I like to brag to my kids that back in the early 90’s, I worked outside in -30-degree weather. Awesome humblebrag, huh? I didn’t walk to school uphill both ways, so this is my version of miserable suffering my kids need to know, anytime they get mad at me when the wi-fi doesn’t work for a few seconds (because you know I can fix the internet).

The reason I worked outside in -30-degree weather in South Dakota was because I worked construction the summer before I started college to earn money, and I thought it would be a good idea to make some money during my short Christmas vacation break. I’ve done some stupid things in my life, and that was one of them. I should have just relaxed for two weeks, because the $42.14 I made after taxes wasn’t worth the oppressive cold. I’m still mad at my parents for making us move to South Dakota for those 10 years.

I blame my parents for the South Dakota thing, but I blame myself for working construction in the first place. Because why would I work in concrete construction, when I don’t know anything about building things, beyond screwing in lightbulbs or tightening a screw. I was constantly asking my crew leaders, how to do things. If you’ve ever met a grizzled construction worker, you know they hate when you ask them how to do something. They just assume you know everything about building stuff and you’re an idiot for asking questions.

I’m no Bitter Ben the Builder. The only building I do is world building, and I’m not even good at that. If you’ve never heard of world building, it’s visually constructing a world in a fiction novel or movie. I can barely understand how things work in my reality right now. How am I supposed to make up all these rules in my fictional world? I’m in the middle of finishing a book I started 15 years ago, so you know, it’s going swimmingly. By the time I’m 65, I’ll almost be finished.

The nice thing about world building is that all you need to make up is a new government, laws, geography, math, magic systems, economies, caste systems, races and completely new personalities and backstories for every character. I can barely come up with a backstory for Bitter Ben. How am I supposed to know what 3rd character operating a dial ate for breakfast or what his parents’ horrible divorce lead him into an operation of dials major in college?

I listened to a podcast the other day that talked about just focusing on going narrow and deep on your worldbuilding. In other words, just focus on three different categories and understand them deeply and only flesh out what is truly important to your characters and plot. But then she went really deep on magic systems. Magic took most of the podcast and all of sudden we were talking about the different types and if it was hard or soft magic, and all of sudden my head is spinning and I have to start my novel all over again with the magic system in mind.

If I even tried to explain the magic system in my fictional world to an average, ordinary person, their eyes would glaze over like a Krispy Kreme donut. Almost like my eyes get when my nephews try to explain Magic the Gathering or Settlers of Katan to me.

It’s the hundreds of aspects of world building that explains why my book will take 30 years to write. The best part will be when it is actually published and the Settlers of Katan and Magic the Gathering readers get ahold of my book. They will start doing their nerdy thing where they absorb the world like Thor absorbs the lightning and start inhabiting the world. And then describing in detail on Twitter what is wrong with everything and telling me about my black hole sized plot holes.

You know the type. The ones that love Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, that constantly debate the finer points of the books and movies. They will ask questions like, “Why didn’t Harry Potter get a wand with Dragon Heartstring instead of Wormtail bits? On page 35 of Prisoner of Azkaban, it said he had the heart of a dragon, which means his wand should have reflected such.”

Yes, the trolls will have the Mjolnir to hammer my book with. What they won’t know, is that I have the Bitterness Absorber that takes all their bitter energy and throws it back on Twitter. Twitter gets more powerful, the more bitterness you put on it, and it will power my Bitter Publicity Machine. As the saying goes, “There is no such thing as bad bitter publicity.”

As the Trolls start attacking me, people will start noticing and become curious. They will wonder how a book could be so bad, and they won’t be able to control themselves from buying it. Then they will be surprised by how good it is, and then read how long it took me to write it.

Then the Taylor Swift type net detectives will start realizing that I started a blog 30 years ago (this is in 15 more years) and start combing through the details of every post like it was one of Taylor Swift’s songs. They will try to decode details from the blog and how it connects to the book. It will turn into the world’s largest treasure hunt for the people of the world. Conspiracy theories will be out there.

The joke will be on them, because I will deliberately make no connections, but not stop them from trying.

And just like that, I will troll the trolls.

Mark that on your calendars, bitterlings. On July 28, 2038, all this stuff will be happening, and you will smirk to yourself, knowing that you were one of a dozen people who read this post today, and you were a witness to someone predicting the future precisely as it happened. And you will scramble to find the post, showing those smug trolls that you were way ahead of the worldwide phenomenon.

Boom! And you thought I couldn’t do worldbuilding. Roasted.

ARRGGGHHHHHHHHHH

Bitter Ben the Worldbuilder Ben