OMG I LOVE LOVE LOVEE YOUR PHM FIC SM AAAAA 🥹🥹🥹!! I absolutely LOVE your world building skills and, as someone struggling to get back into writing for pleasure, was wondering if you had any tips?? Sorry if you've already answered something like this in the past! (Also ur work reminds me of raspberry jelly bc it's so refreshing and scrumptious 😋😋😋)
TY FOR YOUR TIME AND HAVE A LOVELY DAY/ NIGHT BYEE 😁🫶
KSKSKDKD THANK YOU SO MUNCH OMG, that's very high praise!!! I'm happy to hear you've been enjoying the fic :D
Worldbuilding tips... Hmmm
Mind you, I'm not a professional by any means, but personally tend to approach it in a way where I have a plot idea first (in this example case: Grace and Rocky go to earth together) and then ask myself mainly two things that I need to solve to make it work:
1) For what reason do they go to earth?
Functionally: shenanigans and bonding
Lore-wise: traveling between the planets would take a huge amount of resources, effort and preparation, so the reason for why they're going has to be important. As the shared heros of both their homeworlds, interplanetary politics makes sense. Since this story will be on the fluffy and silly side, negotiating an official alliance without any threat of war would work. Grace and Rocky thus function as ambassadors! ALSO: gathering and bringing home better/replacement resources for Grace after they're done
2) okay, I have my purpose for the plot, but how do I make it happen?
I have a few things here that I need to account for:
- I want Rocky to exist in a human body that he wasn't born with, so how do I (1) make it happen and (2) reason doing so?
->->-> (1) the book introduced stem cell cloning as a functioning concept and Eridians are much better at chemistry than Humanity is, so that can account for *making* the body + temporary/reversible avatar style consciousness transfer for controls.
->->-> (2) Logistics and personal safety, since Earth has a vastly incompatible atmosphere and unlike Erid nowadays, lacks the infrastructure to host Eridian lifeforms safely.
Bonus: Rocky not only gets to experience earth as a place but also being a human *on* earth
- between Earth and Erid is a huge stretch of distance that will take over a decade to cross, even at near lightspeed, so generating that much fuel will be difficult + humans have short livespans, so I need to find a way to cut that travel time down somehow
->->-> ✨WORMHOLE✨ that cuts travel time down to just 2 years
Bonus: discovering this could be a great reason to kick of the interplanetary alliance idea in the first place and allows for better planning since messages don't take nearly as long to pass back and forth!
And this whole Goal->why?->how? structure is a good way to start, but imo the real sauce for the details and meat of the worldbuilding lies in this next type of question:
- what are the consequences?
Example questions in this vein that I asked myself:
1) What does turning human mean for Rocky, who's used to a wildly different mode of existence?
2) How does Grace handle the possibility of being able to more easily return home, given his complicated history and the passage of time?
3) How does Earth react to the Hail Mary returning? Do they know about alien involvement or was that kept secret? What would change if they did/didn't keep Erid's tangential involvement in the astrophage crisis a secret?
4) What does Earth even look like now, after all that happened?
5) Where does Adrian fit in all of this?
6) What about the other characters from PHM?
The rest is then just a matter of logical contextualizing everything in sequence and plugging plot/continuity holes where they pop up!
I hope that's not too confusing? In any case I wish you a lovely day/night too!!! :D <3
Disclaimer: Please check this post before sending me an ask!
