I am not a linguist, and there is no fully developed language for the world of The Book of Ten Queens. However, a few words have emerged that I think add depth to the text as presented. Most often, I’ll use the English word in the text, for clarity’s sake, but the created words linger under the surface, adding additional meaning and subtlety for those who care to examine them. This post will be updated as the language evolves.

Dox = n. daughter

Imbra = related to word, song

Madar = n. Queen, mother; pl. mada

Ul = v. to be

Ular = n. being, the world

Ulet = n. silence, not being, nothing

Vinkyr = n. others, enemy

Visatue = n. journey, tale

::last updated January 14, 2007::

Out of silence
came Imbra
and the people followed
into Ular.
The mark was set
upon the shore
and the arrow
loosed into the sun
claimed all beneath its arc
for the people
and for Imbra,
First of all Queens.

A long-imagined web project of mine has been The Book of Ten Queens, the first (very brief) chapter of which went up last winter. I never went any further with it because my original presentation concept meant I had to put together a second set of web graphics to go with the text of the second chapter. And since I wasn’t happy with any of my attempts at the graphics, I felt no inclination to work on the text either.

So I don’t have the excuse of graphics and web design to distract me from the writing, I’ve decided to incorporate the project into this journal instead. I’ll let the WordPress tools handle the organization and presentation for the time being, and maybe someday, when there’s enough text to justify it, I’ll spin it off into its own site once again. Meanwhile, Ten Queen posts here should be easily identifiable by the graphic you see in this post.

Inspired by a friend of mine, who has for several months been publishing a brief “Freaky Friday Fiction” in her blog, I’m going to attempt to write a new episode in the book each week. They won’t necessarily be written or posted sequentially, or even in completed episodes, but I’ll put up an index page to keep track of what goes where. Hopefully, this will allow me to start winding my way through the various stories that I have envisioned so far, and discover what other tales are waiting there to be told. Since today is Sunday, I’ll call Sunday my post day, and I’m going to cheat by posting what is already published on the original site. But I’m going to put up the nascent glossary, so the week won’t be wholly devoid of original content.

Enjoy!

I’ve just gotten through importing most of the posts from the Greymatter version of this site — there really wasn’t that much, and I skipped the more personal notes and site update type things. I don’t know if what I did bring over is of much interest to anyone, but I’d like to delete the Greymatter database from the server and I’d hate to just lose everything.

In other site news, a while back I installed the rather impressive (at least as far as my needs are concerned) Stat Counter web tracking software. The sweetest thing about the utility is that there is a WordPress plugin that installs it on every page for you, which makes it that much easier to track visitors throughout your site.

What the tracker tells me is that, once separated from the mind-boggling amount of traffic other parts of dumoski.com recieves (mostly, I think, spam bots and search engines pinging the largely unused family gallery and a non-functioning guestbook page), Artifacts only gets a couple of real hits a week. I thought I’d boost those hits a bit by registering my site with Technorati, but that has turned into a real bust. Whenever I try to “claim my blog” to begin the process, the function times out on me with a message that “we’re too busy right now, try again later.” A message to their help gurus went unanswered, as did my follow up request. I’m not impressed! So not impressed that I don’t think I’ll even add any links to the service from this post! Just call me a rebel.