I’ll look it up the world building list again. Should be nostalgic. BTW, I have the second Frontier Magic book on Interlibrary Loan request and I’m hoping to get it in soon!

Several people have mentioned Tough Guide, too, and that was awesome as well. I am so sad that there won’t be any more DWJ books forthcoming.

I was just looking it up again because I had some questions of my own I wanted to post as a sort of addendum if you don’t mind (first part here /plug) and came about this post of yours.

I had no idea there were actually people complaining that your list wasn’t complete! I am quite familiar with the prescription syndrome, though. No idea (yet) why people do that, but I do intend to find out.

Alex - Not being bored is really critical. So is balance. If your boredom threshhold is very low, you may be best served by keeping track of your worldbuilding as you write and make it up, rather than doing it in advance. The main thing is that it all hangs together reasonably well (and to remember that no matter what you do, there will be people who disagree that it would work that way).

The only thing I can say I’ve noticed myself, off the top of my head, is an increasing need to look up details of what I’ve said in previous books, to make sure they’re consistent with the current one in that setting. It’s a direct parallel to researching history for books like Sorcery and Cecelia or the Mairelon books, which are set in almost-but-not-quite versions of history, except instead of going to A Social History Of England or The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue to look up a custom or a turn of phrase, I have to go to my own books.

I wonder if that’s why I seldom do more than two or three books in the same setting? The Lyra books were an exception, of course, but the last two are so separated in time (both in terms of when I wrote them and in terms of when they’re set) from the first three that they might almost be another setting.

What I too easily forget, to my cost, is that the worldbuilding I love is just construction lines for the stories - the bits that don’t get into them aren’t yet real, and can and should be varied when the logic of the telling demands it. And the bits the story needs aren’t necessarily the sort of things the historian or the appendix-reader cares about.

This suggests to me that the process of a first story in a setting might be different in kind from its succession of sequels, as the world becomes more set in stone with each addition. If the writer likes open worlds, this should tend to make telling harder, all else equal; if closed ones, then easier. And in either case, perhaps, a different way of making and telling. Do you find it so?

C.f. Roger Zelazny’s brilliantly balanced opening of serial vistas in the first Amber series, versus the increasingly desperate novelties of the second. Tolkien’s steady and valiant deepening of Middle-Earth in successive drafts of Lord of the Rings, from the imbecile blank-sheet beginnings of Bingo Bolger-Baggins et al., is I suppose the all-time stand-out in the other direction!

Chicoy - I love the Tough Guide! Even though it was wildly embarassing the first time I read through it (”Oh, blast, I did that! And that! And…criminy, I did that, too!”). Ecology is one of the things I think is sufficiently fun to play with that I seldom forget about it entirely. It is, in fact, one of the most fun parts of working on the Frontier Magic series for me, and I get kind of disappointed when I start going on about the life-cycle of mirror bugs and why and how cinderdwellers work, only to have my friends’ eyes glaze over! But that’s one of the hazards of worldbuilding.