i think i’ve got a decent analogy for how much work it is to create a galaxy as fully realized as i want it to be in order for me to play with it in my stories. quite simply, it is like this:

say i want to take a picture with my digital camera. great, i’ll just pick it up and shoot, right? no. in this case, what i must do is first go to the mines and pull the ore out of the earth, smelt it, form it, etc, and drill some oil, put it through numerous chemical processes and create plastic in order to make the parts i need to build the camera. next i need to go to a glass making factory and grind my own lens. then i have to run all over creation collecting the bits and pieces of circuitry. when i’m done with all of that, i next have to do all of the programming of the software that tells the camera how to do what i want it to and design the look and feel of the camera itself. okay. now i can put the camera together and take a picture. but wait. there’s no light. someone forgot to turn on the sun. and that’s where the fun begins.

in other news, it is fuck cold here and i absolutely love, love, love it. it’s winter, my eyes are tearing with the cold, my feet get chilled, but i can breathe and everything feels clean and bright. lovely time to start new projects and build on old ones. ah, winter.