And I don’t want to hear one word of protest from you, O reader! This is completely, totally, 100% your fault!

You see, I tried. I tried so hard. I started planning it out and everything! Then I realized, well, maybe I should add this other bit… and these parts… and man… these would be too long to be easily-digestible blogsnacks and…

…and I wound up realizing I’d have to write a book.

What do you mean, what am I talking about? (Yes, I know that’s not exactly what you said – but this is a professional blog, and we’re not gonna use any damn vulgarity here! –oh, whoops.)

I’m talking about Oh, The Inhumanity!, a miniseries I had planned to cover my approach to designing realistic, awesome, non-human intelligent races for fantasy, science fiction, or anything else. As you’ve seen with my Korats, I’ve got a sordid love affair with the decidedly non-humanoid sapients in fiction; I’ve been critterbuilding for over a decade now (wow, really?), and I wanted to share my methods, tricks, and insights with you. There may be plenty of worldbuilding resources out there, but not nearly as much when it comes to sapients who aren’t a direct offshoot of humans (like Klingons, dwarves, etc).

I got as far as an increasingly-detailed 14-post outline before I realized it wouldn’t work. If I’m doing this at all, I’m doing it well, and I owe you, my readers, nothing less than a stand-alone comprehensive resource. I couldn’t just talk about building a culture, a history, and a functional non-human physiology – I had to incorporate the world in which your species lives, the language that it speaks. Being just one person, I might miss something, so I thought of coercing persuading my fellow geofictionists to contribute some of their tips and tricks…

And, well, to be honest, the thing’s better off as a free ebook than an ever-lengthening series of too-long blog posts.

It will be epic! Consider the incredibly-tentative release date to be January 15th, 2010.

My humble request of you, dear readers, is that you share any resources you have that I haven’t already found in this post. I’m writing this ebook for you, and I want it to be spectacular, so I’ll need all the research I can find!

Related posts:

1. Worldbuilding Resources (And A Bit Of Chatting)
2. A Rejuvenation & A Restart!
3. They Aren’t Human, Okay?

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