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…

It’s done, one day ahead of schedule – I “won” NaNoWriMo 2009.

This year, it was particularly hard. Not only do I have a new job which kept me quite occupied, I also did not have any furniture at home, having just moved into a new apartment. Like last year, I encountered mental resistance to the project after some time, and just like last year I asked myself, “why the hell am I doing this?”

I am doing this, of course, to teach myself to be “creative” to a schedule. I did a better job of this than last year. I wrote on fewer days of the month than last year, and got much more done on those days. And while I did not complete the story yet, I am quite close.

What made all the difference is that I followed one of the lessons learned from last year: This time I created an outline ahead of time. Some adjustments were necessary, as I moved the story form one of my worlds to another, but these were relatively minor. I did not complete the story yet, but I am very close; another 2-3 days will get me there so unlike last year, I will get to “The End”. It’s still a crappy story, so unless I edit it into something fairly nice I won’t be posting it. ;)

I am not sure whether I will do NaNoWriMo 2010, but unless some other big project interferes, I probably will. I’ll try to take some days off of work next year, though: If I have an outline and write every day, I should be able to easily complete a story in the 30 days.

I will take part in this year’s NaNoWriMo. I have my outline 90% done. What about you?

…you have to worry about it actually meaning something in another language. There was the anecdote of the car company – Volkswagen, I believe; but it does not matter – which tried to sell a car brand called “Nova” in Latin America. No Va meaning “doesn’t go” or even “doesn’t work” ruined their product for them.

Whether this story is true or not doesn’t matter any more than who made this mistake. It still means that any words you invents, especially names of important places like planets or your protagonist names – need to be checked on-line. Otherwise you may add just a little more humor to your setting than you’d like.

I guess I was lucky. One of our Turkish translators tells me that “enderra”, in Turkish, means “rare”.

I can live with that.

By random chance I came across Life after People on local TV tonight – the 2h original version, not the series. While it is hardly perfect – Wikipedia lists some criticisms or omissions, and I can come up with several more – it is still an inspirational film and a good idea to watch if you’re into post-apocalyptic fiction / gaming.

Richard Bartle – the man when it comes to MMO design – held a very interesting talk at IMGDC. In it he’s discussing the different types of MMO designs, and how “social” mmo’s contrast with the linear World-of-Warcraft design and the more freeform games like Eve Online. His talk is definitely worth a read, I just wish there was a recording.

The PDF is here.

While I am on the topic of maps… The Map of Thraeton that I showcased last month is now done. That is, as done as it’s going to get without detailed world-building – the place names are mostly placeholders, and so on.

Thraeton World Map

Thraeton Eastern Continent

Thraeton Western Continent

Thraeton North-Eastern Detail

I think it came out quite well, if I may say so myself.

This is my entry for the Cartographers’ Guild’s “just for fun” competiton for March, the River Challenge:

Cartographer's Guild River Challenge Entry

The basic template of the landmass and some pre-defined lakes and rivers was provided by the guild’s community leaders, and there are various rules on the number of rivers the map needs to include.

I honestly did not enter this one to win – the guild counts far better artists than I am amongst its members – but rather I took the opportunity to try out a “fancy mountain” style. As you can see… it still needs some work. ;-)

Today was an art day:

Milky Way Galaxy

Milky way Galaxy II

I spent a lot of my spare time working on maps. Here’s what I have to show for my effort.

First off, Thraeton now has mountain ranges. I experimented a little and came up with the following abstract style, which I like a lot.

Thraeton

Detail view:

Thraeton Detail

I am currently working on climate – wind, ocean currents, climate zones.

In between, I revisited that world which started it all, and which gave the name to this website: Enderra. I began by recreating what geography has already been established over the past 17 years. As you can see, this is not the entire planet just yet – the entire “new world” in the west was never mapped out, so it’ll be added later.

Enderra

I also experimented with drawing pretty national borders. These are very rough, and I’ll have to redraw them as the map evolved, but as a stylistic experiment I think it was quite a success:

Enderra National Borders

As always, I work in Inkscape.

Lately, Ive been working on the outline for my Arnâron writing project. I’m behind schedule with the writing, but after my NaNoWriMo experience I really want to nail down the outline before I write even a single line of actual story. I guess there’s no real hurry anyway. I’m on chapter 7 of 12 for my revised outline, the other 5 chapters are basically still bullet point lists.

In addition, I have been working on Thraeton, which is one of my many worlds, and intimately tied to Terra and Arnâron. Specifically, I have been working on its world map. Currently, it looks like so:

Thraeton - Plate Tectonics

One thing noteworthy about this is that I am using Google Earth for visualization. If you ever build a world, give this method a try; the .kml files are well documented and easy to craft.

Thraeton in Google Earth

You can load the current WIP of Thraeton into Google Earth using this .kml file. Enjoy!

Here’s an assortment of links you might find useful.

How-To’s

• Map-making tutorial using The Gimp.

Inspiration, Locations

• Photos from Paris Exhibition, 1900. In color.
• Abandoned subway stations in New York City
• The Uros people of the Titicaca lake live on floating islands, which is a cool style of living for a conpeople.

Science Fiction Stuff

• Tests have shown that it is possible to protect long-duration missions from solar wind using a magnetic shield.
• Scientists figured out that Mars’ loss of atmosphere to the pressure from solar wind isn’t a slow, gentle process; instead it is quite violent: Solar Wind Rips Up Martian Atmosphere.

NaNoWriMo 2008 Research

• Wikipedia on radioactive fallout
• Wikipedia on fallout shelters and blast shelters
• Mount Weather government bunker
• Gas masks vs bad smells: Gas masks do not filter out odors, unless they are designed for the job, but vick vapor rub is a work-around used by law enforcement and emergency workers.
• Geiger counters
• Compound bows – bow hunting is done in the US

Here’s a little bit of a bonus and post scriptum for NaNoWriMo. I didn’t just design a fallout shelter, I also sketched out a city.

Saint Brendan, so named after St. Brendan the Navigator, is a large city located in the US State of Acadia. The city rose to prominence as a trade port after the discovery of the Northwest Passage and benefited greatly from the increase in trade with East Asia after the World War. It is New England’s largest city, with over six million people living in the metropolitan area. This makes Saint Brendan the fifth-largest urban conglomeration in the United States, before the Delaware Valley but less populated than the Dallas-Fort-Worth Metroplex.

Major industries are transportation, financial, and high tech. A large military presence secures the strategic location.

Destroyed Saint Brendan

Saint Brendan is an amalgamation of San Francisco, New York, and a few other cities. I decided to use a fictional city for several reasons:

1. I don’t know New York personally, having never been there, and certainly do not know any other major US city intimately either. Potential readers would likely be more familiar with the setting than I and that is a problem. Using a fictional city frees me from the risk of making gross errors when describing the location.
2. A fictional city gives me the freedom to arrange locations and other facts in a manner convenient to the story’s needs.
3. It’s a great way to tell the reader “dude, this is not YOUR world“.
4. I enjoy world-building. Duh!

I am a firm believer in recycling material, so expect Saint Brendan to pop up again in more detailed form.

Here’s another attempt at the CD cover game:

Eryx Elegans, 'Run Away From Life'

I actually edited the photo in question this time; if you look at the original you will see a woman in the photo which really distracted from the composition:

Original Photo

Edited Photo

Yes – it is quite easy to see the photo was edited, but after all this is not an exercise in forging photographic evidence :-)

To critique my own work, the speech bubble is probably a little too dominant and the “band name” logo colors might not mesh perfectly with the rest of the image.

Original photo: Feliz 2009, by murilocardoso. Licensed cc-by-nc-sa.

NaNoWriMo is over, I won, and I am in the process of completing my novel. I decided on a project to tackle next. I could just start something completely new, but I do not want to start yet another project that never gets done. So I looked at my large collection of worlds and picked one that is dear to my heart.

Arnâron.

As you may remember, Arnâron is my version of Barsoom. I began to work on Arnâron in its current form as my project for World Building Month, back in August. (Has it only been three months? Amazing how time flies.)

When I last visited Arnâron, I was writing random articles and working on a con language. I still have a to do list with many open items. Let me re-list it here, with current status:

• Language. I made some progress, but a lot of work remains to be done.
• Religion. I have not worked on this aspect.
• Nations: Still in the same state as in August.
• Money and trade: I have posted one article on natural resources, more needs to be written.
• Cities of Arnâron. No update.
• Ruins and relics: I wrote about the ruins and the past, I think this is a solid basis to work from.
• Astrology and zodiacs: I haven’t created these at all.
• Heroes and villains: Still needs to be written.
• Prizes and princesses: Ditto.
• The hordes: Ditto, again.

Now, a lot of this is fundamental work that could simply keep me busy for years. I’d like to define some sort of goal, something that is reachable. (NaNoWriMo taught me the importance of that.)

There is one event, or story-arc, that I planned for the world, somewhat related to the basic John Carter story A Princess of Mars. I will use this event to write a series of stories, and will create all the supporting material I need for this story. I will try to write one “chapter” every month in 2009 (and into 2010 if the series does not get done in 12 months).

I have a month for outlining and for completing my NaNoWriMo novel. Let’s see how this goes.