World Building
Guest Post by Samantha Warren
KindleObsessed: A big part of fantasy or paranormal fiction is the detail in world building. Can you tell me a little about how you created the world inside “The Iron Locket?”
World building is a very tricky topic for me. Unlike a lot of authors, I’m a pantser to the core, so while I usually create a very skeletal outline, most of my writing takes place on the fly, by the seat of my pants. Plotters will sit down beforehand and create their worlds, figuring out the whole thing before they write a single word on the novel itself. My worlds develop organically, growing around the characters and action as needed.
While The Iron Locket spans two worlds, they are actually very similar. Aiofe’s world, modern-day America, is not the world we typically thing about. Faery hunters live removed from the society they protect, typically on the outside of a larger city, deep in the woods where doors to the land of Faery materialize. Much of Aiofe’s part of the book takes place in those woods, chasing faeries who are trying to hurt those she loves, and in the cabin she and her grandparents live in.
The rest of The Iron Locket delves into the world of Faery, a land that elves, pixies, and all sorts of unsavory characters call home. Unlike most Faery tales which only have two faery queens (Titania and Mab), my land of Faery has four corners, therefore it needs four queens. So I changed the traditional lands of Summer and Winter into South and North and added an East, ruled by Oonagh, and West, ruled by Isobel. And since the queens don’t like to get along, they needed a place where all four could come together under a sort of treaty. Thus formed the little knoll on which Arthur and his knights were buried, deep in the land of Faery, the only place where all four kingdoms touched.
The castle where the knights stay morphed quite a bit during my writing. It started out very small, with only a few bedrooms. But as the rules developed for the castle, so did the land. In order to be fully self-sustaining, it needed to be much bigger. I eventually added gardens, a forest, and lots of land.
Leanansidhe’s castle is a whole other beast. Only parts of it have been seen at the point in The Risen King series, namely the dungeons and her office. I look forward to writing the next book in The Risen King series and increasing the world of Faery and creating new obstacles for my heroes to face.
She was raised to hunt faeries. He was raised from the dead.
Aiofe Callaghan comes from a long line of faery hunters. Hired by one of the faery queens, they protect the human world from chaos and destruction. But when Aiofe stumbles through an open door into the land of Faery, she discovers the job isn’t as simple as it seems, and neither is she.
Arthur Pendragon spent centuries in blissful nothingness, until the day the four queens banded together to raise him from the dead. Along with his twelve most talented knights, he leads the warring armies of Faery against the greatest enemy they have ever known: one of their own.
Can they overcome their differences to confront the greatest challenges either of them have ever faced?
Samantha Warren is a fantasy and science fiction author who spends her days immersed in dragons, spaceships, and vampires. With her pet dragon, Anethesis, she ventured to the ends of the universe, but the cost of space travel cut into her sock fetish fund, so she sold her ship and returned home. When she isn’t writing, she’s milking cows or trying to feed them Pop-Tarts. She spends a lot of time in her weed patch (aka: garden), watching any show featuring Gordon Ramsay, or posting random things on her blog Stalk Samantha: Website / Blog / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads Purchase The Iron Locket: Amazon / B&N / Smashwords The Giveaway!!
Thank you for hosting me on your blog, Misty! 🙂
You are welcome! Wishing you success with your book! 🙂