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Bios and Chara Designs :: kestra mayera :: taki davison :: jon davison :: sainlea cataneo :: talya marei :: shykar adariphina :: jackie dannah :: sam rines :: tenya mayera :: other characters Sidenote: :: the cazeirean language At various points in the story, there were times when the "aliens" were alone and speaking perfect English to one another ... and that just didn't make sense. I thought it only natural that they would speak to each other in their native language, so I inserted a few key words here and there. The language simply grew from there, partly out of boredom, but mostly out of a genuine interest in creating my own language. It didn't matter to me that nobody could understand me, most of the time it seemed nobody understood me anyway. I pursued the creation of Cazeirean as a language from 1994-1998; after that, new words were added only sporadically. I created a writing system along with several of the initial words in which each "character" represented a letter of the English alphabet, with a few additional characters for sounds like "th", "ch", and "sh". That proved to be too complicated, however, and in 1996 I created much simpler characters, derived from the original complex characters. The new system was based on syllables rather than sounds, not unlike Japanese kana. I utilized it in later stories as the Dakesia language; the Dakesia being something of a sister culture to the Cazeireans. |
Cazeireans When I was about 11 years old, I had already been writing for some time -- mostly poetry, but a I'd crafted few prose pieces here and there that my teachers thought showed some promise ... but they were all pretty typical settings; showing kids going to school and interacting with one another. After all, I wrote what I knew, which I thought was pretty sound advice ... but I wanted to write something a bit more expansive, something a bit grander. It wasn't quite the length that allured me, but the desire to write something with real adults in it, not just parents and teachers. In fact, I distinctly remember wanting to write something "where people were called by their last names". And so, during the summer before sixth grade, I decided I was going to write something just like that. The Characters So I called up Word and just started writing. I put together any old combination of letters to name my characters, giving birth to Kastri Mayera, Taki Doliers, their ship the Sareize, and even an alien race to blame everything on, the Cazeireans. Kastri was shortly changed to Katie, as I believed she deserved a more "normal" name. Eventually she became Kestra; something kind of similar and certainly cool enough for her. She's incredibly sarcastic -- more so than an avatar really should be -- but I suppose her biting wit was something I craved for myself. She said all those things I wished I could say; she could actually talk to Jon, the love interest I crafted for her. He was a Brandis-clone, as I was infatuated at the time and was pretty darn obsessed with seaQuest. Taki, Kestra's best friend, sort of disappeared halfway through the story and was replaced by a bubblegum-chewing "brilliant ditz" named Sainlea who Kestra wasn't very fond of to say the least. Also included in the cast were Captain Rines, the relatively insane man in charge of a seaQuest-type "boat"; Thalia Marei, a Deanna Troi rip-off (who Rines eventually fell in love with); Tonia and Desol Mayera, Kestra's parents; and Shykar Adariphina, the evil alien queen who was every cliche of every evil alien queen ever written. (She was really fun to write anyway, being essentially my first evil character.) And in the summer of 2001, eight years after I first started Kestra's story, In the Eyes of Cazeireans, I have decided it's time for an overhaul. Time enough has passed that I can look at the original story objectively, and re-tool it. I plan on actually incorporating a plot this time, for one thing, instead of characters just sort of aimlessly meandering about and occasionally talking to each other. No words have actually been written yet; I'm currently in the process of fleshing out and redesigning my main characters. For example, Taki is going to continue to be a major part of the story; and I'm actually considering changing the gender of one of my major characters ... I'm also figuring out the main character relationships and how they interact with each other. A lot of this is still in my head, but I will be posting more as it starts to coalesce. |