Tales from the Circle

I usually think of planning as a matter of personal preference. And I often see others asking “what kind of planner are you?” Or “Are you a plotter or a pantser?” But I’ve recently started to realize that the amount and type of planning I do for a novel is not dependent on me, it’s more dependent on the story itself. Planning a fantasy novel is significantly different from planning a sci-fi novel, for example. That much is obvious to me. But even within these different genres each individual story needs a different type of planning. I’ve written a few novels now, only one of which has been published so far, but I’d like to look at the type of planning I did for each one. Children of the Dead City - Epic Fantasy ( Published ) This novel takes place in the fantasy world I’d been building for about 15 years before I wrote it. It’s actually the second version of the same story. I wrote an entire novel that focused on the character Hawk (but his name wasn’t Hawk back then) and...

I’ve been thinking a lot about justice and world-building lately. This is spurred on by a lot of different things going on at the same time. First of all, and most importantly, the events going on around the Black Lives Matter movement recently have put the idea of justice at the forefront in my thoughts. I’m also currently writing a sci-fi novel that focuses on justice (and injustice) in society and how that plays out when contact with aliens is made. And I’m also watching a sci fi tv show right now that has really interesting world-building and tried to talk about all kinds of “deep” themes, but it has an enraging lack of justice. So anyway, I’ve been thinking about justice in world-building. I’m not necessarily talking about a full-blown legal system and how it works in detail, I don’t necessarily think that fantasy worlds need to go into too much detail in that area. What I am talking about is a general idea of justice permeating the world. - What is considered just in th...