Link Round-Up: World-Building for Writers

Charmaine Clancy's W is for World Building Workshop can be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.

Denyse "Domynoe" Loeb's Alden.nu has five world-building outlines along with tons of other templates and lessons here.

Encyclopedia Mythica offers info and articles from A to Z on mythology, folklore and religion to help inspire and populate your fictional worlds.

Evidently pantsers can world-build, too, just in reverse: Kat Zhang's Backwards Worldbuilding.


For obscure words and vocabulary resources, you can't do much better online than The Phrontistery (warning, wordsmiths, highly addicting site.)

How to Draw Nice Maps

Kathy Steffen's article Jump-Start Your Imagination: Creative Writing Exercises for Worldbuilding offers a list of questions you answer about your world as building exercise.

Loren J. Miller's Mythopoets Manual covers in exquisite detail the many things writers might consider when writing the multi-cultural fictional setting.

Orion's Arm states their manifesto as "...to inspire writers, artists and thinkers. To create a vision of the future that is plausible at every level, internally consistent and abides by the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences." Some decent examples for hard SF world-builders.

Stephanie Cottrell Bryant's 30 Days of World building tutorial can be read online or downloaded in several different formats, and covers a range of topics interesting to world builders. 

Merchandise: HTML Book Ends

HTML BookEnd Tags

Available for purchase at 55his.

Book Reading: Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany reads from Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders at St. Marks Bookshop NYC on April 23 2012. Introduction by Brian Evenson, author of "Windeye." 

"Like his legendary Hogg, The Mad Man, and the million-seller Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s major new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders—explicit, poetic, philosophical, and, yes, shocking—propels readers into a gay sexual culture unknown to most urban gay men and women, a network of rural gay relations—with the twist that this one is supported by the homophile Kyle Foundation, started in the early 1980s by a black multi-millionaire, Robert Kyle III, to improve the lives of black gay men."

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Table of Contents: House of Fear

Prime Books has posted the table of contents for their upcoming anthology, Extreme Zombies edited by Paula Guran. The book hits shelves August 1, 2012, but you can pre-order it now at Amazon. Personally, I'd pick up a copy just for the George R.R. Martin story, but I'm a fan of Joe R. Lansdale and Nina Kiriki Hoffman, too.

Product Description: 

"It’s too late! The living dead have already taken over the world. Your brains have been devoured. Nothing is left but spasms of ravenous need—an obscene hunger for even more zombie fiction. Forget the metaphors and the mildly scary. You want shock, you want grue, you want disturbing, gut-wrenching, skull-crunching zombie stories that take you over the edge and go splat. You want the bloody best of the ultimate undead. You have no choice… you… must… have… Extreme Zombies!"

News: Creation of the A.E. VAN VOGT Award

The Winnipeg Science Fiction Association has just announced the creation of the A.E. van Vogt Award (The A.E.V.V.A.). Here's the press release:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada – The Winnipeg Science Fiction Association Inc (WINSFA) is delighted to announce the creation of the A.E. VAN VOGT Award (The A.E.V.V.A.).

Exactly 100 years ago, on April 26, 1912, Alfred Elton Van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada. By July 1939, he had written his first Science Fiction story and had it professionally published.. He continued to write in Winnipeg until 1944 and it was during this time that one of his major stories “SLAN” was written. By 1995 he was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) . He has been the ONLY Canadian Science Fiction Writer to be awarded this major title.

Art: Eric Drooker Illustration

Eric Drooker is a native New Yorker, born and raised on Manhattan Island. He’s the award-winning author of several books, including “Flood! A Novel in Pictures” and “Blood Song: A Silent Ballad.” He’s the Animation Designer on the new feature film, “Howl.” His paintings appear frequently on covers of The New Yorker, and hang in numerous collections.

Via: Cuded