#pennedpossibilities Timeline

I tend to go for overwhelmingly overpowered antagonists. In "Starter Pack" Jum and Tabitha are up against the Last Empress; in the Laundry Files Bob was confronted with the Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep: and so on.

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21d

#PennedPossibilities 1102: Do you have a strategy for how you approach worldbuilding in your WIP(s)?

When I'm doing world-building, I sometimes start by itemizing the prevailing clichés in the sub-genre I've chosen, just so I can interrogate and—where necessary—avoid them.

I'm currently working on a multi-book space opera setting. I began it in 2016, and this blog post summarizes my thoughts about common problems in space opera world-building:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html

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14d

#PennedPossibilities 1111: Do you respond to feedback, reviews, or comments? Why or why not?

I answer direct questions (if they're polite). But I NEVER argue with reviewers over an opinion they hold about my work because authors arguing with reviewers are radioactive:

"This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

"What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger."

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12d

#PennedPossibilities 1102: Do you have a strategy for how you approach worldbuilding?

Yes and it's gnarly! Start by working out what kind of story the setting is a backdrop for, then examine ALL the stock clichés so that I can use them *if they work* and deep-six them if they're nonsense.

My current WIP, a space opera, got rolling right after I wrote this essay, which was just me setting my own ground rules *before* the world-building:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html

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6d

#PennedPossibilities 1118

Name a catastrophic event that occurred in your world/universe.

In the Laundry Files, it's unambiguously CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN—that's the main plot driver for the last 7 books in the (main) 10 book series! (A positive feedback loop that makes magic easier, like anthropogenic climate change, nearly tears the universe apart before we stop adding to it.)

In the current WIP, the fictional universe is so vast that no plausible catastrophe is big enough to be non-local.

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4d

#PennedPossibilities 1120: Share something from your WIP pertaining to the word “entertainment.”

See screencap: full text in alt-text. It doesn't specifically use the word "entertainment" … but it might as well. Will fix later!

(The house party is so entertainingly memorable that it ends with a jewel robbery, a fox hunt, a nuclear explosion, then the inquisition turns up and crucifies all the survivors.)

Smoothbrain Freddie's house party was well into its third week when the Apothecary arrived. The venue was the Earl of Ozobranch's so-called "hunting lodge"—a medium-sized palace in the middle of a deciduous forest carpeting the foothills of a picturesque mountain range. The Earl had made it available for his children's recreational use, so Freddie had taken it over for the summer and invited all his friends (and a few of his enemies).

After three weeks of Freddie-grade festivities the servants had bags under their eyes, the wine cellar was down to a third of its original level, the guests had fought four duels (none of them conclusively fatal), and the roof of the west wing was still smoking from the dragon race the Drones Club had held the weekend before.

Luckily for the servants, many of the party animals from the first week had moved on: most of the survivors were confined to the gaming salon. They were mainly hedge-lords playing for grim death to avoid homelessness, or vainly attempting to recover their squandered fortunes. The latter crew were absolutely pestilential—they'd propose marriage at the drop of a hat, and some were unscrupulous enough to try to compromise their target—so the Apothecary avoided them. In any case, the gambling tables were not her preferred hunting ground right now. Instead she mingled with the ladies of the fourth party as they arrived from the capital aboard one of the earl's personal airships.

ALT

Edited 4d ago

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