It started with a simple idea. As I mentioned in my first post, I decided to start down this road as I watch my kids become enthralled with the fantasy worlds of video games, on TV, and in movies. I had a brief concept of a story I wanted to write and I started doing a mind map of some general ideas and shaping the world around them. Then I got distracted.
What started as a simple mind map of organizing story concepts turned into geography research as I mapped out continents across the planet which led to doing research on the lifecycle of stars and designing the entire planetary system.
The engineer in me looked at what I laid out and said, but where did they all come from? How is there so much intelligent life here? And then inspiration hit me.
I did some more mind mapping, but soon realized this wasn’t going to be enough. I started writing out detailed descriptions of things I thought would be important, but I still wasn’t satisfied with what I had.
Looking into websites or applications that would help me build a timeline of everything, I ended up settling on a simple spreadsheet project timeline template. Fast forward about a week and I now have a fairly well detailed 5000 years of history leading up to where my initial story idea takes place. I’m also pretty sure I have storylines for 2-3 stories that aren’t anywhere close in history to what I initially set out to write that are more detailed than my initial story idea.
Collectively I have a few thousand words written down, unedited, and not necessarily in any cohesive layout. It’s a start, I suppose.
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