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Now on to your regularly scheduled blog post about world building, short stories, etc. :-)
It's funny how things go sometimes. When I was asked to write a story for The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2 (Blood Feud), the deadline was right on top of my deadline for Edge of Dawn. Time would definitely be an issue and so I thought I'd just use standard vampire lore for the world building and leave it at that.
But that's not how it worked out.
While I was writing on EOD, my brain buckled down, and the next thing I knew, I had a fully-formed world with a history and rules and all the rest of it. I knew there'd been a war between the vampires and demons that had ended centuries ago, but that prejudice and hatred remained between them. I knew the vampires had seven clan lords, but that one had been killed during the demon wars. And I knew I wanted to do more stories set in this world because it had become fascinating to me.
Blood Feud kind of had a star-crossed lovers thing going on. Seere, the hero, was a demon prince and Isobel, the heroine, was a vampire enforcer. They're reunited when a demon starts killing vampires and they're assigned by their peoples to find the murderer before he reignites the war between the two groups.
With Demon Kissed I mention vampires, but they're not a factor in the story. This, as you might have guessed from the title, is focused on the demon part of the world.
It was an interesting writing experience because I had to write it so that it completely stood alone and the reader had no need to have read Blood Feud, but at the same time, if someone had read the first short story, I wanted them to know it was the same world. So there's one reference to Seere and Isobel in the story. Their names are never used and it's just a one sentence mention, but it's there.
I have a few more ideas for this world. The first of those will involve the vampires without any demons. The other ideas encompass both peoples and get into more vampire hierarchy/world building than I've revealed so far. That's the one thing that's so interesting to me. To create a truly awesome and believable world, a writer has to have a huge amount of detail behind it, but at the same time, the reader shouldn't be bored by it or be subjected to an info dump as they're schooled on the world. That means I have all these excited details, but because 1. the reader doesn't need to know it and/or 2. the characters in the story have no interest in it, they remain unsaid in the stories.
You see (and this is a totally different post), if the point of view (POV) characters don't care about something, you can't make them for convenience sake. It's like when writers have the heroine describe the home she's lived in (in her POV!). Right. How many times have you walked into your home and thought to yourself about how the impressionist paintings added just the right note to the sunny decor. Please. It doesn't happen. It's more like when you go visit your parents and they still have the avocado carpeting down you don't even see it because it's been there too long.
Um, better stop here or I will end up going on about POV and staying true to characters and I've already written enough.
It's funny how things go sometimes. When I was asked to write a story for The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2 (Blood Feud), the deadline was right on top of my deadline for Edge of Dawn. Time would definitely be an issue and so I thought I'd just use standard vampire lore for the world building and leave it at that.
But that's not how it worked out.
While I was writing on EOD, my brain buckled down, and the next thing I knew, I had a fully-formed world with a history and rules and all the rest of it. I knew there'd been a war between the vampires and demons that had ended centuries ago, but that prejudice and hatred remained between them. I knew the vampires had seven clan lords, but that one had been killed during the demon wars. And I knew I wanted to do more stories set in this world because it had become fascinating to me.
Blood Feud kind of had a star-crossed lovers thing going on. Seere, the hero, was a demon prince and Isobel, the heroine, was a vampire enforcer. They're reunited when a demon starts killing vampires and they're assigned by their peoples to find the murderer before he reignites the war between the two groups.
With Demon Kissed I mention vampires, but they're not a factor in the story. This, as you might have guessed from the title, is focused on the demon part of the world.
It was an interesting writing experience because I had to write it so that it completely stood alone and the reader had no need to have read Blood Feud, but at the same time, if someone had read the first short story, I wanted them to know it was the same world. So there's one reference to Seere and Isobel in the story. Their names are never used and it's just a one sentence mention, but it's there.
I have a few more ideas for this world. The first of those will involve the vampires without any demons. The other ideas encompass both peoples and get into more vampire hierarchy/world building than I've revealed so far. That's the one thing that's so interesting to me. To create a truly awesome and believable world, a writer has to have a huge amount of detail behind it, but at the same time, the reader shouldn't be bored by it or be subjected to an info dump as they're schooled on the world. That means I have all these excited details, but because 1. the reader doesn't need to know it and/or 2. the characters in the story have no interest in it, they remain unsaid in the stories.
You see (and this is a totally different post), if the point of view (POV) characters don't care about something, you can't make them for convenience sake. It's like when writers have the heroine describe the home she's lived in (in her POV!). Right. How many times have you walked into your home and thought to yourself about how the impressionist paintings added just the right note to the sunny decor. Please. It doesn't happen. It's more like when you go visit your parents and they still have the avocado carpeting down you don't even see it because it's been there too long.
Um, better stop here or I will end up going on about POV and staying true to characters and I've already written enough.
