16 Comments

I do think you need to explain why he wasn't upset by being separated from his horse when he was a Heroiini. Especially since he still has the connections, even as an elf.

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I thought you were going to read Contract Marriage!

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Oh, I read that already. Wanted to get an idea of your writing style. Yes, let's try to do something together. And I'm a grandparent too.

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You didn’t make any comments on contract marriage!

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So what do you want to try to do together?

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Oh. You said you had five different cultures, so I assumed five different sets of marriage customs. Do you have it all written, and you were looking for someone to write in your world?

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Okay, so here’s the deal. In contract marriage, I take one planet, libertas, and I have worked out a pretty serious set of customs and laws and everything for Marriage

And then for ephemera, I have a lot of customs, but nothing quite as definitive as I do for libertas because we’re going to spend most of the time there.

And then we’re going to meet a doctor on a ship from another planet, and I have just the littlest bit of information that I have in the story about their marriage customs

And then we later in the book there is a mysterious character from a whole different planet who deals with the mother in her business, and they have some interesting customers that I haven’t worked out, but like I say he’s mysterious, he’s wearing all sorts of clothes and he only wish is to meet with her and will meet with any of the others.

And then there is the trading station and all I have for that as it’s very cosmopolitan. Nobody really fussy about anything.

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So what I thought might be fun is if we worked up basically a Bible of customs for some of the lesser planets, and then wrote a story that sort of intersected with Libertas, but was strongly based in one of the other planets.

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That sounds like fun! What ideas do you already have?

For an example of what I've already come up with, you might want to read the first chapter of "Havoc before Mustang. It's a Fullmetal Alchemist fanfic, but I came up with 2Lt Jean Havoc's "country marriage" customs, which I think you can still follow without knowing the manga, and which you might find interesting. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13950524/1/Havoc-before-Mustang

This is in addition to the Japanese custom of "Signing the Registry", which is actually in the manga for some other characters.

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Have you read the book fledgeling by Lee and Miller? It is free on the web. I stole some of the ideas for this book from it.

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By the way, I use voice dictation, so if anything comes out. Weird, that’s probably why.

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So I think it’s fun to have a lot of interest in customs, but I definitely want to concentrate on the purpose of the book which is to really thrash out a lot of the problems that cultures have with the ideas of sex and marriage. So as you read through contract marriage, which I can send you more. If you wish, you will see that I am getting at a whole lot of the issues that we are dealing with today. For example, I deal with some of the foundations of hook up culture, and me to issues, and divorce issues.

So when we make a new culture, I want to make sure that it really is foundation different both from what we would expect here in the United States, and from what we do on one of the planets that we already have.

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Yes, please send me more.

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How?

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You can email me. I'm a suscriber to your stack.

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Test email sent.

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