I launched this site for Landfall now instead of later mainly to host the Worldbuilder’s Guide to Mythology, a lengthy and comprehensive guide to the formation and structure of myths that persist through time. I think it’s useful, and I hope people read it.
I built the tech that will power the Landfall Knowledge Base, and even though I have extensive material in my internal wiki, I’m not quite ready to release much in particular. But writing the software that imports and parses my internal wiki and renders it into the knowledge base has been gratifying, and depending on how useful it turns out to be, I may talk more about what I did. I may even release the software.
Finally, I included a draft version of Secrets That Bind, Part 1, the first in a series of letters from, to, and about an unfortunate woman and her family on the central coast of the western wilds.
One difficulty I often have with stories like these is that I simply don’t know enough to write them yet. This woman is part of a race I don’t know the name of yet, and she speaks a language I haven’t created, and lives in a port city, the location of which I only have a vague notion of.
What used to happen to me is that I would jot down the premise or outline of these, then I’d think of all the “prerequisite” work that needed to be done: I need a language, a history, a detailed geography, and more, if I am to write about this woman’s heartbreak. So my todo list would accumulate mass, and accordingly the energy required to keep moving the project forward increased steadily as I needed more and more monumental pieces in place to be able to take even small steps into the reality of my potential characters.
But it’s not really true. I can write truthfully about “Jeresa,” whatever her name turns out to be. I can see her heart without knowing her name or her GPS coordinates. In fact, I can discover certain facts about her by simply writing them.
And when I do eventually know her language and her name and her place and her time, I can go back and correct them. Hopefully the corrections reveal more about her reality than the prop names and places did, but in any case I will not let unknowns stop me.
← Back to Blog Index