So I came back from Poland and I've got a bunch of news for you...
iWizard
Indeed, I squashed one more chapter into the book: “Last Fight for Lost Friends” is going to be number 8 because of some recent events (mostly in Poland). It would be kind of sad, but it would throw another spotlight (not the OS X search function) on the family of the main character [spoiling: werefoxes :-D] and - as announced - another fight will be going on. So the book will span from October 6, 2011 until August 21, 2012 (the death of Steve Jobs and the end of this year's summer holidays in a specific federal state of Germany, respectively [do the research if you don't believe me!]).
As I said, I got many, many ideas during the three weeks I spent in Poland, but I also wrote a bit more into my Italian notebook (where iWizard is going to be in a beta version).
Heading over to something else...
Romanice (i.e. Lingua Romanica)
I have some good sound changes (and a kind of metaphony) for my Italo-Western-Romance, but I came to the conclusion that one strict “kind” of LR could prove problematic (both grammatically and due to different vocabulary in Spain and Italy [plus France, as a link]).
To overcome this, I decided to create dialects of my Romance (like do real languages have - compare Standard High German and Bavarian or Austrian German, Salesian and Standard Polish or northern Italian and southern Italian). And I wouldn't forget pronunciation variants (like Spanish).
To make the thing even more funny, I planned to drag the development of LR from 400 AD to this date.
Other than that, I finally got my copy of Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit.
Even if I don't understand every single word, it indeed proves helpful.
And it turned out I'm on point 2 of the Rosenfelder-Skala; inventing a Romance language.
And I got an accompanying book for my calligraphy: Michelle Brown's A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600.
It not only provides me a look on writing styles as the Visigothic Script or the many variants of Merovingian scripts, but also on previously unknown, like the Ravenna Chancery Script.
The book is good enough, except that the example of the Beneventan Script is a bit early (10th century, I prefer 11th or 12th century) and the Italian vanriant of the Carolingian Script is missing also.
But then again, the book is quite old (contents from 1993, reprinted in 2007) and it is in black and white (due to its age, which is better, sometimes, than a blurred, hard-to-read color facsimile).
That's it for this time. Stay hungry, foolish and tuned!
Oh, one more thing: Since OS X Mountain Lion is out, I tell you that I'm going to upgrade to v.10.8 in September (- when Facebook integration arrived, but on my birthday anyway -) when some bugs are erased. And maybe I can install it together with Parallels Desktop 8 if it's on the market early enough (I won't wait for my local tech shop to have some copes anymore [because they did never have had the previous version when I asked for it]!).
