I’ve been vaguely inspired to poke at some worldbuilding, though. For a different setting entirely, of course.
I have problems doing extended generalized worldbuilding for Carouselchain. It’s so very big and it doesn’t map well, what with all the mobile skylands. It has my happy-making original elemental system, and I’ve done a lot of basic metaphysics for it but I just haven’t been able to sit down and detail out a large percentage of countries and peoples. This is kind of because it’s supposed to be able to contain, well, not everything, but an awful lot. I mean, I don’t want to set things there if I’m not comfortable with the setting having flying islands and potential access to a variety of sentient nonhumans. It’s an unbounded setting, where I haven’t even answered a lot of the basic questions I make myself answer in world-creation.
So, anyhow, I’ve been working on Calizene, home of the Alexandrine (Alexandrian?) Empire and setting of the unwritten Victoria novels. Well, when I say ‘working’, I mean that I’ve been going over old notes on it, and digging up old notes on another entirely different cosmological system that I decided to integrate into it. The setting is already the victim of one integration, because I came up with two separate magical elemental systems at two different times. (These aren’t crazy new elemental systems, just an arbitrary assignment of some of the old familiars. When I say elemental systems, I think I mean ‘fundamentals of magic’)
Integrating settings is hard but I think it will ultimately make for something richer. Something I’ve been infatuated by in recent years is obscuring the cosmology. My very oldest settings all featured a world that basically understood itself. The gods were the gods, the creation of the world and the role of humanity was all stuff that was written down and understood. After all, a lot of the stuff I read was like that. Then I started believing that all the fun came when people didn’t understand the universe. In Engines of Heaven, there are only two layers of obfuscation, and tearing away one of them is the point of the story. In Carouselchain, the happy-making elemental system is obfuscated and every culture has their own imperfect understanding of how and why magic works the way it does. However, because I tell everybody who shows the slightest interest how the setting’s magic works, it’s not a very interesting tool for storytelling. It was originally designed as a game setting.
TFN (Citadel of the Sky) has, oh, around two layers of obfuscation. Possibly a few more. As with Engines of Heaven there’s a Secret of the Universe that will never show up in any written form, but that I know and use to shape the answers to various important questions. In Engines of Heaven the other veil is important and global, whereas in TFN… well, I won’t say. 
Let’s just say that TFN is a bit more complicated.
The thing is, obfuscation is hard for me. I come up with ideas I think are cool and I want to share them. The best I’ve been able to do is try to build theories around fragments of The Truth. So the more complicated The Truth is, the more theories I can come up with. I don’t think Calizene has a Secret of the Universe yet, or at least nothing I’ve come up with so far feels Secret. There are lots of lower-case secrets but they’re mostly of the ‘meant to be discussed someday’ variety. However, this may be because Calizene is most likely to have the sort of thaumaturgical physicists who dig that deep. Carouselchain is very magical but it’s fantasy-practical, Engines of Heaven is idealistic steam-punk, TFN is deconstructionist (reconstructionist?) epic. I think I’d describe Calizene as, well, for lack of a better phrase at the moment ‘old imperial gothic’.
Angie, and 
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Angie 10:51 am on December 20, 2007 Permalink
Beating your head against something over and over again does not help, if you’re not slowly breaking that wall down (instead of caving your head in). Back when I was first struggling with school, someone told me, “If it’s not hard, that means you’re not learning,” which made a lot of sense. Not that I was able to make this work for me, mind you, but it made a lot of sense.
Is there anything in particular that really catches you up, or is it just an unexpected zen thing that comes out of nowhere? I know nothing of writing, so am not much help, but certainly offer encouragement!
Chrysoula 3:16 pm on December 20, 2007 Permalink
I think I did my best pre-writing visualization when I was riding a bus. Followed by when I was driving regularly. Without a period of time each day when I have nothing else to do (and probably that thought-provoking engine vibration as well) I just don’t… daydream the same way. Which means that when I write, I rarely have a big dream I’m describing. Instead I’m just describing… a sequence of events. It’s turning into a bad habit, so that even when I do have an ideal chance to drift off, instead of dreaming, I think too hard about words and sentences. Planning out a paragraph gives me a paragraph, but dreaming a scene gives me a chapter.
Anyhow, regular bus trips are not really possible, not ones without a regular dream-interruption, anyhow. So I’m hopefully going to figure out a way to train myself to daydream properly… maybe while doodling or something. And if that doesn’t work I’ll try to come up with something else entirely… to be honest, I’m sure childcare would help. If I could get a guaranteed 3 hours a day with no family to distract or tempt me, I bet I could get more done. But I can’t sit around and wait until that’s possible. I’ve got too many fronts that I need to make progress on, even if it’s only step-by-step.
Chrysoula 3:22 pm on December 20, 2007 Permalink
I agree about the hard thing, by the way, but I think there’s more to it than ‘hard=learning’. I think you have to study why it’s hard and change up what you’re doing to see if changes make it less hard. My very limited baseball/softball experience… I never got any better at swinging the bat, no matter how hard it was, until somebody told me to keep my elbows down. I did and my swings got better. And easier, too. It was a breathtaking moment. (And not being able to /see/ myself is of course why coaches are good.) If I’d wanted to keep on improving I would have had to set new goals that were hard.
Dunno how that relates to book learning, exactly. Sometimes even if you CAN figure out why it’s hard (like, I have problems parsing symbols), changing it is far too much work just to get a passing grade.
Angie 12:53 pm on January 3, 2008 Permalink
…and I’m used to comment notifications so only now saw your replies, sorry!
Does Robin nap much, or are you trying to get other stuff done around the house while he does (I dunno how he naps, exactly; Izzy and Teo behave completely differently with such)? Do you need a long-time sit-down to get your daydream on, generally, or might you be able to do it in shorter sprints (not that dreams should feel like a push), or something? I agree that you shouldn’t wait until the stars/family align to give you hours to yourself, but also want to make sure you have time for this, because it’s important. I dunno!
And the learning, that’s a good point, too–there was one thing (I forget which) in calculus that I had someone explain to me differently, and it was a freaking revelation, something just slotted into place, like what you describe with baseball. So it’s definitely not just practice/work=learning, it’s true.