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Tuesday, December 08, 2009

World Building Part Deux

I'd been focusing my world building efforts on the heroines and their people, but I realized this morning that I also needed to focus on the bad guys. They're part of a different society and I knew nothing about them beyond some nebulous idea of evil. (In our opinion, of course. The bad guys have a completely different perspective on their actions.)

One of the things that surprised me a little bit was how learning about my villains helped me learn about the good guys. But maybe it shouldn't have because my heroines' jobs exist in large part because of a need to battle these beings.

The other thing that I'm finding interesting about the world building is that I feel like I'm missing something. I can't figure out what it is and I can't think of anything I'm at least not mulling over, but it just feels like there should be more parameters I look at. But then maybe I'm looking at it from a futuristic world building perspective and thinking that this is less intensive than that. I don't know, but it's bothering me because I hear about "elaborate" world building and I don't feel as if I've done that, and yet, I cant see anything that's missing.

I'm going to continue letting this play in the back of my mind, but my focus is shifting to my characters and the stories now. I usually get the handle on my h/h first and I don't have that yet--which might be part of why I feel unanchored. I also need to continue doing research. When I first had this idea come to me, I picked up some books that I thought would help and now I need to read them.

Character names are important and luckily my heroes and heroines almost always tell me who they are and I just move forward. My heroines did that and the first hero shared his name. The other two weren't nearly as forthcoming, but I did some looking and came up with a couple that felt as if they might work. Hero number 2 did, indeed, fit his name. Hero number 3, well, I have his name wrong. He made that clear over this past week. That means more time trying to pin him down and get it right.

I also need to find pictures of hero 2 and hero 3. Character pictures are big part of pre-book for me. And I guess that's where I am. Pre-book. It seems weird since I haven't worked on so many multiple proposals one after the other in a few years and I was just in pre-book.