Why Choose: Genre Edition
Sometimes, people ask about writing different genres. They want to know why an author does this, or how authors switch gears like that.
In truth, I started writing the Wars for Gwenaria long before jotting down Nemo Dade’s story. It started in my early childhood. Da read The Hobbit and all The Lord of the Rings books to me when I was only a wee thing of three or four years old. That and Winnie the Pooh, which my friends have said explains a lot. Lol.
Inspiration Is Found At The Library
My da fed me on all sorts of speculative fiction as I grew up. By the time I was seven, I was allowed to walk the mile or so to the library by myself. Being Gen X, the rules were a little different for us then. It helped that I was a bit on the precocious side with a pretty sophisticated vocabulary.
YA fiction didn’t exist in late 70s/early 80s, so as I became what’s now understood as middle school aged, I began reading adult fiction like Mercedes Lackey, Sheri S. Tepper, Judith Tarr, Stephen King, Stephen R. Lawhead, and others. The more fantastical, the better. New worlds, bizarre takes on our world. Stories to scare and inspire. They wove adventures, battles, and a side of humanity that I had yet to meet. I couldn’t get enough.
By the time I was twelve, I began telling myself stories, pulling pieces from books to create my own worlds. I also started rewriting TV shows and inserted my own characters—what we now label as fan fiction. That was how I’d fall asleep.
How The Gwenaria Series Started
It was years later before I began literally putting pen to paper. The first attempt was an epic fantasy in a universe that I’d created from scratch. I still have the couple of notebooks where I’d handwritten the story. My unasked for two cents, always save your writing, even the stuff that you think is “awful.” When you look back at it years later, it will undoubtedly make you laugh and be proud of how far you’ve come.
My first complete (and “trunked”) novel was an Urban Fantasy (UF) story. After that, I revisited the epic fantasy from my teen years, but it didn’t capture me the way it had then. Of all things, I was playing a video game and had made a bunch of characters. That led to me making backstories for them. It all just sort of snowballed from there. The Gwenaria universe doesn’t have anything to do with that game world though.
That’s one of the challenges of writing any of the types of fantasy (epic, romantasy, dark, etc.), the author has to create a whole lot of stuff. Decisions need to be made about marking time, weather, geography, politics, magic’s rules, maps, and so on. It’s sometimes easy to get lost in what is called world creation. Some folks never make it past that stage. Others start with characters and go back to create the rest. That’s how I did it. I wanted to know what kind of world Soot inhabited.
Not Every Book Has The Same Origin Story
Creating Nemo’s story and world was more of a lightning strike in my head. I was sick with bronchitis and stuck in bed. While my sinuses were filled with horrid gunk, and coughing was ridiculously persistent, I just hadn’t had it in me to read. It hurt to wear my glasses, and my eye doctor had said that I couldn’t wear my contacts. So at one point, I woke with a bunch of characters in my head and started handwriting things. As soon as I was healthy enough to be at the computer, her story was born. It came out of me surprisingly quickly. The early drafts for the second book followed pretty quickly.
The helpful thing about writing UF, like Nemo, was that a number of the world’s basic rules were already set. It was more a matter of pinning down the dynamics of the fantastical and how that impacted “real world” physics. So, the world building stage went much more quickly. Well, at least for me that was the case.
That being said, I absolutely love Gwenaria and everything involved with building its universe. There are so many aspects that I’ve needed to write down so I don’t forget, and some of them even warranted scene drafts to know how earlier events affect what happens on the pages. Readers won’t necessarily ever see them, but they keep me honest about how the characters respond to the world and each other. Worth it. Happy reading!
