World-Building FTW!
Something that's new for me with this upcoming fantasy series is world-building. I've been working on creating my fantasy world of Torrea for well over a decade, but now with getting ready to write, I realized there’s more world-building to do. As you can imagine with a zombie series set on Earth there wasn't a whole lot to do besides, how the outbreak happened. But when you're creating a fantasy world with all kinds of magic, governments, races, landscape, lore, and awesome creatures, there is a lot going into it. So that's what I've been working on this entire summer after finishing up the Brother’s Creed series. And it's been an awesome experience because I discovered that I love to world build—to create worlds and creatures and cultures and races and histories! Oh and Magic, lots and lots of magic.
When I started looking into all that I still needed to figure out for Torrea, my good buddy Ryan, sent me over a world-building questionnaire that had over 30 pages of questions about the world I'm creating. On top of that, I found a really cool world building podcast that I've been listening to that has been able to inspire even more ideas. I've been creating this world for over 10 years, but I didn't start to really “world-build” it for writing until the last four years and not heavily until the last two. Now that I'm finally getting ready to write a whole series set in the world, I'm going through and putting all the information in one spot and polishing it. This has been a lot of work, as you can imagine, but it's also been a lot of fun and has really inspired new things as I'm going through my old notes and I’m finding little things include tie into the story as well as big things for future works.
This is the OneNote where I keep all of my world building notes: the Torrea Codex!
One of my favorite things to create was the magic. Torrea is full of all kinds of magic, races, and creatures, and that's all been awesome to do, but the magic has been especially fun. It's not so much that I'm reinventing the wheel with any of it, but I’m putting my own twists and my own signature on it. I made sure to create rules to make sure it's balanced, while still being powerful enough and a big part of my world. With all that, I've really been able to flush out how magic works and it's created a new way that the world operates.
It's been an awesome and creative process and I love it. There is still a lot more work to do over in the years to come and I will be making changes, tweaking, and adding more for a long time. But now I have a solid base to build off of, which I didn’t have before.
Now I just have to find time to start writing the stories set in the world! Hahaha!
From my desk to you,
