This morning, four years and seven months after its inception, TalkToYoUniverse has reached a total of 1000 published posts! I'm amazed to have gotten to this point, and I'm so grateful to all of you who continue to come and read the blog. I've made lots of great friends here, and even met a few as I've traveled to conventions - I hope that continues!
For those of you who are new to the blog, I encourage you to take a look around my archives. The left menu bar suggests some great places to start:
These are transcripts of the live discussions I've had on Google+ with interested folk, and cover a wide range of topics such as the Culture of Oppression, Gender Roles, Illness and Medicine, and Language Design (featuring Game of Thrones' David Peterson and Dr. Lawrence Schoen of the Klingon language institute).
These are articles about areas all over the world, intended to give hard-to-research insights into world regions for people interested in setting stories there, or interested in having inspiration for alien/fantasy worldbuilding. Each article has been written by a person who lived in that location long enough to have a very intensive cultural experience, or by a person native to that area. The collection now has 34 articles from Australia and Brazil through Latvia and the Netherlands, all the way to Wales. It even includes several articles on different states of the USA. Please contact me if you are interested in adding your own location to the collection!
For these posts, I took the first 500 words of a story sent to me by a blog commenter, and went through it word by word for worldbuilding clues, looking at what each choice of word or image implied about the world being created. They're a bit like detective explorations of the stories in question, and they cover a lot of interesting topics like the Narrator as Ambassador, Juxtaposing Normal and Abnormal, Metaphors and Magic, and Managing Information and Surprises.
These posts feature common things that are often taken for granted, and look at how they can be valued differently across cultures or in literature. Some examples are Alcohol, Information, and Water.
These posts were featured on the SFWA website, and explain the different areas of linguistics, and how they can be valuable to writers in their work. They cover things like articulatory phonetics, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
These posts each take an excerpt from a well-known piece of science fiction or fantasy and analyze word-by-word to see what can be learned about worldbuilding and writing craft. They include authors Kij Johnson, Jacqueline Carey, Ursula K. LeGuin, and others.
You may also be interested in these post topics:
Again, thanks for being a part of TalkToYouniverse over its first thousand posts! I'll be posting another Hangout Report later today (I hope) and will be holding another hangout tomorrow at 11am PST on Google+. We'll be talking about how to build cultural interaction.
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