I thought I’d give you a little update on current projects and status. The past year or so has been a little hard on me “in the real world” but all that is sorted out now and things are on the up again. On the other hand, it hasn’t left me so much time for world-building: Besides my new real-life job keeping me busy, NaNoWriMo ate up a lot of free time in November. That’s done and over, and with the holidays coming up I should have a good amount of time to write and build.

• My Wacom tablet needs to be replaced, but I am not yet sure which one to get, and what size. They get expensive really quickly once you go beyond A6. I have some maps to draw!
• I’ve been consolidating settings. At least two, probably three, and perhaps four of my worlds will be merged – details to follow…
• I am totally into science fiction right now. This comes from reading everything H. Beam Piper that Gutenberg and Librivox could throw at me, but it is also related to finally playing role-playing games again; in this case we’re up to our ears in the Star Wars Saga Edition. I’m playing a shard in an IG-86 chassis with a severe identity crisis.
• I’d like to complete short “world books” for what I consider my main worlds. Say something on the order of 48 pages each.
• With the death of imaginaryworlds.net and the disappearance of Paul of the Shakespeare & Dragon podcast, I’d like to expand enderra.com to include more how-to’s, more discussion, more interactivity. This is more of a long-term goal, we’re definitely talking mid-2010 here. Anybody who’d like to get in on this, drop me a line…

I am now using DevianArt to host an art gallery / portfolio sort of thing. I will still post images here, but it’s nice to have a community on DeviantArt. It’s also nice to have a simple, art focussed URL that I can give people who are just interested in the art aspect.

My works can be found at http://nilsjeppe.deviantart.com/ – I’d love it if you drop by.

I am now on Twitter.

Enderra.com will be moved to a new server infrastructure shortly. I apologize in advance if you experience any problems. The whole thing should be over by the end of the weekend.

Because I just hit the “mile stone”:

Spam comments: 1003

Legitimate comments: 89 (that includes my own because I can’t be bothered to count manually)

Fortunately Akismet is doing a really good job of blocking spam. I guess once you discount my own comments it’s about the same quota I have in my email, where I once calculated that 98.5% of all emails I receive are actually spam.

Sorry about the change in wordpress themes… again. I actually liked Librio better. However, the author did update it to fix some bugs… and messed up some of the layouts. So I’ll be using devart by the same author. It does look a little more mellow and less “technological”, so I dunno, maybe it’s not a bad choice. (Devart looks to be inspired by DeviantArt.)

I promise to stick with this one for a while… unless there are serious problems with it, of course.

Today is a holiday here in Bavaria. This gives me an unlimited amount of time (within the absolute daily maximum of course) for world-building. You’d think this would result in a flood of new posts, but I just do not feel like typing. So I guess I’ll just take a break today.

More photos from Wikipedia / Wikimedia commons. Again, you can click on them to get to the source + high resolution version.

Settlement in Wadi Rum, Jordan. Photo by Steffen Sledz.

Judean hills. Photo by David Shankbone.

White Sands, New Mexico, USA. Photo by davebluedevil.

Salar de Talar near San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Photo by Luca Galuzzi.

Valle de la Luna, Atacama desert. Photo by Reinhard Jahn.

PS: I am done with the photos, I swear! ….well, okay, unless I find something extra-cool like Antelope Canyon.

More resources:

• How to design a good flag
• Flag generator
• Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
• Inkscape – A Guide to a Vector Drawing Program

Found more interesting world building links:

• Thud and Blunder: Article by Poul Anderson about worldbuilding.
• 3D-Starmaps is dedicated to star maps.
• Atomic Rockets contains a lot of information about real and fictional rocketships.

I’ve added a few links – and since I can’t really expect anyone to do a mental diff on the two link lists, I decided to quickly post what I’ve added since I initially started the link lists.

World Building Resources:

• Climatology for Worldbuilders
• Language Construction Kit
• A Way with Worlds

Worlds on the Web:

• Planetocopia
• Life on the Planet Furaha

I’ve started to build a list of useful links about worldbuilding and related topics. Enjoy. And if you know of a good site I didn’t include… send it to me (at nils [at] pandemonium.de) and I’ll include it.

Yet another WordPress weblog…

…and this one is my dumping ground for all things related to world building. The blog won’t be directly linked from anywhere while I am still setting it up, but since I won’t actively block access I wonder how long it will be before someone stumbles in from Google or some place like that.

Welcome, anyway.