Meditations on the Limits of the Human Brain (Patreon)

We are about two weeks into this wiki and it’s growing fast enough that I’m making back-ups every couple of days. There will come a day when changes are minimal and infrequent enough that I can move to a weekly back-up, but that day is not today, won’t be tomorrow, and honestly I don’t see it coming for several months.

As an illustration, I bring you an image! I did not think to check the wiki statistics until today and wasn't that an eye-opener. 420 content pages! And we haven’t even gotten into most of the Chatcaavan stuff. And 172 images! Almost 5000 edits since the site went up! In two weeks! The wiki has gone from ‘you can check a list of all the pages and hope there’s a stub to edit’ to ‘you have to search for things because there are too many pages to browse’, and it’s amazing.

This has brought me to a new place, mentally. When the wiki was in its first few days and I made the ‘Common Misspellings’ page so people could doublecheck some of my errors, I despaired because I was finding so many of these little inconsistencies. How could I fail to notice that I’d spelled KindlesFlame’s first name three different ways? Why didn’t anyone point out that sometimes it was Noble’s Row and sometimes Nobles’ Row? I thought of the occasional messages I got or reviews I saw where people told me that I got things wrong and wanted to crawl into a hole.

But two weeks of dedicated work on the wiki has completely blown those feelings of inadequacy away. I’ve spent hours every day researching and updating pages, and watching other people do the same, and I’m not even close to done filling in all the backstory, history, or detail in the books. There are enormous chunks of the Peltedverse canon that haven’t made it into the wiki, and every day when I am paging through a book or sketchbook looking for something, I find a completely new thing I need to add. 

This is a universe where I have troubled to name specific restaurants and cafes, breeds of chicken and dog, and competing schools of sword training; I’ve made maps of sectors and maps of cities and floor plans for everything from apartments to castles to starships; I’ve namedropped the equivalent of rock and movie stars and named their intellectual properties, come up with cuisines from microcultures on multiple colony worlds, and brainstormed jewelry for appendages we don’t have. I’ve designed the biology of plants, the etymology of languages, and physiognomy charts for alien skulls. And that’s just the background… the data that’s front-and-center, like the biographies of major characters, is its own enormous ball of wax, and on top of deciding what they looked like and how they acted, I also decided whether they preferred coffee, tea, or beer and if they like ballet or collect aircars. 

“How can you not have remembered x” has become “how did I keep even a little bit of this straight.” Because researching information for the wiki has made it clear to me just how much of it there is. It no longer bothers me that I spelled Fasianyl with two ‘s’s early in the series, or that I may have messed up which of the two brothers left the Eldritch homeworld first, Amber or Jahir. That I managed to make it all hang together at all is shocking.

The other factor that’s made me realize what I’ve been dealing with involves the feeling in my head as this stuff passes into a database… because I feel a literal relaxing, as if I’ve been keeping something clenched between my ears for over two decades. I’m currently editing one Peltedverse novel and writing the first draft of another, and the ability to switch windows and search for something, and often find it written down already, is enormous. In the past, I would often have to stop writing to go on a (sometimes fruitless) search for some detail in the existing books, or ask for help from a reader with a more recent memory of the specific series. Sometimes I’d have to drop what I was doing and embark on a complete re-read of some prior book just to get the details settled in my head. The ability to bypass that by typing a name or place or thing into the wiki search and finding that data already extracted from a book (often with a reference to which and what chapter!) is so freeing a sensation that I’m hard pressed to describe my relief. I can only describe its effects: I am spending less time preparing to write books and more time actually writing them. Which is good for all of us.

I’d like to say ‘if I’d had a plan I would have done this from the start’ but when I started the Peltedverse I was working on an Apple IIe and wikis didn’t exist yet. (Neither did the public internet.) And in a way, I’m glad that I’m doing this now. Digging into the world after the fact has forced me to appreciate how much work I’ve put into it… and until this moment, I didn’t realize how much to heart I’d taken those ‘you got this wrong how could you fail the continuity on your own universe’ comments. Those accusations hurt more when I thought it was my fault. Now, as MadameBadger points out, I can look at the sprawl and agree that I would have had to have been a D-per myself to keep track of it; my squishy analog brain alone was not up to the task, and no wonder.

This has been a really eye-opening experience, I tell you.

Wiki editors who are helping me, you are golden. I hope this post lets you know how huge a thing you’re doing by recording even one detail that I don’t have to look up again. Everyone else, I invite you to go look around and enjoy everyone’s hard work. No, not everything’s there yet. And yes, that’s a feature, not a bug, because it means the Peltedverse is just that big. Pretty crazy stuff.💖