My world origins are somewhere between Creationism and Big Bang; I get to be god but I use the tools of science and art. I just go with my hunches because over-thinking these details ruins the fun for me. I understand the science behind these things (tectonics and vulcanism, erosion, jet streams, ice ages, magnetic poles, tidal actions, etc. etc. etc.) but I'm not about to go modeling all of these things just for the sake of hyper-accuracy. I don't know everything, of course, so I just use what I do know to make it look plausible. I draw out some continents, put mountains where I think they would be, deserts and jungles come next, then put in the rivers and lakes, and lastly put down the towns...pretty simple stuff.

I guess you could say that I'm more concerned with representing how it looks right now instead of worrying about how it got to be this way or where it's going in the future. Those things are more for the writers to put in so that they can come up with mythologies in order to make a culture more real but has little to do with how to make a world. Having a creation story is fun to write but it doesn't explain why this swamp is here or that mesa is there or why this river has so many tributaries plus you'd have to have a creation story for every culture...that's a lot of writing. No one culture has access to the whole planet so their mythologies are rather narrow -- the Greeks say nothing about how Zeus made the Grand Canyon, Mt. Fuji, or penguins. These stories cover the big picture stuff and not the minutia. To me, it also gets trite to say "Joe the Awesome Troll-Slayer died here so god put a mountain here". That mountain had to have been there before Joe.

My main goal is to have the land shape the people and they in turn shape the culture and what we know about that world. I don't think that I could do it the other way around -- start with a culture and go backward to see how the world made them that way. My sense of wonderment has nothing to do with how the world was made but instead how that world molded fantastical creatures like bugmen or lizardmen and how that world created the cultures and their myths. If only I could write about such things instead of draw...



then I'd probably wish that I could draw