World Building

            One of the most important parts of writing is world building. It doesn't matter where a book or story is set; the writer needs to know the world inside and out.

            Some world building is easier – for example, a book set in the real world tends to need very little creation, although it does require more research. Other times, world building can be challenging – like a book set in a fantastical city in another world where the various people and establishments are critical to the plot.

            What I chose to do is, in hind sight, nearly impossible (at least for one person) and exceptionally challenging. I decided to build an entire fantasy world, the same size as ours (or, at least, close enough).

            Why is this task so difficult? Try to picture our entire world. Can you name all the countries and their capitals? What are the diplomatic statuses between each country? Where are the trade routes and what do the countries trade?

            Those are the easy questions. There are a whole lot of other details to come up with as well, like plants and animals unique to the world or ones that appear in other books and mythology that have their own twist in this world. Famous historical figures and locations. Religions, cultures, societies, politics, regional moral standards. The list goes on and on.

            Luckily it can be cheated, at least to a certain degree. Do I really need to know about unicorns if they don’t appear in the book I'm working on? No, I can leave that until I actually need it. But the more that is developed in the world, the easier it is to add flavour.

            Recently I decided that it was high time (after four and a half years and books of writing in this world) that it was high time I named the months and days of the week in my world. It seems like a relatively unimportant task, but now that it’s done I can actually set my characters’ birth dates in stone. Plus, whenever I feel like naming the day or the month in which the story is occurring, I'm ready to do so. I may even go back and add them into the books I've written, adding a new depth to the realism of my world.

            Of course, that whole process opened up a whole new can of worms for me, because now I'm working on the moon cycles. It sounds easy enough – and it was. For the first moon. However, following in my footsteps of craziness, I decided that the moon has a couple moons of its own. Now I'm working on coming up with the rotation patterns of those moons, trying to find a pattern that will allow me to have an easy reference for when I'm writing.

            It’s a good thing that I found a program for making my own encyclopaedia. I have the right mind for storing all this information, but having it all written down and organised in one place has made my writing infinitely easier.

            Nevertheless, let this be a lesson to you. If you want to build a world, start off small or you might find yourself drowning in the oceans of your own creativity.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

What Were Those Mysterious Sounds?

            I don’t get out to as many medieval fairs and renaissance festivals as I’d like to – I mean, after all, they’re a ton of fun and it’s where chainmaille sells the best. However, of the ones that I know, I have a particular fondness of the Royal Medieval Faire that we were vendors at last Saturday.

            What makes this event so special? It has a new theme and storyline each year. I've never seen that anywhere else and I've gotta say, the organizers have a lot of fun with it.

            Last year, the faire was invaded by Vikings (also a drunken lady asking people to kiss her stuffed frog). This year was something unique and – I felt – very clever. It was a mystery. In fact, it was such a good mystery that I still don’t know what was going on. All I know is that throughout the day, we kept hearing the oddest noises. I also observed two shady looking characters dressed all in black offering a child a gold coin in exchange for information about the strange sounds.

            My best guess is that it was a snoring dragon. While that only accounts for some of the sounds, it’s the best I've got.

            Story line or no, medieval fairs are great fun. If you've never been to one, you should find one near you and go. Beware of dragons and Vikings, though. Also drunken ladies with kissy frogs. I'm not sure I’ll ever recover from that on.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Minecraft - the new Lego

            When I was a kid, my brother and I used to love playing with Lego. It was one of the best toys out there – at least for us, because after we’d built a Lego set, we could take it apart and create.

            Our different personality types were very evident, even back then. My brother’s constructions often focused on creating vehicles, while I was busily building castles, fortresses and forts for us to play with our Lego men in.

            Of course, as always happens, we grew older and we stopped playing with Lego. Our vast collection got packed up in a big plastic bin and is now sitting unused in a closet at our parents’ house.

            In more recent years, the same style of creativity inspired by Lego has come back into my life, in a far less messy platform. Minecraft.

            This is a video game that was created by a small company called Mojang. Minecraft is a game where your character is dropped into a randomly generated world made up of blocks. What then? Well, then you do whatever you feel like.

            You can harvest blocks, craft tools, build structures and mechanisms, mine, explore the infinite world, explore monsters. Oh, yes – monsters. In survival mode, one of the first things you learn is to build a house as quickly as you can, because at night, the monsters come out to play.

            This game, so simple in appearances, has grown to be one of the most popular games out there. Why is that? Because it allows people to explore the same creative side that Lego does. Find the blocks you need and build whatever you please!

            Creativity is an integral part of the human mind and, to many of us, we feel stunted if we can’t express that creativity. Minecraft provides a unique outlet, similar to Lego blocks, that has gripped the world’s imagination. You need look no further than a simple search on Google or YouTube to find examples of the brilliant things people have done.

            I can’t truly say that Minecraft has replaced Lego – although it comes close. For one thing, you can’t make vehicles, so my brother won’t play it. It does, however, cut down significantly on the mess and sore feet.

            Naturally, such a similarity has not been missed by others. For those who enjoy both Minecraft and Lego.... There are also Minecraft Lego sets and Lego texture packs for Minecraft. Sometimes I love this world.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Heat Wave

            I don’t know about the rest of you, but we just had a terrible heat wave over the last week. Luckily I didn't have to deal with the heat itself all that much, but it did get in the way of the usual running of life.

            Colleen and I had just started getting into our new routine – we actually had a work schedule set up for ourselves and it was already improving our productivity – when this smouldering heat comes along, intent on hanging about all week. It came along and spoiled everything.

            See, our home is set up like this: we have one room downstairs which serves as dining room, living room and kitchen, while upstairs we have our bedroom, workroom and bathroom. Only the downstairs is air-conditioned.

            To further this, our workroom contains a lot of electronics which produce heat, particularly when they’re being use. While we make chainmaille, we always have a movie or show playing because – let’s face it – no matter how much patience you have, if you’re making as much chainmaille as we do, you need something else going on to keep your brain from melting.

            So, we had two choices: work upstairs in the sweltering heat, adding more heat to the point where it would be impossible to sleep at night, or move downstairs while lowering productivity. Unsurprisingly, we chose the latter.

            But we’re nothing if not adaptable. I often read to Colleen while she’s doing various chores or tasks, so that’s what much of the days went to for me. We finished Take a Thief (Mercedes Lackey), went through the whole of Homeland and most of Exile (R.A. Salvatore). Meanwhile, extra housework got done, a little chainmaille was completed and, while I wasn't reading, a lot more writing work got done than usual.

            Finally a thunderstorm came along and broke the heat. Usually “it never rains but it pours” is a negative saying, but in this case it was delightful. Now we can get back to work as usual. Although, I must admit – as sore as my throat has gotten at times, I'm going to miss reading so much.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Aren't Allergies Fun?

            Allergy season has come again. Funny, isn't it, how there are multiple allergy seasons? It’s a little unfair, too, to those of us who suffer from them.

            I've had a myriad of minor allergies since I was very young. I remember lying awake some nights, hardly able to breathe because my nose was congested and my throat was closing on me. When I was tested for allergies, the tests showed I had a sensitivity to... well, just about everything. No serious allergies, for which I'm grateful, but a minor sensitivity to just about everything in the natural world – grass, trees, pollen, dust, cats, perfumes, milk, wheat... I don’t even know everything that was on the list, it was so long.

            Luckily for me, spending several years on a rotation diet and growing older have lessened the severity of my allergies, but every now and then they hit me – and hard. In the past week I've been sneasing regularly, with litters of 3-15 sneezes at a time. I've single-handedly gone through three boxes kleenexes in a week.

            I've always felt that the timing of allergy seasons was notoriously unfair as well. I mean, the first one of the year is springtime, and it usually isn't too bad, but it meant that my nose was running and making me feel miserable for the first good weather of the year.

            The second season hits in late June. The end of the school year. Have you ever tried to write exams with your nose dripping onto the paper? Naturally, the third season arrives around now – just about the right time to go back to school. It was many years that I sat through the first couple weeks of classes, trying to discreetly wipe my nose (blowing my nose was out of the question, as I've always made it a point to be as silent as possible when around other people).

            Throw into the mix any colds that could be caught during the winter... well, I needn't say more.

            So, as I sit here blowing my nose and trying not to rub my eyes that are so itchy I want to gouge them out, I can’t help thinking about all the other people out there suffering as I am (or worse). To them, all I can do is tell them the same thing that the doctor told my father-in-law when my sister-in-law swallowed a dime when she was a baby (there was no good way to say that): This, too, shall pass. (Don't look at me; it wasn't my joke.)

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.