesApril Day 30: Monthly Wrap Up Thanks and kudos to everyone who liked or interacted this month! I'm really looking forward to getting into my third Garrison book, and hoping that everyone will enjoy reading it as much as I'll enjoy writing it! #IndieAuthor #WriteSky #Isekai #Fantasy
