City building
Feb. 17th, 2013 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anthimeriaY'all, it's been so long since I did any nitty-gritty worldbuilding stuff that I forgot how much I LOVE it.
Flying Machines (which I suspect will need a new name sooner rather than later; hopefully the outline will reveal one to me) takes place in the bowels of the City in the Sky. Because the City is held up by gas bags underneath it (yes, I know this is not the way lighter-than-air flight really works. Please keep in mind that I did research, seriously considered all my options, and then threw the laws of physics out the window for what would work better culturally and look the way I wanted), this meant googling airships and lighter-than-air craft till my googler was sore. Much of the City's infrastructure is going to be involved in this story, which means I need to know more than the vague outlines of infrastructure that I put together when I was initially worldbuilding for Skywatch.
Thus, instead of working on the story outline, I bent pencil to paper and sketched out schematics of the City's Envelope, the very structures that keep it aloft. It took three and a half hours, three sheets of paper, almost an entire lead for my mechanical pencil, and a lot of erasing and re-drawing, but I think I have the basic structures, their names, and their origins worked out. Since this is all going to figure into the plot, I am excited! It was a ton of fun articulating what I'd sort of known in the back of my head into specifics that I could put on a page. Though I did wish for a 3-D modeler a couple of times. I suspect that some of my sketches will only ever make sense to me.
Now I need to figure out what's directly under the City, between the building foundations and the Envelope. Obviously maintenance tunnels, but what else? So much of worldbuilding is cultural, historical and biographical that I forgot how much I love building buildings.
This feels very much like a tiny glimpse of what it's going to be like to put Moxie's city together when I get around to her books, and I think I'm going to spend way too much time on it and have a marvelous time.
Worldbuilding FTW!
Flying Machines (which I suspect will need a new name sooner rather than later; hopefully the outline will reveal one to me) takes place in the bowels of the City in the Sky. Because the City is held up by gas bags underneath it (yes, I know this is not the way lighter-than-air flight really works. Please keep in mind that I did research, seriously considered all my options, and then threw the laws of physics out the window for what would work better culturally and look the way I wanted), this meant googling airships and lighter-than-air craft till my googler was sore. Much of the City's infrastructure is going to be involved in this story, which means I need to know more than the vague outlines of infrastructure that I put together when I was initially worldbuilding for Skywatch.
Thus, instead of working on the story outline, I bent pencil to paper and sketched out schematics of the City's Envelope, the very structures that keep it aloft. It took three and a half hours, three sheets of paper, almost an entire lead for my mechanical pencil, and a lot of erasing and re-drawing, but I think I have the basic structures, their names, and their origins worked out. Since this is all going to figure into the plot, I am excited! It was a ton of fun articulating what I'd sort of known in the back of my head into specifics that I could put on a page. Though I did wish for a 3-D modeler a couple of times. I suspect that some of my sketches will only ever make sense to me.
Now I need to figure out what's directly under the City, between the building foundations and the Envelope. Obviously maintenance tunnels, but what else? So much of worldbuilding is cultural, historical and biographical that I forgot how much I love building buildings.
This feels very much like a tiny glimpse of what it's going to be like to put Moxie's city together when I get around to her books, and I think I'm going to spend way too much time on it and have a marvelous time.
Worldbuilding FTW!