I was doing some thinking earlier today. And I came up with the theory that all the worldbuilding I do today is rooted in my worldbuilding ideas from the past.

In Grade 1, we were given a short writing/drawing project. We come up with a story, and we draw pictures to go along with the pages. Most kids wrote some story about their day or their pet. I wrote a story about a dream. A dream in which I found myself at a really cool hotel occupied only by kids my age. No adults. There was a beach, a pool, lots of food, and holy shit it was great.

Kid Hotel, I called it. And it was my little imaginative paradise.

And I started building up on that. The hotel soon became part of a city. Kid City, because it was a place where only kids lived and worked. I built up Kid City. There was a massive park 5 times bigger than Central Park in NYC. The cars drove themselves. There all this awesome (read: junk) food everywhere. And everything was perfect.

Grade 4. Kid City became a boring name. So I changed it to Cosmetia. Why? Because it sounded cool. I also introduced a new language that looked like a bastardized version of Hawaiian. Skycrapers, industry, resorts, oh my.

Grade 6. I expanded the world again. Cosmetia became the capital of Westchester on the continent of Vespucci. I mapped the largest cities and highways that led into the countries around it.

Grade 7. I changed the name of Cosmetia to New Haven, because paradise needed a name representing that. I designed highway signs, laws, and social systems. However, a bout of depression led me to throw away all my notes and crude sketches of the world. So that was that.

Grade 9, freshman year of high school. New Haven was back on my mind, but in a new and even nuttier version. Instead of kids, the citizens were dragons. Small statures sentient dragons. New Haven was renamed to become Bergen. And it was no longer the capital, as that title was passed to a new town, Alibracto. The highways and culture were preserved. And the new country was called Aldendrin. And in case you don’t recall what this is, it’s the setting for Post Crusade’s precursors. So that means that this world was scrapped, too.

Grade 10! Déjà vu strikes again. I bring back Aldendrin, shift the shit around again, rename it to Equestria, and use it as the setting for Ponyville Diaries.