The confusion of many worlds

This week I'm working on three different pieces at the same time.  First, there's the completed novel which I'm starting to pitch to agents.  Then there's a second novel, which I'm re-writing.  And because it's NaNoWriMo, I'm going to the local write-ins and using the time to turn a short story into a novella.  All of which means I'm working on three separate invented worlds at the same time.  And that can get mighty confusing.

It's confusing partly because the worlds of the stories are so similar.  All of them are interstellar societies where humans have settled many worlds.  Another source of confusion for me is that I call those organisations different things.  I have a Union, an Alliance, and an Assembly, and I'm having difficulty remembering which one belongs to which story.  I also have Presidents and Premiers, and I'm getting these confused too.  All of which points to needing to add extra data to my records for each novel.

When I start planning a new novel I set up a ringbinder for it, which I label my research file.  Into that goes all the details of the worlds and characters I'm creating.  And if it needs a piece of hard science research for the story, I put that in there too.  There's also probably a map I've drawn of the world my characters are moving through.  I draw them on an A4 sheet, and colour in the details with watercolour pencils.  Then I make a colour photocopy on my printer, which travels with me while I work, and file the original in my ringbinder.

Character tables are the next thing to create.  I create a Word table, with headings for first and last names, occupation/role, appearance, and a notes column which I use for recording relationships between the characters.  But the biggest thing which goes into the ringbinder is my chapter plan.  This  is where the real work of discovering the story is done.  I determine the viewpoint character for each chapter (I have up to six these days), how the narrative thread passes between them, and cliffhangers.

Even with all this recording, I can still get confused.  I used to not record the local names of the solar system's star on my records, now I add it to the character table.  The same is true for the names which aliens living on that world give to their planet.  Now I'll have to add Union/Alliance/Assembly too.

It's an ever-evolving process, but I really value that research file when I'm coming back to something a wrote a decade ago - or when  I'm working on three things at once.

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