Three Dollar Quill

In this post:

• What topics do I want to cover, in general?
• What topics do I want to cover, in specific?

(HAHA Whoops the slug for the last post was wrong. It's fixed now.)

So, I forget if I ever really explained the OMI on this blog. Beyond the jokey name ("One-Man Institute"), the general idea has been to provide guides for worldbuilding, focused on worlds in which some natural laws are replaced by alternatives. I further ended up trying to to derive some principles of writing from an admittedly shaky understanding of quantum physics; I want to try to divorce the principles from said shaky understanding, since they're worth more in their own right than an analogy that I can't vouch for. Because it's hard to reason about a world with completely alien physics, most worldbuilders that could make use of anything I have to say in the OMI, could also do with pop-sci introductions to general principles, and, in particular, how those principles were developed or discovered.

Putting that in terms of some high-level summaries:

• Philosophical pieces, more explicitly opinionated, that lay out the ethos of the OMI.

  • How should we write?
  • When should we worldbuild?
  • How should we worldbuild?

• Surveys of real-world science. These will have to be extremely focused, because there's a lot of science out there.

  • General principles that are likely to apply to a fictional world, or that require care to violate.
  • Accounts of particularly subtle scientific discoveries.
  • Accounts of the adoption and overturning of obsolete ideas and concepts.

• Worked examples of world-building according to the above philosophies and principles.
• Whatever that Tom Swifty thing I did was, that was gold.

I think that does it for now; I had an exhausting day and I can't think of anything else.

Next time, the types of article, and what each will take to be "done".