On to something new

I’m getting into the habit of writing series for this blog, rather than individual posts. There’s still a few individual posts interspersed through the output, but more often I’ll write a bit here and there over the course of a few days, or even a few weeks…gradually building up something bigger (often tweaking my ideas through the middle of a series based on the comments of one reader or another).

Sometimes I just get ideas out of my head, stream of consciousness style, because I need some place to store them other than a piece of paper that’s going to get lost, or a computer file that’s going to disappear when the current machine goes down.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested the idea of writing a series based on world-building, and it seemed to get a bit of traction. Sure there are plenty of forums and sites already dedicated to the fine art of developing alternate histories and fantasy worlds, but surely any alternate perspective has got to be a good thing for rounding out the avenues of exploration. You could ignore my words, or add them to your repertoire.

The main reason I’m thinking of doing this is because I’ve seen plenty of the same mistakes over and over in many examples of world-building, and I’d like to highlight them as pitfalls to avoid for any future world-builders. On the other hand, if you are building a world and you know that a pitfall is on its way, you could choose not to avoid it and instead make it a feature. Perhaps through parody, perhaps through highlighting the issue as a narrative/stylistic choice.

I’ll use a few of my existing worlds as examples in this series, such as the Walkabout Setting, the Goblin Labyrinth, and a few others that I’ve touched on. There will be a few examples from other game settings and novels as well. But generally I’m thinking that this series will work best if I build up a new world from scratch.

Let’s see where this leads us.