> Sounds good. How do you develop the story line? I draw the characters, the world, the plants and animals, and the artifacts and such and grow the story around those ideas. Drawing things takes mere ideas and transforms them into something material you can work with. Instead of something just sitting in my mind, it's right in front of me, and I have something to reference upon when I need it.

Like you, I've started with the idea for the world itself, which has a very unusual feature that produced interesting geographical possibilities when the idea occured to me. The next idea was the history of the world which brought about its flawed condition, and after that I decided on a good time frame to cast the story, relative to those definitive earlier events.

After that, some ideas for the kinds of character personalities who interest me: I've got two or three "definites", and intend to let the story dictate the others as the plot begins to be hammered out. In creative writing class in college, I tried to force one or two stories to be about a particular character, only to find that a different character should have been the focus all along.

Right now I'm going back and forth between working out ideas for the scope of travel the characters will make within the world, smaller histories and political/social systems, and what the backbone of the plot should be so that I don't end up creating the dreaded "travelogue." :-)

As a rank amateur, I don't know what the prescribed methods are for this kind of preliminary work, apart from browsing books and Internet sources such as Dave Parker has thoughtfully compiled right here on RW. It doesn't much matter; this story is for me, and I don't have any professional writing aspirations. I wouldn't even have said this much except that you've asked, and I'm feeling more enthusiastic than usual about getting some work done on the danged thing.

To everyone: Have a happy Thanksgiving; I'll be computer-less for a few days while visiting my wife's parents in New York. See y'all (okay, not literally) next week!

Iss "who started this whole quote-within-a-name thing, anyway?" achar