The Never-Ending…Worldbuilding Process…
Greetings, traveler! Thanks for stopping by my little corner of time-space. When thinking of what to title this first entry, I started thinking back on all the years of thought that have gone into getting Zeer this far.
I mean, seriously…it’s been…20 years? Now, understand, it isn’t like I was worldbuilding night and day the way I do now. No, there were many chapters along the way where I was barely engaged with the hands on process at all. The seed was planted at age 14, when I made my first attempt at writing a piece of serious length (maybe 150,000 words?). In hindsight I am heinously embarrassed by that work, having destroyed every copy I could find. However, and most importantly, at the very end, the main character leaves Earth to use his new god-like powers to build his own world. And BAM - Zeer began to take shape.
That first iteration of my little world was the basically the kitchen sink of fantasy and the whole funny farm to boot. If there was a mythological race, I wanted to include it. I think at one point, I had a list of 76 sapient/sentient races I was trying to jam onto one planet. It was perhaps a bit excessive, but that is one of the traps of being a life-long lover of the fantasy and sci-fi genres.
Which, I’d like to point out, is part of what pushed me towards my worldbuilding interest in the first place. Tolkien became young Zack’s icon. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was one of the first pieces of high fantasy I ever read. And then for whatever reason I became obsessed with his works, consuming most of the rest in short order. The way he constructed these vast histories was enthralling. And upon learning that it all stemmed from his desire for a world to exist in which a particular elvish phrase could be used…I think that was the hook.
Without sounding too critical, Tolkien’s world is, one might say, flawed in a number of ways, but it did set the bar for much of the fantasy genre we know today, at least in the West. And now we have so many iterations of elves and dwarves and goblins/orcs that it’s hard to keep track.
Parallel to my love for all things magic and fantasy is my love of science, the scientific process, and science-fiction. In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1962 essay Hazards of Prophecy: Failur of Imagination his third law states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I have absolutely no idea where I heard that for the first time, but it stuck with me, and it feels true in my bones. When watching works like Star Trek my brain doesn’t really categorize that as “impossibility” but rather “things we haven’t yet learned how to do.” And case in point: the tricorder. A handheld device for capturing information and relaying communication. Now most of us walk around with such a thing and live amongst other wonders that even 50 years ago didn’t seem “possible.”
Perhaps it is just my high degree of curiosity, but knowing how something functions, why it functions, where it is applicable does little to nothing to dim the wonder I feel for any particular phenomenon. And thus I’ve spent my life absolutely in love with exploring our universe through the lens os scientific inquiry.
It’s that flavor of inquiry I’ve always brought to my world building. During college, a favorite past time of mine was to sit around a table in the cafeteria with my friends and work out the mechanics and plausibility for various “fantasy lifeforms” like sea serpents and rock golems, etc.
Even that was over a decade ago, and Zeer has continued to evolve as my understanding of what is possible, plausible, and quasi-geometrically-beautiful has evolved. So maybe it is a good thing that I didn’t “get serious” about world building until the summer of 2025. While working at a mushroom farm I became friends with a woman who had a long history with D&D and worldbuilding within that framework. Our conversations re-lit, perhaps even expanded on the fire I felt for world building, and now here we are. The present. Where I spend half of my waking moments thinking about how all the little pieces of Zeer fit together.
I have been warned of getting sucked into the trap of endlessly world building, and I do understand. It’s a very, very addictive activity. But I do have some guideposts to help keep me on course to produce some narrative in the near future. There are just some crucial pieces I want to have in place before I start the next leg of this never-ending journey.