12) In what story did you feel you did the best job of worldbuilding? Any side-notes on it you’d like to share?

I’ve in the past not been a disciplined worldbuilder, preferring to feel my way along as I write and see what falls out of my head over nailing things down ahead of time. This has sometimes worked well–in Brutal Light, my answer to this question–but oftentimes it has come back around to bite me, forcing significant additional revision time. I’m working on changing that in my upcoming projects–the short story sequence set in a remote jungle location on what may or may not be another world, for instance, is something I’m very aware I have to put a lot of extra pre-writing worldbuilding effort into. My next novel project, Minions, will also require some considerable forethought, though more of it will be left to ‘discovery.’

That said, I don’t think Brutal Light would have been as strong a novel if I’d tried to get things lined up right at the start. Some projects are just like that. In this case, it was the end result of years of thinking about stories like it, and iterations of working on previous attempts at novels and even some of my Superguy material. It had spent so much time incubating that, had I tried anything like formal worldbuilding, I might never have stopped, and might never have gotten around to writing the actual book.