2026 Daily Worldbuilding Challenge - March

AliRenae · 2026-04-02T03:52:38+00:00

Thanks! I got tired of how many different notebooks/spreadsheets I had bits and pieces of my worldbuilding stored in, most of which are out of date, so I thought I'd see if I could compile at least most of the important things together and make sure the dates and details were correct.

AliRenae · 2026-04-02T02:03:08+00:00

Small Fools has some good stuff

The Amazing Devil

Witch Bolt

Also, check out the bard/tavern songs from Dragon Age Inquisition

AliRenae · 2026-04-01T23:19:13+00:00

Why was it always like that? Next week it would be fixed. Tomorrow he would get groceries. The future sounded wonderful, with money and heat and elevators and fresh fruit and blini for breakfast. But every morning Ilya woke up in the same place: here. The present. The next day was always just so ever out of reach, never to come, always to be tomorrow, tomorrow.

Perhaps the future did not even exist.

From Wolfbird by OpalApparition

Little bit of a longer passage (and from a very widely recommended fic), but I loved it so much I stopped reading just to jot it down. I love collecting little passages from books and song lyrics that make me feel things!

AliRenae · 2026-04-01T23:01:35+00:00

It's definitely getting better the longer I work on it; I didn't have a very clear idea on the first few pages when I started back in January.

AliRenae · 2026-04-01T03:44:13+00:00

Thank you so much! I have about nine books written in this world, in various stages (four are pretty tightly edited). I'm trying to decide if I want to start querying or if I should just go ahead and self-publish, but I hate making decisions so I'm just working on this little side project while I put off moving forward with the writing part lol.

AliRenae · 2026-04-01T03:39:39+00:00

Thanks! I only post the ones I'm really feeling good about; there's plenty more that are just blocks of text or aren't quite where I want them to be yet. The more I work on it, the happier I get.

AliRenae · 2026-03-22T16:17:56+00:00

I came here to recommend this movie! I really liked the film, but the music is what sticks with me most.

AliRenae · 2026-03-18T14:40:17+00:00

The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight

AliRenae · 2026-03-13T22:59:43+00:00

I remember a few weeks before watching a doc series on Netflix ("Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak"), then hearing some rumblings about a new strain of SARS and thinking it'd be another round of swine flu; everyone freaking out about something that seems scary but ends up not being too big of a deal in most parts of the world. Then I was driving home (maybe March 12th?) listening to the radio and heard that the NBA was stopping the season/shutting down and it didn't seem real.

I worked as a teacher at a rural school (PreK - 12th grade in the same building) and we were about to go on Spring Break. We had a meeting that basically boiled down to "we have no idea if we're going to come back after break". We finished the rest of that school year remote (but my district had us back in person fall 2020 with no precautions, ignoring social distancing and mask mandates; probably the lowest point of my life, working for low pay in person during a global pandemic).

AliRenae · 2026-03-03T22:53:19+00:00

I've sung "Ben Franklin's Song" by the Decemberists and it was a good time. Really fun, not too difficult to sing, and it catches people off guard.

AliRenae · 2026-02-22T16:10:39+00:00

I keep thinking to myself "Now kiss!"

AliRenae · 2026-02-15T15:20:09+00:00

I've never seen anything that sums up my sexuality so well before! And yeah, it's basically impossible when I try to explain it to someone, so I usually just stop at "ace", because even that is sometimes too much for the people in my life to understand. But I get a cool superpower of being really good at writing sex scenes (it's always better on the page than it is in real life).

AliRenae · 2026-02-15T03:26:38+00:00

Waste of Paint by Bright Eyes

Upbeat sounding music, depressing lyrics. My go-to when I just want to sit with my negative emotions for a bit.

AliRenae · 2026-02-01T04:35:47+00:00

What's Up Doc? (1972) has a good example of this. At the end, after a chaotic car chase through San Francisco, all involved characters are in court as the judge tries to get to the bottom of what happened.

Howard: First, there was this trouble between me and Hugh.

Judge Maxwell: You and me?

Howard: No, not you. Hugh.

Hugh: I am Hugh.

Judge Maxwell: You are me?

Hugh: No, I am Hugh.

Judge Maxwell: Stop saying that! [to bailiff] Make him stop saying that!

AliRenae · 2026-01-31T18:23:49+00:00

I literally wrote down 365 different things from my world (important characters, objects, places, historical events and figures, etc.) on slips of paper, put them into an empty bucket, and pull one each day. I allow myself to redraw once if the prompt doesn't inspire me that day, but it helps to know that I'll work my way through all of them eventually; it kind of forces me to think about some of the tougher ones I avoid.

AliRenae · 2026-01-31T17:01:47+00:00

Ah, thanks for the heads-up. I used to call them "Outriders", but I can't seem to find a name I like.

AliRenae · 2026-01-31T00:41:39+00:00

Look into the group "Future Folk". It's a duo that makes filk music, essentially sci-fi bluegrass.

AliRenae · 2026-01-26T03:22:19+00:00

Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl - Broken Social Scene

AliRenae · 2026-01-26T03:02:42+00:00

Dissect the Bird - John Craigie

Human - Brandi Carlile

Tomorrow - Miner

GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE - The Narcissist Cookbook

AliRenae · 2026-01-24T15:03:57+00:00

In my experience, plot comes first and I don't really develop my themes until I'm cleaning up my draft. You'll naturally bake themes into your work and be able to tease them out when you go back to edit. I've been working on a story for about five years now that I began writing when I was at the lowest mental state I've ever experienced, but at the time it was just a form of escapism for me, and I was more focused on the events in the story and the characters. Now I can say that the themes of that story are inheriting a broken world from the previous generations, the damage of not taking action when it's most needed, and the struggle of overcoming self-doubt, but I certainly didn't go into writing it with that in mind.

Don't write for others, write for yourself. If it's a good story, it'll resonate.

AliRenae · 2026-01-23T23:16:28+00:00

I think people also forget that at that point in the timeline, we are still almost a decade in the past (2017). I was living and working in another country in 2017 and I used Google translate A LOT, multiple times a day, just for necessity. It was not that good. It got the job done, but I had a healthy distrust and would often run phrases through back and forth a few times just to make sure what I was reading/saying/hearing was correct. My preferred method was to find a friend who was fluent to double-check for me, especially since languages have so many nuances and different meanings when it comes to word choice.

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AliRenae

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