That seems a simple question, but it's not simple to answer when one has been writing a long, interconnected story all one's life. I started writing in this world as a child, so the early stories are kids' adventure stories from a kid's POV. But when I reached my teens, I began playing around with why this or that happened, or how things got the way they were, reaching for connections beyond the immediate, including back in history....
"Character List for Inda"
Characters and Ships in THE FOX"
Characters list for THE KING'S SHIELD
This is how I 'hear' the names pronounced
Glossary for the worldbuilding nerd, or detail about the world, its history, its paradigm.
A detailed map of the portions of the world in Inda's story. (PDF version here, a very LARGE file).
The map of Marloven Hesea made it into BAMMER OF THE DAMNED but not the map of COLEND
Some stuff about the ships at this time in the southern hemisphere...
A counterblast to those fantasy-haters who use A Tough Guide as their stick to lambast
A few years back, in the Critters Writing Workshop Discussion newsgroup on SFF.NET, we were talking about fantasy, and what sells, and why, and what we want to write. Some fantasy writers are defensive after the excellent and very funny skewering Diana Wynne Jones gave the unthought cliches of the fantasy genre in her A TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASY. Heck, I have my own, much older, satire in my Henchminions story...
I discovered Georgette Heyer in high school, after reading an entire issue of the fanzine Niekas devoted to it, somewhere around 1967-8. At that time I hadn’t yet read Jane Austen, though I’d loved historical novels ever since I checked out Mara, Daughter of the Nile in grade school. My favorite by ninth grade was Annemarie Selinko’s Desiree, based on real people during the Napoleonic period (though I was to discover it was every bit as romanticized as most of the memoirs penned by the...
(spoilers ahoy)
Mentions of Patrick O’Brian’s historical novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin entered my awareness through an astonishing variety of venues—from the online Rec Arts Science Fiction newsgroup to my mother-in-law’s dining table.
I read the beginning of Reverse of the Medal in a bookstore once, but there was too much a feeling of in medias res to engage me. In subsequent discussions readers repeatedly insisted that one must begin with the first volume, Master and Commander....