Latest News

April 29, 2024 Two more soundtrack songs my my brother Lewis! Listen here. Sort of an overture for the 2nd Passage, that he rendered in two songs on the basis of my outline.

3rd Voice got nominated for AN AWARD: The NCS Divisional Award in the category of longform online comics (which seems confusingly defined, as awards categories for webcomics have seemed to always have been lol). NCS members can vote until May 5.

TCAF in Toronto is coming up, May 11 & 12. I am tabling there!!!! It is free to attend!! I would love to see you!!!

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Latest Letter Column

You can email me something at 3rdvoicemail@gmail.com and I will maybe get to it here.

Hello Mr. Dahm, I’ve seen your usage of fictional scripts, language, and grammar in your novels, specifically Vattu and 3rd Voice. What is your inspiration and how long does it take for you to come up with them. Thank you, Anonymous * March 16, 2024

Hi! I have made several invented writing systems, basically alphabets— Vattu uses one of these extensively, but it doesn’t actually have an invented language behind it. I think it seemed like it would’ve been too complicated and distracting to do all of that for Vattu, it being such a broad-strokes sort of mythic history thing. 3rd Voice however does have an actual invented language in it, with its own modes of writing also. It feels to me like it fits with the world-logic of 3V a little better! Making a language with the scale and complexity of an actual language is, like everything in world-building, a basically impossible task. SO I have tried to apply the same logic I use for everything in working with invented settings: build thematic throughlines, emphasize evocativeness over plausibility, and keep in mind how it looks to the reader above all else. What the 3V language amounts to, so far, is another textural aspect of the setting, and a tool for me to build a sense of richness into all of it.

SO I mean it could take forever to make language! But what’s the point of making something so impossibly huge and arbitrarily complex? You can get some basic structures in place pretty simply, and build upon them as you need to. Verbs make sense to me as a place to start, though any attempt to universalize this sort of thing is naturally beholden to one’s own perspective from inside of their language(s).

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