Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with.

Oh my gosh, my favorite changes depending on whatever story I’m working on at the time!

For the sake of this question, I’ll respond with this. My “favorite” universe I wrote in would have to be the one for Raise Holy Hex. This is my favorite universe because it’s the first time my friend and I really poured extensive amounts of research into world-building.

We created all the different races for this world, drew maps, developed a world history, country’s history, history that affected the story, discovered political leaders, designed architecture for different parts of the world, fashion for different cultures, entire languages. We plotted major rivers, figured out political alliances, used that to figure out trade routs, discussed economies of different countries and how it affected each other. Designed technology, different methods of transportation, figured out how nature affected the cities and viceversa.

Then we added another continent. We figured out how immigration worked between the continents, figured the climate changes, resources, magic differences between the regions. We created segments of history where the continents used to be aware of each other’s existence but due to a dark ages following apocalyptic natural disaster, they lost contact with each other and slowly their history fell into legend.

And finally, we wrote one story in this world. Then fast forwarded a few years and wrote another story. Then again. And then wrote stories for side characters, created alternate histories to see what we liked better. Raise Holy Hex turned into a sandbox for our imagination and the project just kept getting bigger and bigger. I don’t think we have any other project with world-building on such a grand scale.

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