bitterkarella wrote:
I want to know where you got the inspiration for vorairs. And is there a meaning behind the name?
I keep thinking they look like this:

Tundro from the Herculoids! I love it! That's a happy memory, forgotten until now.
This is a really fortuitous question to interject because I didn't have any other good place to discuss this stuff.
Tundro isn't that far off. I imagine a vorair as bigger than a bull (but smaller than a triceratops), four-legged, low to the ground, arch-backed like an armadillo, and with very short, stubby horns. I can't decide if there's much fur, but it's probably a mammal.
The vo-ball in my game got its name from the vorair, but conceptually the vo-ball came first. And the vo-ball came from trying to think of some odd but remotely plausible new way to do farming; actually it was my first and only idea along those lines. Covered with blades and holes, the vo-ball could till the earth and scatter seeds at the same time; I just needed an animal to push it. Other types of vo-balls may exist for other purposes, I imagined, but Lonon just needed the one.
The word "vorair" came from my random word generator, a little piece of software I wrote at least a decade ago. As I discussed in the postmortem for last year's Koustrea's Contentment, I routinely use this program to conjure new words and names--mostly names--for my various projects. For a project such as Hill Ridge, I generate a couple thousand words, making a short list of the best ones, and then assign them their proper roles. If I don't end up with anything good for a particular role, I go back and generate more. This is all much quicker and easier than it probably sounds, even though I must make an assessment of each one. "Vorair" was carefully selected for a number of reasons. One was that I can readily imagine someone saying it with a southern accent. More importantly, "vo-" was an excellent prefix to stand on its own and get the point across for the objects "vo-ball" and "vo-nip". Not very many two- or three-letter syllables are that unique.
For those keeping score at home, I think there were only six randomly-generated words in Hill Ridge: Langle, Vumfarr, vorair, Cloody, jiller, and catknenk. (Koustrea's Contentment had 19 of them.)
I did depart from tradition here by selecting some real names too. "Lonon" is unusual, but it's real. I saw it on a street sign somewhere very remote. Research indicates it's pronounced like "London" without the "d", but I imagine the folks around Hill Ridge have country-fied it into "low-non". It was impossible to pass up, once I saw it, as a thinly-veiled suggestion of "the lone one".
I also used "Bertrand" but without any reason other than it seemed fitting. "Elsie" appears in the game too, and it's my grandmother's name--another nod to the Texas side of my family. Lynnea Glasser misread this, in her online playthru, as "Elise".
As for the Ambler's last name, "Talgaw"--I just made that up.