The Official Alex Russo Blog

 Hello everyone! My name is Alex Russo, and I am a science fiction and fantasy author. All of my friends tell me that worldbuilding is my main strength, so I wanted to share my process of building a civilization with you. Why Are Fictional Civilizations Important in SFF? A civilization, whether its comprised of humans or not, is always a key step in great SFF franchises. Try imagining Lord of the Rings without the Elven societies, or Star Trek without Klingons.  Setting For starters, your civilization needs somewhere to live. If the civilization is on Earth, or a fantasy civilization set in a place like Earth, your work is done. All you need to do is fact-check for ecology and demographic information in order to make it believable. However, if you are creating a new type of civilization not based on Earth, you’ll have to build the world from scratch. The distance a planet and its tilt affect its climate. If a planet is too close to its star, the planet will be tidally locked a...

Hello everyone! I’m here with a new blog post about writingcraft. Over the past few months, I've been hearing about setting alignment, along with terms associated with it. In this post, I wanted to go over what some qualities of each aesthetic are, give some examples of fiction with the aesthetics, and help clear up some misconceptions about setting alignment when it comes to series. What is setting alignment? So, what is setting alignment? Setting alignment refers to qualities exhibited by the characters and setting in your story. Usually, setting alignment is portrayed as a graph with one axis that spans from grim to noble while the other goes from bright to dark. Grim and noble refer to the qualities of the protagonists, while dark and bright refer to the aspects of the world around the characters. This sets up the information contained in the next slides, as each aesthetic’s name is a compound of two of these words. The Types of Setting Alignment Grimdark First off, we’re visit...