Tag Archives: writing

How to Build a World, (or at least how to keep track of it)

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A reader entering the world you created. (Source:Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888).)

A reader entering the world you created. (Source: Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888).)

Many articles and blogs have been written on Worldbuilding by writers far more experienced than I, such as here and here. Still, some lessons that I have learned may be helpful.

When I began writing my first steampunk novel To Rule the Skies, I had no idea that I was starting in the middle of Professor Nicodemus Boffin’s saga, but at some point I realized that Boffin’s back story would make a fine story in itself. Now that I’m deep into writing another book (the aforementioned prequel), I think a lot about the world I’ve created for my characters to live in (which I call the “Boffin-verse”), and spend a lot of time making sure that it’s all consistent. Continue reading →

Nigh comes the Anteprologue!

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I am putting the finishing touches on a stand-alone Airship Flamel piece.  Chronologically, it comes immediately prior to the beginning of my upcoming novel To Rule the Skies.  Think of it in the same vein as the Doctor Who webisodes between seasons or the Marvel One-Shots that give more background to various characters in the Marvel Universe.  The problem is:  What to call it?

Even though it’s a prologue to the novel, I can’t title it “Prologue”, because the novel already has a Prologue.  There doesn’t seem to be a word that means “the chapter before the Prologue”.

So, I’m inventing one–Anteprologue.

It’s analogous to the ultimate, penultimate,antepenultimate, preantepenultimate series (I just discovered that last one).  And I like chewing through stacked prefixes (so long as they make sense like “hemidemisemiquaver”–a 64th note).

Which reminds me of two favorite and, I believe, useful words in German:  vorgestern and übermorgen which mean, respectively, “the day before yesterday” and “the day after tomorrow.”  I don’t know if any other languages have these useful words.  English apparently did at one point–ereyesterday and overmorrow–which are direct parallels of the German words.  They’re cited as being first used in the 1500s, and seem to have immediately not caught on.

So, watch for my Anteprologue on the overmorrow or so!