A colonist's mindset

I'm editing a novel right now which has my human characters on a colony world.  That world is very different from Earth, and it's challenging me to come up with new ways of referring to things.

It starts with the way we refer to the world and its star, and the way we divide up planetary time.  We're so used to referring to sunrise and sunset, but of course, on a different world, the star it orbits won't be called the Sun.  I've called that star Fenia, but saying Feniarise and Feniaset doesn't sound right.  So I've had to find other ways to describe daybreak and dusk.

The star is a different colour from our familiar yellow sun, and that's resulted in the predominant colour of the vegetation on that planet being red.  So I have to remember that when I'm describing the trees and grass.  One way I do that is to create a full colour map of my world.  I've only fully detailed one very large continent so far, the one on which the action takes place in book one.  I plan to write a second book set on a different continent, but so far I haven't detailed that's landmass.  First I have to work out how my intelligent big cats got from one landmass to the other.

As well as the planet seeming alien to the humans, I also have an alien character's viewpoint.  This is one of the intelligent big cats, and what I've done is built a culture for them over the structure of a lion  pride.  The cats have hands, and their own technology, and I've given them a spoken language.  I've cheated a bit to allow the cats and humans to learn each ither's languages for story purposes.

It's been an interesting exercise deciding how the cats live.  They're divided into different tribes, of around a couple of hundred cats each.  They live in clan caves, and they are experts with biotech.  They control raptors as drones, and to provide their radio relays. And they have their factional squabbles, just as humans do.

One of the biggest challenges takes me right back to describing the star the planet orbits.  I needed new ways to describe the times of day for the cats' culture.  I settled on light and dark to mean day and night, and first-light and last-light to mean sunrise and sunset.  Sometimes the extra words meant I had to construct the alien' sentences differently, but that just added to the sense of alienness.

To make an alien world seem real it has to be seen through the characters' eyes.  To  make it come alive, I need a colonist's mindset.