So last week, I talked about getting some world building done to bring last year’s NaNoWriMo WIP back to life.

And I’ve spent a great deal of time since then forging ahead with that. Two things happened to break through the block I’ve had with that. The first being that I got the opportunity to brainstorm with my baby brother, who also shares my interest in genre blending. He wasn’t afraid to point at multiple cultures and mythos to reference various things I was getting at.

Yes, we even talked about Jedi. Oddly enough, even though Star Wars is sci-fi it’s appropriate to discuss it when deciding whether or not to use hard or soft rules for magic in a fantasy setting AND the Force aligns itself well to the real world concept of animism.

Sci-fi tends to lean towards harder rules while stories, like Lord of the Rings, is softer. In the past I’ve leaned on the soft side, but this world feels like it needs harder rules. So before I begin writing, I need to clearly define what it can and can’t do – doesn’t matter whether or not I tell the reader these rules, I just need to know them and they need to be set in stone.

The other breakthrough I had was switching to a different brainstorming template, and this one is set up for Scrivener. It’s called the World Builder Leviathan and it has you start with a basic idea with your story and your characters and works outward from there. As you move through the template, it has you shape an outline for your book.

I’m not finished with the template yet, but it has gotten me to think about a lot of things that my brother and I didn’t discuss – largely cultural and technological stuff of the world I hadn’t considered. So now I have two brain storming documents running. One is this template and the other is a mind map I put together from the very messy notes I took while talking to my brother.

It’s not as messy as the notes in my notebook at least, but still…

The cool thing in all this is that since I wanted this story to be a web series, my brother and I had already come up with ideas for the next story arc. Those are still budding, but they’re there at least on the back burner.

And my outline is coming along nicely in a logical fashion!

Have any of you used the Leviathan method? How did it work for you? Let me know in the comments!

And of course, I have music for this weekend as well! The playlist features covers by Johnathan Young and Caleb Hyles. The first song in my list is a collaboration between the two. Johnathan’s cover of “Shiny” is Little Bear’s favorite and I added Caleb’s cover of “The Sound of Silence” because I’m a sucker for that song. The last two songs are covers from the Hobbit movie that I hope you’ll enjoy.

As always I hope your weekend is filled with much love, light, and laughter. May your creative endeavors be fruitful!

Featured image from pixabay.com under CC0 license.