worldbuilding nerds, unite!
…and by “the times” I mean “my wiki farm.”
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry. It means the wikis I use to keep track of my world building.
I have some very complex world-building for most of my stories. It’s an addiction, really; I think I’ve been obsessed with world-building since my mother bought me the Dune Encyclopedia when it came out in 1984. I had read Dune a few years earlier and was a huge fan, so I read that encyclopedia front to back (in the days when encyclopedias had both fronts and backs, because they were printed books). I wanted to know everything about that book’s universe. I wanted to be immersed in it!
I did this with all my fandoms, to be honest, and still do. One of my first fan purchases was an original edition of The Star Trek Concordance, which was published in 1976. I bought in 1982 at an sff convention with my own hard-earned allowance money. Yes, I still have it. (Yes, I also secretly bought K/S fanfic that absolutely should NOT have been sold to baby!me, but it was the ‘80s. No, I don’t have that fanzine anymore, much to my regret!)
After I read the excellent book Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard, one of the first things I did was search for the “fan wiki” to read up on aspects of her extensive world-building for the story.
So it should surprise NO ONE that I do, in fact, have extensive wikis for my own works. They have for years and years been hosted on Wikidot, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the site is sunsetting (tech talk for “slowly disintegrating”) and I need to move my wikis elsewhere. I’ve latched onto Legend Keeper, which I chose over the better-known World Anvil. Both sites were created for D&D gamers but have great features for authors to build worlds with, so it’s less that one is better than the other than that they work a bit differently.
Now I just need to move hundreds of wiki pages over… *lol!sob*