Build Me A World

One of the things I've been neglecting as I work on Assassin's is the world building.  I put a lot of thought and effort into world building early in the novel's creation (or, actually, it's fourth incarnation), but I ended up burning out on it and stopping for a very long time.  Really, not the best thing to do since I need the world building.  Most authors seem quite capable of remembering things from one chapter to the next, but my combined ADHD and anemia make memory a serious issue for me.  It's so bad, I like to say i have a 5 minute memory lifespan...literally.

I need the world building, and I need it on paper where I can double check in case I forget and can't easily find it in previous chapters (Alden actually has 5 separate binders for world building), so  ignoring it as long as I have isn't a good thing.  I have characters and things towards the end of the book that I haven't taken the time to think about or get to know, and that not only means inconsistencies in the writing, but it also means it will be harder to weed out the clichés and the images that have been seen before.  The best reworking of certain ideas for my world has come when I've written something down and let it percolate a bit before I am set on it.  Waiting so late in the novel's development means there's less of a chance of the unique taking root, and that can be a real problem.  For example, one of my races is dangerously close to a gaming race, and having the time to think about what I've put down in their cultural profile gives me an opportunity to redevelop them a bit and take them further from that comparison.

In fact, some of what's been holding up any work on Randi Kayde is the world building.  I have an entire new concept for it to work out and just haven't wanted to tackle it.  Loving the concept of a book doesn't necessarily motivate you to work on the much needed background material.  Besides, I have my hands more than full with the novels I'm currently working on.  Once I need a break from Alden, then I'll probably revisit Randi.

Since I've got little going on for the editing job at the moment, I'm taking my unexpected "free" time to work on the missing world building for the end of A.C..  Getting it done now will provide me a little time to do some rethinking for when I work on v6—which is a revision brought on largely by changes in my world building.  Mind you, there are other things that need to be worked out in v6, but a large part of the reason to revise again is the world building.  I'm just not able to stop where I am and go back in a draft and make changes based on a new idea I just had.  Which I think is a good thing—waiting until I've finished the current revision gives me a chance to think through and develop the changes a bit.

So, while I'll still be working on actual A.C. chapter revisions, the main goal this week is to get through the rest of my world building list.  I've already had a character's new profile force a change in a battle scene in the chapter I'm currently revising.  This is the one thing I have to admit I enjoy about world building.  Other authors get to know their characters and locations while actually writing them; I discover my characters and locations when profiling them.  My characters rarely, if ever, surprise me in the story; but they frequently surprise me as I work on their profiles.  I find that very cool.

I've actually made enough little bits of progress when trying to get myself in a place to work on world building (seriously, when I'm working on world building is when I am most easily distracted in my writing) to make a decent dent in what was left of my list.  I now have less than a dozen things left to profile, and most of that is characters (which are the most fun to profile).  Since we're heading into the weekend, and Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are the days set aside for my own writing anyway, I should get these all done fairly quickly.

Then I get to start again for Phoenix.  The good news there is that some of the building will have already been done since Phoenix takes place in the same world as A.C.  And I'll take whatever breaks I can get.