Back on February 11th, I said I was hoping to have a workable setting by the end of the month. And I’m happy to report that I have largely succeeded! While my setting is by no means finished (I’m still missing a map), I think it’s to a point that I can start writing some stories in it (which will in turn help me flesh it out some more). So for all intents and purposes, I have built one of the 2+ worlds I wanted to build this year!
Getting the setting to this point was largely helped when I was able to make an unexpected connection to one of my earlier writing projects. Several years ago, I started writing Detective Spacelord, a story that was written as a series of blog posts. Detective Spacelord tells the story of Lubic, a police detective who is given great powers with which to watch over the human race. While I had a lot of fun writing it, I unfortunately never did finish it (or go back to it).
During the last few weeks, as I was trying to flesh out some stuff in my new setting, I suddenly realized that one of the planets I had created in Detective Spacelord, Imezza, had a creature that would be perfect for the new setting. So I went back and read all of my notes and old blog posts. Doing so made me realize that rather than building a completely new setting, I could take the work I had already done for this new setting and use it to re-imagine the old one. The benefits were two-fold: first, I now had a new name and a few creatures for my planet. And second, I hadn’t originally done a whole lot of world building for Imezza (mainly because I was churning things out rather quickly and didn’t have time to plan everything out in much detail).
The newly re-imagined Imezza doesn’t completely work with what I wrote in Detective Spacelord, mainly because the Imezzans and Camathu (Chameleon Sharks) are no longer the top predators in the world. But that’s okay with me. If I ever revisit Detective Spacelord, I’ll probably do a rewrite anyway; at that time I will make sure the newly re-imagined world will fit in with the story.
An Acquaintance with Letters 