No, this post is not about my amazing homemade pizza or my sad attempts at this crazy chickpea dish that just smelt–and tasted–like old man, but instead, about world-building. From scratch.
As an historical author, I’ve never had to world-build; my world was built over 200 years ago, peopled with Prinny and the Duchess of Devonshire and Byron and Shelley and Leigh Hunt and all those fun folks. The clothes are gorgeous, the art is splendidly creative, the wars are ongoing and the men and women are passionate and intense (at least my heroes and heroines are. I hope).
But now that I am working on an Urban Fantasy, I am having to create my own world; is there a Hell and a Heaven? What’s ‘Earth’ like? What can its people do? What realities do they deal with everyday that I never have to deal with (say, a vampire wandering around after dark, just normal and all).
It’s freeing–and scary! There’s no right or wrong here, but there is interestingly believable and absurdly unrealistic. Each day, I add another piece to the landscape, so that eventually I will have a world as real to me as Regency England.
It definitely makes me appreciate the forerunners in our genre, who picked out the funnest bits for us current authors to work with, and left us a vibrant world for our heroes and heroines.
I hope to do the same for my characters. What’s your favorite fictional world? What do you wish really existed in our time?
Thanks to Diane who posted in my day of internet need last Friday.
