SquarePeg Books

What do you love about the genre you write in most often?

Oooo….

I’m a fantasy girl. Always have been. Magic is awesome. Dragons are cool. Castles and swords and spells, oh my!

World building from scratch is probably the easiest thing (for me). The problem stems from my obsessive need for detail. If I can explain “a thing” or a history or whatever the way I want, as long as I keep good notes to keep the details straight and consistent, it’s all fun and games.

Researching a way to fit steampunk sf into a revised history is somewhat more detailed (I’ve almost figured out how I can legitimately create a precursor to the FBI as an actual government agency in the 1880’s different than what already sort-of existed). What details do you keep? What do you change? How knowledgeable is your readership likely to be on the subject? Will they accept an alternate history in which Lincoln survived as a cripple but Grant was successfully assassinated?

Making sure I have the right details for how something works in a contemporary setting can be challenging as well – will the readership accept a person getting hit by a car in a parking lot, but only suffering from soft tissue damage in the aftermath? What is the evacuation procedure for wildfires in my state? How can I portray a character in a current fashion without severely dating the work (hint – using specific cell phone models and social media terms dates your work and readers may not be interested in reading such outdated stories).

Fantasy? Well, sure, I had to take a character’s leg in a society without antibiotics, but magic makes it easy to explain how he can be up, mobile and ready to go in less than 6 weeks. History? Gender roles? Monetary system? Sure, I can document that stuff anyway I want by my rules. I just have to be consistent.

Seeing my obsessive love of detail revealed (over repeated blog postings), I suppose you can understand why I did so well as a file clerk tracking all the software licensing and documentation for several thousand machines on a LAN.

I suppose it could be argued that tracking details for fantasy world building is one of the few things I have total control over in my life these days, which is why I get a kick out of the power trip, but does that really matter?

Check out the Insecure Writer’s Support Group to see more writers dish about their concerns, their solutions to various problems, or just genera scelerophobia.