Planetfall

Worldbuilding, or the art of creating a cohesive, internally consistent fictional world, is something that every science fiction or fantasy writer (and for that matter, many writers of literary fiction) must do in order to create the scaffolding upon which they build their stories.  Most such writers only build their worlds just as far as is necessary to tell their tales, and no further--as is right and proper, of course, if the main goal is to tell a story.  For some folks, though, the story is not enough, and they become engrossed in the world itself, weaving it out into strange complexities that sprawl far beyond what would ever be useful for a story.  Eventually, the fictive world itself becomes the primary "work" of the worldbuilder, and any stories, paintings, languages, sculptures, songs, etc. that may be associated with it become not individual works of art, but threads in the overarching tapestry that is the world.

For most of my life, I've been imagining, refining, and adjusting a fictional world (universe, really) of my own, with most of my energy devoted to threshing out the details of a single planet which I currently call Gavanna.  I've written a vast number of short stories set on this world, covered reams of paper with doodles of the various critters, plants, characters, and landmarks that exist on it, and have even worked out a few details of a script, counting system, and language (the last being very crude; I'm no linguist) for the creatures that inhabit my world.  I figure it might be productive for me to throw such imaginings up here, and while I can't promise any regularity in my posts (heck, I can't promise that this won't be both my first and last post), I shall try to keep this alive, and will be sure to post plenty of purty pictures so that my reader(s) aren't subjected to nothing but walls of text.  Sound good?  Excellent.  Onward!

...Wait, dagnabbit.  Not quite onward just yet.  I forgot one detail, and a rather important one.  The title of this blog is a reference to one of my characters, an extremely metafictional character named Dejerara who functions, in my world, as a sort of legendary--well, not a deity, that's not an appropriate descriptor (and she would never stand for being worshipped), but a--patron, I suppose, is a good term.  A mythical patron of stories.  Her story, in my world's chronology, is the oldest and most important story that's told, and the first story ever told to any young beastie going out into the world.  All other stories are told because her story exists, and her story dictates the nature of all other stories.  We'll get to her later, I think; I imagine that most folks reading this will already be well familiar with my world already, so as I plow ahead my modus operandi will probably be to simply post updates as they come along, with little attention paid to getting any newcomers caught up--simply because I don't really anticipate any newcomers.  If that changes in future (and heigh-ho to the comments to pronounce your newcomer status, if'n you aren't already familiar with Gavanna!), then I'll likely add a set of primer pages on the astronomy, biology, history, paleohistory, and civilizations of my world.

Alright, that's better.  Got things cleared up, mild incoherence notwithstanding.  Now, onward!