These are the five things about your fictional world or setting that you are very pleased with.
Something that you can look at and go “Wow, I am proud I came up with this!”. Do you have something like that?
Come on down and list them now!
I shall return with mine later.
Bump.
I only have one to share, though it requires some context. My current WIP takes place in a post-Great-Flood world with most of the population living on islands that used to be mountaintops. There is, however, a city drifting on ocean currents, made from hundreds of ships chained together and bridged by boardwalks. At the heart of this city is an unrealistically gigantic ship whose foremost half juts out from the edge of the city to act as a sort of rudder directing the city.
Now, I called this city The Ark, thinking I’d simply refer to the mothership by this same name. Bad idea. Things got REALLY confusing in act 3. So I figured I’d rename the mothership to Leviathan. That worked perfectly fine, but one fateful night I awoke in a cold sweat and gasped somewhat longwindedly, “is it unrealistic that so many would seek asylum in the shadow of a behemoth named in direct biblical opposition to the story after which such denizens would eventually name the city they built around it?” And I thought, “yes, that is a bit incongruous.”
So I instead looked to Flood myths for the ship’s name. Noah was a bit on the nose, but then I remembered that other civilizations had different names for Noah.
Thus Atrahasis was born.
And that’s it. I like the name I gave to a boat.
Bump.
Can’t think of five things really 
I’m just happy with the story concept in general, as it features virtually immortal characters and stuff from all points in time so I can pretty much do whatever I want with the story.
Came up with Galiausmos the other day. It was a sporadic, unplanned moment of world building for Elgana when my brain became too tired to focus on academic stuff. Kind of like a Christmas.
Elgana’s name. It took me WEEKS to come up with the perfect thing.
Seven guardians and the seven stones lore.
That one mountain that exists through all the realms like an anchor.
Balance magick. Pretty cool.
I’ll list them, though there is no order (except number one lol).
This is my very first sci-fi fantasy novel (and anything within the genres) as I mostly stick to contemporaries. But this is a book I’ve had in my head since 2015, letting it brew and simmer for so long. I’m mostly proud of finally finishing it and I’m almost done with the second draft, too. Woo! But the history of the world is what really makes me proud the most. Is there some kinks I still need to work out? Of course. But even then, it comes together so beautifully that it feels real.
This is, technically, my second book to have a vast diverse casting. My previous one did have quite a few, from various races, subcultures (Emo character here, Goth character there), and sexual orientations (lesbian couple here, bisexual character there, gay characters over there). But I never really got into depth with it and I feel disappointed sometimes that I hadn’t gone farther with the diversity.
Instead, I tried making up for it in this new book where there is a great amount of it because the world is different, and so should everyone else be. A few of the main characters are LGBT+, I even have transgender characters. My MC is demisexual and bisexual. I have a few characters with amputations, deformities, and are blind and Deaf. There’s people of various ethnicity and races, people with various personality types, etc.
Of course, I don’t describe the struggles these characters face (personally speaking, like wanting to be accepted for who they are kind of thing) as that’s not my story to tell. It is, however, set in a world where it’s normal to be LGBT, so I don’t show negativity to it anyway. But I am really proud of myself for going the extra mile and creating something isn’t just about straight, white people.
The world is set a few thousand years into the future. There was a continental shift, global warming and climate change worsened, and so, the world really isn’t what it’s like today (because it’s set on Earth). The story is more like an adventure quest journey thing, so the characters do travel around. I know there’s some people who hate those types of stories, but I love them and as both a writer and reader, I adore them even more in fantasy because it shows how amazing the world looks and builds onto it.
And, if one day, the story gets published or something, I can always write about other characters who live in these different environments. Doing things like swimming in the underwater castles where the Siren Queen lives or freeze in Glaciana where the bright stars shine and the southern lights touch the earth, or walk along the deserts of Lesian and find buried monuments and buildings.
It’s a soft magic system, so there’s not many rules to it other than how powerful you can be. And again, I know not many like soft magic systems because they’d rather have hard magic where the author spent a lot of time and effort in creating a full on guide book to it, but I don’t have that kind of energy, honestly. I wouldn’t even know where to start. xD But I’m still proud of it and the amount there actually is because it’s not necessarily this green smoke that does whatever, there is different things about the magic and other types of magic (like telepathy, telekinesis, etc. as those are considered as such in the world).
I’ve got all sorts of creatures, things like mermaids/sirens, vampires, witches, dragons, sea serpents, phoenix, and a few others. However, there’s a spin to each of them where they’re not exactly the same kind of creature you may read in other fantasies or at least their origin. Like witches, for example, aren’t human (like in Harry Potter, etc.) The main one, Victoria, was born on another planet and stolen from someone to use as experimentation. She was given the magic through that and escaped. In a nutshell, she created her own army as she used her magic to make others like her, and she calls her race Victorians. So they’re not known as “witches” or “sorceresses” but simply, Victorians. They also don’t look human either. Pointy ears, grey skin, long hair kind of thing. Vampires are another. They were created by the Victorians as their “secret weapon” as they’re made to hunt. They also don’t look like your normal vampires (you know, anything between Interview with a Vampire, Twilight, Dracula, etc.) They also don’t only drink blood. They can, and will, but they’re out for flesh… so they’re even more dangerous.
