I know I've been radio silent for a while, but for good reason. We finally turned in that script for a movie version of Yolkman, and it's finally been accepted. And in the downtime from that I've been hard at work on some worldbuilding. In particular, the next book in my Forging Fantasy Realms series. So may I present to you the cover of Fantasy Worldbuilding Workbook, due out August 12th:
As the name implies, it's a workbook for putting together your worlds. It includes 700+ (closer to 800 but I didn't count) worldbuilding prompts and questions. But it's a lot more than that, and makes you focus on your goals, the fantasy conceits, antecedents, extrapolations, and mood and tone of your world before you get to work. Plus some basic story structure, top-down, and bottom-up processes.
It's good, and I'm pretty proud of how it's turned out.
But as I was working on it, I realized I had a system where I could come up with a world on the fly in about an hour. This was based a bit on Jemisin's worldbuilding workshops, and I tested it out at QuaranCon back in Februrary (March?). One thing led to another, and suddenly I had a YouTube channel oh, so originally named Forging Fantasy Realms. On it, I break down a new worldbuilding concept per week, then demonstrate the concept later in the week by building a whole new world based on concepts I randomly draw out of a bucket.
Yeah, it's as cool as it sounds.
I'm not going to lie, the reason it's taken me so long to do this is because I've been crash-coursing on Premiere Pro to learn how to edit videos. And... I'm not great at it. Or the lighting or sound. Which is kinda ironic since I'm a working screenwriter again. But I'm learning, and I promise the quality of the videos will improve shortly. And significantly.
So go give it a gander if you have a few minutes. I could use some new suggestions as to worldbuilding ideas that go into the bucket. So leave a comment there, on my twitter, or even graffiti in the street.
