Question to the four readers of this blog about respectful use of not-my-culture stuff.

I have a new concept I'm working on that needs a whole new world, which is fun and I like worldbuilding a lot. The issue is I am so sick and tired of all fantasy worlds using western-european naming conventions. The  world's culture will be a mis-mash of mores ( Read more... )

My kid-let loves to talk to me about my stories, and he wanted me to use a Tree of Knowledge in my familiar trouble world. With his prompting, also known as pestering until I did it, I wrote a 4,000+ word short story about a wizard from Alexandria searching for the knowledge trees of myth and rumor ( Read more... )

I will be so happy when this term ends and I get a week and a half or so break.  I have a story that's just itching to be written, and finding the time has been headache-inducing to say the least. Today it took bribing the kids with pizza and unrestricted video games to have approx three hours of writing time.

Not all of that was writing, some of it ( Read more... )

This new world I'm building for the d'Libre stories is shaping up well, but it's complicated enough that I find that I am in need of a map. Which is so not one of my skills. Drawing anything beyond basic stick figures is not in my skills set. Then I remember, I know somebody! Well, lots of somebodies actually, but one of them has a degree in maps ( Read more... )

One of the reason I haven't joined the Steampunk bandwagon is I don't want to do it wrong. Like the people described in this musical rant. Enjoy...

Click to view

So the lesson to learn here is take a little thought in the worldbuilding, just because there's a road to follow doesn't mean you can be lazy.

All over twitter today, because it's writer's day or writing day, or something like that, is the tag #whyIwrite. And I paused to ask myself that.

Why Do I write anyway?

I write because I like stories. I like worldbuilding. I like the what if? I enjoy filling in the picture, painting with words a complete 3D scene of what reality is like if you ( Read more... )

For those of you who don't know, I was a teenager before the berlin wall fell (yes, I am THAT OLD). Before the fall, when the USSR was a world power, we lived with the certainty that at any time, any moment, major cities in the USA would explode into nuclear nothingness. Hell, we had movies about it, Hollywood and made-for-tv. We had TV shows about ( Read more... )

I am plotting. Evil writer plotting even. heehee ( Read more... )

The world of Avatar, even if it's a movie not a book, has IMO awe inspiring worldbuilding. The detail in how the planet works, what's it made of, size, even what it orbits, to the ecosystem, is almost perfect. I found very few holes, only once do I remember asking "But what about?"

I found today at this link, that they followed the attention to ( Read more... )