I meant to put this update on The Cellar Dweller a few weeks ago. Somehow it is now November, so a summer catch-up has become an autumn one as well.
It was quite a busy summer, and it kept me away from dedicated worldbuilding — at least as far as creating new canon and lore goes. Instead, I’ve been consolidating projects and making sure the foundations are solid. That has continued into the autumn, although there are now a few things finished as well.
So, what have I been up to?
Well, those of you who have visited The Cellar Dweller before will know that my wife wanted me to recoup some of the expenses I’ve somehow accrued over the years. Software, atlases and historical maps, iPads, MacBooks and so on — all bought, naturally, in the name of Panimálay.
She suggested publishing some of the stories the world has given me in the hope that someone might actually want to read them. So I have. When I first wrote this update, the £37.00 income had gone a long way towards this! But at least I’d recouped something. :)
The plan was fairly straightforward: write some fiction and a worldbuilding guide.
I started working on the publishing side of all this back in late 2024, and the first two books in the Foundations of Edrass fiction series appeared earlier this year. The plan was then to release the worldbuilding guides during the summer. Plans, however, are great on paper but seldom survive contact with the enemy. I don’t know who first said that, but it’s very true. The enemy in this case was both the project and life in general.
Life is life. We all have one and things just happen. The main thing was my wife having the summer off school, which meant days out, holidays, visitors and such forth. All the normal things that probably would have been fine if it weren’t for the second front — the project itself.
I wasn’t happy with the first editions of the Foundations series.
The re-edit of Book One, Silent Winter, is now about 90% done, and I’m reading through the manuscript for the final time. I plan to give Beyond Winter’s Silence the same treatment, but the worldbuilding series has also needed a considerable amount of work.
Since the first settled draft in 2025, I’ve progressed a great deal. From around the middle of that year I also began using AI tools, and these have not only changed my workflow considerably but allowed me to get far more work done in a much shorter amount of time.
Now, that sounds wonderful. But therein lies a danger. I can now do things that once took me weeks in a matter of days: research, calculations, logical checking, trying one path against another, testing ideas and so on. The problem is that you can create so much stuff that you bury yourself remarkably quickly. That’s probably a story in itself.
The worldbuilding method I use remains essentially the same, but the workflow around it has evolved considerably. I wanted the worldbuilding series to reflect that.
So… back to the typewriter I went.
Worldbuilding with an AI Assistant: Part One: Foundations has now been published on Kindle. The accompanying practical programme has started too, with Module One released. The learning materials can be accessed free through Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee, so you can try the exercises without buying the book.
The practical material accompanies the eight-part series. It gives people something to work through with their own worlds, alongside the examples and discussion in the books. There is still more to prepare and release, but it is good to have the first part out after spending so long working on it.
And then there’s QGIS… another rabbit hole I’ve been investigating. In the past I’ve hand-drawn maps — well, hand-drawn using an Apple Pencil — in Photoshop and Illustrator, and more recently Affinity Designer and Artstudio Pro. But I wanted more detail and realism in the maps of Panimálay.
There does seem to be a pattern developing here.
So hello QGIS. That has taken me on quite a journey of its own. I’ve been learning about terrain and drainage, and finding out just how much work goes into getting a landscape to behave plausibly. There is still plenty to do.
It has also opened up a host of possibilities for the mapping side of the project. I’m looking at producing interactive maps with information and data attached to locations, rather than maps simply being static pictures. And that is very exciting.
One of the things that came out of the terrain work was using the geographical and biome information to help create generated views of Panimálay’s landscapes. The images are interpretations, with plenty of detail supplied by the image generator, but the first time I saw them I was quite awed. I could look at my world with my eyes as well as picture it in my mind. I want to give that a post of its own.
Anyway, I mainly wanted to take a moment to set the scene and explain where things currently stand — and why there has been a slight hiatus in project updates. Over the coming months I’ll be sharing more of the work behind the books and maps, along with plenty of other aspects of Panimálay.
The bit I’m most looking forward to, though, is seeing people use the practical material and, hopefully, gathering together a community of like-minded people who simply enjoy making fun and interesting worlds.
Because ultimately, that’s what all this is about.
Russ.
PS The header image: A view across Panimálay’s foothills, from the landscape work I’ll be writing about next.
Landscape imagery generated with ChatGPT and DALL-E, informed by Panimálay’s terrain and biome data. These views are interpretations.
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