Presenting Eighth Day Genesis
[image error] I’m pleased to announce the new anthology of essays on worldbuilding and subcreation from Alliteration Ink, “Eighth Day Genesis,” which happens to include an essay from yours truly.
The book is intended to be treated as a textbook for worldbuilding and features articles and essays from nearly two dozen authors and other creators (here are some of their other works). My own piece, “History for Story’s Sake, or, No One Cares Who The Emperor Was 500 Years Ago. Unless They Should,” addresses how one’s worldbuilding should never overshadow the story it serves, and how crafting a fictional world’s history, in particular, is an opportunity to enhance and enrich a storyworld. Here’s a taste:
There are those who worldbuild for the sake of worldbuilding, and those who worldbuild in order to add verisimilitude to a particular storyworld and depth to the stories set there. Those who worldbuild for fun can, and do, refine their creations to as detailed a degree as they like. A hobbyist can spend years adding to their creation, right down to descriptions of individual shopkeepers in every village and every proverbial (or even, perhaps, literal) blade of grass… or whatever passes for grass in their world.
If you’re engineering a storyworld, writing a piece of fiction, or designing a video, role-playing, or other game that calls for some degree of worldbuilding, it can be easy to fall into the trap of going too far in the development of the secondary creation that is meant to serve that larger creative endeavor. It’s possible to go too far down the rabbit hole of worldbuilding and never emerge to tell the actual story, especially for independent creators working on spec, when the actual creative process might just be their only reward.
One area in which this creative self-deception can be especially seductive is the in-world history of a storyworld. After all, histories are, themselves, little stories…
It was fun to write, and serves as a nice sidebar, of sorts, to my own ongoing series, “Worldbuilding for Writers, Gamers and Other Creators.”
Buy “Eighth Day Genesis”
“Eighth Day Genesis” is available in ebook formats for the Kindle, Nook, and as an epub/mobi bundle directly from Alliteration Ink. The publisher splits 70% of net proceeds between the authors, so the more we sell… the more we make!
Thanks! And if you’ve read “History for Story’s Sake,” I’d love to hear about it in the comments here… and a review at Amazon.com wouldn’t hurt, either!
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