Posts Tagged ‘world building’

Making It Different – Pushing Genre Boundaries in Fantasy

by Martin Jenkins

One of the pleasures of genre is that it lets us identify a type of writing that we know we like. We’d feel short-changed if a crime novel didn’t feature a crime, after all, or if a romance didn’t put the travails of a relationship front and center. What we don’t want to see, however, is a mere repetition of genre tropes and clichés – it’s what is fresh and different in a work of fiction that keeps us turning the page while still being identifiably a genre work.

Technology and Worldbuilding, Part Two

by Kevin L. O’Brien In this second part of my series on technology and worldbuilding (see Part One), I would like to examine mass production. This is the concept of manufacturing many copies of a product quickly and efficiently, rather than creating each copy by individual effort, as in craftwork. Mass production is in turn […]

How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends: Tools for the Toolbox: Going Viral

“Tools for the Toolbox” is a series of posts that describe disease types and organ systems. Eventually I hope to include enough information that a writer might be able to do some creative mixing and matching to produce the symptoms they want to give a character. Because it’s really frustrating to throw darts in the dark and hope something lands near the bull’s-eye. Hope it helps!

Happy… what day is it?

Around the world people are celebrating February 14, 2010 as a special day. What, exactly, that special day is depends on who you are and what tradition you grew up in. It provides an excellent example of ways to use different calendars in world building.