World Building
Work is crazy! Cat Kitty Pryde is terribly sick! So not a whole lot else going on. I have a couple of stories laying around I need to fire off somewhere just so I can feel productive.
The Writer’s Ink crew just started up a world building exercise. I have laid claim to the bitterly cold frozen tundras of the north east. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and start naming things, but I think I’ll be aiming for a mixture of Scottish, Finnish, and Welsh. Should result in some stuff that’s got the right sound but not cliche.
World building is sometimes the most fun aspect of writing fantasy or science fiction. You can let your imagination roam and create anything that comes to mind. That’s probably the first exercise in storytelling I ever engaged in; I still have little pencil-drawn maps in ancient spiral notebooks with all sorts of improbable geography and crazy names. Each nation had its own little epic history and a Lego hero to call its own. I remember spending tons of time writing these histories and never actually writing any stories in them, heh.
It’ll be interesting to see what this shared world will generate. At the moment there’s six of working on it, so we should come up with a wide variety of cultures populating this place.
Anyway, here’s a few websites I’ve found massively useful (discovered while working on my first failed NaNo a couple years ago).
Medieval Demographics Made Easy (handy for getting a grasp on how big is big for ancient towns and what sort of tradesmen might be in any given population center)
http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm
The Language Construction Kit (handy if you’re insane and want to create a language for your people)
Horses in fiction (awesome little article with a few basic facts about horses)
http://fantasy.fictionfactor.com/articles/horses.html
Guide to Gods and Mythology (useful as inspiration if your people are of a religious nature)
Creating and Earthlike Planet (tons and tons of information about some of the basic science behind climate and geography, with tons of links to other resources)
