My very own world

I'm excited by the idea that Lightspeed Magazine is having a 'Women Destroying Science Fiction' issue next year.  I want to submit a story to them, but I've decided I want to write something new.

I have the basic idea: a clash of cultures, high and low tech ways of seeing the world, and I want to present a way of living where males and females live apart and it is seen as normal and natural.  In short, I want to challenge just a bout every aspect of modern western culture in that story,

But for the story to work, I have to do more than construct the social structure and culture.  I have to create the whole world.  I've decided their society is going to be threatened by greedy humans with their insatiable need for resources and no respect for the land.  I want that lower-tech society to be able to defend itself without the use of high tech weapons, and see off the invaders.

Quite a challenge, but I have a rough idea of how it will work, thanks to borrowing yet another idea from Anne McCaffrey.  Thank you, Anne, your writing is often inspirational to me, and I hope you're looking down on us and feeling satisfied by how many writers you've inspired over the years.

Constructing my whole world leads me to learn so many things.  For this story I want to know about Iron Age metalworking, so have been researching this.  Often my stories take me off into exploring biology, information science or artificial intelligence.  As well as massively expanding my education, these studies help me to write richly-detailed and believable stories where everything holds together.   

There's nothing like the joy of creating a world from scratch, and I'm going to enjoy making this one even more because I have a clear idea in advance of what purpose it needs to serve.