Hello folks! It’s about time I made another newsletter, isn’t it?

While I haven’t been writing newsletters, I have been making updates. Lots of them.

In January, I attempted to switch servers, because some of the pages were mysteriously disappearing. The server change didn’t help anything, so I went back to Awardspace and asked the support staff. As it turns out, the pages that linked to Amazon were the ones vanishing; because the bot in charge of searching for spammers thought that all Amazon links are evil. So, I found a different way to cite books, and it’s all better now. Funny thing: it also removed the Telerin Wordlist because the word “porn” (from Teleporno, Celeborn’s Telerin name) appeared in it.

I made a wordlists page! It took about a week of staring at thousands of lines of code, but I finished it, and posted it. The Wordlists were put together by Gildor. They are of Nandorin, Doriathrin, Mithren, Telerin, Khuzdul, Adûnaic, Westron, and various other human languages.
http://www.realelvish.net/wordlists.php

I’ve extensively updated the Sindarin pronunciation page and the pronunciation lessons. It now has a recording of Tolkien speaking Sindarin!
http://www.realelvish.net/sindarin_pronunciation.php

The namelists have had a makeover. I split them into sections to make them easier to download, and Phil put together some fancy Javascript coding to make the gender specific namelists much easier to browse. I’ve finally put the “Our Names translated into Sindarin” section up, and am continually adding to it. I’m also in the process of adding several hundred Sindarin names to the list, which will be available pretty soon, depending on how the start of classes treats me.
http://www.realelvish.net/namelists.php

The Sindarin and Quenya phrasebooks also received a makeover. They’ve been reorganized into more situational collections of phrases.
http://www.realelvish.net/phrasebooks.php

The essays page has been reorganized; taking a bunch of links from the Trustworthy Websites page. I also wrote a new essay: Vampires and Werewolves in Middle-earth.
http://www.realelvish.net/essays.php
http://www.realelvish.net/vampandwerewolf.php

Other than that, I started putting ads on the website, hoping that they would make the website pay for itself. Vote in the poll about how to fund the website here:
http://realelvish.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=guestbook&action=display&thread=97

Galu a gell!

dreamingfifi

According to my dad, he's groggy and incoherent at the moment, but the surgeon tells us that the surgery was easy and successful!

This past spring/summer has been like a TV drama. There's the overall plot, the episode-by-episode plot, and the surprise season finale.

I've been fighting depression again. I suffered from it in 2006 when my grandfather died, failed all of the classes that year, and I've been fighting to recover my mental balance and my GPA ever since. But, I got better. I got married, and I spent two and a quarter years on top of the world. Then, my two best face-to-face friends left for Japan. One of them, Julia, is the main person who helped me get out of depression last time. I was locking myself in my dormroom, unable to get up for anything but going to the bathroom, and she forced me to get out at least once a week to teach Sindarin in a classroom. It changed my life. I found so much joy in it that I ended up changing my major to Teaching English as a Second Language. She saved my life. We'd spend hours talking on every subject; we'd meet every day for lunch.

Suddenly, I was alone. I don't have a good understanding of what's happening in my emotional part of my personality. I've never been very much in touch with it. I have to work hard to be tactful because I often don't realize how harsh I am. I didn't realize I was depressed until I couldn't get out of bed in the morning.

My symptoms of depression are quite boring. I'd always thought there'd be dramatic cutting or weeping to sad music, but no, my depression is boring. I just can't get the will to do things I need to do. How lame is that? I'd lay in bed, not sleeping, but not really awake, all day long. That, and I hoard things, which is just messy.

So, we've got me, all depressed and on meds. I've been getting better these past few months. I can get things done; I'm answering e-mails; I'm visiting my relatives; I'm sewing again; I'm eating again; things are lookin up. My mom came to visit; we hung out, and we went swimming in Harper Lake, where she delivered to me some news that she'd just received by phone moments before I picked her up to go swimming.

My youngest brother, Ivan, had gotten diagnosed with cancer that morning.

You read that right. Cancer.

Apparently, the surgeon who took out Ivan's wisdom teeth spotted a funny lump over one of the wisdom teeth, so he biopsied it and sent it to a lab. It came back as a small low-grade mucoepidermoid carcinoma, an oral cancer. Apparently it's very slow moving for cancer, and Ivan won't have to do any chemotherapy or radiation. The most dangerous part of the whole thing is that the surgeon might have to cut out part of a nerve that controls half of his tongue.

We don't know what caused it, other than random chance. The most hardcore thing Ivan chews is cinnamon flavored bubblegum.

Ivan is chipper and optimistic about the whole thing. He's romantically thinking that if he and his current girlfriend stay together through this, they might make it long enough to get married some day. The biggest downer for him is that he can't bring his girlfriend to Seattle, where the surgery is taking place.

So, we came home to Belgrade, Montana to give Ivan hugs and hear what the surgeon recommended. We had dinner with Trevor's folks, which was cheery and lighthearted, until his 18 year old sister dropped a bomb on us. She announced that she was pregnant with a guy she'd dated for two months. She's scared and confused. I don't know what she's going to do. I don't know what to feel about it.

Now, we're just waiting for an evil twin sporting a goatee to show up; or someone to disappear and return with amnesia.

*sheepishly wanders back to Deleterius*

Howdy all ye GAFFers adding me to their friends. The snark must go on.

See! See! I didn't rant about the ridiculousness of deleting the entire board just to... ahem. No bitterness here. None at all.

At least I have an excuse to use my LJ again.

Because naming in my beloved Tolkien fandom is a very touchy and careful process, there are a lot of mistakes made by youth new to our ranks. Sometimes the author is serious enough to get a proper translation, and often they come to my website. Every once and a while, I'll get one of those crazies, but recently, I got one that tops them all.
( Her post on my forum... )</div>
Now, I explained to her that many of these names are impossible or need extensive expansion on their exact meanings before I could any translating. After a month of silence, I got an e-mail from her.


So, let's do a little math... 2(10+2+3+1)=32 names. It's a lot, but I can handle it; even if the names sound like something out of My Little Pony. However, I was a little suspicious. That was a lot of names, and she was being very vague about them, as if she hadn't made characters for them yet. I make it a policy not to write name databases for websites other than my own. I asked her about it, and she responded:


Of course I asked, but still no response. I pointed out that using Tolkien's languages wasn't the best idea, as it would clash with the cultures of the people's she was naming, so I ended up making up a new fantasy language.

32+16=48 names.

It is really cool and I had fun with its phonology. I was distracted by the sparkly morphology and wasn't pressing the "what exactly are you going to use these names for" issue. Then she asked me to do more translations, and I unsuspectingly agreed.
( Her Reply )
It doesn't look that bad like that, but when you do the math... she's asking for a minimum of 330 names! I should charge her money. She's probably trying to build a name database for her D&D RP group.

48+330=378 names.

And the names are just so... stupid! It's like a sadistic bastard is strangling me by force feeding me handfuls of cold marshmallows sprinkled with stardust. This is the first translation request I've had to completely reject. I never thought I'd see that day.

Your tired, overworked, and a little depressed neighborhood linguist,

dreamingfifi

Happy New Year Everyone!

Boy, have I got good news for you. The textbook is back up and running! I’m accepting homework again!

Choose between the two flavors:
Plain- http://www.realelvish.net/your-sindarin-textbook/
BETA- http://www.realelvish.net/textbookbeta/

Let me know if you’d like to continue taking lessons or not.

See you around!

dreamingfifi

Great news for my friend, Ghassan! He's a musician from Baghdad and has been trying to make it into the 'States. We've been hearing about this character claiming to be from a radio show called Studio 360 interviewing him for a few months. We were really suspicious especially since the guy was talking a lot about Baghdad. For a while, we even thought he could be some sort of spy. It turns out, he wasn't! He put Ghassan's story on National Public Radio!

The Bluesman of Baghdad

We've been working for years trying to get him out of Baghdad and into the United States. We got him enrolled at the University of Montana, but his visa application was still denied, and he got stuck in Syria. I'm hoping that this radio broadcast will help him somehow!

Everyone, keep him in your thoughts and prayers!

Wow, it’s been a long time since you heard from me, hasn’t it? Well, have I news for you!

I GOT MARRIED! Check out the wedding website: http://www.freewebs.com/jallingswedding/

I finally got some work done on the website! I’ve been updating the beta-readers section all along, and I did some small tweaking: I made a mock-up website for the pages that my server refuses to host and are being held at Tripod. At least they don’t look as bad now. I’ve changed the pronunciation sections from the stuff in my collegiate dictionary to IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). I added a few websites to the Trustworthy Websites list and deleted a few from the Untrustworthy Websites list.

The big updates are in the name lists. I’ve finally gotten Ederchil’s Adûnaic namelist up! 95 names in total. I also deleted the Rohirric namelist and replaced it with the Behind the Name Old English namelist. In a few days, there will be several hundred new names in the Already Existing Character Names section.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Time section! Gildor provided a bunch of timelines for you.

Edited Pages:
http://www.realelvish.net/names.php
http://www.realelvish.net/namelists.php
http://www.realelvish.net/adunaic_names.php
http://www.realelvish.net/essays.php
http://www.realelvish.net/trustworthywebsites.php
http://www.realelvish.net/untrustworthywebsites.php
http://www.realelvish.net/sindarin_pronunciation.php
http://www.realelvish.net/time.php
http://www.realelvish.net/timeline.php

Garo ‘lass a lalaith!

dreamingfifi

Getting set up in our own apartment has been a fun adventure. Fir the first couple days, we were sleeping on an air mattress that was flat by the time we woke up, and the only chair in the house was the toilet. All we had to eat was the "Chow Mein" my nonna cleaned out of her pantry, which is basically expensive ramen noodles. Yetch! We had an electric stove, but nut no pots or pans... so we were using nothing but a hotshot. At least now we can whine about it to our future children.

Then, all of the donated furniture arrived, and suddenly I could cook! First meal: Pancakes. They were heavenly, but maybe that's because they were the first.

The best part of it all? I get to wake up to this.

Other than that, I've been drawing like a maniac. Tons of portraits:
Jethro Atop a Cliff
Ivan, Five Years in the Future
Jethro in the Car
Ivan in the Car
Jethro Reading
Random Transsexual
Random Anime-style Portrait
Rianna, Pres. of the Anime Club

And some Fanart:
Ghost in the Shell
Fullmetal Alchemist
Blood+

And finally, the best out of all of them! Another picture from The Coffin's Occupant!
Bagheera

Now, I've gotta go home to mooch off my parents a little. Sayounara!

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Please don't kill me for my disappearance! I have good updates to offer to you!

Firstly, the Timelines are up! Gildor is the one who donated them, I just rewrote the coding.

The Beta Reader List has been updated (six months worth of updates!) and I've closed the lessons. I'm in the midst of getting married, settling into my new apartment with my fiancé, finding a job, and going to college, so I don't have the time to correct homework. Sorry! I will leave the lessons up with answer keys, so you can continue to study.

I've given translation duty at the forums over to Tyrhael and Ederchil.

Lastly; even though I won't be actively working on the forums or teaching, I will still be doing updates to the website! I am accepting donations of material that you think would be beneficial to the website, if you are the author of that material. Don't copy someone else's essays and send them to me, please! Speaking of essays, I realize that the essays and naming traditions pages are pretending that they don't exist. They're temporary loaded onto Tripod for now.

Garo ‘lass a lalaith!

dreamingfifi

The server for my website is starting to piss me off. Well, not starting to, it officially does. No matter what I do, I can't get the server to display the Naming Traditions or the Essays. It behaves as if the files don't exist! So, I have to set up camp somewhere else and link back to them. The thing is, I don't have any other ad-free places to post my website on besides the one I'm on now. Looks like it's back to tripod with my tail between my legs.

I still have a mountain of updates to do on the website too... *groan*. The textbook is almost ready for reposting, (I really ought to take it offline while I don't have the time to correct student's homework) and I have new material to put up in the Time section. I have several essays to finish too... That, and tomorrow I'm moving into my first apartment with my fiancé. I have no time. I really shouldn't be posting here right now.

I've officially severed myself from the fanfiction writing community. I just don't have the time to write fanfiction anymore. If I write, it has to be papers for class or something that'll earn me money. *pats The Coffin's Occupant* However, I'm going to keep my website online for everyone. I won't be able to write as much of the content, but I'll accept essays and such and post them. I'll keep the beta readers section going too.

Anyways. I have to finish packing.

じゃあ!

I've actually been back for a while, but I've been far too busy to keep up all of my internet stuff. Seriously, I don't have time to do everything. At the moment, I'm just kinda letting my linguist friends care for the visitors to my website, I've dropped all of my fanifiction communities (yeah, I went into withdrawals for a little while there) I post art on DeviantART every once and a while. All of those classes means that I can sketch while I'm taking notes, so a lot more artwork is on it's way. Lately, the pictures I draw are scenes from Oroboros. L O O K Y! It's heavily inspired by some of my friend's art styles. One is very anime, the other is is very comic-book like. I've got a sort of middle ground going on here.

Anyways. The Coffin's Occupant. Not having a computer for a month really slowed my progress. I'm getting back on it slowly but surely.

I love learning Japanese. After French, it feels so easy! Everyone says that it is so hard to learn, but I like its structure. I think French was harder for me because it was so close to English. I surprised myself by how quickly I learned the new alphabets. Kanji is hard, but not near so bad as everyone makes it out to be. It's like learning what all of the little roadsigns mean. This language is very tidy. I like tidy languages. English upsets my nit-picky nature. Too many exceptions! I want a language that follows rules, gosh darn it all!

I also love my linguistics class. For all that stuff with Sindarin, I taught myself linguistics. I'm finally learning all of the proper terms for concepts that I have been using at an unconscious level, which means that I developed a good linguistic competence for a language I could only imagine hearing... which is a really weird idea, now that I think of it.

Now, I know how to say "I love Trevor!" in one more language.
Toreboru-san ga daisuki desu!
ﾄレボルさん が だいすき です｡

Life is busy as all heck, but I'm loving it.

New scenes from The coffin's Occupant as I finish them.

I just received my sparkly new computer. Well, it's not new; it's my dad's old work laptop. I was in the midst of installing Windows XP when the CD drive broke down. I had just finished reformatting the harddrive too! WAAAAH!

What makes all of this worse is that I'm taking 18 credits this semester and most of my classes require me to download my homework off the internet. Et tu, drama?

/wankery

So that's why I haven't been answering my e-mails or attending to forums or other things like that. I have no working computer unless I beg off someone else.

Believe it or not, I've been trying to get through writer's block on The Coffin's Occupant. All I've been able to do lately is change the story with massive background story changes. So, I decided on a radical movement. I'll write the story backwards, end to beginning. The end is what changes the most often anyways. I've written at least a dozen climatic scenes. Most of them are pretty good, but it means that the rest of the story would have to change significantly. At least, this way, I'll be building the story around its result.

Of course this has several problems. The characterization might end up not being as fluid or strong moving this way. I'll have to comb through it carefully, and make notes on what all I need to accomplish in the earlier scenes. Luckily, I don't have to do much of the mystery this time. We won't know the whole backstory by the end. Marianne's dreams will be significantly shortened. She'll see brief glimpses of him from other times and lives that she's met him.

Without further ado: ( the climatic scene of The Coffin's Occupant, which is still very rough and needs smoothing out, but the concepts are the important part. )

Hmmm... better not let my mom read this one. She hates anything violent. I'm not set on how Marianne leaves the story, except that she doesn't stop them from burying Alex. This end seems almost too passive for her, but how do I end it otherwise? I'll let that sit while I work on the scenes working up to it for now.

Well, I decided to write some backstory. This'll never appear in the final version of The Coffin's Occupant, but it's nice to have it written out anyways.

It takes place in some little mountain village, somewhere exotic and extremely isolated. The dates aren't set yet either, because I'm not settled about the timeline quite yet. Anyways, for this, the setting isn't as important as what happens emotionally. I might end up made this a short story, however. It'd be cool, don't you think?

( Excerpts from the journal of Charles Branbury )

Waddiya think?

Well, today we meet some people that my dad is friends with online, and we go camping in Yellowstone with them. This is another record-breaking forest fire season, so I'm a little nervous.

Good news though: once my dad is done fussing over his old laptop, I get it! It's from 2000, unlike what I'm using now, which is from 1998. It's much faster and has lots more memory.

Gah, gotta go pack my sleeping bag. Be back in a five days! (Then I have to pack for college, which I leave for on the 25th. Where did summer go?)

Well, I've been at college. I just finished an intense immersion French course, and I'm happy to announce: Je ne dois pas étudier maintenant le français! I'm moving onto Japanese.

I've already figured out my name: アルビニ フィオナ or 白白美. In Rōmaji: Arubini Fuiona or Shiro Shiromi. My name means White of the Whites. Fiona comes from an old Celtic man's name, "Fionn". When the Latin-speaking conquerers took over, they thought it made a good woman's name and added the feminine A at the end. That's why I added "-mi" for good measure. Albini is easy to figure out. Albini-Albino... duh. The Japanese word for "White" is "Shiro", et voilà: Shiro Shiromi. Interesting fact: My grandfather, Frank Bessac, speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently and studied it in China right before the communist take over. His adventurous escape from China is one that surely a movie will be made of someday. There's already been a book or two written about it. To set the record straight: he wasn't in the CIA or OSS. He was just a translator that caught up in the fray of a collapsing country. Surprisingly enough, he was given a Chinese name, which was also "白" (but pronounced "bai" if memory serves me correctly. It also means "white"). It's an interesting coincidence, don't you think? Kanji are cool!

I just realized something. Japanese will be my fourth serious human language. Go me!

I've been rewriting The Coffin's Occupant again. Yes, again. I promise that this version will blow you away. I'm changing the POV from 3rd person omnipotent to 3rd person limited: Marianne's POV. I'm also expanding the story significantly. Things that were glossed over in the beginning before will be gone into detail, and the discoveries that lead to the end will be staggered. There's a completely new end to the story now, and it brings back Marcus Branbury! It also gives Marianne and Deva-Bagira more active roles, and takes away the Deus Ex Machina problem that the story has been fighting with. It also goes into more of how Devika locked the God of War into Hanatiza.

What do you think of a series from The Coffin's Occupant? He's lived through a lot of history, five millenniums of it, to be exact. I think I'd call it "Oroboros", and it would work backwards from The Coffin's Occupant. Next would be "Death of Cesar" or something like that. Alex would watch the collapse of Rome, and somehow meet Devika's spirit again. His name at the time: Pardus. Then we would travel even farther back in time, and witness Hanatiza in the depths of despair, traveling around China in its Golden Age, trying to find a way to die, then giving up and deciding to try his hand at learning as many trades as he can. It would be called something like "The Secret of Silk", and Hanatiza's name would be "苗" or "Miao". At some point, he'd meet Devika again. Then even farther back. Hanatiza is fighting for control over his body with Deva-Bagira during a series of bloody wars in India that would become the mythos of Ramayana. He's called Kumbhakarna, a Rakshasa. This one would be called "The Defeat of Ravana". And finally, how Hanatiza managed to get a God of war trapped inside him: "The Plague's Messenger".

Waddiya think?

Isn't it beautiful?

He proposed to me! I have a ring! I'll post a picture of it when I get my hands on a camera.

"I love Trevor!" in every language I can think of at the moment:
J'aime Trevor!
Se amo Trevor!
Melon Drevor!
Melanyë Trevor!