A World All My Own

As part of my goals for the last few years, I wanted to build 2+ of my worlds that need building.  I have a few projects that have gotten stuck in the worldbuilding stage for various reasons.  At my last count, there are currently 13 worlds that I want to build; these are all for personal projects that I currently am interested in writing (meaning that I have more worlds, but they were left off my list because I don’t want to develop them at this time).  I chose to develop 2 for my goal because that seemed like a reasonable number to me, leaving room for other projects.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been mulling over one world in particular.  I don’t know what exactly caught my attention with it, but the more I think about it, the more hooked I am.  It’s going to be a fantasy world, but more than that I don’t want to say right now.  I’m hoping to develop it as a setting for some short stories.

I hit upon a rather strange snag about a week ago though: what kind of ocean tides do I want the planet to have?  By extension, I need to decide how many moons I want to have orbiting the world.  And this has led me to the work of Neil F. Comins.  In particular, two of his books, What If the Earth had Two Moons, and his earlier What if the Moon Didn’t Exist, caught my eye.   In them, Comins writes a series of essays where he speculates, with science, what our world would have been like had it been different (having no moon, two moons, a thicker crust, and many other scenarios).  I’m currently reading the first, while eagerly awaiting the second to arrive.  While dense, I’ve found What If the Earth had Two Moons to be fascinating.  My world may not need all of this science (it is going to be a fantasy world, after all), but I’m having a lot of fun delving into it nonetheless.

Advertisement