(WBM stands for World Building Month) While travelling to San Francisco to pick up my girlfriend the other day I started considering what sort of world I wanted to build. I already knew it was going to focus on the things present within two of my short stories, so that was the easy part. I had two cities to work with: Barksville and New Timberfax. The latter does present a problem, however, because it begs the question of where the regular Timberfax actually is. I don’t know at the moment. That’s something to worry about later.In any case, while I waited in the airport whilst consuming a piece of Turtle Cheesecake at a place called Just Desserts, I started drawing a map in one of my Moleskines (the one with the graph paper lines). And things started to take shape…and world, a continent with interesting features. It’s not finished yet, but here is what it looks like as of right now:This is just the start, of course, and I have big plans for this continent. It’ll be a land of magic, swords, and crazy stuff. You can probably tell by some of the strange structuring that this will have some truly bizarre things in it. Now, as for the two towns I mentioned (or cities), I thought I’d offer a little discussion on them: New TimberfaxThis is the setting of a story I’m working on called “The Gnomes of New Timberfax” (which is probably pretty obvious). New Timberfax is a small city, but not too small. Right now I know it has a big hospital (a medieval hospital with some modern fixings, though not too modern). I want the world NT is in to have a lot of the medieval feel, but I don’t want it to be an intentional rehash of all those medeival worlds that people create. I want it to have a modern flavor mixed in. I don’t know how that will work, but we’ll see. NT is a bit like an old English town with some good old fashioned 1950s culture tossed in. BarksvilleThis place is actually just a village consisting of maybe one hundred or two hundred people. It’s a somewhat isolated place near a very thick and well stocked (with animals for the hunt that is) forest. One of the things I’ve established for this town is that they have a yearly “hunt”, which is conducted with another town that lies on the other side of the forest. Both villages send their men out, armed, and they work their way towards one another and share the “bounty” in the end. It’s sort of an uneasy peace between them. They don’t like each other much, but they do cooperate.And…Barksville has a few secrets that only the women are aware of. The main secret is that the town is haunted by the Ellefolk, though the men are mostly unaware of this fact, but do what the wives tell them out of tradition. I won’t ruin what that is all about, though, as that would make one of my stories rather pointless. And that’s what I got for the time being. More to come, of course, especially updates on the map. Enjoy!
