My Agent Told Me To Make A Blog

A while back, I gushed about how awesome the solar system is , and gave a very brief overview of details I've learned about each planet. However, I felt I needed to give some extra attention to one of the planet that most "wows" me: Venus. (There may be another post in the future about the ice giants, which are a close second). The thing about Venus is how ferociously, cosmically, scorchingly inhospitable it is. I mean, all the not-Earth-or-Mars planets are pretty inhospitable, but Venus impresses me beyond the rest. Acid rain and metal snow, a molten surface that our probes can barely survive--it's fierce, man. I never thought much of it until I watched a planetarium show that demonstrated these aspects in blazing panoramic color. Venus has a few interesting quirks. The sun rises in the west and sets in the east. It has no moons. The planet itself rotates slowly, but the atmosphere whips around at hurricane speeds. A lot of old sci-fi speculated Venus to ...

One of my most memorable experiences was Blackwater Rafting in the glowworm caves in New Zealand. The word "rafting" is a bit misleading, because it's actually tubing, and at a rather relaxed pace. The awesome part comes from the fact that it's on the underground river, through a cave, with glow worms lighting up the ceiling overhead. Some of the tours cross bridges over the river, so you can see each other occasionally. One of my early Setting Inspirations was from another part of the same cave network , if you want to check that out. All right, that photo above isn't from the blackwater rafting. It's a photo of the caves I got from google. There are that many glowworms, but as most of the tour was in pitch blackness, I don't have any photos of them. All the photos came from the tour guide, who had a waterproof camera. Before we launched, we had to don wet suits, helmets, and go over procedure. One of the important steps we had to do was to link ...

Touring the grounds and palace of Versailles sparked all sorts of ideas for stories and settings. My husband and I visited Paris early on in our relationship (during the trip, he went from boyfriend to fiancee :D). Let me tell you something--I really underestimated how cold France is during March. Our visit to Versailles was quite the adventure. For starters, we had to take the metro farther outside the city than we'd ever been, which involved upgrading our train passes (a confusing and expensive ordeal). The ride itself was long and allowed a view of Paris rolling past us. Heart of the city and out through the suburbs. And a bunch of French highschoolers getting on and off from our cabin. Versailles itself is divided into two parts--the mansion, and the grounds. Getting the tickets for each was another confusing and expensive ordeal, with the longest queue you've ever seen. It turns out we really shouldn't have gone in March. Half the place was closed off, the res...

Sure, Tatooine has two suns, Arrakis is a giant desert full of sandworms and spice mines, and Doctor Who once visited a planet made of diamonds --but characters don't have to be traveling on spaceships to have adventures in non-Earth settings. Sci-fi has always done a pretty good job imagining strange and fantastic worlds, which always makes me happy, yet at the same time I've realized there's some cool real science that could be used to expand sci-fi and fantasy settings a lot more than is often seen. (And as cool as Star Wars can be, it's worth mentioning how silly it is that most of the places are mono-settings: ice planet, swamp planet, city planet...) Now, all of the pictures you see here are from the public domain. I want to show you a few other things, too, but I'm going to send you to the original sources (or at least, the links where I found them). It all started when I stumbled upon this reddit thread discussing plant colors on other (theoretica...

Today's setting inspiration is brief, but sometimes that's all you need to add some flavor to atmosphere and worldbuilding. This isn't even that clever or original, it's just a thought I had--something that would be nice to include as one element of many. Underwater tunnels. There are two ways I can think of utilizing this. One is the classic underwater city, which I think could go in many directions culturally. We won't talk about the Gungans , but in general this is a relatively common society design in sci-fi. Some of the factors that might influence the society would be whether or not the species is amphibious (or can otherwise breathe underwater), whether the city is meant to be a secret, and what the surface is like. There's a big difference between a community that has solid trade with land-dwelling societies and a unique aquatic industry, versus one that's completely isolated and hidden away from some enemy seeking genocide. My other idea is eq...

This might be cheating a bit--a way of sharing some fun pictures for no real reason--but I betcha I can tie it into writing somehow. Dunedin, New Zealand, is home to the steepest residential street in the world . Naturally, we made it one of the stops on our journeys. The bench at the top: Turn around 180 degrees and this is the view: Down at the bottom, there's even a gift store with magnets and bumper stickers. It's a completely unremarkable section of the city, and the store is tiny, but it's somehow both very touristy and very everyday. Lots of people drove to the bottom to see it, or walked up the steps along the side, but not so many at once that it felt crowded. A number of brave souls, with cars less tiny and useless than mine, drove all the way up to the top. We had a different plan. We had leftover cherry tomatoes that weren't good for eating anymore, and brought them up with the intent to roll them back down. Considering the steady strea...

I've been adventuring further and further into the mysterious realm of steampunk. I've always had a bit of a fascination and admiration for this sci-fi subgenre, though my knowledge of it has accrued slowly over time. The first time I'd ever heard of it was when I was a pre-teen and got a book on how to draw fantasy characters. There was a whole chapter on steampunk, and I was like, what is this ?? I like thinking of steampunk as Victorian sci-fi, or sci-fi set in the past instead of the future. I suppose it's really more alternate-reality. It's defined, obviously, by steam power, and things like gears, zeppelins, vests and tophats, tinctures, wires and tubes and neon glowing chemicals. But at the same time, one of it's most endearing qualities is how the genre is more of a collection, a heterogeneous hodgepodge of ideas and gadgets and dark colors. Part of what makes it is the combination of all those things--the sum of its parts. The grandfathers of ste...

For this chilly time of the year, today's setting inspiration is right in theme with cold and snow: Antarctica. More specifically, the photos I took from the Antarctica Museum in Christchurch. Christchurch is where most flights to Antarctica fly out from. Okay maybe the museum is targeted more for kids, but that's never stopped me before! The museum had several sections dedicated to different topics. Of note, there's the weather, the expeditions and vehicles, and the penguins. To get to Antarctica, people heading out on an expedition generally travel on one of two kinds of flights (don't ask me, I forget the details), on a long, grueling, windowless journey out of Christchurch or somewhere else in the southern hemisphere. There was a model area with a video explaining what the trip is like, and you can see the hard, unforgiving seats with the backs up against the wall and the cargo at your feet. There were a lot of model setups of camps, vehicles, and ani...

When we lived in New Zealand, there were a lot of wind farms near us. Wellington in particular, renowned for its windiness, has enough to provide quite a bit of power for the city and local areas. I don't have as many photos of these as I'd like, but I do have some fantastically foggy shots from exploration with my parents. A google search of Manawatu wind farms will yield plenty of other photos of the area. Cows abound in New Zealand, wherever you are. Even on the top of a mountain next to a wind farm. And because of the dearth of photos, here's one of foggy Wellington. The ones above are actually in Manawatu, but I don't have any photos of the Wellington wind turbines, I'm afraid. My thoughts on this as a setting... Well, I love fog. The fog alone makes me love those pictures. As for the actual wind turbine part, that's an interesting and different sort of backdrop. They make a constant sort of hum if you're close enough to them. While t...