Reader question: how'd you build the am'r language?

I got asked about how I came up with the am’r language, and I am so happy to talk about this!

First off, if you want to see me go over the am’r language word-by-word, here you go:

🛑SPOILERS, SWEETIE!🛑 I am pretty sure that if you are here, you have read the books in the Blood & Ancient Scrolls series, and you don’t have to worry about spoilers. If you have not read through Blood Eternal, you might want to save this newsletter for after that…

When I was first writing Blood Ex Libris, I knew very quickly into the process that I was going to need a language for my vampires—and that they would not even be OK with being called “vampires.”

This slowed down writing the first draft of BXL by months, as I researched where my vampires had originated, because that would inform their language.

Because Anne Rice, ancient Sumer and other Mesopotamian cultures were right out. I spent about a week just feeling deeply salty about that. (Although, in the research I did in the years following, I discovered that Ms. Rice did her homework really thoroughly and her vampire origin story was based almost verbatim on ancient Sumerian blood-drinking demons from ancient texts. So she has become a complete inspiration to me.) At the time, her origin story felt more like a road-block, like I had to hit at least that bar, and I had never written a novel before, so this was making it that much harder for me to even write the damn story.

I’m so grateful for that difficulty now. It forced me to take things up a notch, to write an origin story that would satisfy even readers who had grown up reading Queen of the Dammed.

I had to take it back further, and build around another culture. I researched in a few different directions that didn’t pan out, but once I read When Zarathustra Spoke: The Reformation of Neolithic Culture and Religion by Mary Settegast, I knew I’d found my place and time.

It all came together pretty fast after that, even though that origin story doesn’t get told until Blood Eternal, still, you can find the little “Easter Eggs” I leave for you along the way through the first two books. (That was so much fun, putting those in from the first book, and knowing how cool it would be for readers when it all came together! 🤓)

Once I had the place and time, the language was ready to be built. I already knew a fair bit about language acquisition (both as a baby and adult), and about how languages have evolved over time. That made it easy for me to take a few “ancestor” languages and have them evolve differently than their modern versions.

If you knew those languages, the origin of the am’r would have had a big neon arrow pointing to it. But as one of the ancestor languages was the dead-like-Latin language of Avestan, I was not terribly worried about the majority of people having the origin story ruined for them…and for those who knew the Ancestor languages, I hoped it would be a welcome connection of their own cultures with the am’r.

I did initially look into Proto-Indo-European (PIE) but it doesn’t take more than an hour of research to realize that PIE has been permanently tainted by Nazis—the originals, and the modern ones keeping it going. Their linguists did a lot of the early research on reconstructing the language, as they wanted to use it to prove all of their beliefs about Aryans being the “Master Race.” 🤮 It’s all horrific bullshit, of course, but I did not want my series tainted by association, and I couldn’t think of a way that I could use PIE and not have it attract that sort of people.

So while I did familiarize myself with the concepts of PIE, I used Avestan, Persian, and Sanskrit as inspirations—all three languages having evolved from PIE. I looked at how the PIE morphology evolved and changed through those three languages, and then I pulled “what felt right” from each to form each am’r word/concept—those being words and concepts we don’t have in kee languages, because we didn’t need them.

Those three languages spread where the Neolithic peoples amongst whom the am’r developed, so it made sense to me that little core pieces of those languages would have been in the am’r language as well. And, since the am’r are so long-lived, that the am’r language might have had some changes over time, but the core concepts would remain unchanged as the kee cultures and myriad tongues rushed to evolve around it.

I tracked it all in a spreadsheet. So if you want the short answer to how the am’r language developed, it’s simply: “in the nerdiest way possible.” 🤓

In a cool belated note: I keep on learning about early human development (it’s a topic I’ve been interested in long before the am’r pushed themselves into my mind) and as I do so, more and more things just chink into place. For instance, the Carpathian Mountains area also had a similar rise of early farming, permanent settlements, and advanced pottery. So the fact that Romanian vampire concepts like the “strigoi mort” and “strigoi viu” worked into the language as the “am’r” and the “am’r-nafsh” just feels so very right. Like, sometimes, for a second, I wonder if I made it up, or it’s all real and I just discovered the secret. 🤫

So, the origin of the am’r and their language is intrinsically tied together, as is right and proper. And having developed both—along with the biology of the am’r body and its differences from the kee—it gave me a very strong base to build stories onto. It why continuity is so easy for me as I write, because I know this history as well as I know my own.

Finally, my best newsletters come from reader questions, like this one! So please hit “reply” to this newsletter with your question for me. It’s an “AMA” kinda thing. Ask me anything. It can be about the series, the characters, vampires in general, or ask me personal stuff. Even if it’s really personal, I can find a way to answer it that shares stuff about me and I’m comfortable with. So don’t hesitate to ask— I love getting the questions and it helps me write the next newsletter! 💝

I had an exciting moment recently where I opened an email from Publisher’s Weekly BookLife and saw my face looking out at me.

It wasn’t a complete and total surprise, as they had asked me to do a video for them, but I simply wasn’t expecting to be in that email, which I had opened because I liked the subject line—and it turned out that the subject line was quoting me. 🥰

I could get used to that sort of thing! Anyway, here you go:

🎃 Enjoy spooky season while we’re in it! Until two weeks from now, be good or be good at it! 😘

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