This is a very interesting interview with my friend, Teagan. It explores, in some depth, the amount of research and hard work that goes into her world-building before she even begins to add the characters and storyline.
I am intrigued by the mystery that she maintains behind White Wolf.
Have a read. I’m sure that you’ll enjoy it.
Teagan, blogger and author of the Delta Pearl a serialized steam-punk novel, is publishing a fantasy novel Dead of Winter on Saturday, January 2. This is an interview about her new book and her writing.
1) When and why did you make the switch from this type of fantasy to the lighter fantasy of the Delta Pearl?
I was an avid reader of fantasy, particular “high fantasy,” so that was the genre I chose when I first took writing seriously. I’m actually surprised that I ever wrote anything else.
When I made public, my “three things method of storytelling,” I let those reader things completely drive every aspect of that story. It turned out to be a 1920s mystery. My stories spontaneously evolved into the steampunk tales you’ve seen on my blog in recent years. (Universal link to The Three Things Serial Storyrelinks.me/B01MRRC0B2 )
2) The harsh religious elders…
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Write to Inspire 
Thanks for your re-blog. I share your fascination in how much work that Teagan puts into her research and world building. I would like to live in some of those worlds.
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Lance, you’re a gem. Thanks so much for this reblog.
Yes, the wolf is one of three different (what I call “tier 2” or even “tier 3” characters) characters whose identity &/or nature remain a mystery until far into this multi volume series. He was perhaps the most interesting, as a writer, to develop.
You’re right. I did volumes of research, from topography of the UK and European locations that inspired my fictional countries, to the meanings behind character names. There are well over 200 character and place names in the overall manuscript.
Some leftover research (legends that I didn’t use for this story) ended up providing “loose inspiration” for my Atonement, Tennessee urban fantasy stories. If you couldn’t tell by now, I’m a huge research geek!
Thank you again. Happy New Year and hugs on the wing!
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I know a lot about the topography of UK and the rest of Europe and East Africa. I was a military surveyor. I LOVE maps and I have made quite a few. I’d love to meet you face to face. I think that we could chat for hours and wonder where the time had gone.
I mentioned Swanwick in another response. I am on the Committee and the current webmaster. Check it out. I’m trying to persuade Eloise to come too. It would be easier for her to get there than for you, but she has four kids, four cats, a dog and a husband! And she always has a thousand and one writing assignments to work on.
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I’ll look for the Swanwick comment.
From what I gather here, it’s something to attend… and unfortunately the most inconvenient manifestation of my PTSD is agoraphobia… Some days I can’t even go to the mailbox at the end of my (very short) driveway.
Oh! Well, I’m definitely no expert on the locations, but I wanted my descriptions to evoke places — or at least how they would have been 200-300 years ago. It was funny — looking at archaic names for places, sometimes I tried to make up my own variation, or make a purely fictitious name — only to find that it was a real place.
As I told Pat, I’d love to have a map for this story. For the sake of storytelling, some borders are different, and I even created a land bridge between two places. I don’t know if I still have the sketches — I couldn’t take much with me when I relocated. Anyhow, I admire the ability to create maps.
Cheers!
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As I walk around the British countryside, I look at the landscape and often imagine the fear of the people of centuries past as they catch first sights and sounds of the laird’s men thundering into sight, over a ridge or out of the woods, as they come to collect the unfair taxes or payment in kind….
And I have to tell you that I illustrated a ‘We Won a War’ by General John Akehurst with sketch maps and line drawings. He was happy with the results and so was I.
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I’m sure he was very pleased. 🙂
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