My Internet’s been running really slowly this week, and my reigning thesis for why is that most of the bandwidth for my local cable provider is being gobbled up by the ten trillion people all trying to download Diablo III. … Continue reading
With this installment of Magrathean Diary I’ve come to a turning point. I’ve talked about world-building for a project from a number of different angles—how to look at it, how to organize it—but I haven’t yet said the one thing … Continue reading
I blame B. Kliban. Among his many cartoon books is one with a title that embodies a perfectly sensible piece of advice: Never Eat Anything Bigger than Your Own Head. He could have been talking about the book I’m currently … Continue reading
With all this talk about wikis (I’m considering changing the name of the series of Magra-wiki Diary at this rate), I feel I’ve gotten a little far afield from my original premise: how to build worlds for your fan-to-pro project, … Continue reading
Earlier in the current draft of Flight of the Vajra (the project whose creation inspired this series of articles), my story broke. I was in the middle of a scene when I stopped to look something up in the project … Continue reading
The other night I was elbow-and ribcage deep in my story—and my story/world wiki. I’d finished one scene and was adding some notes to myself about the nature of a scene I’d written a month and change ago, reminding myself … Continue reading
Last time out, I talked about how to take a world-sized project and use a wiki to keep it from overwhelming you. Because a wiki is an inherently open-ended way to store and cross-reference information, that means coming up with … Continue reading
Last time out I suggested a wiki was the single best way, hands down, to organize any project that has its own world. Now comes the thornier question: how exactly do you do that? The same thing that makes a … Continue reading
Last time around I talked about the contrast between flat-file and relational information management systems—the former being a word processor and the latter being a database. That makes it seem like you have to choose between one or the other—full … Continue reading
One of the first jobs I held out of high school was gofer and computer-monger for an audio engineer who was building a recording studio for Sony Classical (formerly Columbia Records). My duties included fetching coffee, pounding out correspondence in … Continue reading