Worldbuilding Wednesday – The Return + Inktober Writer’s Gauntlet

Lately I’ve been itching to breathe a little more life back into my blog. Other than my Flash Fiction Friday posts, I don’t really post anything regularly and I miss the days when I used to. What I miss the most, though, are my Worldbuilding Wednesday posts. I honestly can’t remember why I stopped writing those. I guess I just “got busy” for a while and then never got back into it. Which is a shame because I really enjoyed writing those and since they’re about the only posts on this blog that still get semi-regular views even years later, I guess others enjoyed them too!

My worldbuilding activity since discontinuing my Wednesday posts has been a bit sporadic. I mean, I’m almost always working on a story or two and working on stories almost always involves a little worldbuilding, but for most of the past few years it’s been something I’ve mostly done incidentally, as a side-effect of developing story, rather than something I put concerted effort into for its own sake. However, there have been two notable exceptions from this trend and I wanted to tell you a little about them.

The first exception is Orklands, a worldbuilding, conlanging and fiction project I started on my Patreon, which focuses on a secondary world fantasy setting and (primarily) the Orks that live in it! It is/was a really fun project, wherein I posted three Patron-exclusive posts a month, one for each of the three topics. I also did Lexember, an conlanging challenge where you make a new word every day for all of December, for the first time last year using my Ork conlang and had a great time! I say is/was because the project (and thus, my Patreon) is currently on hiatus. In the spring, I came to the realization that I had to revamp some fundamental parts of my Orklands worldbuilding. Around the same time, I got very busy working on my BA paper in English, so I didn’t really have the time or energy needed to work out the issues I’d encountered. To be honest, I still haven’t, and so my Patreon is on hold since the beginning of the summer. I hope to get back to it soon, but I don’t want to rush it (and I’m also trying to get my next Orryn novella out by Christmas – we’ll see how that goes…) so it will likely stay on hiatus the rest of the year. 

The second exception to my trend of incidental worldbuilding has been my Tea Time streams on Twitch, which (hopefully) take place on Sundays, possibly in the morning, and supposedly involve me working on a worldbuilding or conlanging topic for an hour or two. Although this certainly involves a concerted effort to worldbuild, it’s been sporadic to say the least. I’ve had trouble sticking to a regular streaming schedule, both on account of ill-timed bouts of the common cold and ill-timed social engagements. In addition, I’ve had the habit of going on stream without preparing or picking a topic – which usually results in me not knowing what to focus on and ending the stream early because I feel silly. But now I’ve practiced some foresight and started keeping a list of concrete worldbuilding topics that I want to work on. That way, the day before my stream, I can pick a topic ahead of time, and lower my chances of feeling silly on stream. Hopefully that means I will be be streaming, and thus worldbuilding, more regularly in the future! I always feel so pumped after a good worldbuilding session, so I’d like more of that in my life when time allows.

In fact, I felt so pumped after I finished my stream on Sunday that I made two decisions in fairly quick succession, the most important of which being that I’m going to start making Worldbuilding Wednesday posts again! Maybe not every week, but as often as I can. For the most part, the posts are likely to be little summaries of my Sunday worldbuilding streams, and occasionally some discussion of related topics. The second decision was to participate in World Anvil’s October worldbuilding challenge. World Anvil, if you’re not familiar, is an awesome website where you can basically create a wiki for your fictional world, without the hassle of actually trying to make it look good yourself and with a really active and friendly community of other worldbuilders around you. You can follow other people’s world on the site, and have others follow yours. Anyway, their October challenge is basically a spin on the common drawing challenge Inktober in which you’re supposed to draw a picture every day, usually based on a prompt. The only difference is that this variant is for writing worldbuilding posts instead! Here’s the list of prompts being used this year.

All this to say that Worldbuilding Wednesday is back, lovelies! And chances are that the posts for the next month will be round-ups of my World Anvil posts for the challenge with some commentary (unless, of course, I realize that I’m in over my head in a couple of days and give up). I’m 1/1 on the challenge so far but I think this post is long enough already, so I’ll bundle my article from yesterday in with next week’s update. Until then, take care everyone!