Conlangers Join Friday Fictioneers!

My name is Danny Bowman, and I usually live over at glossarch.wordpress.com but Madison’s having me write a post on her site describing an experiment we’re doing with Friday Fictioneers.   Yesterday I realized I knew a group of people who would probably enjoy it a lot-the members of the CONLANG (Constructed Languages) mailing group.

What is a constructed language, you ask? It is simply a language consciously designed by individual people as opposed to evolving naturally. Some well known examples include Tolkien’s languages, Klingon, and more recently, Na’vi and Dothraki. Other examples include Esperanto, Lojban, and Interlingua.

However, there are thousands of lesser known constructed languages. Some are built to test philosophical principles, some are developed as facilitators of world communication, some explore alternate histories, and many are simply meant as a work of art. My own constructed language, Angosey, falls under this last category.

I emailed Madison yesterday and asked if she’d be up for having me post a link to Friday Fictioneers on the CONLANG mailing list as a translation challenge for the members. The idea would be for them to compose a short story in their language(s) and post it on Madison’s site (with an English translation, of course!). Madison agreed that it would be an interesting experiment, and it will be neat to see if some of them end up posting.

So if you see anyone posting under titles with the tagline of CL or CONLANG, you’ll know who they are and what they’re up to!

Photo Prompt for 100-word Flash #FridayFictioneers

A couple of announcements this week. First, those of you who follow me on Facebook might begin to notice a trend…I’m going to start posting the photos there on Tuesday night if I have it picked out already by then. Sometimes that doesn’t happen until Wednesday morning.

Second, one of the new Fictioneers  wants to invite another type of writers to join us on Fridays. They create languages and I don’t know much about this but he will get a guest post up here in a little while (it’s scheduled for 0700) to tell us about it.

If any of them decide to post links in our stream they’ll tag it with “CL” at the end of their post title, so we’ll know it’s not our usual flash. Personally, I’m curious and can’t wait to see what it is they do. So watch this space for another post at 0700.

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Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Put your best efforts on display for 100 words (more or less) and hop on board so we can all see what you’ve written this Friday (come back to my blog and follow the links).

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For those of you who want to pre-load your posts, here’s the link to where my story will be: http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/flash-fiction/barbed-wire-and-bulls/. The page is there, the picture is there, the link is live. But there’s no story yet. I’ll add that Friday morning as usual. But this will allow those of you who have to be out of town, or for whatever reason want to get started early, to link to it so we can all find you more easily.

Why only 100 Words

100-words isn’t a *rule* and some of us write more than that. My goal is to have The Friday Fictioneers use 100-word stories as an exercise in choosing concise phrases and strong verbs. It’s an excellent way to show your stuff to the world without exposing too much. It’s okay if you use more words, but if it’s much more let us know in the comments so we’ll know how to allocate our time if we’re trying to read all the posts.

Put your best efforts on display for 100 words (more or less) and hop on board Friday with links back to your blog so we can all see what you’ve written. If you don’t have a blog of your own you are welcome to post your 100 words in the (Friday) story page. Go to the side-bar calendar and click on the current week’s Friday date. Then follow the link from there to the story page.

If you accidentally post your link here on this page today, you’ll miss out on a lot of the blog hopping because the action will be stemming from links on the story page.

How to become a Fictioneer

1. Write a 100-word story (more or less, and it’s okay if you didn’t use this picture for inspiration)
2. Post your story to your blog on Friday (or just link to it tomorrow if you wrote earlier)
3. If you’re a WordPress user, include “Friday Fictioneers” as one of your tags so you’ll show up on the tag search. 
4. Comment on my story Friday and post a link to your story.
5. Tweet your link and include the tag #FridayFictioneers if you’re on Twitter.
6. Visit and comment on all the other stories that link to my story. If the comment forms allow, leave your link on all your comments, so others can find you and us later on.
7. Check back often because participants post throughout the day.
8. Get psyched up to do this again next week

Keep in mind that sometimes I can’t read or comment until late in the day and throughout the weekend because of the day job on Friday.

You can click the “Flash Fiction” tab at the top to read a little more about Friday Fictioneers.

I hope to see your creativity shining tomorrow!