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Having more details than you need, is not a bad thing per se. Many writers do that, and it often leads to an authentic world, even if the reader isn't aware of all these details. It is especially helpful, if you plan a long series of books for the same world. But you are describing procrastination. You do not want to start, so you do other things, which ...

My advice? Skip the world building. Focus instead on your characters. Tell the story as it happens to them. Invent the world around them as you need to in order to tell their story. If you introduce inconsistencies, clean them up in a later draft. Focusing on the axial tilt of the planet your characters live on rather than who your characters are and ...

I promise you, if you do it without permission and get published nonetheless, they will sue the shit out of you. You have to ask for permission, there will be legal contracts, because the world's "owner" wants money, your story must really fit and must not disrupt anything the owner wants to do in the future. So, if you have a name and are already ...

Just from the information you've provided, it seems you're creating a convoluted and potentially confusing situation for no good reason. If, however, this is important to the story, you can always refer to "Earth" (formerly "New Earth") and to "Old Earth". Using a slightly different version of the word would work, but I believe that's already been done: ...

Don't worry about "it's been done before." Your goal is to do it your way, and never mind what anyone else has done. Your theme (Lack of purpose => Apathy => Failure to adapt => Vicious cycle) is interesting, but I'm having some trouble connecting it to your précis. How does "too much freedom" equate to "lack of purpose"? I think linking it to ...

If you are writing it to make money: don't. If the world created gives you inspiration and makes you sit down and write for hours, then go ahead and do it. It's your mind, and you can write whatever you want as long as it's not published. Let people/editors/whoever read it, and if the feedback tells you it is really, really good, the you can contact the ...

SimEarth might work well for you. As I remember, in addition to the Earth simulation, there was Martian terraforming as well. It is an old DOS game; I wish Maxis had updated it for modern computers. Something that might also be interesting is EdGCM, the only global climate model I know of that will run on a PC. Changing the forcings in model can provide ...

If you're still getting novels written, and don't have a pressing need to write them faster, I'd just go with what you're doing. Make the world real to you, and it'll show up in the story. Have maps (just don't be afraid to mess with them as needed) and backstory. One of the things that stands out in Tolkien's work is the feel that Middle-Earth is a real ...

You're looking for balance, so the answer is double edged: Stay compelling by avoiding drifting off on tangents; don't explain about your world where it isn't relevant to the story at hand and to the readers' interest. Convey your world by choosing a structure and a plot where the elements you want to convey feature heavily. If your setting elements are ...

It isn't a "bad idea" per say, as long as there are in-world reasons for what you have contained in it. It's very common to have fantasy stories based in other cultures. Eon, for example, is based in large part in Chinese mythology. Codex Alera by Jim Butcher is based in Roman culture, even though it is not based explicitly in Rome. World building isn't ...

Reuse the worlds! Force yourself to write novels within the worlds you have created until the number of background pages is eclipsed by the number of story pages. Surely that much detail will give you more than one story. Let the stories be unrelated, you don't have to write a series, just stay on the same planet/in the same universe. This has the ...

This passage reads like an info dump—a lecture from the author to the reader, with no strong purpose in the story. If you could name the planet something else with no loss to the story, that tells me that the name isn't important to the story. If I'm right about that, then call it something else, and delete this passage. If the name is important to the ...

Regarding climate: I struggled with climate on a fictional world for a long time. What I eventually realized is that all the climate models we have are generated in reference to a single example. In other words: things like albedo effect, cloud cover, precipitation and seasonal weather patterns are entirely dependent on the specific shape and configuration ...

Although it's been answered already (and it's a good answer), I'd recommend you reconsider your chosen course of action and think about the implications. First of all, it would be highly unlikely for people who were originally from "our" Earth to only mention "Earth" using the Latin phrase. All their history books and reference materials - anything to do ...

This can really change very drastically from author to author and from story to story. There's no doubt that developing characters and then building a plot around them is a great way to come up with a story. Characters are compelling; interactions between them are interesting; put the characters as the center of your plot, and they may drive the whole thing ...

"the world is quite rich with events"-->Are these events related to one another? If you have an enormous series of unrelated events, you need to work on stringing them together. Find ways to make them relate, or change them entirely until they do. Possibly George Lucas started off with something like-- "A spaceship the size of a moon vs. a fleet of little ...

The first step is to hold back your urge to write. First do your homework, thoroughly. Learn. Learn a whole lot about the place. Start with Google StreetView and Panoramio. Proceed through Wikipedia to learn not just about the place but about landmarks, anything in the area. Find movies, amateur videos, anything to take place around there. Read blogs of ...

Some software for making a story bible: Tiddlywiki - a free, personal wiki - mentioned above. It's a single html file, so it's very lightweight. I used this for a while and it worked well. It's very easy to tag things and link items together. Evernote - also good for tagging, not so good for linking. Scrivener - mentioned above, included here because it's ...

I have used a Wiki to help me organize my thoughts for a novel I was writing in the past. It is actually in quite a helpful format, because you can so easily link from one concept to another. Having pages for separate characters, groups, locales, etc. is extremely helpful. When writing chapter outlines on the wiki, you can easily link to all settings and ...

I know of a few shared world out there, some are more open then others it really depends on what sort of genre you're looking to write in. Up here in Pacific Northwest is a setting called "New Cascadia" which is one of those community sent back in time thing... though in this case it most of western Washington and Oregon. I know there is quiet a bit of ...

Given your paragraph description, I have to admit to being somewhat unconvinced along a few points. You set up a direct connection between the regime's oppressive control of its citizens and a lack of purpose, but I think you need to nuance that connection more closely. The currently much-analyzed phenomenon of the quarterlife crisis among middle and ...

As Patches noted, play first, pay second. I launched a shared story world commercial entertainment property, and I curate examples of others. It is possible to make money from a shared world, but the hurdle is getting folks to want to play in the world first. You'll need to build a compelling world, lay out the rules clearly about how rights and revenue ...

Rule of thumb: you want to avoid confusing the reader. A confused reader is not enjoying your story. But, that doesn't mean "never do anything that might confuse the reader." It means, "if you want to do something that might confuse the reader, make sure to take steps to make sure it's not confusing." It sounds as though, in your particular case, the name ...

Some people like just reading about fictional worlds. Most readers care about people they can relate to. Your problem is to make people who live in these immense worlds you write about characters people can relate to who are reading in this world. If you limit yourself in terms of handing out information to the bare minimum to let an audience understand why ...

Characters drive the story. That's why most (not all) writers and lecturers out there will tell you that the characters should be developed first. With all the tics and quirks which make them human. The next thing is the conflict. The main character wants some candy, but the evil fairy has stolen it. How can he get the candy without shooting the fairy, ...

I worked with a friend on what basically amounted to story-telling in a shared world, but which out of necessity also involved quite a lot of world exploration and some building, because the characters we worked with only interacted to a limited degree. What we did amounted mostly to "killing time", but resulted in a fairly hefty collaborative short story ...

Licensing fees Do you own the rights to, say, Starwars or Forgotten Realms or Hunger Games or Twilight or anything that big? 'Cause if you don't, no one's going to pay you to use the universe. Think about it -- why should I, the poor starving writer, give you what little money I have, or have coming in, for something I can do myself for free? There's only ...

If you reveal too little, new revelations will be deus ex machina, cheap tricks to overcome story obstacles, elephants in the room the reader wasn't allowed to see. The pacing of the story should be the only factor that limits the pacing of exposition of the mechanics of the world. Such exposition might be boring so keep it as sparse as to keep ...

I've written my own tool: ePen. It comes with an automatic wiki: If it finds a character name in the text, you get a link. It's not for the faint of heart but I'm using it to write on my story "Haul" ATM. Before that, I used the MoinMoin wiki. I prefer MoinMoin over MediaWiki for these reasons: More simple syntax Fast (I hate it when I have to wait after ...

A MediaWiki installation isn't "heavy", or at least doesn't require anything more complicated than your standard webserver and MySQL that any decent host will already have. If anything, it's less complicated and memory-intensive than a Wordpress install. If hosting is a problem though, I have heard of a "TiddlyWiki" that can be stored anywhere easily, even ...