My chronophone doesn't really have anything to do with the actual chronophone, which, as you say, was a French device that synched up film with audio back in the early 1900s. But the two parts of the word, chrono and phone, essentially mean time and sound. My world is an enormous city with a giant clocktower in the middle, and every clock in the city is synched to the clocktower. People pay for clock subscriptions the way they pay for tv in our world. People who can't afford private clocks rely on the chronophones, which are public bell systems spread throughout the city, chiming on the hour.

View original postGreeks a nice one cause you can bust out 'Archon', one of those titles that sounds properly bad ass and isn't as overused as Emperor or King. It sounds interesting, its alway more fun to read stuff by people you know. I'd offer myself as an alpha reader but my only two modes are usually 'I liked it' or the sorts of extreme nitpicking that don't help a story, I think last time I unloaded on someone for their insistence on having railroads, which typically weigh about a hundred tons a league, but having steel armor so incredibly expensive only nobles could afford it even though the odds of a reader giving a shit were minimal, and I'm about ten times worse with sci-fi.

Archon is a good one, it's true. Also, I think it would bug the hell out of me once someone pointed out a thing like that. I don't mean that I'd be annoyed by the person who did it, but that I'd be annoyed by the inconsistency in my world. Worldbuilding is pretty challenging sometimes, at least for me. I'm sure there are things I miss, no matter how much I try to think them through. My world has some peculiarities to its essential design. If you remember, a while back I asked some questions about flat worlds. I phrased it so that it sounded as if it applied to a constructed world in space, but that was a misdirect. My world isn't in space, but it is flat. That, plus the other basic elements (which are secret for now) have presented me with lots to think about in terms of where the world would be technology-wise, which things they might have that we wouldn't, and which things we would have that they wouldn't (for example, there's an in-world reason why they don't have computers, televisions, or radios; they use a different style of boat than we do — a sort of modified paddle-wheeler — but they still have cars, and use elevated train tracks involving magnets, because by the time they got to trains the city was too crowded to lay tracks on the ground). I have to think about how the setup would affect geography, history, exploration, all that stuff. It's good fun, but I'm sure I've missed some things.

Thanks for the offer of reading, though the book is actually already in a beta read stage (in which some of my beta readers are reading very, very slowly). I've been writing a second novel, a mythological historical murder mystery, in the meantime, but once I finish it I'll be moving on to a third draft of the first book. I've actually thought about you for some of the snaggier aspects of the world, which is why I brought the flat world question here.