Why I'm building a world, not a trilogy

I want to begin this journal honestly, because the honest version is also the most interesting one: Sphereworld is not, in the first instance, a plot. It is a place. The plots will come — several of them, I hope, told by different people in different centuries — but the place comes first, and the place is the point.

That is an unusual way to start a fantasy project, and it deserves an explanation.

The trilogy-shaped trap

Most fantasy is built the way a film set is built: whatever the camera will see, and not an inch more. A castle with three real rooms and a painted backdrop where the fourth wall should be. This is efficient, and for a single story it is often the right choice. But it produces worlds that feel thin the moment you press on them — kingdoms with one city, religions with one god and one heresy, histories that conveniently begin a generation before the hero was born.

I kept noticing that the books I returned to were the ones that refused this economy. They wasted things. They mentioned a war I would never see, a scholar whose work mattered to no part of the plot, a trade route, a grudge, a forgotten coastline. The waste was the wealth. It told me the world did not exist for me, and that — paradoxically — made me want to live in it.

Building for more than one camera

So Sphereworld is being built the other way around. Not a stage dressed for one performance, but a world dressed for none in particular, with the confidence that many performances will find their place in it.

That means:

• Multiple stories, not one continuous saga. Different protagonists, different eras, sometimes different genres entirely. Closer in spirit to Discworld or the Culture than to a single rising-and-falling arc.
• A history that runs in both directions. Things happened before the first book that no book will ever fully recount, and things will happen after the last one I write.
• Institutions that persist. An academy, a government, a guild — the kind of structures that outlast any individual and give a world its sense of weight.

A promise rather than a plot

I can’t yet show you the world; it isn’t ready, and showing it too early would spoil exactly the quality I’m trying to protect. But I can make a promise about what kind of world it intends to be: ancient enough to have real depth, alive enough to keep moving, and generous enough that the further in you go, the more there is to find.

That’s what this journal is for — to think out loud, on occasion, about how one might actually build such a thing. I’m glad you’re here for it.