Fantasy Chat: World Building with T.F. Walsh and W4WS

 

For today's Fantasy Chat, we have the talented T.F. Walsh here talking about world building.

 

Hi Cherie, thanks for having me on your blog. Today I want to chat about world building.

What I love about writing fantasy is the ability to create things out of nothing. The trick is to make it appear believable by borrowing items from history and even today’s world.

In Cloaked in Fur, the story is set in Brasov, Romania in the Carpathian Mountains. It’s a real place. It exists. My friend actually grew up in Brasov. But where the reality ends and fantasy begins is with the introduction of werewolves in this setting. And why not? It’s a place seeped in folklore, and many tales associated with Dracula come from this location. The backdrop is perfect.

And to take the world building further, I created three types of werewolves with a bloodline that links back to the royal kings from the Kingdom of Hungary in the 1300s. My plan was to differentiate each werewolf kind with names that weren’t too complicated, but almost self-explanatory. So, a moonwulf is a half wolf, half human. The moon still controls them once a month. Outside the full moon, they can’t transform. Now, for those creatures who have complete control over their transformations, I’ve named them wulfkin. And lastly, the monstrous, bloodthirsty werewolves who have zero ability to hold back their appetite are called dracwulf.

Of course with any wolf pack, rules and hierarchy plays a huge part. And the rules I introduced are crucial to the story and Daciana’s undoing. Plus, they set things in motion for book 2, which I’m very excited about. 

The fun part about world building in fantasy worlds is that anything new introduced will have a ripple effect on everything else. And that’s where it gets fun, allowing you to take the story in so many directions.

What do you love about world building in a story?

Cloaked in Fur is Available Now

As a moonwulf, Daciana never expected to fall in love with a human. Hell, she never imagined that she’d abandon her pack, endanger everyone around her, and break the worst rule possible. But she did.

A rogue werewolf is killing Daciana’s friends, and she sets on capturing the creature.  She’ll do whatever it takes to stop the beast. The police and her boyfriend, Inspector Connell Lonescu, are starting to question her involvement in the murders, which is endangering the pack’s secret existence. But when the pack alpha kidnaps Connell, revealing the awful truth about the creature and its connection to the pack, Daciana must choose between saving the man she loves and saving her pack family from certain death.

Paranormal Suspense With Strong Romance

To Purchase: Amazon / Amazon UK / Nook / iTunes / Crimson Romance Books

Publisher: Crimson Romance

T.F. Walsh emigrated from Romania to Australia at the age of eight and now lives in a regional city south of Sydney with her husband. Growing up hearing dark fairytales, she's always had a passion for reading and writing horror, paranormal romance, urban fantasy and young adult stories. She balances all the dark with light fluffy stuff like baking and traveling.

Website / Twitter / Facebook / Goodreads   

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The next installment of Writers4Writers is Monday, August 19th and will feature Carrie Butler and C. Lee McKenzie. Check their sites for Tweets and FB posts to add to your feeds. Just copy and paste and you’re done. 

Fantasy Tuesdays: World Building

 

World building is perhaps one of the most challenging and greatest thing about fantasy novels. Even in urban/contemporary fantasy, there is world building (of course, all novels have it to some extent). What does the world look like? What are the people's customs? Language? Religion? Seasons? Clothing? The list goes on and on about figuring out characters' worlds.

Worlds can be mundane to the fantastical. Beautiful to dark. Under the sea and on top of mountains. It's all up to the writer to convey this new-to-the-reader world.

Even if you aren't a plotter, I do suggest lists to keep track of your world. Plus, the writer doesn't have to add every detail into the book. The fantasy worlds writers create are often even more complex than what is mentioned in the book, and this is probably how it should be too. 

I think one of the best fantasy world builders was J.R.R. Tolkien. His lands were amazing, and he put so much into them, so readers would feel like they could live with hobbits or elves too. Readers could even learn and speak some Elvish.

For my own writing, I like to play off of things in our own world or history and bring them into my fantasy world with new names. For example, the city of Amora (a Roma, or "to Rome" backwards) is similar to ancient Rome. Foxwick is like a mini-Medieval realm.

What's your favorite fantasy world to travel to? If you're a writer, how do you approach world building in your books?