Worldbuilding Part III: The Initial Map

I have been really getting into world building lately. Detailing out lands, races, and languages has brought me a level of enjoyment I didn't know I was missing. Between this book and planning out some fly tying sessions for my upcoming fishing trips, the past few weeks have been quite fun.

As seen above, I have worked out not only some additional continents and major island chains, but I have also placed them squarely on the globe. Using two programs, gProjector and Gplates, I have been able to put my designs together, building a sense of scale and perspective. All told, the major land masses make up approximately 35-38% of the surface area of the planet, centering around two major continents - as shows in my previous post - a smaller continent that has been ripped in two by tectonic forces, and a polar continent that is mostly barren glacier.

Dotting the map are several island chains, most created by tectonic forces, and two chains created by magma hot spots.

Looking at the center continent above, I have been working on the map, adding mountains, forests, rivers, etc., while also working out political boundaries for 7-10 nations. I also started the same on the continent to the right, though I'm stuck between 6 and 8 nations. Names haven't yet taken shape as I'm working out a balance between "easily remembered in English/to the reader" and "making sense within the common tongue of the world". For example, I've worked out that the common tongue doesn't include a /z/ sound, so a Romanized name with a 'z' in it wouldn't make sense.

The story itself is also taking shape. All of this world building certainly helps with that as motivations become more clear and actions have meaning and impact. Otherwise it's just a story with no purpose. 

One day, I would love to show off my in-universe timeline. But that day is not today.

Worldbuilding Part II: Initial Continents

It’s been a while since my last post where I discussed starting the worldbuilding for my book. I didn’t mean for there to be such a long break - I really was trying to stick to a once-per-week pace with my posts - but I got stuck. There’s a really cool tool called GPlates that is a program designed for geologists to simulate and study Earth’s plate tectonics. It’s naturally built by engineer-types for geologists who both understand all the geology concepts and have a focus on creating highly accurate mapping. All that is to say that the UI is not great.

I found a few online tutorials and got to work. The basics were pretty straightforward, but as things started getting complex - continents merging and splitting, and plates disappearing or beginning anew - it started to become unruly. Since I wasn’t trying to go for hyper realism, mostly just wanting the planet to seem realistic enough to not trigger my pet peeves in fantasy writing, I focused on just creating some realistic continent interactions and designs.

After working a few simulations in GPlates, I was able to come up with the basic outline of two continents and the various features that would occur naturally. I took those and sketched them out, scanned them into the computer, then “traced” over them in Photoshop to create my digitized outline.

I am not a digital artist, nor do I play one on TV, but I can follow YouTube tutorials. Doing that, I was able to create realistic looking continents that followed my general outlines. It was nice to be able to extrapolate some boundaries, while also simulating continental crust that had highs and lows - and see that translate into islands and squirrely-looking coastlines.

I have more to do, at least two more continents for sure and probably some other features resulting from tectonic activity such as island chains and microcontinents, but these two continents will certainly suffice for now while I work on the rest.

World Building Part I: Getting Started

I’m still working on my rough outline, but I have been having a blast with all the world building that goes along with creating a fantasy story.

It really has been giving me something to nerd out over for the past few weeks. Everything from the physical world itself, to the solar system, and even the languages the different species will use for writing and speaking. The amount of detail you can pour into this was astounding to me. Digging into all of these things really gave me some better insight to the books I’ve read previously. It gave me a better sense for authors that spent more time doing this or maybe only focused on the physical word and just let the language take a backseat. None of that is inherently good or bad, just a fun new thing to learn.

One of the cool things about writing fantasy is that you can really determine what is realistic vs. what is just going to be cool for your story. For example, general scientific consensus is that there is a very narrow size window for a sun that could maintain a planet within its habitable zone long enough for intelligent life to develop. Some suns/stars just burn out and die too quickly. But with magic, interstellar travel, and other means, a story could easily work on a planet in one of those systems.

For now, I’ve started dabbling in a little bit of every aspect of world building. Using some tools written by bigger nerds than me, I’ve laid out a general solar system that should create some cool skies. I’ve also put some rough land mass alignments on my planet to create some interesting story dynamics (hopefully). I’ve even started working on some constructed languages. I have no intention of going full Tolkien and creating an entire spoken and written language, but I’m looking to create enough to fit into a plot point where an outsider is seen using “foreign words.”

I plan to go into further, non-spoiler, details in future posts, each covering one aspect of my world building.

At the Helm of My Journey

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.

Blogs Are Better With Pictures

After my last post I realized, blog posts, especially long posts, look terrible without a picture or two to break things up. But this is a fantasy blog and I’m not an artist. Should I start paying someone to draw pictures that aren’t likely to accomplish anything other than breaking up my post text? Should I just start adding random photos? Neither of those seem particularly useful, so I opted for the latest - if not most controversial - tool on the market, AI.

I won’t dig into the ethics of using AI, this isn’t the place for that, but I can assure you, no writer or artist was put out of a job by me using AI. Instead, I’m using this as a thought exercise to help tease out some ideas and thoughts based on what’s in my head for several of these stories.

So what I plan to do, for every post that doesn’t have an obvious accompanying image, I’m going to add a random, AI generated image that is something in some way related to something I intend to write about in some form of fashion.

For now, sit back and enjoy.

The Beginning

If you had asked me 6 months ago, hell even 6 weeks ago, the idea of me even reading a book let alone writing one would’ve been laughable. And not just by me, but by pretty much anyone that knew me. And yet, here I sit, typing out this first blog post documenting my path of putting words on paper and maybe doing something with them. I don’t know if I will ever get a full book written, or even if I do if I will get that book published. But what I do know is that for the better part of two decades, I’ve had several ideas swirling around in my head and now I’m giving them their moment in the sun.

How did I get to this point? That’s a valid question that I even ask myself some days as I work on this endeavor. I have been a huge fan of the fantasy genre ever since I was kid. But I was an only child and never really fit into any one group, so I didn’t have that core group of friends that would gather weekly to play Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering like you so often hear about in the backgrounds of fantasy writers.

I played sports, mostly hockey, and excelled at academics - but I had teachers telling me I had to cut sports and focus on school, and coaches telling me I needed to focus on sports. I was never going to make hockey (or any sport really) a long-term success, but I loved it. I didn’t care to hang out with the kids who were at the top of our class academically, even if I was in all the same classes, so I floated through my teens and high school. Bouncing between cliques, never a main member, but getting along with all of them, I picked the bits and pieces that allowed me to carry conversations without having to spend too much time on anything.

Enter the movies!

I was never much of a reader, probably because I was slower than average and my comprehension was never that great. I could read a chapter and have no idea what I read if someone asked me 5 minutes later. But movies, oh those were much better. Easier to remember and much shorter than reading the book, I would find hours upon hours of both entertainment and knowledge building for the various friends circles I was floating through at that point in my life.

Don’t take this to mean that I am against reading. I’m not. Far from it. It just wasn’t at the top of my priority list when I was contemplating things to do with my spare time. I love Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series, Mark Lawrence’s The Broken Empire trilogy is outstanding, and while I’m not sure I’ll read the last books if they ever do get published, I am current on G.R.R.M.’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

If I may quote myself from earlier in this post, “And yet, here I sit.”

I should probably get to the “why” of the matter at this point. As I mentioned in my opener, I have had ideas for a fantasy story in my head for years and they probably would’ve stayed there, except for one reason. My kids.

My daughter is a clever, funny, sweet little girl who loves everything Daddy does. My son just thinks life is exciting, every part of it - especially if it involves food. One thing both of my kids really enjoy is watching me play video games, one of which is a fantasy role-playing game (RPG). Seeing the awe and joy on their faces as they watch my character change shapes, summon dragons, and fight “the bad guys” makes me the happiest dad on the planet.

Who knows if they’ll ever get into fantasy as a hobby or preferred genre. But for right now, they love “moving my guy when he goes to his home” and using their imagination to create stories about what my characters are doing as I explore the world.

So I’m doing this for them. Not because I think I will write a book and they’ll be proud of it - hell, even if I do publish it in the next few years neither of them will be able to read it for several more years still. Maybe I will just print whatever materializes and leave them for the kids to enjoy when they get older. Maybe nothing gets printed and I just use this as a temporary outlet before moving on. Or maybe I publish my ideas and see where it goes.

Only time will tell...

Leading with the Left

I'm not a fan of displaying the unpolished, but I'm also not a fan of wasting time when there is no value added.  So for now, this is where my thoughts will live. I encourage you to follow along. Or don't. I don't run your life. Be your own person, but it would be awesome if you were your own person while following along.