It's our first episode of 2026, and that means it's time for another listener Q&A episode!

From nitty-gritty craft details like writing good dialogue and measuring your pacing to broader concepts like "How do you make worldbuilding fun again after burnout?", we answer your burning questions about the work we do and how we do it.

And as a sidebar: If you want to be eligible to nominate for the 2026 Hugo Awards -- perhaps, say, for your favorite worldbuilding podcast? -- you need to secure a WSFS Membership by January 31st!

[Transcript for Episode 172]

As we turn the pages of our own calendars, let's think about how the cultures we build in fantasy and science fiction mark the passage of time! What shapes the patterns of life for your characters? Do they judge years and seasons and months by the movement of celestial bodies, by agricultural phenomena, by winds and rains and storms, or by something else? The lunisolar calendar is a frantic hodgepodge in our own world; how does that change if your planet has multiple moons? Does your month divide into smaller units like weeks, or not?

Different cultures will conceive of all these things in varying ways, and attention to detail with your calendar can communicate a lot about your world to your reader. The calendar and timekeeping can touch on everything from religion to labor practices to human biology. Your culture's choices might reflect their priorities and values -- or, perhaps, what those priorities and values were at some time in the past when the calendar was set.

And then, of course, you might also have to name all those months and days of the weeks! So how do you handle that? Our own world has been wildly inconsistent with the choices, which means so can your invented societies!

We also look back at our writing years of 2025 and our intentions and hopes for 2026!

[Transcript for Episode 171]

PS: Find your birthday in the French Revolutionary calendar!

We know we’re worldbuilding masochists – But when is too much really, really too much? Some of us try to do all our worldbuilding at the start of a project -- and some of us do it as we go. However you work, where's the line between worldbuilding that's helpful to you and worldbuilding that's become a way to evade actually writing? And, does that line change depending on what your own intentions and goals are?

Often, it's important to consider the difference between the worldbuilding you need as an author in order to get the full scope of a project straight inside your own head and the worldbuilding that a reader needs in order to understand the story. If worldbuilding is an iceberg, just how much do you let float up to the surface, and how do you shape the worldbuilding that you put on the page? Worldbuilding often works best when it can pull double-duty, also serving to reveal character, communicate stakes, and set the atmospheric mood.

We also talk about what you can do with the worldbuilding that doesn't make it on the page! Tolkien had his appendices, but writers today have all sorts of options: You can include them as bonuses for pre-order campaigns, put them on a blog or a Patreon, or, I dunno, make a podcast about them!

[Transcript for Episode 170]