Meredith Mansfield, Author

Since I’m still blogging about world-building, I put up a part of the world-building materials for my first two novels, THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and THE IGNORED PROPHECY (and my latest short-story “Becoming Lioness”).  Look under Worlds for a glimpse of the Dardani.

A post on the Hatrack Writers’ Forum recently posed the question of where world-building ideas come from.  The short answer is: Everywhere.  Everything is potentially grist for that mill.

I have read fairly widely and taken a few courses in subjects that interest me, even though they had no particular relation to my “real life”.  And I find that a lot of that material, sometimes digested over many years and recombined in (hopefully) interesting ways, make it into my world building.

The world of THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and THE IGNORED PROPHECY could possibly be traced back to my cultural anthropology class as well as various books and articles on the subject that I’ve read since.  The subtext of the stories is very much driven by the interaction and occasional conflict between the various cultures who see the world differently and value very different things.

As an urban fantasy, most of BLOOD WILL TELL occurs right here.  Still there’s world-building involved in the non-human characters of the story, the rules of magic, and the interaction between the magical world, Chimeria, and this one.

The inspiration for the world of DREAMER’S ROSE came from a trip many years ago to Princess Louisa Inlet in British Columbia, Canada, combined with many trips  to the coast redwoods here in California.  I was foundering on what made that world unique until my memory dredged up that trip.  (That’s where the caption picture for this blog was taken.)

I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the probably many things SEVEN STARS needs is more attention to the world-building.  I think part of it may just end up looking a lot like one particular area in the Sierra Nevada that I used to visit fairly often.  I need more definition of the different groups that are interacting in this story, too.  Perhaps not quite so much as for THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and THE IGNORED PROPHECY; these cultures won’t be as different from each other as those.  But more than I have now.

Ideas for world building can come from anywhere.