Humour Archives | A.S. Akkalon

Five ways to go overboard with worldbuilding for your fantasy novel

When you write a fantasy novel based in a non-Earth world, you get to make up everything. And with all that freedom comes the opportunity to go way overboard in your worldbuilding. If such is your wont, here are five ways you might do it.

Every fantasy reader loves a fully fleshed out world. They might see only a tiny fraction of it (they’d *better* see only a tiny fraction of it), but they can feel if it exists.

In a fully fleshed out world, the forests are greener and every carnivore knows what it’s hunting. The sky might be purple, but we have the physics to explain why. And you’ll always know which lord build the castle that saved your hero from demons, and how much it cost them.

So if your goal is to give your readers what they want, here are five ways to go overboard with your worldbuilding.

Of course, if you follow these instructions you may never get around to writing your story, but isn’t the price worth it?*

* In general, it’s not.

Five reasons you should aspire to being a crazy cat lady

Life is better when you’re ruled by cats. Here’s why you should become a crazy cat lady today.

A crazy cat lady* is a person who has cats** instead of children (or as well as children), dotes on them to the extent of rearranging her house and her life around them, and has much more important things to do than brush her hair.

* In a gender-non-specific sense

** Experts have not yet reached a consensus over whether one cat is sufficient to make a crazy cat lady.

A crazy cat lady has fur on her clothes and knows better than to leave an unattended glass of water on the table.

How not to bake healthy bread with a breadmaker

Breadmakers are wonderful, and if you can follow a few simple instructions you can easily use them to bake healthy bread. Sadly, I can’t.

At some point when early woman got home from chasing a wildebeest across the Serengeti and still had to knead her bread dough, she stopped and thought, gee there are a lot of steps to making bread. It would be much easier if I had a machine to do all this for me.

Thus was the breadmaker created.*

* It’s possible this isn’t precisely what happened. Not likely, but possible.

I have such a breadmaker, a gift from a relative whose faith in my ability to make bread without a breadmaker is… fairly accurate.

Unfortunately, it turned out my ability to make bread with a breadmaker is not much better.

Introducing my three feline overlords

I have three cats and they’re all here to say hi. The photo isn’t them.

I promised I’d introduce my three new cats, but today I’m going to do better. I’ve brought them along to introduce themselves. They’ve been with me about a year, and not one has finished the first draft of their novel yet, but I’m sure they have plenty of other things to tell you about.

Alecia: So here with me today I have Little Squeak, Runs from Jeans, and Princess Persephone Fluffybum. Why don’t you guys start by introducing yourselves?

Little Squeak: Where’s the catnip? You said there’d be catnip.

Alecia: You ate the catnip. Can introduce yourself anyway?

Little Squeak: I’d rather bite Runs from Jeans.

Little Squeak straddles Runs from Jeans and munches on his ear.

Alecia: That was Little Squeak. He’s a green-eyed, short-haired tabby with the most ridiculous meow you ever heard–

The joys and pitfalls of obsession

I have a natural inclination towards obsession, focussing all my energies on one thing until it bursts into flame. Sometimes this is bad. Not always.

Ask someone who knows me in real life, and they’ll tell you I’m quite good at obsession.

I think of it as having a talent for focus. Hubby disagrees.

In the past I’ve obsessed over study, work, hobbies, romantic interests (before you freak out, I married him in the end), concepts (but what little girl isn’t crazy about horses?), reading books (like reading a ten-book series ten times back to back), writing books, TV shows, video games, and the absolute best way to construct a wall out of branches and pine needles.

I exaggerate. My pine walls were good, but I could have made them better with an additional ten years to experiment.

A flair for obsession can bring unexpected rewards, but the path to them is thick with pit traps and those nasty things you step on that release a log in your face. Today I’m going to share some of these joys and downfalls so you can decide for yourself if a life of obsession is right for you.