Worldbuilding

So a few years ago for NaNoWriMo I decided to do a fiction story that involved spaceships. This mostly started as something of a joke because my husband plays a lot of those “Pew pew, fuck I drove into the sun again” games.  I’d never really read SciFi involving spaceships, unless you want to include Star Wars in that.

It was a little intimidating, but I finished the month with 50,000-some words and a short story about some people in space.  Now, I’m sure it’s a lot more “Fiction” than “Science”, but in it’s rough form it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever written.

So I got the idea in my head that I’d start another project and have it take place in this same kind of “World”.  A sequel, perhaps chronologically, but with a new group of characters and a new plot that really isn’t super tied in to the other story.

I’m still in the early stages of trying to build up this world and I find myself struggling between making things really simple and going so far over the top with elaboration that I’m sure it’ll read like something out of the Old Testament when I’m naming off this crew and how they all know each other.  I find myself trying to find the happy medium.

Do we belief that a story taking place on a ship could focus on five or so main characters?  Do I really need to name 30-some crew members to make it sound realistic that there’s this ship hurtling through space on some kind of a doomed mission?  While there’s a bit of a twist there, I still run into the fact that there will need to be a spreadsheet practically to keep all these people straight.  (Sorry, no spoilers, you’ll just have to wait and read it and be disappointed at the reveal and write me angry “Is that all?” comments once it’s written.)

Now, I use Scrivener and I feel I probably underutilized it and the things it can do most the time.  So this will be a real learning experience as I try to maximize the organization.  It’d be a shame if Lead electrical engineer Stacy turned into Lead Electrical engineer Klaus by the end of it.