oh, oh, oh it’s magic…you know

If you clicked thinking this post was going to be about developing a magical system for your novel, sorry for the tease. As I was driving to the Friday morning write in, my son, who has a cold, tells me, “Mommy, I just want to stay with you today, cause when I’m next to you I almost forget I’m sick.” wow. I couldn’t possibly put the feeling of being someone’e whole world in better words.

Speaking of world’s….

I hadn’t planned to go to the geography of world building at Norwescon because I write historically based fiction. I’m not inventing a world, heck I don’t even invent my own plots. History is ripe with situations just waiting for me (and I suppose you as well, if I must share) to adapt into an amusing little vignette. But somehow Saturday night I found myself with a gap in my planned schedule and I decided to pop in and check it out because after all you never know what’s going to be useful, someday.

Flipping back through my notes what stood out to me most was this:

-Good geography should be like sound effects in a movie, seamless when done right, very jarring when out of place.

-Changing some of the givens like gravity, metals, or water to land ratio can adjust the entire world while still giving you the base of an Earth like world.

-Populate your world with the resources that meet your needs or don’t meet your characters needs, as suits your novel. i.e. conflicts over resources.

-In general, the harsher the environment, the harsher the people.

When in doubt build only what you need. No point in building a 7 planet system when your characters will never leave the valley they are born in.