I liked my invented universe so much, I kept writing stories set in it — and with each story, I learned more about it. Some things I learned by accident. While writing Star Rigger's Way, I imagined a character — not my star-pilot hero, just another rigger casually encountered in a pub. The character's only purpose, really, was to lend a little color to a scene. Here's what he muttered over his drink, talking about some of the star flights he had made:

"Just in on a long haul from the Dreznelles. But usually I work the Aeregian lanes — I like to take slow floaters and duel a bit with the dragons along that mountain route to Lexis and Venice."

He was talking about something that didn't directly concern my story at the time. But later, those words haunted me. In time, they suggested a new character, a new situation, and a new story. This one was about a troubled young rigger named Jael, who actually does meet a dragon during a starflight. That dragon becomes an important part of her life; and the discovery that the dragons are real lends an added dimension to the dangers that riggers face as they fly, slipping along the boundary between imagination and reality.

Though All the Mountains Lie Between

How does this relate to world building? What I did was to return to a world (universe) I'd already created — and asked myself a lot of questions about it, to see what I could discover that I hadn't known before. As a result, I encountered (in my imagination) a rigger named Jael, and also an entire realm of dragons who lived in this strange space-time among the stars called the Flux. Eventually, I found the explanations, and the details, to make them real.