World Building from the ground up.

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Writing is hard. It could be described like gardening. First, you have to prepare the ground. It is not as simple as scrape a hole in the ground and toss a seed in there. It involves breaking up the earth down to a certain depth so that you can get all the rocks and weeds out. It involves planting the seeds down at the correct depth and then thinning out the tender shoots as they come up so that you have healthy plants.

And as you are dealing with those shoots of young growth, you need to pull weeds. You find yourself pulling weeds just about every day during the growing season. And then there's the buckets of water you get to haul. SO MANY BUCKETS OF WATER. If you're lucky, you get plenty of rain when you need it and just enough sun. Because in addition to all of the work you put in, you've got fickle luck to deal with as well.

In world building, you find yourself asking questions that are hard to answer. You start considering things like how do cultures work and what exactly is religion? Or you find yourself way in over your head trying to figure out what in the name of the outer darkness is a biome and if they're contagious. All because you wanted to have dragons that looked cool on the cover but made sense in the story, you find yourself learning more than you ever wanted to know (wishing for mental bleach to get some of the details out) about lizard anatomy and life cycles. (PRO TIP: Lizard anatomy isn't half as messed up as ducks. Seriously, lizards make more sense.)

Asking all those questions and doing your research is breaking earth and chucking rocks out of the way. Sorting out the knowledge is pulling weeds. You've already got the seeds going as soon as you get that little baby idea of 'Hey, let's put a dragon on the cover of the book! But it's gotta make sense.' The maintenance work of sorting information as you gather it is half of the job of world building. The other half is taking your new found facts and putting your own spin on how they fit together. That is a lot of background effort for writing a book. Some people let that stuff happen willy-nilly. If you get lucky, that works out pretty well.

Now, you can put in a whole heap of background effort for the project to go flat before you even get out the bicycle pump to start blowing up the blimp. That's where you set all that hard work carefully aside and come back to it at another time. Because sometimes the seeds are not ready when you think you're ready to harvest them. Sometimes you can write a book in two weeks. Sometimes it takes three years. Either way, you're still sitting on some really good potatoes that will be making an amazing dish eventually.