Cylinderplan

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When I was 13 my elder brother showed my the first few chapters of a fantasy novel he was writing, and I asked myself, if he can write, why can't I? Not long afterwards I set pen to paper on a Friday night and had the third draft of an opening chapter by the end of the weekend. Initially the sheer joy of the writing, and of finding that characters take on a life of their own, exceeded even my self-doubt, and I decided that I wanted to be a writer.

By this time I was a great fan of Tolkien, and, like many aspiring writers, was rather too influenced by him as a model. But the truth is that the depth of world-building—and, above all, the languages—had touched me in a way no other work had. This was of much greater interest to me to any mere story, and so I developed my book in a similar vein.

In retrospect, the book itself was doomed from the start: a huge multithreaded "epic" with no real sense of direction. I became increasingly dissatisfied by every aspect of my writing—a process accelerated by my already clinical depression—and the whole project, and eventually my ability to write anything, ground to a despairing halt. Though I carefully preserved all this work, it has taken me 30 years even to be able to look at it again.

Cylinderplan is what, for the sake of this site, I am calling the world of that book, if just in tribute to 5-year-old me who saw the need for a world-naming morpheme. The world was an infinitely long cylinder, surrounded by the cylinder of the firmament - in my youthful naïveté I thought it best to make an infinitely large world, just to make sure I had room to put everything! Suns, moons and stars, all made of light-stuff (which together with firmament-stuff fell upwards, or outwards, if you prefer) moved over the firmament, circling the world beneath, populated with various fantasy races fighting typical good-vs-evil wars.

My hope eventually is to place some or all the material of the various languages here—at least if I get any indication that the faltering steps of a young conlanger are of interest to anyone but myself—but my more mature languages will take precedence.

Notes exist on Elvish (in several dialects), a Dwarfish language, Old Wingmannish, the languages of the Centaurs and Unicorns, and the Human languages Telikontestan, Pimbalue Qûn and Mpaaladim. There are probably notes on other languages too, less clearly labelled!