Last month I dove into research, looking for seeds of inspiration for worldbuilding for the yet-to-be-named world for my new series. Now that I’ve uncovered all kinds of fun stuff to work into the books, I’m working on plotting out the second book in the series. Sometimes I surprise myself at the direction the story …
One of the people who has read an excerpt from my novel thought that I should spend a little more time world building. He suggested that I read some of the works of LE Modesit for an example of great world building. I followed his suggestion. Legacies (Corean Chronicles, Book 1) was a fun read, …
World Building from the Inside Out, Part 5 All good things come to an end, and so does this series on world building, based on Janeen Ippolito’s excellent blog post. The fifth question to pose my protagonist is: Who or what would she die for? Why? If no one or nothing, why not? This is …
World Building from the Inside Out, Part 4 Each week, I’m enjoying this exploration into my heroine’s mind, thanks to help from Janeen Ippolito’s great blog post on world building. This time the question hits on a topic I hadn’t really thought about. What is she addicted to, or what is one thing she could …
World Building from the Inside Out, Part 3 This is the third week of exploring the world building questions from Janeen Ippolito’s blog. This week’s question about my main character is an interesting one and opens up all kinds of potential for subplots. How would she deal with an unexpected pregnancy? In the …
World Building from the Inside Out, Part 2 Last week we looked at the first question from Janeen Ippolito’s world building blog. This week’s question about my main character is a great one: A bird poops on her. How does she handle it? Brought up to believe that animals are dangerous, being pooped on by …
This week I stumbled on Janeen Ippolito’s blog that teaches, among other things, world building. This blog shows how to build worlds from the inside out. The idea is to get into the heads of the characters and to look at the world from their perspectives. What a great concept. I immediately decided to try …
Travel anywhere in the world and what do you find in every culture? No, I’m not thinking about alcohol (but that would be true). I’m thinking of musical instruments. So as I build the setting for my fantasy novels, I knew I needed to dream up a few so the people of Tlefas would …
As writers of science fiction and fantasy know all too well, a major piece of crafting novels in these genres is creating the world and its history. Part of what gives such classics as The Lord of the Rings such staying power is the loving attention Tolkien gave to creating Middle Earth. The maps, the …
Just about every society has its alcoholic beverages, so I set out to come up with some unusual ones for Tlefas, the world I’ve created for my novels. I searched the internet for some ideas, and found some truly odd drinks. Kumis I first heard of kumis when I lived in Russia, but had …