Way With Worlds: Views, Lenses, and Your True Main Character

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Viewpoint Telescope

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]

Writing your world up is one thing. You can take notes, document everything, draw up timelines, and so forth. That’s a matter of technique, imagination and, frankly, your ability to write everything down. Getting yourself to use all those notes? That’s another challenge.

How do you actually bring all this worldbuilding to life?  How do you get the details to live and not sit forgotten on pieces of paper, wikis, and documents?  How do you keep this information in mind?  How do you avoid breaking your own carefully-crafted continuity without turning every bit of writing into a chore of review?

Perspective is my answer, though that now deserves an explanation.

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Way With Worlds: Recording Your World

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Shelves

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]

So you want to build a nice detailed setting. You are ready to keep a record of everything so you review and expand your work. You’re ready to dive into this and put your world to pen, keyboard, map, and file.

This raises the question of just how you record everything.

If you’ve ever visited a fan wiki or purchased one of those “world of . . .” books that attempts to distill a novel or series of novels into a record of that universe, you know there is a lot of data. It can be a little daunting because when you want to create your setting in detail, really get into it, and you’re basically creating one of those. On your own. Along with writing your story or stories.  It’s a bit daunting

What’s the best way to do it?

Well, that’s actually several questions. So let’s get to them.

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A Real Christmas Display – No Greed, No War On Christmas

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I’m going to start with a rant, but this is actually about re-finding a real spirit for the Holidays, so hang with me.

2013 is the year Christmas finally became meaningless to mean. The shopping season gobbled up Thanksgiving. The usual complaints about the nonexistent War on Christmas were extra stupid (but I’m sure moved books and sold merch), and we got to see a newscaster argue that a holiday figure partially based on Turkish Saint and a Mediterranean Jew were white guys and that this somehow mattered for the kids.

Frankly, I was feeling tired, cynical, and fed up. I like the holidays, I like the fun, the festivity, the feasting, and the gift-giving. I like the gratitude and the simple things.

Not so found of the ever advancing Shoggoth of BS that Christmas has degenerated into over time. Somehow it seems to get stupider and more commercial each year, and we’ve been warned about the commercialism since those old Charlie Brown Christmas specials.

Then, something got me thinking.

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