Howlina - Day 1 - Climate & Variety

I'm going to do 30 Days of Worldbuilding for fun.  I'm only allowing myself 15 minutes a day for this because I don't have a lot of time.  I'm going to use the "world" I build for a mystery or spy story.

First off, I'm using 30 Days of Worldbuilding by Stephanie Cottrell Bryant.  I'm not going to copy any of her writing here, but I will put links to the day I'm working on.

I'm planning on building a country and I'm using Howlina as the working title of the country I want to build.  I was listening to a Howlin' Wolf song when I wrote this.

Climate & Variety

I've started this exercise several times and this day just doesn't do it for me.  It doesn't work.  It doesn't get my creative juices going for two reasons.  First, this is missing the way I start thinking about story telling and world building.  Since it is the start of this process and not MY start I feel out of sorts and not creative.  I start with a concept I want to explore, a mood, a feeling.  Very often this is evoked by something someone says or a song.  It is born of a gamut of inputs hitting me at once and defies digitization.  It is systemic, not piecemeal.

Second, this is not how I look at climate.  Climate doesn't evoke a single mood or emotion it opens a symphony and just like a symphony it can't be described in one word.  If I hear a song I feel a lot of different feelings, but if I want to feel a certain way I can listen to a particular song.

Climates are a pallet that I can use to paint them, just as Ms. Bryant suggests, but I don't need to stare at my pallet and try to cook up some moods, it works the other way around.

So, I HAVE moods I want to evoke.  I will start with them (this may derail some later days, but too bad, I'm doing this to amuse myself and this is the way I want to do it) and think up some climates I want to use.

1. Romance, lustful and passionate, desperate and hot, loving and long lasting
2. Rescue, welcome relief and rejoining of forces
3. Music, personal and intimate
4. Desperation in view of a solution
5. Cleanliness, orderliness, intricate and full but uncluttered, precision and accuracy

1. Tropical rain forest (like James Bond showering in The World is Not Enough) OR a ski lodge on a fur rug in front of a fire place
2. Temperate forest in Autumn (just outside the Fireswamp in Princess Bride), Eastern Europe (the kitchen in Winds of War when Jan Michael Vincent rescues his Jewish wife just before the Nazi's get her) OR along the trail in mountainous forests.
3. Alpine Lake, Sound of Music, a man in a boat with a woman and a ukulele, an Irish pub
4. Desert hills, scrub land OR a fast flowing river in rocky mountains (not THE Rockies necessarily)
5. Bavarian town, cookoo clocks, Bach

I'm trying to keep a variety, but it is getting more an more likely that I will want to use a sort of alpine setting.