a bunch of my landscapes with the summer vibe🌱
prints: Redbubble ✦ Society6 ✦ full processes and tutorials on Patreon
This comic is for you all whose English is a second language for you. <3
differentiating between healing magic and necromancy by making them phenomonologically distinct is Exactly The Problem I Am Railing Against!
This is an especially fun debate in a Dungeons & Dragons context because the game's schools of magic are structured in such a way that healing magic could plausibly fall into like six out of eight of them, and its placement keeps wandering from edition to edition. Healing magic has historically been Transmutation, Necromancy and Evocation, and I think the forthcoming it's-not-a-new-edition-we-swear is shuffling it over to Abjuration for some reason, which has several fascinating implications. I think they should just bite the bullet and give every school of magic its own distinct healing spell, see what happens.
Omg they’re all so small and thirsty and they know where to go to get a drink why am i crying
Go a little fart
be ded
- Go a little fart
- Dig a little dee
- Reach a little
- Catch the Cat
- and pass it on
▪︎ Right Eye of Miss Peggy Hawthorne.
Artist: English School (British)
Date: 1793
Medium: Watercolor on ivory
Source: cincinnatiartmuseum.org
Great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major) photos I took today, West Yorkshire, UK
it's a lot of stuff...
But this is fine. Doing the (worldbuilding) work is important. Showing it (all)? Not so much. The minute the details of world-construction start distracting your reader from the story you’re trying to tell, you’ve started undercutting your narrative’s effectiveness.
Less is more, here. If you know your build’s detail well, it’ll come out naturally enough where needed as you write. Just relax and let it ooze out through the cracks at its own pace.
But what if I'm afraid of forgetting it all, and that's why I want to write it down?
This is a completely fair question. The simplest answer:
Yes, absolutely, write it down! Just not in your prose narrative.
The main reason (IMO) not to do this is because it'll inevitably throw off the timing and structure of your prose. The natural flow of your narration and its interaction with dialogue is one of the most important things to get right in writing. Forcing yourself to maneuver your writing's flow around material that may or may not wind up in the final text is like running a race on a track that you've purposely left strewn with cinderblocks and boulders. It's not kind to you (because it forces you to expend energy you don't need to spend on this purpose), and it's not good for your work.
That said: by all means, take notes on everything in your worldbuilding that seems like you'll need to remember it. But find a safe place to keep this stuff separate from your prose where you can find it quickly—either just to add something, or to use it in the work.
If you're working mostly digitally, a good place is in a separate folder stored along with the files where you're doing the actual writing work. Depending on the software you're using for your writing, you may already have a place to store notes inside the main project but separate from the prose work. (Scrivener, which I've used for years and heartily recommend, has this. In fact, this is one of the reasons I started using it in the first place: I was tired of losing track of the many, many notes lying around the place when I've had five or six projects running at once.)
(For those who might be curious, Scrivener's option for "inline" notes looks like this. That right-hand column can be collapsed away out of sight when you don't need to see the notes: but they're always aligned with the section where you've decided you may need or want them, and you can easily move them around if you find they'll work better somewhere else.)
...There are lots of other digital options. Here's a favorite one: You can very successfully keep worldbuilding work in a wiki—either quite a complex one (like the Errantry Concordance presently being converted to a new format) or a very simple HTML-based one like TiddlyWiki, which you can keep on a USB drive. (See also "wiki on a stick.") Once there, you can cut-n-paste material from the wiki into your text in Word or Google Docs or whatever.
I've used both wiki types, and like them both for different reasons. If you've got a LOT of stuff to store, the heavier-duty MediaWiki software may be the best way to go as you get started. I mean... there's nearly a million words of published Young Wizards stuff now, and I promise you, when you've got a mlllion words of prose and the worldbuilding behind it, you will forget stuff if you don't make notes about it. Guaranteed. So this was my preferred approach for the YW material. But for other books I went with multiple TiddlyWiki installations, and those worked just fine.
You can also use a wiki not just for storage, but for active development of new worldbuild ideas. These can then be stored at the end of a prose chapter as footnotes linked to a URL in the wiki. Some brand-new concepts and events that have turned up in the last few YW books were developed out of notes on already-extant material appearing in the Concordance.)
...Now, possibly you prefer to do your worldbuilding-notes work on paper. And why not? As long as you're storing your notes where you can find them, and can readily associate individual pieces of info with the part(s) of your writing where they may be needed, you're fine. ...Probably the simplest way to do this is to insert note-specific page-locating tags into your prose—or at the top or bottom of chapters, if they're less distracting that way.
I still have paper notes on the Middle Kingdoms works that were made this way. They've traveled thousands of miles with me, from home to home, since the first book came out. (Ten years or so ago I took the precaution of scanning them; then uploaded them to the cloud later on.)
"Look," she said (as if on a cooking show): "here's one I made earlier."
...circa around 1976. With a table of contents for the couple of hundred pages of scraps, notes, linguistic stuff, timelines, heraldic info and sketches, genealogies, etc etc. (90% of which material has never appeared in any of the books in the main sequence or the interstitials—because it hasn't needed to. What has appeared is sprinkled through the narrative, rather than shoveled onto it. ...And this is a good reason to use this method: because material that gets inserted into the narrative has an unnerving tendency to stay there... even if it's an infodump.)
That ToC has sometimes proven almost more useful than the notes themselves—as it's enabled me to look up a given note, determine whether anything in it is still germane, and include (or discard) that piece of business in a matter of moments.
Anyway. Whether working electronically or on paper, definitely take all the notes on your world that you feel likely to need. Once you've got them safely tucked away where they're hard to lose, I suspect you'll find it easier to just let them slide out of your head onto the page in the process of everyday composition. And if you have trouble remembering something, you'll know it'll be ready and waiting for you. :)
HTH!
Honestly, the Captain tied to the wheel with cross in hand is probably the most striking image in the book, and frankly, one of the most striking images in horror fiction generally. A master stroke on Stoker’s part.
antique victorian black iron plant terrarium with stand