November

[melannen]

So, um, yes, it's going to be November soon?

And yes, I have signed up for NaNo again.

I'm doing something a bit different this year: every year the best part of NaNo is the worldbuilding research, so this year all I'm doing is writing about worldbuilding - basically I'm going to attempt to write the comprehensive worldbuilding guide that I look for every year and can't find.

Here is the current working outline:

Worldbuilding for Geographers, or, how to draw a map.

1. Intro.
   
   1. Earthlike planets. (Write what you know)
      
   2. My qualifications
      
   3. Why bother
      
   4. How to use this guide
      
      1. order
         
      2. Worldbuilding by your bootstraps (building a world for a story, not a story for a world)
         
      3. Out of ambit
         
   5. What is an Earthlike planet
      
      1. life
         
      2. carbohydrates
         
      3. moon
         
      4. plate tectonics
         
      5. poles/temperate/tropics
         
      6. days and seasons?
         
   6. Cheats
      
      1. Steal from Earth
         
      2. Minor planets
         
      3. Recommended reading/using your resources
         
   7. Extras/Wierdnesses
   
   
2. Continents and oceans, islands and seas
   
   1. Mountains are at the edges of continents
      
   2. What Continents Are
      
   3. Plate Tectonics
      
   4. Mountains
      Subduction/strike-slip boundaries
      Continent/continent boundaries
      Rifts
      Hot Spots
      High-relief areas
      Old mountains
      
   5. Sea Level rise and fall
      Continental Shelf
      High sea level
      Low sea level
      Local sea level changes
      
3. 
   Climate:
   
   1. winds and currents
      
   2. Warm wet air rises, cold dry air sinks
      
   3. Defining a climate
      
   4. Climate classifications
      
   5. Air circulation by latitude
      
   6. Warm and Cold Air Masses
      
   7. Continental effects
      
   8. Seasonality
      Wet/Dry
      Summer/Winter
      
   9. Microclimates
      
   10. Weather
       
4. 
   Water, ice, erosion
   
   1. (Water goes downhill.)
      
   2. Water cycle
      
   3. Old, young, dry, wet topography
      
   4. Drainage patterns
      
   5. Drawing rivers
      
   6. Glaciation
      
   7. Glaciation aftereffects
      
   8. Dryland erosion
      
5. 
   Life
   
   1. (Life creates its own environment)
      
   2. Things we wouldn't have without life
      
   3. Life and climate
      
   4. Life and topography
      
   5. Biomes
      
   6. Life on the edge; life in the past
      
   7. Shifting ranges
      
   8. Extinction and Radiation
      
   9. A Digression about Classification
      
   10. A Digression about Diversity
       
   11. A Digression about Evolution
       
   12. A Digression about Interdependence
       
6. 
   Civilization
   
   1. People Go Places
      
   2. A Map has a Memory
      
   3. Transportation Routes
      Rivers and Seaways
      Ocean crossings
      Roads
      Air
      (other)
      
   4. Settlements
      Cities
      Towns
      Villages
      Megalopolis
      
   5. Wilderness
   
   
7. 
   Extras if I run out of stuff:
   
   • population (growth, pyramids, matrices, size and change)
     
   • birth control
     
   • matriarchies and how to build them
     
   • anthropological gender, gender variance
     
   • fundamental rules of humanity
     
   • economies
     
   • kinship
     
   • language and the naming of things
     
   • tracing the past, memory, change
     
   • timekeeping
     
   • storytelling and myth
     
   • paintings and description
     
   • colonization
   
   
8. class roles and the doing of stuff

There, now I can no longer say 'I can't write today because I've lost my outline.' :P

Anyway who knows how much of it I'll actually do, and I'm hoping I get distracted by a novel halfway through (there's this YA thing about siblings and suburbia and oral history and four-gendered aliens in the basement that I dreamed a week ago that's kind of like a blend of Daniel Pinkwater and Bruce Coville), and for NaNo I am not going to worry over-much about citations and whether some of my leaps of logic aren't really starting from firm ground, but heck, even if it only exists to help me worldbuild without having to pull out a dozen books, that'll be something.

So I am going to try to post as I go, dunno whether/how much I'll be locking (this isn't that different from some of the stuff I normally post anyway) but here:

ETA: Uggh. Filter poll was meant to go here ,but is broken for reasons I can't figure out. Coming in follow-up post. I hope.

ETA2: Ooh, I forgot this works! Have the same poll showing up in this post too. Because I can!

Poll #8426

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58

View Respondents

Let me see?

View Answers

If I'm already on your nano/wips filter, take me off.
1 (1.7%)

If I'm not already on your nano/wips filter, put me on
40 (69.0%)

I honestly don't care
9 (15.5%)

Seriously, these "filter me" polls set off my social anxiety like nobody's business, you decide
10 (17.2%)

I unhonestly don't care, stop attention-whoring, why does everybody pretend nano makes them special
1 (1.7%)

You know you're going to lose interest by week two anyway, why do you still bother?
3 (5.2%)

I skim your posts anyway, doesn't really matter.
3 (5.2%)

Ooh, a ticky!
38 (65.5%)

Comments

[siegeofangels]

Oh, wow, this is really exciting. I love worldbuilding and look forward to seeing anything you post.

[melannen]

I am hoping to at least manage to finish and post some of it!

[zanzando]

Oh. Oh.

Okay, so the part of me that spent about six hours helping a friend world-build for a Sky High fic ("But canonically the school is floating too high, only microbes would survive!" "Exactly how many heroes are there? What is their organisational structure?"), which is ALL OF ME, really wants to read this. *_*

[melannen]

As you might be able to tell from the outline, I'm deliberately trying to keep this limited to a particular scale, so I am not sure it will cover either floating high schools or the logistics of superhero teams! (Otherwise 50,000 words would be nothing like enough.)

But maybe it will be cool anyway!

[zanzando]

It will be cool in all the ways. My interests in different worlds are quite varied. :D

[ciaan]

Sky High fic + worldbuilding = something I really want to read!

[sophia_sol]

Ooh, this sounds really shiny!

[melannen]

We shall see!

[redsnake05]

This sounds like an awesome project, and you weren't joking about comprehensive. I think it will be great and I'm looking forward to hearing about it all November (and possibly after). I'm especially looking forward to the days and seasons bit, if you get to it. It's one of my favourite bits of Science to teach.

[melannen]

Oh boy! That's my least favorite bit of science to try to explain! Well, maybe you can point out what I get wrong.

(And, ah, since you brought it up: do you know of any good, reasonably-available-in-the-US resources that talk at length about seasonality in the parts of the world that don't go winter-spring-summer-fall? Because I've been looking and am about at the end of my usual resources...)

[redsnake05]

I only teach it in junior Science - your grades 8 and 9 - so it's not like we have to go into detail. Just getting the idea that the Earth is tilted can cause enough problems with their brains. This is also the topic where I have come across the most amusing misconceptions, like the student who thought that seasons were because the sun went round the earth at different distances.

Do you mean like wet-dry seasonal cycles? I have never actually gone into that, because NZ is very firmly temperate, but I will have a bit of a dig and see what I can find.

[melannen]

Spinning things! I am one of those people with a left/right deficiency so spinning things in space always confuse the hell out of me, especially if I can't draw my own pictures. :D Although I only a few weeks ago had to inform an over-thirty friend of mine that no, the phases of the moon aren't caused by the Earth's shadow.

The various wet-dry ones, yes, especially the tropical and subtropical.

Even my college climatology and physical geography texts just sort of skim over them in a few paragraphs of 'look they exist' and then go back to temperate climes, alas. Maybe somebody from a tropical clime will drop by (probably just to complain about how all the texts leave them out, but one can hope.)

[starlady]

I don't know that I knew that you trained as a geographer, but it makes so much sense. Of course you did!

[melannen]

Trained, yes. Practiced... heh. well.

I kind of fell into geography because it's the closest modern universities have to the study of everything. Someday I will narrow my interests down and figure out what I want to go to grad school for! Or not.

[starlady]

Or you could just go to grad school in geography. :)

[holyschist]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SQUEES HEARD FROM SPACE. I looooooove reading about worldbuilding; this sounds awesome!

[melannen]

I hope it works!

[zellieh]

Great outline. Looks like it'll be fascinating.

One more possibility for the Extra Things list: basics of human genetics and mutations, and why you can expect [x %] of any population to have [x trait], consistently. (Aka melanin: not just for decoration, aka QUILTBAG people: not an optional extra.)

(edited to fix stupidity, argh.)

Re: 7.

[melannen]

Bits of that fits in to several of the other categories (the 'life' digressions; the population dynamics extra; the birth control one; kinship...) There shouldn't be a need, in a basic overview, to do *human* genetics and mutations, just say, "Oh and btw human evolution isn't special" and then maybe link to John Hawks' blog if someone wants to argue. :P

But yeah, I could expand indefinitely, this is just the stuff that seems like I can do manageably. Sounds like that's a post you ought to write, actually! Unless you have already.

(And of course melanin isn't just for decoration: It's for GIANT MUTANT FUNGUS growing inside the Chernobyl reactors to live off of pure gamma radiation. In the post-atomic wasteland we will all be covered in symbiotic black mold.)

Re: 7.

[zellieh]

I wasn't thinking of evolution, exactly. I was thinking more of the way genetics and mutations are often misused in fictional universes, and in fictional human populations. (I may have been reading too much X-Men fic recently. Also, Captain America, SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, argh argh argh. ::head desk::)

Sadly, I gave up science at 16, and although I've self-educated since, I don't know enough to explain things properly. I know just enough that certain explanations make me squint and wince. ::g::

That black mould is impressive stuff! ::bookmarks John Hawkes' blog::

Re: 7.

[melannen]

Well, the idea of starting from the ground up is that I won't have to argue with all of the bits of stupid SF science individually, just wipe the slate clean. (Genetics and mutation is natural selection! If it's not, you're doin' it wrong! I think that's possibly your point actually.)

The biology of most superheroes can only be explained by nodding and backing away slowly. I mean, I love Hank McCoy, but, really.

Re: 7.

[zellieh]

Yes, that is my point. It's not enough to Word of God evolutionary changes "because they're cool!" You also have to think at least a bit about numbers, percentage of the population, and reasons why that'd happen, especially if it's a major plot point.

Charles Xavier has the same effect on me. He's a telepath? No problem. Watch me suspend my disbelief. He's a geneticist?! Are you having a laugh, Marvel?!

[thatyourefuse]

Oh my GOD, I strongly suspect this is going to be really awesome. And, uh, potentially rather useful. \o/!

[melannen]

Maybe! ... we shall see.