This is the last in a series of blogs posts concerning questions I often get from fans of The Chronicles of Henry Roach-Dairier. Next month I’ll get back to other types of topics.

When creating a world, there must be a balance needed between “new” things with enough context for readers and “traditional” human ways. Vocabulary used can enhance a created world or make it seem to “present day”. Word use must fit the fantasy being created but not stray so far from “normal” understanding of readers that it turns them off. I tried to have that balance.

The words “I love you” are sometimes so overused that they lose meaning in present day human society. I made a conscious choice not to use the word “love” and to substitute one of its synonyms, “charity”. When people cherish someone, it’s a different level of emotion. Just look at the meaning of cherish in the 1960s song, “Cherish,” by the Association. Many can identify with that. When my ants cherish each other, it’s closer to the “agape” form of love, involving a willing self-sacrifice, but “I agape you” didn’t work the way “I cherish you” does. I also thought of the meaning of love/charity in St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13. That’s the meaning I was trying to achieve, so in all the books, I use charity/cherish and other forms of the word.

There were some words I chose just to be a bit different: portal for door, season cycle for year, time frame for month, moment for minute, wood plant for tree (although I did use the term conifer), etc. That type of word use is easy for readers to pick up on. Considering my choices for ant/roach sex life, I decided to use mating ceremony, or simply mating or mated, instead of marriage/wedding/married. That was also easy for readers to get used to.

I had a lot of fun with expletives! (I always liked, and laughed until my sides ached, the late George Carlin’s comedic monologue on cuss words.) My ants, in the way they live, don’t have such words since they are always polite with each other, which goes along with charity. My roaches, on the other hand, needed some good insults and cuss words. In human terms, expletives boil down to disgusting things and body functions. Nonhuman alternatives weren’t that hard to come up with: calling a fellow roach a pain in the abdomen, or a piece of fly bate (what do flies lay their eggs on?). I don’t think I have to “translate”, so as you read them, figure it out. Maybe create your own list. Of course, there are gestures, too. So instead of using a middle finger, which roaches don’t have, they twang their outer mandible as the ultimate insult to someone.

It was also a conscious decision not to change the ant/roach numbering system from ours. We humans use a “base ten” numbering system (although the Mayans did use a “base 20” system) because we have ten fingers and ten toes. So “10” means a group of ten and no more, and 21 means two groups of ten and one more, etc. Insects would be much more likely to use a “base 6” because they have six legs, not ten, and do not have fingers and toes like we do. But in “base 6” the symbols “21” would be two groups of six and one more, or “13” in human terms. This could have resulted in a lot of confusion for my readers and would have detracted rather than added to my novels.

It's been my pleasure to share some of my thought processes with you, my readers, in writing fantasy. If you are a writer, fantasy or otherwise, I hope you’ll consider some of these same themes in constructing your setting. Remember, setting can include culture as well as location and time.