Hello, Internet friends!
So I’ve been working on two new stories, and I’m really excited about sharing them with you. They’re very brief. Really, they’re meant to give you just a small taste of the larger story universe I’ve been working on.
Unfortunately, I hit a few snags with this week’s writing/art-making schedule. As it currently stands, one of these stories is written but not illustrated, and the other is illustrated but not fully written. It’s an awkward mismatch, to be sure!
Anyway, you can expect to see the first story on Monday of next week, and the other one will be posted the week after that. In the meantime, I thought I’d share the first episode of a video series I’ve been watching on YouTube. It’s all about world-building in fantasy and science fiction, and it’s one of the things that’s been feeding my creativity of late. Please enjoy!
Planet Pailly 
I think there’s value in studying how Tolkien and Herbert did their world building, but if the message is that anyone who doesn’t spend decades doing their world building, creating new languages and detailed histories, is a slacker, I think that’s too high a standard. I’ve enjoyed too many books where the worlds weren’t worked out in nearly that much detail. There’s a lot to be said for producing a book this year that will be entertaining.
That’s not to say that if someone wants to spend 20 years working out the intricacies of their world that they shouldn’t. Just that it’s okay for the rest of us to get by with the amount of work that people like Asimov and Robert E. Howard did on their worlds.
Anyway, looking forward to your stories!
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Yeah, I kind of thought these videos were a little too hard on Asimov and others for not going deep enough with their world building. I didn’t think that was fair, especially considering how wildly successful and influential Asimov was in his own right.
But I really appreciated getting some fresh insight into Tolkien and Herbert’s process. There are certain things I feel like I can use from that, and also certain things that I probably can’t. It was also interesting to me, in the later episodes about Herbert, to hear about the personal and financial hardships he was dealing with while trying to get Dune finished and published. There was a lot there for me to empathize with.
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I’m admittedly judging things by this one video. Sounds like I might need to check out the others.
I’ve actually studied Tolkien’s worldbuilding in detail. When I was younger, I was obsessed with it. Eventually I reached the point where I could see his tricks and techniques. He was a master at it, and it’s definitely worth studying. But I actually found some of his earliest stuff more fresh than the later stuff he had reworked over and over again, which I took as a lesson in and of itself.
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In that case, these videos might seem a little superficial to you. For me, there was a good mix of things I knew and things I didn’t.
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