Zaumg started off as a joke on Twitter while I was flailing about trying to come up with a proper title for The Sanctum of the Sphere.  I wanted something that sounded like a Star Wars/Indiana Jones/ adventure serial type of subtitle, and specifically was trying to think of something alliterative.  When I referenced The Temple of Doom as a template I was working from, some jackass (and I say that with love) suggested The Ziggurat of ZOMG.  I rejected it, for obvious reasons.

There is a story in the forthcoming Tales from the Benevolence Archives called The Ziggurat of Zaumg.

It is the Internet’s fault.

My theme for this year’s A to Z challenge is my series The Benevolence Archives.  You can learn more about the series by going to the Amazon page for Volume 1 here or add it to a Goodreads shelf here.  

Previously: “Yank”.

 

“Yank” is one of the short stories in The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1.  And this entry is kind of hard to write, because it’s a short story, right, and so if I tell you much about it I’ll be ruining it, but I still need an entry for Y anyway.

Hm.  Yank is the first story with dwarves in it, the first mention of the Malevolence, and also the story about what happens when you think you’re in tunnelspace and then suddenly you’re not.  It’s kind of important to Sanctum, come to think of it.  Read it!  You’ll like it.

My theme for this year’s A to Z challenge is my series The Benevolence Archives.  You can learn more about the series by going to the Amazon page for Volume 1 here or add it to a Goodreads shelf here.  

Previously: Elvish pronouns.

 

Because elves typically do not have a gender, elvish pronouns do not match the binary “he/she” construction common to English.  Elvish pronouns begin with X, meaning that I am the only participant in the A to Z Challenge who had an easier time finding a word for X than he did for J.

Elvish pronouns are as follows:

He/she:  Xe
His/hers: Xir

The genderless “they” and “their” can be used for multiple elves.

My theme for this year’s A to Z challenge is my series The Benevolence Archives.  You can learn more about the series by going to the Amazon page for Volume 1 here or add it to a Goodreads shelf here.  

Previously: Whisper-on-the-Waters.

 

Whisper-on-the-Waters is a dwarf and a high-ranking member of the Noble Opposition.  She appears in The Sanctum of the Sphere.

Dwarves are an intensely matriarchal culture, and women by law hold all positions of status and power.  Female dwarves typically have “story” names (two other dwarves from BA stories are Smashes-the-Stars and Shocks-the-Mountains, for example.)  Male dwarves are practically slaves unless they happen to be the children of very highborn dwarven women; most male dwarves have a three-letter name, not always especially pronounceable.  Brazel and Grond have been called upon to “liberate” male dwarves from their homes on more than one occasion, as the few allowed access to education often try to escape dwarven society to make their way in freedom somewhere else.

My theme for this year’s A to Z challenge is my series The Benevolence Archives.  You can learn more about the series by going to the Amazon page for Volume 1 here or add it to a Goodreads shelf here.  

Previously: Brian K. Vaughan.

 

Brian K. Vaughan is a comic book and television writer best known for several seasons of Lost and the comic series Y: The Last Man and Saga.  Vaughan is also indirectly responsible for the existence of the Benevolence Archives series, and if I ever meet him I’m giving him a copy of the books whether he wants them or not.

I read an interview with Vaughan just after George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, just before the Saga series launched, where he pointed out that instead of getting mad at Lucas for selling what was, after all, his own property, we ought to use Star Wars to inspire us to create our own stories.  This got me thinking about what would have happened if Han and Chewie hadn’t come back at the Battle of Endor, and soon after Brazel and Grond were real.  The earlier Benevolence Archives stories are very clearly (and deliberately) Star Wars homages, and while the series is moving away from that as it becomes more mature the influence is still clear.  If reading that interview hadn’t led me down that path of thought, the series might not exist.

You should be reading Saga, by the way.  It’s excellent.

My theme for this year’s A to Z challenge is my series The Benevolence Archives.  You can learn more about the series by going to the Amazon page for Volume 1 here or add it to a Goodreads shelf here.  

Previously: Untkaar.

 

Untkaar is a planet, the setting for the short story “The Debut,” which will appear in Tales from the Benevolence Archives.  This is another one of those entries where I’m cheating, because I didn’t have a U, and I totally pulled the same move I did with F and named something so that I’d have a letter in this Challenge.

Telling you stuff about Untkaar is all spoilery, so I’m not gonna.  It’s totally a planet, though, with planet stuff on it.

My theme for this year’s A to Z challenge is my series The Benevolence Archives.  You can learn more about the series by going to the Amazon page for Volume 1 here or add it to a Goodreads shelf here.  

Previously: Overmorrow.

 

It’s the last Sunday of April!  Have the final special Sunday supplement of the A to Z Challenge.

Overmorrow is an elf, the parent of Asper.  Xe appears in The Sanctum of the Sphere.  Overmorrow is a general of the Noble Opposition, a user of magic, and controls the spaceport called Roashan.  Overmorrow sets the events of The Sanctum of the Sphere in motion when xe hires Brazel and Grond to steal something from … well, we’ll call it a train.  It’s close enough.

In keeping with Elvish cultural tradition, Overmorrow’s name is a noun; the word means “the day after tomorrow.”  Did you know there was a word for that?  I didn’t, until I found it, and then I had to use it as a name.

My theme for this year’s A to Z challenge is my series The Benevolence Archives.  You can learn more about the series by going to the Amazon page for Volume 1 here or add it to a Goodreads shelf here.  

Previously: Tunnelspace.

 

Tunnelspace is The Benevolence Archives’ way of getting around the fact that space is mind-bogglingly big.  The exact technical process behind entering tunnelspace and how it actually works has been (deliberately) left obscure, as has how fast one actually travels while in tunnelspace; it does not necessarily match up to lightspeed.  Ships can enter tunnelspace anywhere outside of a large gravity well, and it is possible for a Benevolence vehicle called a “blockship” to pull a ship out of tunnelspace involuntarily, a process that is excessively painful for any biological organisms that may be on the ship when it happens.

My theme for this year’s A to Z challenge is my series The Benevolence Archives.  You can learn more about the series by going to the Amazon page for Volume 1 here or add it to a Goodreads shelf here.  

Previously: Sirrys ban Irtuus bon Alaamac.