New Worlds Theory Post: Where to Stop Worldbuilding

A fictional world is potentially infinite in its detail, just like the real world. How do you decide when to say, that’s enough — I’m done worldbuilding?

This question is, among other things, a matter of taste, which means there’s no actual “right answer” apart from the one that suits your preferences. I think it’s pretty obvious from my essays here, my own novels, and the things I enjoy reading that I set the bar on the higher end: I like to feel immersed in a believable world, one that has enough texture for me to sink into the illusion of its reality. Other people would look at books I love and find them tediously over-detailed.

But I’d argue this isn’t purely driven by taste. Or rather, taste sets the upper and lower bounds for your preferences; within the resulting range, there are certain factors you can use to guide your decision-making.

The first is that I think it’s beneficial for a story to have at least a little more worldbuilding than the plot strictly requires. The word “strictly” is key to this equation, though; I am really and truly talking about what the plot absolutely has to mention in order to make the story go. This came to my attention when I tried reading a novel (which, unsurprisingly, I did not finish) that appeared to subscribe to the “only what is required and not an adjective more” school of thinking. Nothing was described unless it was load-bearing — for example, the first mention of anyone’s clothing was when a character showed up wearing the uniform of a dangerous organization. What did that uniform look like? Dunno, because that doesn’t matter. The factual content of “this is why the protagonist knows to be wary of him” was sufficient, and the visuals were treated like unnecessary padding. The story was so bare bones, even a skeleton would eye it askance. And the result was that I had a direct view of the plot machinery operating, without any skin of verisimilitude to make it feel more natural.

Of course, you don’t want to mention that which is entirely irrelevant. In the setting of the Rook and Rose trilogy, when Vraszenian settlements make war on one another, the victorious side raids the labyrinth (temple) of the losing side and steals all the Faces (representations of the benevolent aspects of the deities) as their trophies, leaving behind only the Masks (representations of the malevolent or wrathful aspects). You will find this detail nowhere in the books — admittedly because I thought it up after my co-author and I had finished writing them! But even if I’d come up with that detail sooner, it still wouldn’t be in the trilogy, for the simple reason that nowhere in our story do we have one Vraszenian settlement making war on another. Any reference to that practice would be air-dropped in from the stratosphere, disrupting the story we’re actually telling.

One solution to this, as I’ve mentioned before, is to make your cool idea relevant. We’d have a hard time doing that with internecine warfare, but we could have worked it in as a side note: we do have a conflict between street gangs, and maybe they do something metaphorically similar, which would be reason for someone to mention the larger-scale practice in passing. In this case it’s still a reach, but it serves to illustrate how, if you already have a super-shiny idea, you can look for ways to integrate it with your narrative. From the perspective of “where do you stop worldbuilding,” though, the answer is “before you reach this point, unless the idea comes to you of its own accord” (as this one did). There would be no purpose in me asking “okay, so what does warfare look like in the rest of Vraszan, when city-states or neighboring villages get into conflicts?” when that’s entirely tangential to the actual plot.

You also have to keep an eye on your pacing. Let’s say your protagonist is writing a letter in cipher: should you spend time figuring out what type of cipher their society uses? It’s a relevant question . . . but the details could potentially bog down your scene, stalling the reader with minutiae that distract from the content of the message itself. Personally, I’d be more likely to go in-depth on that question if the character was trying to crack a cipher, because now it’s a challenge they’re trying to overcome — automatically more interesting thanks to the unknown contents of the letter. If you start to research or brainstorm on something, then realize it’s drawing you away from the forward momentum of the story, limit it to a line or two of description at most, or just let the reader supply whatever default lives in their brain.

Finally, is your worldbuilding stopping you from writing the story? It’s one thing if you genuinely need to know something in order to move forward. That happened recently with me getting some distance into the draft of an upcoming novel about a monk going on a pilgrimage, then stopping because I needed to do a lot more development of both my map and my calendar if I didn’t want the pilgrims to be floating in a vague, timeless void. That’s one I maybe should have seen coming and taken care of sooner . . . but there’s a lot of worldbuilding stuff you don’t know you’re going to need until you sit down to write a given scene.

So the notion that you will do all your worldbuilding first and then, when that’s complete, write your story? That’s a trap, one that can keep you forever in the planning stages and never in the execution. Some things you have to know in advance: I couldn’t have started the novel without a basic sense of the religion my monk protagonist follows. It’s entirely legitimate to lay some groundwork before you begin. Much of your setting, though, can and probably should grow with the characters and the narrative, shaping and being shaped by the specifics of the tale. You’ll get a more organic, real-feeling result that way than if you lay down a bunch of shiny ideas in advance and then shoehorn everything in around them.

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First story of 2026!

Sunday Morning Transport is making all of its January stories free to read, and that includes my latest piece: “The Final Voyage of the Ouranos“!

If you’re getting Mary Celeste vibes off it, you’re not wrong; the genesis of this story was entirely me going “oooh, I want to do something kinda like that.” (It is not, however, a retelling of that specific incident.) The setting of my previous SMT story, “The Poison Gardener”, struck me as the ideal place for such a narrative, and the editor, Fran Wilde, snapped it right up!

New Worlds: Memento Mori

You probably don’t much like thinking about death. It’s understandable: death is sad and scary, and few of us look forward to it coming for us or anybody we love. But believe it or not, reminders of death have not infrequently been baked in as a cultural practice — in a couple of cases I’m going to discuss, literally baked! (more…)

Books read, November-December 2025

I have fallen out of the habit of doing these posts! I stopped for a while when I couldn’t talk about Sea Beyond research, then failed to really ingrain the practice again. But no time like the present to start up once more!

What if the Moon Didn’t Exist? Voyages to Earths That Might Have Been, Neil F. Comins. I would not call this book well-written on a prose level, but it’s conceptually interesting. Comins goes through a number of different astronomical scenarios and looks at, not just what that would look like now, but how it would (likely) affect things such as the evolution of life. For example, if the moon were closer to Earth, tides would be much stronger, greatly increasing the distance covered by the tidal zone, which would make it harder for sea life to transition onto dry land.

Worth noting, though, that this was originally published in 1993, so it doesn’t take into account more recent advancements in astronomy and biology. We’d just barely confirmed our first exoplanet sighting back then, and also Comins very much assumes that “life” must look like it does here. On the other hand, it’s sort of charming — in this age of climate change — to see his final chapter explore a doomsday scenario where we’ve completely wrecked the ozone layer, which was a major concern at the time. (In fact the “ozone hole” is healing now, and we should be back to 1980 levels within the next couple of decades.)

Comins has another book along these lines, What If the Earth Had Two Moons?, which I may pick up. Dry prose notwithstanding, these are very interesting to read with an eye toward designing different kinds of worlds!

And Dangerous to Know, Darcie Wilde. Third in a series of Recency mysteries I started reading last year, which are very fun — though demerits to the author, or perhaps her publisher, for the fact that A Useful Woman is NOT the first book of the “A Useful Woman” series, though both that series and this one, the “Rosalind Thorne Mysteries,” involve the same characters. It’s more than a little confusing.

But anyway! The premise here is that Rosalind Thorne is of a good family that (thanks to her father) fell on hard times a while ago, and so she scrapes by kind of being an assistant-slash-fixer to ladies of quality, handling everything from sending dinner party invitations to hushing up minor scandals. Naturally, the series involves her getting involved with rather more large-scale problems, which bring her into contact with both an attractive Bow Street runner and her former suitor, who unexpectedly inherited his family’s dukedom and so couldn’t possibly wed a gentlewoman teetering on the edge of being utterly fallen.

This is the third volume in the “Rosalinde Thorne Mysteries” series, and as the title suggests, it tangentially involves Lord Byron — specifically, some indiscreet correspondence with him which has gone missing. (Byron himself does not appear, which I think is probably for the best.) I suspect you could hop into this series wherever you like, but there’s no reason not to start at the beginning.

Copper Script, K.J. Charles. I very much enjoyed Death in the Spires and All of Us Murderers, so I went hunting for other books of Charles’ that are more mystery than romance, the latter being less my cup of tea. I’m pleased to say that Copper Script breaks from the similarities shared between those other two titles — not that the similarities were bad, but it was going to start feeling predictable if all of them followed similar beats. This one is likewise set in the early 20th century and involves a m/m romance that has to maneuver around the prejudices and laws of the time, but the main characters (a police officer and a man who, having lost one hand in WWI, now ekes out a living by analyzing handwriting) are not former lovers who had a bad falling-out some time ago, etc. The story this time is also sliiiiiiightly fantastical: the handwriting analysis slips over the line into psychic perception. Apart from that, though, it’s a satisfying non-speculative mystery, with police corruption and blackmail and murder.

Some by Virtue Fall, Alexandra Rowland. In one of the months I didn’t report on, I read Rowland’s A Conspiracy of Truths, which is a very odd book — the main character spends essentially the entire novel imprisoned or being shuttled between prisons, only able to affect things through the people he talks to. I enjoyed it, though certain things about the ending left a sour taste in my mouth; I’m pleased to see that the sequel may address those things.

But this is not that book! Instead it’s a standalone novella (I think in the same world), focused on the cutthroat world of Shakespearean-style theatre in a land where only women, not men, are permitted to act upon the stage. The rivalry between two companies gets wildly out of hand, and mayhem ensues. The main character was slightly difficult for me to empathize with, being very much an “act first think later if ever” kind of person, but I felt it all came together pretty well in the end.

Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, Oliver Darkshire. Straight-up one of my favorite things I’ve read recently, and also (I am not the first to make this observation) the most Pratchett-esque thing I’ve read not written by Terry Pratchett.

But that doesn’t mean it’s just a Discworld knockoff! Darkshire has built a similarly bonkers world — e.g. the sun beetle does not travel at a steady pace across the sky and sometimes decides to turn around, making the length of a day rather difficult to guess at — but his leaping-off point is a story from the Decameron, and the overall vibe is much more medieval English smashed into the Romantics (a Goblin Market plays a large role in the story). You’ll know if you want to read this one about three pages in; either you vibe instantly with the voice or you don’t. I did, and I’m looking forward to the sequel even though the protagonist of that one is a thoroughly unsympathetic antagonist from this book.

Audition for the Fox, Martin Cahill. Novella about a character who needs to win the patronage of one of ninety-nine gods and has already failed with ninety-six of them, so she tries the trickster fox god. Surprise, he throws her a curveball! She winds up in the past, assigned to make sure a key event happens in the revolution that freed her country from the grip of its invaders.

I loved the folkloric interludes here (stories of the Fox and other gods), and the fact that Cahill doesn’t have his heroine single-handedly win a war. Her job is merely to facilitate one specific event, which is one of many dominoes whose fall started decades of fighting. Which doesn’t make it not important! I love how that part played out. But it’s also not One Person Saves The Day, which is very, very good.

The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English, Hana Videen. I had managed to overlook the subtitle, so I thought this book was primarily about language; turns out it’s halfway between that and the kind of daily life book I read on the regular anyway. Videen digs into different aspects of life and looks at the words used back in Anglo-Saxon days, seeing how they do and do not map to the words we use today, and how vocabulary reveals the ways things got categorized and connected and what this means for how people lived. Being a language and culture nerd, naturally I found this right up my alley!

A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Sylvie Cathrall. My other favorite thing I’ve read recently! I think it’s no accident that both this and Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil are very quirky in their premises and voice-y in their execution.

Here the voice is Victorian-style letter-writing, and the premise is a world (you’re soon able to guess it’s a colonized planet) where, thanks to a catastrophe in the distant past, everybody has to eke out a living on an ocean where there’s basically only one landmass of anything like meaningful size. Society is organized around Scholars in different fields — a concept that extends to things like art — and the main body of the story is the correspondence between a Scholar of Boundless Campus (a fleet of migratory vessels) and a woman who lives a shut-in life in the underwater habitat built by her eccentric Scholar mother. Around that you get a second set of letters between the siblings of those two, who are trying to piece together what led up to the explosion that destroyed the habitat and caused the main characters to disappear.

Cathrall does have to indulge in a bit of contrivance to get the whole story into letters, diaries, or other written documents, and to control the pacing of reveals. But I didn’t mind, because it all just felt so original and engaging! This is the first book of a duology, and I promptly ordered the sequel, which is sitting on my desk as I type this.

City of Iron and Ivy, Thomas Kent West. Disclosure: this book was sent to me for blurbing purposes.

Alternate-history fantasy, in an England where floral magic is put to uses both trivial and epic, both fair and foul. The era is essentially Victorian, but West acknowledges in the afterword that he’s taken a number of liberties with the period. That includes the Reaper, who is obviously meant to be an analogue to Jack the Ripper (the story starts in 1888), but — and for me, this was crucial — is different enough that it didn’t trip my very strong opinions about how to handle the historical evidence of those murders.

But it is not entirely a story about murders. Elswyth, a scarred young lady, has to come to London to seek a husband after her more beautiful and sociable sister Persephone disappears, because otherwise she’ll have no future and her father’s entire estate will go to a loathesome cousin. Only Elswyth is convinced her sister’s disappearance has to do with the Reaper, and furthermore that the Reaper is probably a gentleman or noble, so her attempt to navigate that world is cover for her investigation.

I read the whole thing in about a day, and very much appreciated the ways in which the ending eschews some of the easy resolution I anticipated. I don’t know if there will be a sequel, but some dangling threads are left for one, while the main plot here resolves just fine.

The Tinder Box, M.R. Carey. Disclosure: this book was also sent to me for blurbing purposes. (I read three such over the holidays, but finished the third after the New Year.)

Labeling this one “historical fantasy” is kind of interesting, because it both is and it isn’t. I’d almost call it Ruritanian fantasy, except that term means works set in a secondary world without magic, whereas this is more Ruritanian in the original sense of the word: it takes place in an imaginary European country (circa the late 18th century), and then adds magic to that. If it weren’t for a couple of passing references to real places and the fact that Christianity is central to the tale, it could almost be a secondary world.

Anyway, genre labeling isn’t the important thing here. The story involves a soldier demobbed from his king’s stupid war due to injury, who finds that making a living back home is easier said than done, thanks to the peasantry being squeezed to the breaking point and beyond by said war. He’s employed for a time with an unfriendly widow, only for everything to go haywire when a giant devil falls dead out of the sky and the widow, who turns out to be a witch, pays him to loot the body. He pockets one innocuous-seeming item for himself — a tinder box — which of course turns out to be exactly what the witch was looking for, and so begins a chase.

I think of this book as being anti-grimdark in kind of the same way I used that term for Rook and Rose: it starts out there, but it doesn’t stay there. Mag is living on the edge of starvation and then makes a variety of incredibly stupid decisions in how he uses the tinder box (in fairness, partly due to repeatedly not having time to think things through), while Jannae, the witch, is deeply untrusting of everyone and everything. Meanwhile, the tinder box turns out to contain three trapped devils, and I’m often leery of “deals with the devil” type stories. But I loved the direction Carey took this in, and the ultimate trajectory is toward hope and healing rather than pyrrhic victories. It’s a standalone, and absolutely fine that way; you get a complete meal here, without being teased with anything more.

New Worlds: Sacred Objects

We’ve touched on sacred objects before, as they’re often integrated with other aspects of religion, but we haven’t looked at them directly. We’re going to do that now not only because it’s a key element of practically every religion, but because these turn out to be the hook upon which cultures have hung some fascinating behaviors! (more…)

2025 publications in review

Man was this an unusual year for me and publications.

Not the part where I didn’t have a novel out. That’s happened before, and it will again, thanks to the vagaries of scheduling; I have years with multiple novels out which more than make up for it.

And not really the part where I only published two short stories, thanks to a drop-off in my production of new stories (after an absolute flood of short fiction writing for a few years prior). Those are:

No, the unusual part is where I published EIGHT POEMS in 2025. There are plenty of poets who outpace that, but for me it’s a lot! All are either free to read online, or out of their period of exclusivity so I have made them available myself:

. . . actually, I published nine poems, but one of them is a piece I tucked into one of my own self-pubbed collections as a bonus piece. There were two such collections this year:

So that’s it for 2025! I have three things slated to come out in January, though — a short story and two poems — so I’ll be hitting the ground running next year. Let’s see what else 2026 has in store!

New Worlds: That Belongs in a Museum

I’ve been talking about the preservation of history as a matter of written records, but as a trained archaeologist, I am obliged to note that history also inheres in the materials we leave behind, from the grand — elaborate sarcophagi and ruined temples — to the humble — potsherds, post holes, and the bones of our meals.

(more…)

y ahora . . . ¡Pillaje de palabras!

I suppose it’s fitting that a poem about language should attract some attention from translators after it wins the Hugo Award, but I didn’t see it coming.

Cuentos para Algernon has published my work once before, a translation of “Waiting for Beauty” as “Esperando a que Bella . . .”. A little while ago, Marcheto came back to ask if she could also translate “A War of Words” — a query that left me staring in a bit of surprise at my computer screen, because I’d legit never thought anybody would be interested in translating my poetry. The result went live today, as “Pillaje de palabras.”

Nor will that be the only one! There’s also a Romanian translation in the works!

But this one is a little special, because as you may recall, I spent 2024 bludgeoning myself up to something like reading proficiency in Spanish so I could do broader research for the Sea Beyond. When Marcheto asked to translate “Waiting for Beauty,” I could kinda read the result, but mostly because I already knew what it said. This time around, I was actually in a position to collaborate more actively with her: the translation is Marcheto’s, but I read a draft and gave feedback, suggesting some slight alterations to bring it more in line with my original intent.

This was a fascinating process. Every translator knows there are always choices to make — and they’re not right or wrong choices, just questions of priority and style. For example: if you were to translate the title for its literal meaning, it would be “Una guerra de palabras,” and that’s what Marcheto originally went with. She proposed “Pillaje de palabras” as an alternative, though, because I had mentioned at the outset that I wanted to preserve the elements of alliteration within the poem if it could be done naturally in Spanish. It’s a less direct translation, but one that emphasizes the poetic quality of the title.

Or take the places where languages can’t quite re-create each other’s effects. Marcheto originally translated “raid” as “incursión,” which is of course completely reasonable. In reading the Spanish draft, though, I became aware of something I’d done entirely on reflex when writing the poem: the text leans heavily toward short, simple, Germanic-derived words, rather than Latinate ones, because the former tend to sound more direct and harsh than the latter. What do you do, though, when the language of the translation is Latinate through and through? I suggested, and Marcheto agreed with, “ataque” instead, which sounds a little sharper (and assonates with “arrebatada” to boot). The same happened with “existe una palabra” becoming “hay una palabra”: she said, and I believe her, that “existe” doesn’t sound at all high-flown to Spanish speakers, the way that “a word exists” sounds fancier in English than “there’s a word” . . . but “hay una” flows off the tongue a little more smoothly, so that’s what we went with.

All told, my suggested alterations were few and minor. (There were also a couple she stood her ground on — which was entirely fair; she’s the native speaker!) But it was a really intriguing process, the first time I’ve been able to meaningfully contribute to the translation of my own work. It makes you think a lot about what you did and why you did it, and if you have to choose between two different priorities, which one matters to you more.

If you read Spanish, I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on the translation!

The No Longer Littlest Black Belt Takes the Next Step

Nine years and eight months ago, I earned my black belt in shōrin-ryu karate.

Today, I became a second degree black belt.

It was supposed to happen sooner. But right when the head of my dojo began saying that maybe it was time for me to prep for testing, a pandemic started. Which put a dent in my training. And even once classes began again, various factors meant I wasn’t able to go regularly. And then 2024 was, in hindsight, a rather abysmal year for my health. And and and, spring of this year rolled around, and I realized I was in danger of it being ten years since my previous test, and dammit, I did not intend to let that milestone pass without me at least trying to take the next step.

There were more than a few hurdles along the way. I’ve had wrist problems for years that meant I hadn’t been doing kobudo (weapons training), but you’re expected to do that as part of your test. So starting in August I began a crash course, scraping the rust off the sai kata I was expected to perform — not too bad; it was one I used to know well — and, uh, learning from scratch a long and difficult bo kata that I did not know in the slightest. I went so gung-ho on that, in fact, that I managed to give myself a repetitive stress sprain in my right ankle five weeks before the test (bear in mind that sprains take about six weeks to heal . . .). And then, to put the cherry on top of that sundae, I caught my big toe against the mat nine days ago and basically re-activated the hellacious sprain I had in that joint some years previously.

As I put it to several people, by the time I got to the test, I felt like I was being held together by chewing gum. Not even duct tape: that would have been an upgrade.

But these higher-level tests can only be done when our dojo’s founder is in town (he moved back to Okinawa a few years ago), and his next visit will likely be for the seminar in April of next year. That would be past the decade mark I was determined to beat. So, come hell or high water, I was going to drag my sorry carcass through the test — and I did! And, barring a couple of utterly bone-headed errors brought on by nerves (which got knowing nods of “yep, that happens” from other black belts later), I did acceptably well. I faced down literally an international panel of seven sensei — Shihan being in from Okinawa, and also we have a contingent of Germans from one of our sister dojo here for the fall seminar — whose collective belt rank totaled well over forty degrees, and I achieved ni-dan status.

You don’t get a new belt, of course. It’s still the same black belt as before. But there’s kind of a joke that a truly experienced black belt becomes a white belt again, because over time the black threads fray and break, revealing the white canvas core underneath, so that a truly high-level sensei’s belt can be tattered indeed.

And this afternoon, after I passed my test . . .

. . . I glanced down at my belt . . .

. . . and I found a tiny frayed spot on the corner of one end where the white canvas is peeking through.

I consider it my ni-dan badge. ^_^