I'm getting ready to start prepping the next novel. As with all fiction writers, that means that I need to develop characters, settings, and situations which are relatable and compelling enough to make a reader want to slog through several hundred pages of my imagination. But there's something that I do, being a SF/F author, that authors in other genres don't have to: I have to create worlds. It's amazing how difficult it is to do that if your goal is to have coherent rules that can be