World building
Time for an admission of über-geekery. I love world-building. It’s great. Keeps me occupied on boring bus journeys; while I’m doing the ironing; any time at all, really. The world I spend most of this time creating is very similar to our own on many levels. People fight and scheme and misbehave, and they also love and laugh and indulge in random acts of kindness from time to time. They invent gadgets to make their lives easier, and play at politics to make their lives more interesting. However (there had to be a ‘however’), there are differences. There is magic, for a start, and there are dragons in the mountains.
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Reading fantasy novels, I always wondered why the presence of magic in a world seemed to bring everything to a technological and scientific halt. Just because maybe one in ten people can light a fire with a snap of their fingers, doesn’t mean everybody else is going to be content using flint and tinder. Someone’s going to come up with the safety match at some point. This is the basis that I build my world on – that, and Celtic mythology. I do have a soft spot for Celtic mythology. Over the next unspecified but probably fairly extended period of time, I’ll share some of my world-building techniques here, and the results of it. There’s also this map here, and some full-immersion for you on my stories page.
World building 101 – why world build?
Mapping – Estimating the scale of the problem
Map drawing – the practicalities
Maps and what to do with them next
Gender balance – the start of sociology
Drawing inspiration from world cultures