I just recently received confirmation that the Varin alphabet will be used in my novel! I’m super excited about that. Given that it’s an alphabet for a whole conlang (constructed language), it won’t be used for any of the text of the novel, but will appear in the lists of the castes of Varin, and in the list of the eight underground cities.
David J. Peterson, possibly best known for his work on the Dothraki language for Game of Thrones, was the one who took my alphabet and turned it into a font. If you’ve ever been curious about how conlangs work, I encourage you to go look on his YouTube Channel. If you would like to learn about how font creation works, I’ve embedded a video below. This video is the first of eight livestreams David did while he was putting together the Varin font.
Creating the font involved not only creating the character components and putting them together, but because Varin is a cursive font, it also involved an extensive set of programming instructions that detailed how each character was going to connect to the next. It’s amazing to think how much work goes into something we can type in without thinking!
