One of the cool things about my protagonist Jhayni in Season of Rains is that she’s a (an?) historian. This means that I get to make up all kinds of artifacts, sub-cultures, texts, dynasties, legends and colorful anecdotes about historical characters of her world.
And oh boy, did I ever do so, with joyful abandon.
There are Malekine characters and Ameate caves. There’s the Cyrene period, the Taumad dynasty, the Hibrean culture. There are documents succinctly known as “The Saphis Text” and ones with Stupid Long Titles like An Account of the Province Scalos in the Seventh Year of the Reign of King Saleem, and the Twelfth Year of the Governor Carados: Population, Agricultural Yield, and Mining Production. Scholars accuse each other of Darianism (whatever that is), turn up their noses at Coran “scholarship” and quibble over the merits of various academic journals. Ancient vases and tapestries abound.
No, I’m not at all having fun making stuff up. Why do you ask? *grin*
SoR rev. 2 progress: 151/245 pages <– Less than a hundred pages to go!
We are entertaining this weekend (how grand that sounds!), so I will be busy cleaning house and cooking food. Dunno if I’ll make much progress but it’ll be nice to get another 20 or so pages done.
Ooooh! I love love LOVE stuff like that! That’s so cool! I got to do that with my first nano novel. Needed 5000 years of history, a pantheon of gods and myths (two sets of the same gods for side-by-side cultures), stories, legends, the basic structure of two languages. It was such a blast. That’s the only book I’ve done that for though; the rest haven’t required it, sadly. It really makes me want to read this one! And I want to know about those Ameate caves now!
I’m a by-the-seat-of-my-pants worldbuilder. I make up random names for cultures, books, historical characters as I write. Then I go back and try to create a cultural and historical context for all the things I invented. 🙂