Building a World: Week 1

Top down worldbuilding starts with little details but fills in later.

After a successful year of reviewing movies, I’ve decided to take my blog in a slightly different direction. The original intent of this blog had been to be a writer’s blog. At the start of the year, I managed to cover a lot of content on writing. As time progressed, that lost focus while I maintained my regular posts on movie reviews though those were sometimes late.

For 2013, I plan instead to devote every Tuesday to a post dedicated to work building one of my worlds. I will be using this blog to discuss the process and I’ll be sharing pieces of my world, how I’m developing the world, and various resources I’ve encountered in the process.
For those of you who don’t know, I have a Twitch account. I use the account to stream myself playing a variety of games. Though I promise no schedule for streaming, I will be using my Twitch account while I write these blog entries. And, to meet Twitch’s guidelines for gaming streams, I’ll have a special game running at the time as well as discuss on stream how this can be applied to gaming.

Building a World: Week 1

There are several ways to approach worldbuilding. In this blog series, I will not be focusing so much on how to worldbuild, but rather discuss my process of worldbuilding. Part of my goal here is to not only build up my world, but start to finalize and compile the details of my world. I have a massive binder filled with notes and pieces of my world. I have computer documents scattered all over the place with details I’ve come up with. I have approximately eight manuscripts worth of writing with details of my world that I can skim through. I also have an assortment of short stories. There is a lot of information to work with, many of it is contradictory.

With worldbuilding, there are two main approaches. I’m gloriously “stealing” this information from wikipedia

• Top-Down Worldbuilding: Starting with the larger aspects of a world such as continents and countries and creating the details within those aspects. (1)
• Bottom-Up Worldbuilding: Taking a detailed section of your world, such as a single city, and building the world around that city. (1)

For the most part with my blog, I will be doing top-down. There are, however, parts of my world that are finely crafted and I will need to better fit them into the world around it. For those areas, I will focus on a bottom-up approach.

My world is a fantasy world with three distinct magical systems and three major races. There are other races and the magic system has a unified rule that allows some manipulation to imitate different forms of magic. However, these are merely the exceptions to the rules.

This is why the first rule with worldbuilding is to have core rules, rules that cannot be broken. Today, I want to talk about the nature of death and life in my world. Much of my world revolves around what happens when someone dies. In The Rose and the Crown, the story gets into what the humans believe happens when you die and what the fae believe happen when you die. Are they the same? No. Does it matter to the reader what really happens? No. Does it matter to me, the writer, when I am working on a story? Yes.

It is important that when I tell the story, I’m being consistent. If I have one story in which a character dies and the ritual is followed one way, and in another story, it is different, the reader will pick up on this and wonder if I am doing things right. You never want to break the trust in your readers. So, it is important to know the story behind your world even if the reader never encounters it.

So, in my Aldaric world. This is a place where all souls go when they die. This area is timeless and is inhabited by the keeper of the dead. She is a special soul who sacrificed her ability to move between worlds in order to guide souls to the next point in their life.

This allows me the possibility to have souls reborn and allows me to have souls move to a place in which they remain for the rest of eternity. However, it also means that souls cannot be destroyed in my world. No matter what I do in my universe, this rule cannot be broken. From this, I can then extract different cultures and work from there.

• The fae believe that the soul moves on to a new world.
• Humans believe that the soul can move on, but requires a specific ritual must be followed to prevent the soul from lingering in the current world.
• Aquians, my third race, believe that souls are reborn in the form of a new life.

It is important to begin starting your process by creating a list of hard rules that you cannot break in your universe. By creating this list, you have a handy reference anytime you need to add something new to the world around you. Never break these rules, even if you are sure that the reader will never realize they were broken.

Next Week
I will dive into the Fae Kingdom, my most developed culture, to reflect a little bit on bottom-up worldbuilding and explore how to blend real world cultures and folklore in a fictional setting.

How To Write An Unsolicited Query Letter

On Friday, I submitted my first novel to an agent. While this act does not make me an author, it does bring me a step closer to that goal. I've reached the the longest of the six requirements outlined in my Writing Is Hard entry. I must wait. I have no idea how long to expect for a response. If this were a normal case of an unsolicited query letter, I'd expect five to six months, possibly a year. In this case, the agent had indicated she was out of unsolicited queries and was requesting more. Hopefully, this puts me near the top of the pile and will give me only a couple of months of waiting.

Sending a query letter was a process. I've never done one before, and I can't be completely certain I did this correctly. What I can tell you is that the internet is full of conflicting advice. I used several different resources on the internet to piecemeal together my final query letter.

What is an Unsolicited Query Letter?

A query letter is a letter outlining your interest in publishing your novel and information about the novel you'd like to see published. Most query letters will be unsolicited; that is to say, query letters that were not directly requested by the agent or editor. In my case, I was made aware of an agent looking for submissions. This was still an unsolicited query letter. She asked for submissions, but did not ask ME for submissions.

Step 1. Outline Your Story

This step is listed first because it can be completed long before you should be hunting down an agent or writing a query letter. If you write your stories by outline, this step should have been completed long ago. If you are a pantster, I recommend doing this during a read through of your novel. Break the story down into chapters and outline the major events of each chapter. This will be a reference later. You can skip this step, but I recommend against it. I got this tip from Writing World.

Step 2. Determine the Agent/Editor's Submission Guidelines

Every editor and agent is going to be different. Be certain you check what they prefer before you send an unsolicited query letter. These guidelines are your first in. You are being told exactly what they want for information. Figure it out. Find what they want. Search around. Ask. Trust me when I say that this is for the better. I couldn't find two articles online that agreed on how you should do a query letter otherwise.

Step 3. Write the Components

The best I can figure out, there are three parts to most query letters. You have your initial query, the story synopsis, and your writing excerpt.

Step 3, Part 1: Hook, Mini-Synopsis, and Biography

My research in query letters led me to a site that defines them as being three paragraphs long and a single page. This page does contain information that should be included in any submission. You need to have information on your hook, you need to have a mini-synopsis, and you should include a biography. I recommend going with the advice I linked earlier in the paragraph. However, for the hook, you do have a bit more flexibility (or at least, so I've been told). The hook doesn't have to be a one-sentence summary of your story. It can be a statement as to why you think your story should be published. In the case of my query, I pointed out that fairy tales are in and that the story will do well in the current market.

Step 3, Part 2: The Synopsis

If the agent or editor you are submitting to wants a synopsis, now is the time to write it. Do not use the outline you wrote in Step 1. You will instead be using that outline to aid you in writing your synopsis. The agent I submitted to was looking for two pages double spaced. That left me little room to work with. I had to condense it and still allow the story carry through. My first draft of my synopsis was two and a half pages long. I rewrote the synopsis twice. In the end, I felt my synopsis hit the important elements.

One trick that I found useful during the two page synopsis was eliminating minor characters. It takes a sentence to explain how the minor character interacted with my main character and I spent another sentence explaining why it was connected to the plot. By eliminating as many minor characters as I could, I was able to put down a more concise synopsis.

Step 3, Part 3: The Excerpt

Find the excerpt you are using for you query. Copy and paste it into a new document. Have a friend or a loved one read it over. Read it over again. Read it out loud. Make sure it is free of any grammatical issues. Make sure it is captivating. Read it once more to be absolutely certain. The first two parts of your query are where you sell your skills at plotting and making a book that an editor/agent wants. This third part is where you have to sell your skills at writing.

Step 4: Put Together the Email

Never send attachments. If you refuse to not send an attachment, save your document in a Microsoft Word format unless they specify otherwise. Even if you send an attachment, be sure to include the text in the body of your email. I used hyphen breaks to make it easier to find each section of the email. Make sure you include a greeting in the front and to thank them at the end.

Step 5 – 999998: Build Up the Courage to Click Send

I'm not going to lie here. I had a very hard time clicking send. I closed my eyes, listened to the music that was playing. Ironically, it was my favorite song, Army of Love by Kerli. When I had convinced myself that this was the next logical step for me, I clicked send. My eyes were still closed at the time.

Step 999999: Click Send.

Click Send. Reward yourself with something. You've earned it.

Step +1

Tweet.

Whatever Wednesday: Meet the Cats

For this installment of Whatever Wednesday, I'm going to introduce you to the cats in my world.  These cats are one of the most wonderful things in my life.  So, without further ado, here are my cats:

Hercules

Nicknames: Herc, Herkemer, Herky

Type: American Short-Hair

Age: 11 years

About Herc:

I have always had cats around me in my life.  Despite this, there has rarely been a cat that I brought into my life.  Hercules was the cat that changed that for me.  Alice and I got him together and he's been with us for almost the length of our entire marriage. We got him from a childhood neighbor of Alice's when Herc was only a year old. He has been there through the best and the worst parts of our life. By my count, Hercules has been with us through seven moves from one home to another. He hates moves and can tell if we are preparing for another.

Herc is about as laid back as a cat can get. He is friendly, affectionate, and has never used his claws on anyone on purpose. The only time someone was scratched by Herc was when he fell and was trying to catch himself. Herc is also one of the smartest cats I know. Alice has trained even him to do High Fives. If you hold you hand up in front of him, he'll smack it with his paw. It is super cute.

No matter how many, or what cats we've had in our house, Herc couldn't care less.  He doesn't get into fights and is very content with doing his own thing.  Unfortunately, Herc's idea of doing his own thing does involve getting onto the counters and eating fish, chicken, or any other food that was left unattended.  Outside of stealing food from the counters, Herc is a well behaved cat.  Lately, he has been coming around and telling us to go to bed.  Or at least that's what we think he is saying.  Did I mention he is a very, vocal kitty?  Yeah, Herc loves to communicate.

Writing Influence:

Hercules is the primary inspiration behind my short story Timid the Cat Goes to War. I returned to our home in Asheville, NC one afternoon to discover the screen knocked out. Risu hadn't gotten very far and was quickly recovered. Herc was missing. For over twenty-four hours, Alice and I did everything we could to try and find Herc. We were worried we had lost him for ever. This area, after all, had a tendency to eat cats. He returned the following day on his own with no explanation as to where he had been or what he had been up to. I decided after this moment to write a story explaining what exactly catsdo when they go missing.

In my novel, The Rose and the Crown, Vincent wakes up after having fallen asleep in a chair to discover that a cat has curled up on his lap. This was also inspired by Hercules and his behavior of curling up next to people sleeping in chairs as if it were a part of his daily routine.

Risu

Nicknames: Brat, Princess Prissy Pants

Type: Siberian (Believed to be purebred)

Age: 5 years

About Risu:

We did not pick Risu. Risu picked us. I woke up from an overnight shift and heard piteous mewing from bushes outside our apartment. The source of this crying was Risu. When I lowered myself down to the ground, she ran towards me and hoped up into my arms. I couldn't turn her away. We put signs up and, much to my eternal joy, no one claimed the fluff ball of happiness. We named her Risu, the Japanese word for squirrel.

Risu has a kitty crush on me. She wants everything in her life to do with me. If I lie down on the floor, she'll snuggle up next to me. If I sit on the futon, she will curl up beside me or behind me. At night, she climbs up next to me and gets under my right elbow, making reading difficult. She also is kind enough to inform me when the clock reads 5:00 AM. Why? I have no idea.

Risu also is obsessed with the sink. She'll run ahead of us in the hall if we are heading towards the bathroom and leap into the sink. Half of the time, she'll drink from the sink if we give her a chance. The other half, she looks at us like we are crazy.  Do believe me?  I offer you video proof.

Writing Influence:

I have a WIP titled, “Finnish Cat Story”. This story is about a young man, Eric, whose cat is accidentally stowed onto the wrong plane and is flown to Finland instead of Boston. Eric uproots his entire life and leaves for the strange country he knows nothing about to recover his cat. There, he spends a six month quarantine with his pet, eating into his life savings for this one cat. The cat in this story is directly influenced by Risu. I adore this cat so much, words can not describe it. She is a complete brat. She does hundreds of things that drive me crazy. And yet, I love her. It is also clear that she loves me very much and just wants to be close to me. I felt this kind of love deserved recognition in writing.