Being a Better Writer: Disease and Worldbuilding · 9:04pm January 6th
Welcome writers to the first Being a Better Writer post of 2025! I hope your new year had gotten off to a good start, but if you need some writing fuel to seed your creative mind with ideas, BaBW is here to offer assistance as we jump back on the topic of worldbuilding once more.
Before we dive in though, we need to go over some quick bits of news that weren’t discussed in last Thurday’s news post. To start, a new Patreon Supporter reward is up and available to read for supporters of the site! Patreon Support keeps Unusual Things advertisement (and pop-up) free, which is greatly appreciated by all who come here, so if you’re looking to give back to Unusual Things and Being a Better Writer, please consider heading over to the Patreon Page and becoming a supporter! As a bonus, you’ll be able to take a look at some of the supporter rewards that have gone up over the years, which include this latest offering, a nice hefty peek at an unnamed Sci-Fi story about a bunch of shipbreakers out on the job. If you’re already a supporter, then check it out here!
The other bit of news that’s worth mentioning is that Unusual Things now has a Bluesky Social Account. In effect, it’s going to be used the exact same way that the Unusual Things Twitter was, serving as a feed for the site’s posts. Though Twitter slowly morphed in a monstrous semi-living dumpster fire even before the takeover, Bluesky is attempting to shake things up with a more refined approach to the original Twitter idea, allowing users to actually choose what they want to see an interact with on the site.
None of which will really change how I use it, which is as a feed for Unusual Things content. Anyway, if you’re a social media user who lamented the loss of Twitter when it became too much of a nightmare to deal with and accordingly moved yourself over to Bluesky, you can follow Unusual Things by going here.
And that’s the news! Like I said, two quick bits. Though if I may add a third, partially for my own benefit, I must say I was thrilled to hear from those who gave away copies of Axtara for Christmas! One photo I received was of a copy of Banking and Finance gifted to someone who had already, by the end of Christmas Day, made it a third of the way through the book. Delightful!
Okay, that’s the last bit of news. Let’s switch gears to talking about writing!
So, today’s topic is a little bit in-line with one we discussed back in December about Holidays and Celebrations. Which … we might revisit in the future, since we could still talk about what shape those celebrations take. But today’s topic is a worldbuilding topic that is definitely cut from the same cloth … but is also addressing a very different part of any setting. One that, in my experience, often gets sort of slid aside in a lot of settings, and for reasons we’ll get into. Nevertheless, when real history is observed, it does feel like a bit of an omission in many stories.
Hit the jump, because today we’re going to talk about disease and sickness in worldbuilding.
thanks for advice