[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]
So you’ve got the origin of your universe (or perhaps you used our universe as a template, which does save a lot of effort). So now that you know how it all began, it’s time to move things to the next level. Namely, what’s going on in the places your characters will be living, working, loving, dying, and in other ways advancing the plot.
Cosmology is decided. Time to move to Ecology
Now when I talk Ecology, that’s a word with a lot of meanings and a lot of applications. So for the sake of the column I’m defining Ecology in world building as how you define how the living parts of your setting (world, worlds, etc.) work, relate, interact, etc. Your plants, animals, biospheres, diseases, and the like. I’ll refer to it as Ecology with a capital “E” for general purposes, and with a small “e” for specifics.
You know, where life comes from and/or lives. Life in short, like your characters, or the things they’ll be interacting with, domesticating, fighting, eating, and so on. Or come to think of it the reverse as well . . . (more…)
If you can read this then it means that my latest addition to the Sanctum is working. If you can’t . . . well then you don’t know to laugh at me.
So what you’re seeing is codex.seventhsanctum.com – a non-generator section of Seventh Sanctum that will host columns, updates, and more. Basically I wrapped the Sanctum theme around a CMS in a rather educational endeavor that yielded some pretty decent results.
Now I’m going to give it a few days to settle in, then start getting to work with it. See, this is an entire content system, so it doesn’t just have to be me posting – it can be other people, autoposts, etc. I’m going to play with this for awhile to see what we can do.
– Steven Savage
[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]
For the next few columns I’ll be looking at specific things that you need to do and define when building your setting. This should not be taken as the only things that you have to do, but instead a list of basics, with advice and ideas on how you can develop them best. I’m sure you’ll have your own ways to do things, that I may miss things, or that your writing may have some unique needs.
But it’s a place to start. In fact, on the subject of “starting,” the first thing we’re going to look at is literally the First Thing: The Origin of your setting. (more…)
Well with the site rewritten, the numbers back, a new year starting, and some time off I decided to write a brand new, in-depth generator to finally solidify the mojo that’s come back. So I chose something that seemed both easy and popular, the Magical Legend Pony Namer, which seemed simple and fun, and of course played into the most unexpected fandom ever to dominate the internet and the insanely long-lived collector enthusiasm.
Actually it works pretty well, but what was stunning – and indeed obsession-making – is it taught me about language patterns I’d missed. This is actually going to help out in future generators. Without boring you (because I could go on) here’s what I learned, mostly thanks to the incredibly extensive online resources I found.
Lesson One. There’s a continuity between descriptive terms and objects – but it’s not that some objects can also define things (like the word “silver”) but objects at times define objects (the words “Pasta Salad” have an object defining another object). So there’s a little more complexity than I realized here, and I think future (and revised) generators will be better for noticing this.
Lesson Two. Names have a level of formality about the – or a lack. The level of formality affects how you associate names, words, titles, and concepts and the difference between a formal name and a nickname. This is reasonably easy to classify, actually.
So I learned something. I just didn’t expect to. I’ll now leave you to the names.
– Steven Savage
Just a quick announcement – I re-added/re-engineered the ability to select how many results you get from the generators. I also figured out a way to make it work and scale on different devices, which was a surprising pain in the backside, frankly.
So let me know if everything is working OK!
– Steve
Hello everyone, and here’s the latest update.
Thanks to everyone who took the poll on my plans to add some content and community to the Sanctum. Before I get to that however I do want to address the issue of removing the option to decide how many entries to generate. A lot of people wanted it back.
I had waffled on this because removing the option didn’t seem to make much impact and it kept things simple. But in the poll, someone gave a me case of why they needed to modify how many entries they got. That was the real convincer for me. So I’ve mulled over some ways to work that into the current layout, and I think I have an idea, so I’m going to work to put the choose-your-amount option back in, though I think I’ll have it default to maximum.
That kind of feedback is really helpful. I need to know how people use the site. So in the future if you want a change or have a new idea, spell it out in detail, it helps a lot!
So now what the poll told me!
First of all, people are in general behind adding a content/blog/library section. But it’s not everyone’s primary interest – more of a secondary (20% of people were neutral, 8% didn’t like it or really disliked it, 55% were for “pretty good” and 17% were really enthused). That tells me that it’s a decent idea, and one I’ll do for various advantages, but its appeal is mostly secondary to the larger audience. Right now I plan to add one, but I probably won’t trick it out with any bells or whistles right now – though as I’m going to be doing some really weird stuff to make it work, that may be secondary.
Secondly, I got some good suggestions from the polls period – and not just on the number selections. So I think I’ll do some of these now and them! Also frankly it’s kind of fun.
Third, yes, I am going to be making more generators. Now that I got the site rewritten and have my mojo back, I plan to add new ones over time. I’ve got about one to three I want to do now more for fun – and one silly one turned out to be a fascinating exploration of language structure I want to finish.
Fourth, I got other good ideas for the site I may give a shot, mostly usability tweaks. Stay tuned 😉
Finally, for those asking for a mobile version of the site, the site is optimized to work across devices, though a vertical cell phone profile is a bit hinky. I am looking into making it into an app (though the generators based on other media wouldn’t be there), but that’s more later 2014 if I try it – a friend is experimenting with such things and we may team up.
– Steven Savage
[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. (more…)
First of all thanks to everyone who participated in the poll!. I have to do these more often!
And the results? Well the results surprised me but also point in a clear direction.
First of all, only a bit over 20% of people wanted no social or content features on Seventh Sanctum – but the rest was near-evenly split over “yes” or “not sure” with a slight lean to yes. What was amazingly clear from the comments was that people were worried social media, forums, blogs, and so on would take over the site.
That at first surprised me, because the focus of the site is on generators – until I thought about it and agree, yes, social media and features can change sites and not always for the better. Buttons for social media end up everywhere. Forums can consume a site. A blog can become a giant mess of irrelevant articles.
So your voices were heard. Don’t worry I never intended the site to get like that anyway, but I now understand how people feel even better.
Now when it came to what people wanted to see content and feature-wise, it was very big on two things – tips and info, and user contributions. Message boards came in behind that and other features were more distant, with mailing lists losing out – but more on that later.
So people want information and useful stuff, and maybe some things about what’s going on with the users.
On top of this some people had other generator suggestions, so I may need to run polls like this regularly to get new ideas. Two things to get out of the way:
- Those of you wanting a way to subscribe to generators by email or RSS feed, I’ve actually experimented with it . . . no promises, but there’s a few fun things I’ve done lately that point at interesting directions.
- It seems people want the number options back on the generators. I’m considering some ideas (like having the HIGHEST be the default then you can choose less). The biggest challenge ironically is putting them in the new layout.
Now, this all gives me a direction. The site is fine, but more content would be great as long as it’s part of the site and doesn’t predominate, and social tools and interactions are good only in limited ways or when they don’t take over.
So here’s my plan.
- The site pretty much stays as is. That’s a given, though obviously I’ll tweak things and add stuff, and of course occasionally redesign it.
- I’ll add a subdomain like “zine.seventhsanctum.com” or “stuff.seventhsanctum.com” or something that will be sort of The Library. This will be part of the site that contains archives, information, and so forth. To do this I can probably wrap the Sanctum Bootstrap template around a blog or CMS system and make an ez-to-post archive (if I can’t then we’re back to square one – and my first goal is to keep the site stable).
- The “Library” (or whatever I call it) will be where updates, advice, regular columns (like Way With Worlds), and so on are posted. It will allow discussion (via Disqus of course). The feed will display on the front page where the old blog is now.
- The “Library” will be specifically for advice, updates, and discussing creativity in the comments. I will also invite other people to contribute so all of you can share your ideas and help each other out. We may also have “open discussions” for people to share sanctum-based works, and so on – so you can see what people are up to.
- I may actually implement a mailing list at some point for tighter social discussion – in a nice, unbounded, but not-on-the-site manner. The mailing list was the least popular idea, but I think it’s bounded nature may be worth it for people who want to get social, but I don’t want to radically change the sites.
So I think this fills all requests. The site stays the same. There’s a subdomain for posting advice and guides and discussing creativity – and you out there can get involved. We may have a mailing list for socializing, for people who know each other and want to chat.
What do you think? Go take the poll!
– Steven Savage
[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. (more…)
Another update? Actually, yes.
- First, now that the redesign is done, I’ve actually gotten back to tweaking generators. I actually wanted to expand the Mage Maker, because frankly the Spellslinger of Wildstar Online sounded really cool name-wise, so I wanted more names like that – the kind of “magic-manipulator” name like Spellslinger, Airbender, etc. That led me down other paths . . . and you can see the results. Frankly it also helps me get my mojo back after the redesign.
- I removed the affiliate bar with my sites as it got pointed out . . . it’s a bit tacky let’s be honest here.
- Ironically that affiliate bar WAS also part of a prototype for something else very cool that’s coming, so stay tuned . . .
- Still getting real mixed feedback on the idea on the site AND off of the site. So I wanted to know what you thought – because I actually have several options for what I can do. So go and take this poll!
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
