(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!

Apparently August is World Building Month. I suppose this is because NaNo is coming, and I’m quite excited to take part in this, even if I don’t take part in NaNo. I’ve decided to participate, even though I am late. So, what world am I going to build?Well, I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot since yesterday and I’ve decided that I’d like to start building up the world where some of my short stories are set, mostly because there was never a connection between them before. There are currently two stories set in what will be a new fantasy world: “The Beautiful Are Not Far Away” and “The Gnomes of New Timberfax”. There may be other stories, but right now that is it.So, what is this world called? I don’t really know at the moment. We’ll just call it “Timbergnomelle” for now, because that at least encompasses all the stuff I have for it right now. I suspect it will be a rather large world and quirky. How quirky? I’m shooting for high fantasy, but with silliness tossed in the mix. Perhaps it will be a fully developed YA world or adult; I don’t really know. At this point I just want to start worldbuilding and drawing maps. This will get me into the spirit of fantasy I think. I have three worlds as it is: Traea/WISB, which is partially finished as far as worldbuilding goes (some of Traea is missing and there is a second continent); the world of Mirland, which is where “Irlgem” is set and there is more to that world that I haven’t divulged as of yet (and a short story I’ve yet to finish set in one of the kingdoms of that world), and then there’s this world I’m going to be working on. WISB is the only world that has been developed enough for novel length work, and I made a lot of mistakes in creating that, initially at least. I don’t want to make those mistakes this time, which is why I’m participating in World Building Month. I want to make sure I write things down before I start writing it. That’s the smart thing to do (short stories really don’t count as being extensive additions to the world, since they are relatively isolated from what might be the grander scheme of things).So, that’s what I’m going to be worldbuilding about. As for some sort of order, I’m a bit lost. Should I follow some sort of world building list and simply go down the line? Or just haphazardly, jumping around at will? What do you think will make for more interesting blog posts?