Wednesday Worldbuilding Workshop

Welcome! This is a post both for tracking/reading the Wednesday Worldbuilding Workshop and for submitting to it.

First, if you're interested in workshopping with me and having your work looked at by my readers, please submit, in the comments space below, an excerpt of no more than five hundred words from your work in progress (novel length or shorter story length), with a sentence or two telling me what kind of feedback you're looking for. If the excerpt is the opening of your work, and you want feedback on your world-entry, don't tell me anything else. If the excerpt is from the middle of your work, you may add an additional sentence or two to give me some basic previous context. Entries totaling over 1000 words of text and explanation cannot be considered, so please be concise. Please include an email address if you want me to inform you that you have been selected.

Here is a list of links to all the posts that have appeared in the Wednesday Worldbuilding Workshop, in case you would like to take a look:

1. The Narrator is Your Ambassador - E. Arroyo
2. Making the Amnesiac work for you - Megs
3. Managing the juxtaposition of normal and abnormal - David Marshall
4. Signposting Differences - Che Gilson
5. Macro- and micro-grounding - Anonymous
6. Foregrounding and Backgrounding Information - Rachel Udin
7. Description implies narrator focus - Domini
8. Metaphors and magic in a blended world - Harry Markov
9. Take your time and build - Nnedi Okorafor (for her Nebula-nominated Who Fears Death)
10. Managing information and surprises - Suzi McGowen
11. Aligning "Ordinary" Judgment - Megs
12. Ambiguity and Anchoring in Fantasy Contexts - Lexie
13. Orienting by marking insiders and outsiders - Siri Paulson
14. Superiors and inferiors in a magic system - Nicole Sheldrake

How Linguistics Can Help You - Index

This series of posts first appeared during a workshop here at TalkToYoUniverse, and has since been reprinted at the blog of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). It goes into detail about how different aspects of linguistics can be helpful in writing fantasy and science fiction.

1. How linguistics can help you
2. How articulatory phonetics can help you
3. How morphology can help you
4. How syntax can help you
5. How semantics can help you: Part 1 (choosing the right word)
6. How semantics can help you: Part 2 (connotations and allusion)
7. How semantics can help you: Part 3 (making up words)
8. How pragmatics can help you
9. How sociolinguistics can help you

A Different Value - Index

Here is a list of all the different posts I've made concerning different values placed on commonplace things/ideas in different cultures:

1. Teeth
2. Pale Skin
3. Alcohol
4. Choice
5. Information
6. Water

Ridiculously Close Looks - Index

A Ridiculously Close Look, for those of you who don't know, is when I do a line-by-line analysis of some aspect of a previously published work. These posts deal with voice, tension, point of view, worldbuilding, and other useful aspects of writing - from a perspective that is both useful and best described as "ridiculously close."

1. 26 Monkeys: Also the Abyss by Kij Johnson - includes comments from the author!
2. Dinosaurs Before Dark by Mary Pope Osborne
3. Dune by Frank Herbert
4. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
5. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
6. Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey
7. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge