Worldbuilding starts innocently enough. You name a kingdom. Maybe draw a map. Maybe throw in a couple of gods, a weird storm, a family tree with just enough trauma to be narratively satisfying.

Then one day you blink and realize you’ve written a 3,000 word document on sky island crop rotation. You can’t remember your own birthday, but you know which fictional provinces export fermented windfruit and why their trade alliance fell apart in Cycle 617.

This post? It’s a love letter. And a warning.

People think you have to know everything before you start, but if you did, we’d all be frozen in “research” mode until the sun exploded. It doesn’t need to be logical either, it just needs to feel true to your world. And no, it’s not just for fantasy authors. If you made up a cozy town with suspiciously nosy neighbors and a bakery that mysteriously never runs out of raspberry scones… congratulations, you’re one of us.

Worldbuilding is part chaos magic, part archaeology. You’re not building a world, you’re excavating one you barely understand, with a pen instead of a shovel and caffeine instead of common sense.

It’s balancing six cultural systems, a magic rule you regret inventing, and a civil war you vaguely alluded to in chapter two that now demands three pages of backstory and a hand drawn battle map.

It’s naming things like a drunk linguist. It’s opening your notebook and realizing you’ve contradicted your own timeline in three different places and somehow invented a holiday that happens every thirteen days.
It’s divine, maddening, and wildly inefficient.

And sometimes… it’s dangerous.

Because once the worldbuilding black hole opens up, it sucks you in. Suddenly it’s 2 a.m., your eyes are dry, your tea is cold, and the story you meant to write has been sitting untouched like a gentleman caller you stood up on the porch, in the rain, with flowers. And bless it, the poor thing’s still waiting for you.

But despite all that, there’s this moment, if you’re lucky, when you zoom out and realize it all fits together. Like the world was waiting for you to stumble onto it. When a reader points out a connection between two pieces of lore and you’re like, Yes, I did that on purpose absolutely I am a genius.

Or when a character walks into a room and you know what’s on the walls, what year it was built, who buried a secret in the floorboards, and why the ceiling still leaks. I may not use everything I know in that moment, but in the future, who knows?

It’s tea-stained madness with a side of purpose.

Maybe it’s punishment. Maybe it’s passion.

Probably both.

Because let’s be honest, I don’t worldbuild because I have to. I worldbuild because I can’t not. I’m already asking “what if” a hundred times a day. I might as well write it down and charge my protagonists emotional interest.

Also? It’s fun. Fungi-powered cities? Sentient storms? An economy based on literal hot air? I’m not just building a world, I’m raising it like a feral child I fully intend to unleash on readers.

What’s the weirdest rabbit hole you’ve fallen into while worldbuilding? Calendar math? Magical sewage systems? A military hierarchy based on fish?

Tell me in the comments. Validate me. Share the pain. Maybe bring snacks.

And stay tuned, I’ll be opening the doors to some of my multiversal chaos soon in a section called My Worlds, where you can marvel (or panic) at the sheer number of universes I’m juggling like a gremlin with a tea addiction.

Because why write one world… when you can write twelve?