Worldbuilding: Building Blocks and Lists

I've talked before about the importance of understanding how agriculture and domestication of animals influences the building of societies.  Cultures don't move past hunter-gather stages without domesticating animals and mastering agriculture, and they can't do that if the proper plants or animals aren't present. 

So, what are the "proper" plants and animals? 

Well, I've done research (built off other people's research, of course), and compiled it here for easy access. 

ANIMALS

Here's a list of forty animals which form the basis for early-culture domestication.  I'll break this into three sections: large domesticatible animals, small domesticatible animals, and semi-domesticatible animals.  The semi-domesticatibles are ones where various individual factors (such as ability to breed in captivity, or demeanor) prevent full domestication from occurring.  I've also included how each animal can be useful to the culture domesticating them. 

Large
Alpaca (Vicugna pacos) USES: fibre, meat, show, pets
Domestic Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) USES: milk, transportation, working, hunting, plowing, draft, mount, fighting, show, racing, meat, hair
Domestic pig (Sus scrofa domesticus) USES: meat, leather, research, show, racing, fighting, truffles, pets
Yak (Bos grunniens) USES: milk, transportation, working, plowing, mount, racing, fighting, meat, fibre
Domestic dromedary camel (Camelus dromedarius) USES: transportation, working, hunting, plowing, draft, mount, show, racing, fighting, milk, meat
Bali cattle (Bos javanicus domestica) USES: meat, milk, show, racing, working, plowing, draft
Donkey (Equus africanus asinus) USES: transportation, working, plowing, draft, mount, meat, milk, pets, racing, guarding
Domestic goat (Capra aegagrus hircus) USES: milk, meat, fibre, skin, show, racing, fighting, clearing land, pets
Horse (Equus ferus caballus) USES: transportation, meat, working, guiding, servicing, hunting, execution, plowing, draft, mount, fighting, show, racing, milk, pets
Water buffalo, including "river buffalo" (Bubalus arnee) and "swamp buffalo" (Bubalus bubalis carabenesis) USES: working, plowing, draft, mount, fighting, meat, show, racing, milk
Zebu (Bos primigenius indicus) USES: meat, milk, leather, hides, working, plowing, draft, vellum, blood, transportation, soil fertilization, fighting, show, racing
Gayal (Bos frontalis) USES: meat
Cattle (Bos primigenius taurus) USES: meat, milk, leather, hides, working, plowing, draft, vellum, blood, transportation, soil fertilization, fighting, show, pets
Llama (Lama glama) USES: transportation, working, draft, pack, meat, show, racing, pets, guarding
Sheep (Ovis aries) USES: fibre, meat, milk, leather, pelt, vellum, pets, show, racing, research, guarding, fighting, ornamental

SMALL
Domestic goose (Anser anser domesticus) USES: meat, feathers, eggs, show, guarding, pets
Domestic duck (Anas platyrhynchos domesticus) USES: meat, feathers, eggs, pets, show, racing, ornamental
Domestic pigeon (Columba livia domestica) USES: show, ornamental, messenger, meat, racing, pets
Chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) USES: meat, eggs, feathers, leather, show, racing, ornamental, fighting, pets
Ferret (Mustela putorius furo) USES: pets, hunting, pest control, show, racing
Domestic turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) USES: meat, feathers, eggs, show, pets
Domestic silkmoth (Bombyx mori) USES: silk, animal feed, pets, meat
Guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) USES: pets, meat, show, racing, research
Domestic rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) USES: meat, pelt, fibre, pets, show, racing, research
Cat (Felis silvestris catus) USES: pets, pest control, show, pelt, research
Dog (Canis lupus familiaris) USES: Pets, hunting, herding, guarding, pest control, transportation, draft, working, show, racing, sport, rescuing, guiding, servicing, meat, research
Domestic guineafowl (Numida meleagris) USES: meat, eggs, pest control, show, alarming, pets

SEMI
Mandarin duck (Aix galericulata) USES: meat, ornamental
Stingless bee (Melipona beecheii) USES: honey, pollination
Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus) USES: show, feathers, meat, ornamental, pets
Egyptian mongoose (Herpestes ichneumon) USES: pest control, pets
Addax (Addax nasomaculatus) USES: meat, horns, leather, skin
Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata) USES: meat, feathers, eggs, show, pets
Red deer (Cervus elaphus) USES: meat, velvet, hides, leather, antlers
Western honey bee (Apis mellifera), including subspecies Italian bee (A. mellifera ligustica), European dark bee (A. mellifera mellifera), and Carniolan honey bee (A. mellifera carnica) USES: honey, wax, pollination
Fallow deer (Dama dama) USES: meat, hides, antlers
Semi-domesticated reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) USES: meat, milk, transportation, working, draft, mount, hides, racing, leather, antlers
Asiatic honey bee (Apis cerana), including subspecies Indian honey bee (Apis cerana indica) USES: honey, pollination
Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), including subspecies Indian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) USES: working, transportation, hunting, show, racing, fighting
Scimitar oryx (Oryx dammah) USES: meat, hides, horns

AGRICULTURE

For this list, I'm going to look less at individual plants, and more at centers of origin for plant domestication.  Roughly speaking, there were eight "centers of origin" on Earth for independent rise of agriculture (two with subcenters), so the more realistic option would be to keep these various species of plants grouped together.  So here are the centers, including where they were developed.

Center 1  (Mexico/Central America)
Grains and Legumes: maize, common bean, lima bean, tepary bean, jack bean, grain amaranth
Melon Plants: malabar gourd, winter pumpkin, chayote
Fiber Plants: upland cotton, bourbon cotton, henequen (sisal)
Miscellaneous: sweetpotato, arrowroot, pepper, papaya, guava, cashew, wild black cherry, chochenial, cherry tomato, cacao.

Center 2 (South America, northwestern region)
Root Tubers: potato, Other endemic cultivated potato species. Fourteen or more species with chromosome numbers varying from 24 to 60, edible nasturtium
Grains and Legumes: starchy maize, lima bean, common bean
Root Tubers: edible canna, potato
Vegetable Crops: pepino, tomato, ground cherry, pumpkin, pepper
Fiber Plants: cotton
Fruit and Miscellaneous: cocoa, passion flower, guava, heilborn, quinine tree, tobacco, cherimoya
2A (Chilean region)
Common potato (48 chromosomes), Chilean strawberry
2B (Brazilian region)
manioc, peanut, rubber tree, pineapple, Brazil nut, cashew, Erva-mate, purple granadilla.

Center 3 (Mediterranean Coasts)
Cereals and Legumes: durum wheat, emmer, Polish wheat, spelt, oats, sand oats, canarygrass, grass pea, pea, lupine
Forage Plants:  clover, white clover, crimson clover, serradella
Oil and Fiber Plants: flax, rape, black mustard, olive
Vegetables: garden beet, cabbage, turnip, lettuce, asparagus, celery, chicory, parsnip, rhubarb,
Ethereal Oil and Spice Plants: caraway, anise, thyme, peppermint, sage, hop.

Center 4 (Middle East)
Grains and Legumes: einkorn wheat, durum wheat, poulard wheat, common wheat, oriental wheat, Persian wheat, two-row barley, rye, Mediterranean oats, common oats, lentil, lupine
Forage Plants: alfalfa, Persian clover, fenugreek, vetch, hairy vetch
Fruits: fig, pomegranate, apple, pear, quince, cherry, hawthorn.

Center 5 (Ethiopia)
Grains and Legumes: Abyssinian hard wheat, poulard wheat, emmer, Polish wheat, barley, grain sorghum, pearl millet, African millet, cowpea, flax, teff
Miscellaneous: sesame, castor bean, garden cress, coffee, okra, myrrh, indigo.


Center 6 (Central Asia)
Grains and Legumes: common wheat, club wheat, shot wheat, peas, lentil, horse bean, chickpea, mung bean, mustard, flax, sesame
Fiber Plants: hemp, cotton
Vegetables: onion, garlic, spinach, carrot
Fruits: pistacio, pear, almond, grape, apple.


Center 7 (India)
Cereals and Legumes: rice, chickpea, pigeon pea, urd bean, mung bean, rice bean, cowpea,
Vegetables and Tubers: eggplant, cucumber, radish, taro, yam
Fruits: mango, orange, tangerine, citron, tamarind
Sugar, Oil, and Fiber Plants: sugar cane, coconut palm, sesame, safflower, tree cotton, oriental cotton, jute, crotalaria, kenaf
Spices, Stimulants, Dyes, and Miscellaneous: hemp, black pepper, gum arabic, sandalwood, indigo, cinnamon tree, croton, bamboo.
7A (Southeast Asia)
Cereals and Legumes: Job's tears, velvet bean
Fruits: pummelo, banana, breadfruit, mangosteen
Oil, Sugar, Spice, and Fiber Plants: candlenut, coconut palm, sugarcane, clove, nutmeg, black pepper, manila hemp.

Center 8 (China)
Cereals and Legumes: e.g. broomcorn millet, Italian millet, Japanese barnyard millet, Koaliang, buckwheat, hull-less barley, soybean, Adzuki bean, velvet bean
Roots, Tubers, and Vegetables: e.g. Chinese yam, radish, Chinese cabbage, onion, cucumber
Fruits and Nuts: e.g. pear, Chinese apple, peach, apricot, cherry, walnut, litchi
Sugar, Drug, and Fiber Plants: e.g.sugar cane, opium poppy, ginseng camphor, hemp.

Hopefully, you'll find these lists helpful to build some interesting things.  Good luck.

Ten Books That Stuck With Me

Earlier this week, I got tagged over on Facebook with that "list ten books that stuck with you" meme, and I listed ten books with little additional commentary, save to note that "stuck with you" does not mean the same thing as "loved".

Here's the list:

1. Watership Down - Richard Adams
2. The Belgariad - David Eddings
3. Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins
4. Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
5. World According to Garp - John Irving
6. Caves of Steel - Isaac Asimov
7. The Green-Sky Trilogy - Zilpha Keatley Snyder
8. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
9. Time Enough For Love - Robert Heinlein
10. ...And Eternity - Piers Anthony 

I should note that the first seven are all books I first read between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.  I would have a hard time isolating exactly when I read which for most-- I know Green-Sky Trilogy was around seventh grade, Belgariad was the summer I was sixteen-- but they all were formative-reading-years books.  And those two-- both series, but the sort of series that are essentially One Big Story-- are the most Traditional Fantasy on this list.  Well, Belgariad is traditional fantasy.  Green-Sky is more Traditional Fantasy with New Age Sci-Fi hidden inside it like a Russian Nesting Doll. 

I've talked before about how Watership Down is one of my favorite books of all time.  And this book is really the Fantasy Epic that resonates the most with me.  It's sweeping in scope while being deeply personal, and it's filled with worldbuilding top to bottom.  The fact that it's a cast of rabbits is almsot incidental.  And despite being often labeled as a "children's book"-- mostly because back then a fantasy novel or a novel with a cast of rabbits would never be designated anything else-- it's filled with maturity and complexity.  I re-read it every few years and still find new discoveries.

Jitterbug Perfume is also fantasy, but you won't find it on those shelves, mostly because Tom Robbins is Tom Robbins and he's pretty much his own genre.  But a story about a man who lives a thousand years, and occasionally hangs out with the god Pan?  Yeah, that's a fantasy book.  World According to Garp isn't genre at all, save for crafting an alternate history where Jenny Fields is a major political figure, and there's an extreme feminist movement that involves cutting one's own tongue out.  But it is a book that's almost entirely character study, really forsaking anything resembling a traditional plot.  It takes a special talent to make that engaging, and it was one I attempted to emulate in early versions of trunked novels. 

Caves of Steel is here as the standard-bearer for all the Asimov I read, which includes the rest of the Robot books and the Foundation books, and scores of short stories.  Caves also stuck with me because it showed me that with sci-fi (and fantasy), a simple plot like a murder mystery can be the gateway into a strongly built world.  You can take two cops solving a murder and put it anywhere and have the promise of a good story.

Hitchhikers is just plain fun, and it was definitely an early influence.  I think somewhere in a box I have a hand-written start-of-a-novel from my teenage years that was, without any doubt, Hitchhikers with the serial numbers filed off.  My one vaguely clever idea in that was that no other civilization in the galaxy had mastered Visine, so having a small bottle in his pocket gave my protagonist a significant amount of wealth on other worlds.

Guns, Germs and Steel I've talked about several times here, and it's the only non-fiction book here.  It formed the template for my worldbuilding ideas, beyond simplistic things like, "Here is the psuedo-Europe, here is the psuedo-Arabia, etc...".

And then there are the last two, which "stuck with me" entirely for bad reasons.  Both represent authors and/or stories that just went off the rails in such a train-wreck fashion that they actually angered me.  And strangely, both of them involve immoral sex and time travel. 

...And Eternity is the seventh and sort-of-final* book in his Incarnations of Immortality series, a series that starts relatively strong with In A Pale Horse (or at least did to my teenage self), and wavers up and down before crashing into the ground with this book.  There's a lot wrong with it, such as a climax where one character's prophesized "saving the world" from the first book turns out to be casting a deciding vote in the Senate on whether or not God is Dead (and said vote actually removes God, as the Incarnation of Good, from his place so a new person can fill it... it's very strange.)  But the real Oh My God What element for me involves one of the main characters: a 15-year-old prostitute, who over the course of the book gets cleaned up and straightened out by two ghosts, and then takes up a romantic relationship with a judge.  Yes, a fifteen-year-old-girl and a judge.  But he justifies what he's doing to himself because the fifteen-year-old girl essentially time-travelled ahead four years.  So even though he knows she's only fifteen, on paper she's nineteen, so he decides what he's doing is fine.  

Time Enough For Love has a different kind of skeezy.  There you have two-thousand-year-old Lazarus Long in the 41st century, more or less ready to finally give up and die, because he's done everything he can do, so what else is there?  What else is there?  Why, there's new theories that might make time travel practical, for one!  Once Lazarus learns this, he's got a new spring in his step.  He's back to being alive and vital, so he can finally cross the final frontier: going back in time to seduce his own mother.  The last third of the book is entirely about that.

So those last two books had a valuable lesson: Writers can let you down, and hard.

--
*- In that Anthony wrote an eighth book many years later, which I never read, but I'm given to understand it doesn't so much continue the story as shade in more background detail.

Worldbuilding: From the Neolithic to the Agricultural

Progressing from my initial ideas of bottom-up worldbuilding, once you've established your geography, your basic flora and fauna, and then had your people rise up and spread throughout the world, you've more or less finished your paleolithic phase.  Can you go into more detail here? Absolutely.  Especially if you're interested in doing stories that are paleolithic or paleo-to-neolithic-transition in nature.*

But odds are you'll be ready to move into defining those neolithic cultures, and their multi-millennia transition to agricultural cultures-- if that's something they are going to logically do.  And there are plenty of reasons why they wouldn't.

Cultures don't transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural without good reason, mostly in terms of geographical conditions.  Climate, water source and base foods that are easily domesticated all need to be present.  Egypt had perfect conditions, for example, since you had the gentle Nile with predictable flooding patterns, allowing for easily irrigated and constantly renewed soil, as well as early native wheats to domesticate.  As a contrast, southwestern Australia had similar environmental conditions, but no native plants worth domesticating.

And without some form of agricultural revolution, your cultures won't progress toward civilization or past stone-age technology.  I'm not assigning that any sort of value judgment-- simply that the two go hand-in-hand.  You can't have a culture that remains hunter-gatherer but yet has cities with electricity and quantum computers.**

So, what foods can be the ones people eat and domesticate in this period?  You can look to the "founder crops", which were crucial in our Fertile Crescent, but that wasn't the only place where agriculture appeared.  There are other ways to go. 

Fortunately, Lynne Olver has put tons of work into The Food Timeline, a website that is an absolute treasure trove of information.  Pretty much every kind of food, she tells you when and where it came into use. 

It's important to remember this transition is a slow one, taking several thousand years, and once it get going, it tends to spread, at least along east-west lines.  But that means a lot of things can be happening in your world long before anyone figures out to write it down.

---
*- Is Stonepunk a thing?   If not, shouldn't it be?
**- Not to poke at any specific Hugo-winning novel. 

Worldbuilding and the Challenges of the Cosmopolitan City

So, I've finally begun the work on The Little East (aka the sequel to A Murder of Mages) in earnest.  Without delving too deep into spoilers, it deals with investigations in the sub-neighborhood generally referred to as The Little East, which is kind of Maradaine's equivalent to Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Italy and Little Ukraine all rolled together.

Except not exactly, because none of the foreign cultures that are enclaved the Little East are really equivalent to Earth cultures.  Not exactly.

And that's the big challenge I've given myself with this book.  I need to depict these cultures as their own thing, unique to my world.  If readers start going through and going, "Oh, these people are just Japan with the serial numbers filed off" or something like that... then I've done something wrong.

So, how do I accomplish that, exactly?  One way is by trying to avoid any cultural buzzwords that will immediately but a specific culture in mind, especially in combinations.  You might be able to get away with "silk" or "paper lanterns" without evoking China, but put both together, and that's where your readers will go.

The other thing I try to do is give each culture some unique element or feel that doesn't directly evoke any real world culture.  For one culture, for example, there's a caste system that involves dying the hair specific colors. 

How do you evoke new cultures in your worldbuilding without making it feel like a copy-and-paste job?

Worldbuilding: Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them

As an old school D&D person, one of the things I loved about the old Monster Manual was that it wasn't just a listing of monsters and their combat stats.  Care was taken it A. also putting regular animals in there and B. discussing the behavior, habitats, biology and ecology of all the creatures discussed.

Earlier when I talked about Bottom-Up Worldbuilding, I touched briefly on adding the flora and fauna, and how those decisions would shape the cultures around them.  Of course, those choices also have to fit the environments around them.  You can't just, for example, stick lions or tigers or bears just anywhere because they're awesome.

Nor can you have any animals just be domesticated, just because that's what you want.  The animals domesticated over the course of human history were domesticatible for a reason.  And more to the point, those that were NOT, were not for a reason.  Zebras are the angry jerks of the equine family, and they do not want to be your friend.  Bison are skittish and can JUMP like you wouldn't believe, and thus are challenging to put into a corral.  Elephants can be tamed, but they stay pregnant for two years, just to have one calf, which makes raising them for meat or transport unideal. 

But this is fantasy worldbuilding, and you can make whatever creatures you want, right?  Right. But make sure they make ecological sense. Fast-moving apex-predators, for example, are going to need a lot of calories, so their food supply should be ample, and there's a limit to how much competition they should have for that supply.   Non-domesticatible megafauna should have a good reason for not having been hunted to extinction for their delicious meat.*

And if you want to create a from-whole-cloth domesticated animals, remember that they should include many or all of the following traits:

1. Flexible diet (i.e., it can eat a variety of things, especially the foods that humans can either spare or not need themselves)
2. Reasonably fast growth rate (i.e., one where it's worth the trouble to domesticate it-- if it takes several years of care before you have a useable animal, it's not worth it.)
3. Can breed in captivity 
4. Pleasant disposition and minimal/usable panic reflex.
5. Social hierarchy, especially ones where humans can take over the role of pack leader.
6. Useful resource for humans: including and not limited to meat, milk, cloth, transport or labor. 

What animals do you use in your worldbuilding, and how do humans interact with them?

--

*- Australia had quite a bit of mega-fauna**, including cow-sized marsupials and sheep-sized monotremes (platypuses), but a leading theory is that when early humans arrived in Australia, they were already accomplished hunters, while the Australian animals were not accustomed to humans or being hunted, and thus were easily hunted.  Contrast that to African megafauna, which had the advantage of evolving with humans, and thus learning how to adapt to human hunting techniques.
**- If you want some inspiration for fantastic-seeming creatures, googling "Australian Megafauna" is a wonderful way to go.

Worldbuilding: Pure Bottom-Up Worldbuilding

Since I'm in the process of editing my draft of Thorn II and working on the rough of Murder of Mages II, I clearly don't have enough on my plate. 

At least, that's what part of my brain seems to think.

Because that part of my brain has become strangely obsessed with an idea of a brand-spanking-new-from-scratch worldbuilding project.  And by "from-scratch", I mean completely.

Whenever we do worldbuilding, there is typically some form of top-down idea guiding the process.  There's some underlying idea of what we want the world to be or have, the technology leer, the way the culture is.  We start from that concept and build down, forming the infrastructure to make that idea work. 

And there's nothing wrong with that.

But it tends to create limiting ideas-- secondary fantasy worlds that still are, in essence, England or Italy or Arabia or Japan in medieval or rennaisance times, or steampunked or otherwise tweaked.  The scent of the familiar stays with it. 

And, again, there's nothing wrong with that.  It makes it easy to define when it comes to writing stories.

But I've been thinking more and more about what really, truly working from the bottom-up would bring about.  That means starting with the land itself, building the details of geography and climate.  From there, decisions about flora and fauna-- especially the key domesticatible plants and animals, and then determining where the "cradle of life" where humans or other intelligent life emerges (indeed, if it's a fantasy world, the decision to have multiple intelligent species is crucial).  Once that cradle is determined, you would determine the pre-historic diaspora, as people spread across the world as hunter-gatherers before they start settling into agriculture.  And that's dependent on if settling into agriculture is even a viable option given their terrain and available possible crops.

From that point, the slow development of civilization and cultures as states and empires rise and fall, develop and regress.

Of course, the question is, would this be a valuable exercise?  Would the deliberate bottom-up process yield results that were significantly different than the more typical top-down one?  And more to the point, would it give a world that would be an interesting and dynamic setting for stories, or would it be little more than an intellectual exercise to its own end?

And is it a process a person can realistically do on their own?

I'm honestly not sure.  But I think it's worth exploring, and I'd love to hear other thoughts on the subject.

Perils of the Writer: Real World Politics and SF/F

I don't usually bring up real-world politics here.  But it's been drumming around the circle for a while now, so I might as well address it. I might be something of a rare bird in this industry, in that I'm on friendly terms with people with vastly varying political leaning.  People who I disagree with, even vehemently.  And don't get me wrong, I do love occasionally getting into it, politically speaking, as long as it's a good argument, and not just yelling, "You're wrong!" back and forth. 

But let's not confuse politics for behavior.

Because there are plenty of people-- people on the far left and far right, frankly-- who gleefully act like assholes, and then when called on that behavior, use their political affiliation as a shield.  "Oh, you're coming after me because of my beliefs!"  Terms like "witch hunt" are used, because it's easier to hide behind that, make yourself a victim, instead of acknowledging: hey, I'm acting like an asshole.

It's so much easier to act like you're being persecuted.

But if you act like an asshole-- and believe me, I've been there: back in my twenties I'm sure I had some Grade A moments-- people will and should call you on it, and it's disingenuous to say it's because of your politics.  You know why?  Because I know people with the same political lean who aren't assholes, so it's clearly not some sort of obligatory behavior based on political opinion.

I am all for people wearing their politics on their sleeves.  And put it in your fiction.  Have your fiction be a full-on polemic; rip your political opinion off your sleeve and shove it down my throat.  Politics I agree with, politics I don't agree with.  Go full out.

All I ask is that it actually be a good read, too, you know?

Which brings me around to the Hugo Nomination thing.  I want to believe that people who nominate things do so in good faith, even if they are politically motivated.  I haven't read Larry Correia's Warbound-- or anything else by him-- but I've seen enough people praise the books.  He was nominated for the Campbell a couple of years ago.  I can honestly believe that there are plenty of fans who really liked his book and feel it deserving of a "Best Novel" award, even if their reasoning was motivated by politics.

However, I actually read “Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day.  Now, I won't go into Mr. Day's personal history or anything-- it's out there and well documented, and you don't need me to give you an opinion on him.  You have your opinion, one way or another.    But here's the thing about “Opera Vita Aeterna": it's just poor writing.   Overly florid, trying-too-hard writing that, if I were in critique-teacher mode I would have made a lot of red-pen marks on. 

I get, as a matter of principle, wanting more stories with an explicitly conservative or religious message to them. I get wanting those stories to be lauded and nominated for awards.  If that's your political or theological lean, then of course you want to see that.  But given that, why would you hitch your wagon to a work that is so mediocre and hold it up as a shining example of the sort of thing you want to see?  What do you gain by that?

Worldbuilding: Integrating the Top Down and the Bottom Up

I'll fully admit, the worldbuilding work I've done for the Banshee space-opera verse has was done in a strange way.  Namely, I did a combination of top-down and bottom-up building. 

To define these terms: top-down building is when you make first big decisions about the different cultures, borders and interactions, and then build the map to meet those needs.  Bottom-up building is when you create the map first, and then figure out cultures, borders and interactions based on what the map demands.

Neither approach is right or wrong, good or bad.  They're just different ways to go about it.  In fact, I advocate the hybrid approach.

In this case, the "top down" involved the decisions about some of the alien cultures closest to Earth.  I knew one thing I wanted was a large Alliance in close proximity to Earth, who had taken a preservationist/non-interference attitude to the planetbound cultures in their spheres of influence.  I knew I wanted an aggressively expansionist culture (the Paxin) and an imperialist culture (the Surani), and a recent interstellar addition who would give the humans a good fight (the Krek'nik). 

Also, in general, I wanted our interstellar region to be filled with intelligent life that was all, more or less, in the same place-- i.e. everyone had gotten into space or could potentially get into space within a few centuries of each other (or in the case of the three "old" powers in the region, a few millennia)-- which, in cosmic terms is the blink of an eye and highly improbably, unless you incorporate a serious don't-poke-this-too-hard conceit.  Which I did. 

But, in terms of "bottom up", I knew I wanted the stellar geography to be sensible.  Real stars where they really are. Now, this meant I probably did a bit of homeworld-fudging-- I'm given to understand that Procyon is probably too young a star to have a planet with advanced life on it, for example-- but that fulfilled at least a sense of verisimilitude.

But the other "bottom up" aspect I had to ask myself was-- what else was out there?  I had the raw data on stars within 150 light-years of Earth, and from that, crafted some randomization for each star:  Are there planets?  Where are the planets?  Do any have life?  Is that life intelligent?  How technologically advanced is that intelligent life?  Have they achieved FTL travel, and if so, when?  From all that, I could build up exact details of the 147 starfaring cultures, and how their potential interaction might be.

This bottom-up method gave me the opportunity come up with ideas that I might never have had without star-map based data fueling it.  Seven alien cultures in relative proximity to each other form a loose coalition.  One advanced culture with no one in proximity builds a sizable empire before encountering any pushback.  Another with a powerful aggressive species nearby builds their culture on defending themselves. 

From this, I found more interesting discoveries.  I devised a little equation based on expansion (how many colonies or outposts a culture had) and their tech level, and were able to calculate who the true "First Level" powers in the region were.  And from that, I've been putting together how the Astronomical Geopolitics (Astropolitics?) really work. 

I'd like to think doing that work-- while anal and time-consuming-- has created something a little more organic than just a top-down alone process would have.

Worldbuilding: Music and Popular Culture

There are some fantasy writers-- I'm not going to name names and I'm not going to necessarily say, "This is bad" or such-- but there are some fantasy writers who will give you lyrics and lyrics of in-world songs.  Sometimes this gives you a fascinating look into history and culture.  Sometimes it stops the action dead while characters sit around and sing.

Again, not saying right or wrong, it's a stylistic choice.  Sometimes it pays off.

It's never the route I go, mostly because... not a lyricist.  If I wrote songs I might have a different frame of mind.  Now, I do have a poem in A Murder of Mages, but it's plot-relevant. Songs typically aren't.  They are a typically a pleasant diversion at best, a nice bit of atmosphere to set tone and enhance worldbuilding.

Because that's the important thing: music and songs are a critical aspect of culture, and thus part of worldbuilding.  Just ignoring it doesn't work any more than having it freeze up the narrative.

For example, in my backburnered work-in-progress Banshee, Lt. Kengle is the only human on a ship of aliens.  The only thing she really has to connect to, emotionally, is her music.  Her music is, of course, 24th century music, and I really don't go into details about what, exactly it sounds like-- though I do highlight her preference for female singers (and that it is, still sung).  What I do go into is how listening to her music makes her feel.

Would you be able to hear it, reading the book?  Honestly, probably not.  But what you would get out of it is what it means to Lt. Kengle, culturally and personally.  That same technique can be applied-- in fantasy or sci-fi--  to any pop culture element: music, drama, sports, lifestyle.  The msot important aspect of it, in terms of your story, is not what it is, but how your characters feel about it.

Genre Writing and Honesty

So let me talk a bit about Arrow, which is probably my favorite show currently airing on network television.  And it's certainly the best superhero-genre show, well, ever.  A big part of why it is lands on how it handles its subject matter.

Usually when superheroes go to TV or the movies, there are two ways it gets played: one is the Dark And Gritty method, launched with Batman Begins.  Everything is played with as much gritty realism as possible.  It isn't a terrible approach, but it doesn't always work.  Case in point, the recent interesting failure that was Man of Steel.  It treats its subject matter seriously, but does so by attempting to undercut the source.

The other way is to go full out, but with a bit cynicism.  It's as if the project knowingly winks at the audience and says, "Yeah, this is dumb, but roll with us here."  And, again, you're undercutting the source.  A prime example would be when the show Smallville first started.  The producers went on record saying, "No flights, no tights".  This was an explicit promise: don't worry, we won't be doing that stupid stuff as part of our Superman story. 

What Arrow does is own its source material with honesty.  This isn't the same as being grimly realistic.  Hell, it has a WWII-era Japanese experiment called "mirakuru" that gives its recipients super strength and healing, but at the expense of their sanity.  It has introduced Barry Allen, including the accident that will give him his super-speed as The Flash.  But it does all this as if these elements are simply part of their reality.  Taken seriously, fully owned.

And that's part of the secret of strong genre writing.  Write every element as if it's simply part of the reality the characters live with.  It's not fantastical or science-fiction to them, even when they learn about some element for the first time.  

Approach it with honesty instead of apology.

And so we're clear, I do think writing a exposition-heavy beginning, or even a prologue, can be a form of apologetic weak writing.  When done poorly, it becomes something like, "OK, I know this is silly, but here's a bunch of stuff you need to know to understand what's going on, and I'm sorry, but let's get through this bit, and then stuff will get good around, like, chapter five or so."

Screw that.  Write it real, write it honest, and you won't need to do that.  Trust your reader, that they're willing to get on board with you, and hit the ground running.

Mark Your Calendars: ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop

So, I haven't quite started bulking up my Con appearances yet-- I'll save that more for the back end of 2014, and expect to see me attending several in 2015, at least in Texas. 

But I will definitely be attending ArmadilloCon (July 25th-27th) , in part because it's my local con, and in part because I'm running the Writers' Workshop with Stina Leicht.

I've spoken before of the workshop, and if you followed my Path To Publication posts, you saw that I attended several times before "graduating" to the other side of the table.  So I say as a former student, this is a very valuable resource for an up-and-coming writer.  Now, in being responsible for it, it is of great importance to me to maintain that level of quality.

Think about it: for $70, you A. get full attendance to ArmadilloCon plus B. get the workshop on Friday.  A full day of panels and interactive critique of your work by writing professionals.  For the aspiring professional writer, that is invaluable.

So: Friday, July 25th for the workshop.  Deadline for submission is June 15th.  If you can attend, I highly recommend it.

Path to Publication, Part V: Crash and Epiphany

By 2007, I had attended the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop twice.   I have my "finished" novel The Fifty Year War, and a handful of fits and starts, including Crown of Druthal, which had been moving forward with a snail-like pace.

Because I wasn't working with diligence.  Hell, there were many days in which even the act of opening the Word document was more than I could manage.

I was miserable.

I won't go so far as to say I was clinically or chemically depressed.  I don't think I was, in any sort of official diagnosis.  But I was unhappy, mostly with the fact that I was working a job that felt utterly pointless, and couldn't muster up the energy to do something more pointy with myself.

I had to make a change.

I made some investigations about changing jobs, but I began to realize that was really just trying to put a band-aid over a gaping chest wound.  Something more radical needed to be done, and I had to really interrogate myself of what I wanted and what I was going to do to make it happen. 

So I quit the job.

Radical.  And fortunately I have a wife who, after her initial shock, was very supportive of working out a new plan. You know how most acknowledgements in books thank their spouses?  Truth to the infinite power in my case. She backed me then and continues to back me out of a faith that this was something I really could do. But part of that meant I had to stop being a dilettante about the idea of writing and treat it like real work that I was striving to be better at. 

This involved really starting to investigate how I wrote.  I realized I couldn't just sit and jot out whatever came to mind and see where it went.  That might work for some writers, and if it does for you, great, but it definitely does not work for me.  So I sat down and really worked out the outline of where Crown of Druthal was supposed to go. 

My last day of work at that job was August 2nd, 2007.  The rough draft of Crown was finished by the end of that month. 

And it was a hot mess, of course, but I was fired up now.  I was going to clean it up and sell this, no matter what.

You notice how my announced sale is not for Crown of Druthal?  And how that was almost seven years ago?  Yeah, this is a story of patience, persistence and self-awareness.

Crown of Druthal has some really good bits to it.  It shows a certain degree of burgeoning talent that, in the John-Campbell-at-Astounding era of SF writing, might have found a mentor figure to shepherd it-- or me as a writer-- to the next level. 

I did do my research on agents and publishers, and despite it not being ready (which I didn't realize at the time), I started querying Crown.  My query letter was probably as not-ready, as I didn't get a single response.

But I was fired up, and not about to stop.  Because already at this point, I had realized I needed to think long game.  I needed to think with breadth.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  I would have put Crown directly to market.  I was even tempted, looking at services like Lulu or Xlibris.  And given that the responses of both my query attempts at the beta-readers I sought were so tepid, it's best that I did nothing of the sort.  Crown has some good bits, but it's mostly a plotless meander, a travelogue novel where what happens is dictated by where I wanted to take the characters on their tour of the worldbuilding work I did.  A self-published Crown of Druthal would have been a disaster, and I'm glad I trusted those voices (internal and external) that told me not to do it.

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: I was finally getting a handle on how I wrote.  I had dropped any romantic notions of "just sit and write and see where it takes me."  It took me nowhere.  I learned that I needed to come up with an outline, and more than that, started to get the idea that a novel structure with a plot was crucial to writing something dynamic.

Path to Publication, Part III: The Terrible Dread of NaNoWriMo

OK, so, I've knocked on NaNoWriMo before.  I honestly think it's a good exercise, a way to learn your writing habits, figure out how to write a novel, and understand the way you work.

I don't think it's a good way to get great work.

This, of course, took first-hand learning.

The three years after the failed project fell apart involved several false starts for novels, most of which were connected to the worldbuilding work I had done in the fantasy setting.  I had done tons of detail work and history work-- work that still stands, as it is the world that Thorn and Mages is set in.  And I think a big part of the challenge I had to get over was understanding that just because I had done all that worldbuilding work, it didn't mean I had to share it all.

What I had kind of settled on was the idea of writing a series that was the proto-Crown of Druthal, though it was set in an embassy instead of a ship.  But the "Explain All The Things" part of my brain felt I had to properly set things up.  That readers would need to know the WHOLE STORY to make sense of things. 

I think this is a trap fantasy writers often fall into. 

Anyhow, this became the central idea behind what I would make my 2003 NaNoWriMo project: The Fifty Year War.  A novel which would flesh out the history of the war between Druthal and Poasia.  You know, the stuff that readers would be dying to know.

Now, I did succeed as a NaNoWriMo, writing around 53,000 words in November.  And the "finished" first draft was around 60K. 

But it was horrible.

It was a novel in which I had clearly absorbed all the wrong lessons from Isaac Asimov and David Weber.   It was a novel by the way of interconnected novellas, like Foundation, but unlike Foundation, there was no central theme or core to carry it through.  And certainly no core characters.  The closest thing to a central character wasn't a character, but a series of descendents in the same family who serve in the war.     It was a novel in which, like Weber's Honor Harrington books there are several meetings, in which people you never met before and won't meet again tell each other things that you don't care about. 

Fifty Year War was a book with no heart, no soul, and certainly nothing resembling a proper plot.   It comes across as a bad prequel to a thing that didn't exist yet, hitting the notes to set things up in a perfunctory way, without any sense that those set-ups existed for any organic reason beyond "set things where they needed to be".

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  At the time I really believed in Fifty Year War, though for the life of me I don't know why I thought that.  It isn't an interesting work, but if the means had been a bit more convenient at the time, I might have convinced myself it should be self-published.  And I would have been wrong, because it is awful.  Further revisions made it less awful, but it is such a mess at its core, no amount of editing could save the patient.  So, if I had put it out there, it would have failed, and it would have felt like a toxic albatross on my name and the world I had built. 

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: At this point, the main thing I had learned was-- roughly-- the discipline behind writing a novel, the level of planning that needed to go into getting it done.  But even then, I was still untempered.  I needed to figure out what a novel was beyond "a whole lot of writing".  But reaching the point of sitting down and writing a novel-like-object to completion was something of a milestone.

And now... breathe

So, that happened.  There's pretty much nothing I can post today that wouldn't be a come-down after that enormous news. 

That's all right, because that news is big enough for a few days.

But the question is, now what? Right now, I'm kind of in the eye of the storm.  Things are about to gear up, but they haven't yet.  Things on the horizon: final edits, cover art, galley proofs, release, etc., etc.  I'm really looking forward to the whole process, and I'll make an effort to be transparent enough so that people who are coming up the road behind me can learn a thing or two from my process.

So, for the time being, I just get my bearings. 

And read over my outlined plans for sequels for Thorn and Murder of Mages.  Because now I've got a very good reason to start working on those.

All right, if I'm being honest, I've already started work on Thorn II.

Because let's face it... this process of waiting, wondering when this was going to happen, even if it was going to happen... that's been a huge weight on my shoulders.  Now I can put that burden down.  But it's not time to rest.  It's time to run.  It's time to fly.

Worldbuilding: Aliens and Daily Rhythms of Life

So: get up in the morning, shower, dress, breakfast.  Commute to work, work throughout the morning, take some time for lunch, back to work until the end of the evening.  Commute home, have dinner, attend to duties of household and family, engage in some sort of minor recreation activity before settling down for (preferably) eight hours of sleep to repeat the following morning.

An average day for the average person in modern day North America.

But if you expand it to all the humans on Earth, then it's a different story.  Different rhythms, different daily rituals.  Although most humans prefer to operate in the daytime and sleep at night, even that is hardly universal. 

So, of course, for alien species, the "daily" rhythm is going to be something quite different.  Even what might be considered a "day" to them could be very different, depending on their biological needs and the rotation of their homeworld. 

I started thinking about this more and more with Banshee.  As with many things in that work, I thought about something that was sort of taken for granted on Star Trek, and inverted it.  Namely, the way the time schedules work.  Sure, they use "star dates", so it isn't just exclusively using the Gregorian Calendar, but the day-to-day is still very human.  Life on the Enterprise or Voyager is still a 24-hour day*, and the duty roster is split into three eight-hour shifts.  There's still a "night" shift**, which is incredibly arbitrary in space.   It's not like things are quieter or less active because of when you decided to schedule your sleeptime.

But what's fascinating is, at least on Trek, there isn't even much lip-service to the idea that Klingons, Vulcans, Trill or any other species might be on a different life-cycle.  One exception: Phlox on Enterprise, whose need for sleep is essentially a six-day hibernation every year. 

Now, part of the fun I've had on Banshee involved taking that to an extreme: you have a ship with eleven different species, and each species is on a different rhythm.  To the point that the higher-ups don't even bother setting a schedule or "ship's time".  You need to sleep, eat, or deal with other biological functions?  Go ahead.  That's your priority, and you deal with it as you need.  It's not for anyone else to say you can't do that.

For a human officer, used to a strict regiment and set duty roster... that's very disconcerting.  But that's part of what she needs to learn to deal with.



---
*- On Deep Space Nine, they at least had a 26-hour day, which was based on Bajor, but even still: hours.  And the rest still applies.
**- "Night" shift might be on some universal-ship time throughout Starfleet, but it seems to be more, "When the Captain is sleeping, that's the night shift". 

Banshee, and the Slow Cooker Process: 2013 in Review, Part Three

The other big milestone, in terms of what I've been writing, that I hit in 2013 was getting solidly underway on Banshee. 

Banshee is a project that's been stewing in the back of my mind for a long, long time, and has gone through several permutations in that slow cooking process.

Part of the reason I took such a long time to get around to this is the little promise I made to myself to finish the first books of my four "Maradaine" series before I really moved on to a new major writing project.  I'm not entirely sure why I felt I had to do them first, but that's how I felt, but on some level it was probably a good thing.

Because the Banshee I would have written several years ago is not the work I'm writing now.  Not even remotely.  Essentially everything except the central character (Lt. Samantha Kengle) and the name of the ship (and only tangentially) is different now.  And in the older versions, Lt. Kengle was more the nominal lead in an ensemble, and now she's in the central spotlight, the only POV character. 

Part of that had to do with the worldbuilding.  I started the Space Opera setting that Banshee lives in way back in 2002, but it's evolved and grown a lot in the past eleven years.  As have my writing skills.  My first attempts at Banshee, some of which reached nearly 50,000 words, were all wrong.  Essentially fanfic for a universe that only existed in my head.  It was only after I really started to interrogate what the story was, and who it was about, and why it was about them, that the pieces really came together.

When I shipped Way of the Shield off to the agent, Banshee was really ready to go like gangbusters.  And in about three months, it's about two-thirds to three-quarters done.  Not too shabby.

So that was 2013, which turned out to be a pretty good year for my writing. And I have a very good feeling that 2014 will turn out even better.

Jump the Black- 2013 in Review, Part One

On January 1st, 2013, I sold Jump the Black to Rick Klaw's Texas-themed sci-fi anthology Rayguns Over Texas, which was my first pro-level genre sale.*

I haven't ever really talked about the story itself, as it didn't seem appropriate when I first sold it. 
When it was coming out, it made more sense to talk about the anthology as a whole. 

I should preface this by saying I'm really not a short-story writer.  It's just not a format I have a lot of affinity for, and I don't tend to write them without a specific purpose or plan.  However, "invited to submit to this anthology" works very well as a specific purpose or plan. 

So, I received the invite and remembered a nugget of an idea that I had had for a sci-fi story.  It was little more than this: A sci-fi future with a large interstellar, multi-alien community, but Earth isn't a part of it.  Earth is the place you leave to have opportunity.  Earth is Mexico.

I did some research into border crossings, the lengths people go to in order to get in the States.  I thought about "coyotes"-- those who "help" others get across the border, and the methods they use to do it.  The conditions people will submit themselves to, the trust they will place on those bringing them, and the hope that when they emerge on the other side that an opportunity will be there that will make it all worth it.





And I wanted something in there that could be a direct allegory to swimming across the Rio Grande. Thus "jumping the black"-- where the smuggled humans, freshly awoken from the paralytic "sleep" they were put in to avoid getting noticed by the scans-- have to leap through empty space from the smuggler's cargo hold to a port left open on the space station, so that they're off the smuggler's ship before his cargo gets inspected.  If the humans jumping don't make it safely... that's their problem.  Also, if they get caught right when they get in the station, their problem. 

I really enjoyed writing this, and it definitely clicked one big button for me: I could write a lot more of it.  I kept it at 4000 words to make it fit easily in the anthology, but I could easily expand the story to novella length, building out what happens next once the humans make it off the rock.

But, as I said, selling that on January 1st was an excellent way to start 2013, and I was quite pleased to see it in print in September.

--
*- My story for The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction was paid at over a dollar per word, but it was only 21 words long.  Twenty-two with the title.  But it wasn't genre.

A Rare Moment of Blatant Plugging: Give the Gift of Texas this Christmas

Folks: Christmas is coming, and I'm busy keeping balls in the air this week, so let's keep this short and sweet.

What are you giving your Science Fiction reading friends and family for Christmas this year?  Consider the merits of giving Rayguns Over Texas, a compilation of science-fiction short stories entirely by Texas writers. 

It's quite an impressive line-up of writers and stories, if I do say so myself. 

•     “Pet Rock” by Sanford Allen
•     “Defenders of Beeman County” by Aaron Allston
•     “TimeOut” by Neal Barret, Jr.
•     “Babylon Moon” by Matthew Bey
•     “Sovereign Wealth” by Chris N. Brown
•     “La Bamba Boulevard” by Bradley Denton
•     “The Atmosphere Man” by Nicky Drayden
•     “Operators Are Standing By” by Rhonda Eudaly
•     “Take a Left at the Cretaceous” by Mark Finn
•     “Grey Goo and You” by Derek Austin Johnson
•     “Rex” by Joe R. Lansdale
•     “Texas Died for Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine” by Stina Leicht
•     “Jump the Black” by  Marshall Ryan Maresca
•     “An Afternoon’s Nap, or; Five Hundred Years Ahead” by Aurelia Hadley Mohl
•     “The Nostalgia Differential” by Michael Moorcock
•     “Novel Properties of Certain Complex Alkaloids” by Lawrence Person
•     “The Chambered Eye” by Jessica Reisman
•     “Avoiding the Cold War” by Josh Rountree
•     “The Art of Absence” by Don Webb

If you're still not convinced, then you can preview every story here.

Perils of the Writer: Hooks and Investment

Let's talk for a moment about Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, possibly the biggest disappointment of the current season of television.  And it was the biggest disappointment because the expectations were set high: take the biggest hit of big screen of 2012, a movie which successfully integrated the worlds of multiple movies to create a mega-star movie, and have the acclaimed and beloved writer/director of that movie helm a new show to explore the deeper nooks and crannies of the greater Marvel cinematic universe that a movie couldn't take the screen time to do.

How could it fail?

If I may be so bold, I'd suggest that it failed with its hooks.  Namely, it treats its characters as its biggest hooks, when those characters are not hooking the audience at all. And it feels like it considers it's big hook-- its setting-- as more of an albatross than advantage.  One of the executive producers was even quoted saying something like, "You shouldn't be looking for easter eggs".

Now half a season in, its somewhat clear that what we are seeing is not the "growing pains" of a genre show finding its feet.  Rather, we're seeing the very show the creators want to do: in essence, a brighter, less skeptical* X-Files.  

And that isn't hooking.

Now that's always the challenge a writer faces: that the characters that you love, these hooks that fascinate you... well, that it's just you.  No one else is going to invest in it like you do.

And this is especially true with genre writers.  We spent hours upon hours drawing maps and hashing out centuries of history.  We are deeply, deeply invested in our work, even if the quality of the work itself doesn't match the passion behind it.  I can't tell you how many manuscripts I've read for critiquing purposes that, while the writing didn't hold up, the love was practically pouring off the page.

I didn't get into the story, but I knew that the writer was utterly in love with it. 

And, frankly, the craft can be improved, if the love is there.

---
*- By "less skeptical", I mean when they're investigating hovering bodies or apparent telekinesis, they approach it as you would in a world where superheroes beat off an alien invasion in downtown New York: as the sort of thing you have to accept happens now. 

Worldbuilding: Rituals for the Dead

I've gone over this before, but it bears repeating: cultures have rituals to mark almost every important occasion: marking adulthood or marriage, for example.  Or, it the case of the Minbari of Babylon 5, every single thing possible.

And then, of course, there are the rituals of death.

I've been thinking about this as something of a necessity for Banshee.  Without going into spoilers, various aliens die, and treating their bodies in a respectful manner for their cultures is important to the survivors.  

In coming up with rituals for the dead, be they for secondary-world human cultures, demi-human cultures, or alien cultures, you need to consider the purpose they serve.  On some level, you should address three elements of purpose.

Practical: The body itself must be dealt with.  Preserved, interred, cremated, otherwise kept from rotting on the floor.  It can be as simple as burial, as complicated as mummification, or somewhere in between.

Spiritual: On some level, the ritual should consider the intangible element of the deceased, matching the faith of the culture.  Does the lack of a proper burial mean the dead's spirit wanders the Earth, unable to reach the afterlife?

Emotional: Ultimately, rituals of the dead are for the bereaved.  They are how grief is processed, either publicly or privately. 

Ideally, your rituals address all three elements, or even better, integrate them into a unique whole. 

Consider, for example, the mummification rituals for the kings of ancient Egypt.  The actual mummification itself preserved the body, and it was interred in a tomb, designed for the purpose of giving the king everything he would need for the afterlife, allowing the people to process the death of a person they worshiped as a god, knowing that his time on earth was only part of his journey.

This is a pretty heavy-duty one, though.  You might want to come up with something simpler for the average person.

How do your cultures deal with their dead?