Ask Me Your Worldbuilding Questions!

actually, no. i was a backer on the kickstarter project; i forget how i found out about it. probably browsing the book projects at the time

Oh, mine too! Did you hear about it from the "Space Marine" controversy?

Rex Schrader

You’ve mentioned that many of your characters and story ideas have been around for years or decades. I think you’ve said Alysha is your oldest currently running storyline. What’s your newest? Coracle? When/what point in your life did each of your major worlds become “I need to write this” ideas? How many half formed ideas have you discarded over the years? How many ideas did you get long before you were capable of doing them justice with your writing?

What I love about worldbuilding is when someone uses a game as a worldbuilding tool. 'So my character has this problem, how/why would they do this thing? It's against their morals to do this other thing, and wait, how would their society/family work, how do they even get out of town to do all this other stuff?' I find it fascinating when people use things like Skyrim or Flight Rising to tell these amazingly extravagant and intricate stories and we talk about things down to what their parents like to eat/wear/decorate with or 'What happened to the girl they were supposed to marry and who was really good with embroidery but it just didn't work out?' So...how do *you* like to start? Like Tolkien *nods to madamebadger*, with a language, or a 'here's a dilemma--what caused this? What's around this? I want to know more', or...how do *you* start?

I'd love to hear more about your process. How do you go about fleshing out your world? What things do you think are important to address?

My introduction to your work was Spots the Space Marine, I loved the handling of the story and characters! I was happy the Kickstarter was a success, sorry for the subsequent challenges, and glad it finally came out! Are there follow-up stories in the works?

Relevant to MadameBadger's question above: When you started Kherishdar, why did you start with the language first? You've described at a high level your impetus for writing the stories ("Is it possible to write a Caste system which is not bad") - I'm not exactly sure how that flows into "Aphorisms" and the structure thereof. I'd be interested in hearing more about the genesis of the project, or at least how you drew a line from "Castes not always bad" to a Conlang + Alien Zen Koans.

Rex Schrader

Another one: you've mentioned before doing extensive research for some of your series (I know that you worked out how the Jokka have ice despite living on a relatively hot set of plains). How do you approach research for your worldbuilding? And how do you decide which details to put in and which are too much (for example, you know how the ice is made, but the explanation for that isn't actually in the book)?

Is there a particular place that you tend to start when building a world? Tolkien famously said that he made up a language and then invented the people who might speak it; other authors have said that they started with a what-if question like "what if there was a sentient species with the social structure of lions?"; and sometimes it's just an image (I know that a lot of people assume that The Left Hand of Darkness started with 'what if humans had no fixed physical sex,' but LeGuin has said that it started with an image of two people dragging a sledge, and everything built out from that). Do you have a go-to place where you start? Or does it vary?

We are all familiar with the Exodus of the Pelted, and their origins. My question for you, the author, is how did that story come about? Or better, what was your first concept about the Pelted and how did they expand?

pj wolf