Tag Archives: world building

May
24

Building My World

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I mapped out a city last night. Admittedly it’s not much of a map. I actually have a copy of Campaign Cartographer 3 somewhere (and City Builder 3, among others), but the learning curve is rather steep and as lovely as the pictures it can create are, I just don’t have time to learn it right this second. So I ended up doing the quick and dirty sketch by hand. And it’s pretty wretched, but it gives me a better understanding of the places I’m trying to describe and the paths the characters need to take to get to where they’re going. I ended up creating a detailed time line as well – which isn’t something I usually do, but this particular story has a lot of history. While I don’t need to know *every* little detail, there’s enough going on that I have to make sure things are happening… Read more
May
21

Permission to Plan

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I find myself at a bit of a mental cross-roads these days when it comes to my writing. Part of this is because I still consider myself a panster – when I’m writing, I’ve got my daily word count and I attempt to meet it or do better and life is good. But with this latest book, I’m having to do more research and more planning, and even though its so important to the story as a whole, I still feel guilty if I’m not actually putting words on the page. (Never mind that it does me no good to write something that I’ll have to rework heavily later on because it will be out of sync with the plotting later.) Not sure what my issue is, quite frankly. Plotting is new for me and it’s hard to give myself the time to *do* it.  I suspect I’m afraid I’ll… Read more