I’ve been waiting for my stop on this read-a-long for what feels like weeks now because I have a special treat for all of you! As you all know, Elise Kova is my Queen and I can’t- won’t- stop talking about her for the rest of my days. She is a woman of many, many, many, talents, and among them is her absolutely incredible ability to build a world out of scratch and make it seem as if it has always existed. In her Loom series, we are introduced to the Dragon lands (Nova) and ‘Earth’ which is Loom. In the process of world building, Elise had to come up with a calendar year and this is what her process looked like:
From Elise:
Believe it or not, the calendar of Loom and Nova was actually quite difficult to come up with given the logistics of the two worlds developing completely independent of each other.
Loom is located on the earth and Nova is in the sky with a layer of clouds constantly separating them. Days and nights were simple enough, the sky would brighten and darken. Even the number of days in a given month could be explained simply: the moon. Those on Loom would experience nights of darkness, new moons, that would signify the beginning and end of a month.
So I knew Loom and Nova, without any communication, could reasonably develop a similar number of days in the month, and number of hours in the day… But what about years?
For the sake of developing a more simple timeline, I wanted to have their years be the same number of months. But how would two cultures decide something so arbitrary identically?
To answer that, I ended up speaking with a PhD candidate in astrophysics and we worked out a few hypotheticals. Eventually, we came to the possibility of an orbiting celestial body that would cross the sky once per year and light up an entire 24 hours. Doing this, gave a beginning and end for the year calendars that could be seen on Nova and experienced (via the light filtering) on Loom.
One year is composed of 20 months, with 30 days in one month. On Loom, the months are numbered simply. On Nova each month is assigned a divine patron from the Dragon Pantheon. Dates are written as: Day.Month.Year
Therefore, “1.10.1400” is the first day of the tenth month, year one-thousand four-hundred.
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