Sign outside Forks, WA. Photo: Forks Chamber of Commerce blog

Vampires are the new hot character, in case you haven’t noticed.  Vamps have been popular since Stoker wrote Dracula, but only recently have they had the chance to convert from nasty seductive blood-sucking monsters to broody seductive blood-sucking good guys.

These days, vampire main characters are everywhere:  brooding in the woods in romance novels; at vampire finish schools in YA novels; being superheroes in comics and on TV; and taking over the teen and adult prime time soap genre on television. Many of these vampire-centric stories are entertaining, some are even extraordinary. But still:

Enough, already!! Can’t writers think of ANY OTHER mythical beings to live among humans?

Yeah, I know: werewolves and zombies. Done and overdone. They’re also off the originality list. Same goes for witches, wizards and ghosts, who are not only well past their freshness date but also – duh! – human beings.

For those of you whose imaginations need a little assistance in thinking of other types of  supernatural creatures to populate your world, I offer this short list of supernatural species that I’d like to see in a contemporary setting:

Undine, by John William Waterhouse, 1872

Undine. A female water spirit of lakes and rivers, the undine traditionally tries to marry a human so she can gain a soul (see Anderson’s The Little Mermaid for a literary version of this story).  By the way, once Christianity took hold in Europe, its teachings added a new element to myth and folktale by insisting that fairies of any kind don’t have souls. How relevant that might be in a contemporary setting would be up to you.

Images: MGM & SyFy

Stargate Universe is the third TV iteration of the Stargate franchise. By all the rules of TV franchises, it ought to be either (a) the same series formula and quality, like the CSI and Law & Order clones; or (b) the same series formula and story concepts becoming ever more generic, like the later Star Trek series.

Instead, the creative team of Stargate Universe jumped to a new dramatic level by taking big leaps in concept and storytelling. If you want to take your own imagined world in a completely new direction, this is how it’s done.

Universe starts within the familiar Stargate setting: human military and science personnel stationed on an off -world base accessed by ship and by stargate, exciting Ancient technology to be studied, bad guys attacking. Then the crew’s retreat through the stargate turns into a one-way trip to the wrong end of the universe. Instead of dialing the gate back to Earth, lead scientist Dr. Rush dials the mysterious gate address he’s been trying to reach for months, and the fugitives end up on an Ancient starship that’s traveling distant galaxies on its own.

If this sounds like a variation of Stargate Atlantis or Star Trek Voyager, look again.

Happy Birthday to Us! Yes, its really a cake, made by the London Cake Company and featured on Cake Wrecks - where they also feature outstanding cakes like this one alongside the wrecks (see their link in Geektastic)

Today is the first anniversary of WorldBuildingRules!

In this first year, I’ve made 67 posts in 35 categories and 57 tags.

I’ve talked about several different stories I’m writing about my imaginary world, Khasran. One, The Master Patterns was published before the blog began; another, The Thief of Twilight, is going through the magazine submission slog right now; and two were started this year, because of ideas from posts on this blog. I’m still working on these and other unfinished stories that I haven’t yet mentioned, so stay with me as I address the storytelling and worldbuilding challenges they raise.

I’ve learned more about writing good posts and a lot about formatting blog pages and adding widgets. I’m sure there’s still a lot more to learn and new approaches and topics to try.

And I’ve had some surprises about what kind of  content attracts the most interest. The “Most Popular” list tells the story: by far the most visited post on this site is my Apollo 11 anniversary post. Not necessarily from any virtue of the post, but because this is a very popular topic. Every day I get hits from searches for “moon landing” “Buzz Aldrin on moon” “earth from moon” “Apollo 8 earthrise” and similar keywords. I also suspect that the post’s title “Moon Landings Real and Imagined” has drawn a few moon landing conspiracy theorists – who must have been disappointed to learn that my imaginary moon landing is the one in the Heinlein movie, not the one in their conspiracy! That’s worth a giggle at least. When I reread the post in that context, I’m glad to see that some of my observations do serve to support the truth, in that I point out some details that we could only learn by going into space in person.

I’ve gotten some faithful followers and a lot of compliments. I haven’t gotten as much discussion as I’d hoped, but I trust that will come along in time. And I have grown my visibility substantially.  When I started, I could count the daily visitors on the fingers of one hand. While I’m still far from being a megasite, I ran out of daily fingers and toes months ago.

One major thing that’s still lacking: I really want to find more online resources for worldbuilders. Though I’ve got a few, and they’re all great, I want to add many many more, enough to create a whole page of resource links on many areas of worldbuilding. And for that I need your help. If you’re a worldbuilder and you have some favorite sites that provide indispensable information about space travel, historical or alien clothing, languages, weapons, cities or any other arcane information that helps you make a believable world, please send me the link so I can check it out.

Meanwhile, have some cake and join me in Year 2!

The City of Poets is the setting for my newest Khasran story, as yet untitled. The idea came from an article in the Christian Science Monitor about how Basra, Iraq, is reviving its tradition of populist poetry. As I posted earlier this year, I was captivated by the idea of a city where poetry reigns supreme. I knew I had to find a place for this city in Khasran’s world. So here’s a bit of my process of starting to create this place.

A city where poetry, song and music are the most precious commodity, must be a place where people like to enjoy life, take it slow, and give themselves the leisure to enjoy their favorite arts – to listen, to perform, and of course, to talk a lot about the art.

Endless Skies, by Rick Sardinha, cover art for the webzine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. A little inspiration for my worldbuilding. See more of his beautiful art at his website, www.battleduck.com

So I knew right off that my new city has a balmy climate, where people can sit outdoors all year and listen to performers. A city in a warm climate has to have a way to keep cool in the summers, and a large body of water nearby is the pleasantest way to do that. I learned this in San Diego, whose Pacific Ocean breezes protect it all year round from the brutal heat of the desert just a few miles inland. The river that runs through Khasran flows southward across the plains for another 500 miles, gathering streams and tributaries until it’s a lazy, looping giant a couple of miles wide. I planted the City of Poets just where the river leaves the plains and starts to cut through sandstone hills. The city built of that yellow sandstone sprawls alongside the river like a lazy marmalade cat basking in the sun.

Why would there be a city just here?

Someone in a LinkedIn writing group recently asked for advice on creating a city setting that is “rich, detailed and integral to the story,” a city that becomes a character in itself. He was asking what literary tools he would need to portray real cities, but the question can be asked just as well of imaginary ones. I’m currently working on that very thing for my newest story, which is set in the City of Poets I’ve been thinking about since the spring.

Emerald City

I tried to make a list of famous imaginary cities. To my surprise, I could only come up with four from literature: Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork, Frank Baum’s Emerald City, and Charles de Lint’s Newford. Is this very short list a reflection of limitations in my reading, or is it really the case that science fiction and fantasy writers don’t often set their stories in cities? If you can add to this list, please jump in! Maybe the great gaming worlds, like Warcraft and Halo, have important cities too?

If I look to comics, there are several famous ones, notably Superman’s Metropolis and Batman’s Gotham City. Like Khasran, both began as versions of a real city (in this case  New York) and evolved to have lives and personalities of their own.  This reminds me of a few more additions to the list: alternate versions of real cities in our world such as the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the Oxford of Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and the dragon-friendly Peking of  Naomi Novik’s Throne of Jade.

So what does it take to build a city from scratch – especially a city that has a unique personality?

This week, September 26-October 3, is Banned Books Week, an event sponsored by the American Library Association. The ALA is one of this country’s most active and dedicated defenders of our right to read what we choose, without interference from those who want to “protect” us or our children from books, magazines or any other reading material that they find offensive.

You can find a lot more information about Banned Books Week events and how to participate (or object, if you must) at these two sites, and probably many others:

Superstition Review Blog: the blog of the literary and art journal of Arizona State University, whose post on Banned Books Week brought it to my attention. Thanks!

ALA/Banned Books Week: the home page of Banned Books Week

I was amused, on reading the comments on the Superstition Review’s post, to see that in this country, at least, anyone can be a censor from someone else’s point of view.

A few pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard. All photos by David Rowan, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; courtesy Staffordshire Hoard website.

Beowulf lives!  That was my reaction to the announcement today of a fabulous treasure find in England.

The Staffordshire Hoard is a collection of over 1500 gold and silver artifacts from the Dark Ages, circa 700 AD, found in a farmer’s field in July by an ordinary guy with a metal detector. It’s by far the largest Anglo-Saxon hoard ever found in Britain, and the richness of the objects is leading experts to believe that it may have belonged to a king.

Scabbard Boss, inlaid with garnets.

Pictures of the few pieces they have put on display are astonishingly rich, detailed and exquisite, even in their battered state after being in the ground for over 1300 years. The Anglo-Saxons were master goldsmiths and jewelers.

Archaeologists are orgasmic with excitement, naturally enough, talking about all that the find will teach them about the period, which is mostly lost to history. (That’s why its called the Dark Ages, d’oh!)

And that’s the link to worldbuilding. The Saxons, the Vikings, the Huns and other invading peoples from that era are our cultural template for the “barbarian” warrior. 

Hulu.com is now featuring a 17 minute preview of the new series Flashforward, based on Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, which I reviewed this spring.

I haven’t seen an opening act this intense since the pilot of LOST.  Take a look here:

Flashforward preview

or on ABC’s web page for the series, here

Flashforward premieres on Thursday at 8 on ABC. It looks every bit as cool as promised.

Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog has won the 2009 Emmy Award for Short Format Live Action Entertainment .

Go, Team Horrible! And take that, big studios! Here’s the team showing off their prize:

Dr Horrible at the Emmys. Photo posted on Twitpic by Dr H co-writer Maurissa Tancharoen, 4th from left, between Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. Lucky lady!

The competition in the category was impressive this year:

Do you start with a situation and some characters, and build a world in which those characters could live and that situation could occur?

Or do you start with an idea for a world that has some unique qualities, and find your stories and characters in the process of exploring the world?

In a blog post on Omnivoracious earlier this year, China Mieville brought up this question in his discussion of  Tolkien’s worldbuilding. Here’s the relevant section of the post:

Tolkien

“Middle Earth was not the first invented world, of course. But in the way the world is envisaged and managed, it represents a revolution. Previously, in works such as Eddison’s, Leiber’s, Ashton Smith’s and many others’, the worlds of magic, vibrant, brilliant, hilarious and much-loved as they may be, were secondary to the plot. This is not a criticism: that’s a perfectly legitimate way to proceed. But the paradigm shift of which there may be other examples, but of which Tolkien was by a vast margin the outstanding herald, represents an extraordinary inversion, which brings its own unique tools and capabilities to narrative. The order is reverse: the world comes first, and then, and only then, things happen–stories occur–within it.

Mieville's latest

So dominant is this mode now (as millions of women and men draw millions of maps, and write millions of histories, inventing worlds in which, perhaps, eventually, a few will set stories) that it’s difficult to see what a conceptual shift it represented.”

There’s no right or wrong approach,  as Mieville says; and many of us probably do a little of both at one time or another, within the same world.

The question here is, how much difference does each approach make, in the kind of world you end up with and the kinds of stories that might come out of it?