One of the things I enjoy the most about fantasy writing is the chance to make new worlds. Maybe, if I'm feeling like cribbing from The Tempest (which I almost always am), I could call them "brave new worlds". But I've bumped into a surprising experience over the last three or so years: I'm stuck in one world.
Stuck is probably too strong of a term, because that implies that I'm not content being there. On the contrary: It's been quite a bit of fun. Originally, I wanted Taralys (this new planet) to be a particular way and I focused on fusing the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Then, I had an idea for how to make a Jacobean/Elizabethan fantasy world in my own version of late 16th century London. The fact that I could easily rationalize how this new city fit into Taralys was a new thing for me. I already had a bunch of rules from my sci-fi/fantasy romp that I could apply to this new Elizabethan wannabe section of the world. They could be on the same planet and some of the large-scale, planet-wide changes that the first book treated could leak into the second one.
As so often happens when I write, however, I got more ambitious. My conceit was to make the second book a "spiritual successor", so even though there were pieces from the first book drifting into the second, I didn't write it with the idea that the reader would have started at the "beginning". They could read either book in either order. It would fill in gaps reading both, but you didn't have to be familiar with the whole thing to catch it all.
In a sense, I was following the paradigm that Anne McCaffery set up in her earliest Dragonriders of Pern books, which had overlapping trilogies. You saw the same world events from different angles and points of view, which made the experience of seeing the same thing exciting all over again.
Now, however, I'm looking at another book in the world (with one taking place in the outerspace section of the sci-fi world partially created and not working at all...I'm going to have to remove the dinosaurs, sadly; they aren't working) and I'm having to build so heavily on the foundation from Book 2 that the entire concept is falling apart.
My largest struggle is that I'm teaching a novel writing class, which essentially gives students time almost every day to work on their novels. As an example of good writing habits, I'm writing with them. (It gives them something to shoot for, since we post our word counts every day and I'm always at the highest number of words. If they can write more than the teacher, that's some bragging rights.) So I don't have the luxury of scrapping every project and world building something from the ground up. It takes me a couple hours to block out a book, but I actually have three or four outlined novels that I'm not really excited about. So what do I do? Pick a project that's plotted but I'm not excited about? Fumble forward with this new one, even though doing so will make the idea of writing adventures in a specific world rather than about specific characters almost impossible to continue? Write an indulgent essay where I document something that is even more trivial than most of what I post?
Yeah. The last one.
That's what I'll do.
Stuck is probably too strong of a term, because that implies that I'm not content being there. On the contrary: It's been quite a bit of fun. Originally, I wanted Taralys (this new planet) to be a particular way and I focused on fusing the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Then, I had an idea for how to make a Jacobean/Elizabethan fantasy world in my own version of late 16th century London. The fact that I could easily rationalize how this new city fit into Taralys was a new thing for me. I already had a bunch of rules from my sci-fi/fantasy romp that I could apply to this new Elizabethan wannabe section of the world. They could be on the same planet and some of the large-scale, planet-wide changes that the first book treated could leak into the second one.
As so often happens when I write, however, I got more ambitious. My conceit was to make the second book a "spiritual successor", so even though there were pieces from the first book drifting into the second, I didn't write it with the idea that the reader would have started at the "beginning". They could read either book in either order. It would fill in gaps reading both, but you didn't have to be familiar with the whole thing to catch it all.
In a sense, I was following the paradigm that Anne McCaffery set up in her earliest Dragonriders of Pern books, which had overlapping trilogies. You saw the same world events from different angles and points of view, which made the experience of seeing the same thing exciting all over again.
Now, however, I'm looking at another book in the world (with one taking place in the outerspace section of the sci-fi world partially created and not working at all...I'm going to have to remove the dinosaurs, sadly; they aren't working) and I'm having to build so heavily on the foundation from Book 2 that the entire concept is falling apart.
My largest struggle is that I'm teaching a novel writing class, which essentially gives students time almost every day to work on their novels. As an example of good writing habits, I'm writing with them. (It gives them something to shoot for, since we post our word counts every day and I'm always at the highest number of words. If they can write more than the teacher, that's some bragging rights.) So I don't have the luxury of scrapping every project and world building something from the ground up. It takes me a couple hours to block out a book, but I actually have three or four outlined novels that I'm not really excited about. So what do I do? Pick a project that's plotted but I'm not excited about? Fumble forward with this new one, even though doing so will make the idea of writing adventures in a specific world rather than about specific characters almost impossible to continue? Write an indulgent essay where I document something that is even more trivial than most of what I post?
Yeah. The last one.
That's what I'll do.