K.D. Sarge's Blog, page 68

World-Building, Day Six

Day Six: Races.

(Note: the site I've been using seems to be down, but you can get a PDF with the exercises and more here.)

Spend 10 minutes figuring out what people who evolved in each major area of your world would look like. Then spend another 5 minutes asking "what if this group encountered that group?" Would they fight? Trade? Both? Inter-marry and blend their genetic types? Would they remain largely separate, with pure strains of both racial groups co-existing (not necessarily...

World-Building, Day Five

Day Five.

So, today's exercise is to draw out the physical contours of your map, and then identify at least three places that your people might live. You don't need names for them yet– we'll worry about names next week, when we give our people language. Just draw a dot on the map or maybe sketch a little "house" symbol to indicate that people have settled that area.

Yeah. Here's an hour or two of playing in Corel Painter Essentials (it is MUCH fun, and I got it for free with my Bamboo tablet...

World-Building, Day Four

Nyeargh. Day Four.

For 15 minutes, jot down some of the Really Big Land Features you want in your story and just think "what if that were made by…." Write down a couple of causes for those features and scars, and stick it all into your notebook. Which scars are slow-force scars (like plate tectonics), and which are fast-forces (anything that takes less than 10,000 years is medium-to-fast in geological scales).

Y'okay. I need some good high mountains, definitely. I think I'll put them on the...

World-Building, Day Three

Starting earlier than "almost bedtime" today. Not that I'm sure it's going to help–it's nearing ninety here and I'm pretty sleepy because of it.

Onward. Day Three.

Read over your list from Day 1 and then turn to a blank piece of paper. Close your eyes and think about what kind of feeling you like to have when you write or read. Write down four words that fit into that feeling: two adjectives, a verb, and a noun. Now return to the page with your list of climates and emotions. Do any of them...

World-Building, Day Two

Somebody remind me to stop waiting till I'm wanting to go to bed to do this?

Thanks.

Right. Onward. Day Two.

What role do you anticipate weather playing in your story? Do you have a lot of travel that you want to complicate with bad storms? Are you going to snow in your mighty heroes? Will there be a mighty battle, determined by sudden flooding? You actually don't need to know right now. Your exerise for today is to jot down ten plot devices that relate to weather, and what you think they do to...

World-Building, Day One

And since I'm awful at putting things off for no good reason (yes, I'm easy if I wanna be) I'm going to start tomorrow.

Oh, carp…I did say that yesterday, didn't I? Which would make this…right.

Well, I'm stuffed on pizza and my head is spinning from a great movie (Secretariat, and wow did I enjoy it), but I made a commitment and here I am. So let's see what day one is, hmm?

Get out a map or go to an international website like National Geographic. Look everywhere. Antarctica. Saudi Arabia. The...

World-Building Challenge

So I feel the need to do something with this blog o' mine, and I can't bring myself to follow the A-to-Z crowd as so many are doing right now. (I think it's a great idea, and I'm sure it's awesome, but I get this stubborn streak sometimes, and it hits me at the worst times…)

Anyway. I stumbled on a link for a thirty-day world-building challenge the other day, and I'm going to do that. And since I'm awful at putting things off for no good reason (yes, I'm easy if I wanna be) I'm going to start ...

I love SCIENCE

"Advanced civilizations may live safely inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei without being visible from the outside," he says.

oh em flippin' gee.

Such a civilization would be subject to huge tidal forces and  energy density that builds up in these stable orbits as photons become trapped. There's also the problem of causality violations, which some cosmologists predict would afflict this kind of weird space-time.

My brain. It is in love.

What is a causality violation, and...

Today

A mother's work is never done.

I plan to have brain to blog soon. (Note…plan.)

Needed: Jumper Cables

So you might have noticed I'm not blogging lately. Know what else I'm not doing? Writing. Not editing, planning, plotting, researching (random research doesn't count), or brainstorming either.

I hate it. I feel…dead. Worse. I feel undead. Zombie horde, I am in you!

Grrr! Argh!

*cough*

So anyway. When I'm not writing I'm here (for a given value of "here"), but I don't know why. I'm not even really here. My soul is somewhere else. Or something like that–I don't know. I can't think straight. I'm...