{"id":1279,"date":"2017-12-11T01:00:25","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T01:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/?p=1279"},"modified":"2017-12-10T13:45:22","modified_gmt":"2017-12-10T13:45:22","slug":"guest-post-world-building-with-jeffe-kennedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/?p=1279","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: World Building with Jeffe Kennedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s always a pleasure to \u201cvisit\u201d Brenda here. If only we lived closer in real life!<\/span><\/p>\n

But, since we can\u2019t meet for coffee to chat, she\u2019s asked me to talk a bit about how I do my world building. I can tell, because she referenced how I am the queen of spread sheets, that she\u2019s imagining elaborate world building spreadsheets tucked away on my computer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Really, it\u2019s not so.<\/span><\/p>\n

I mean, I *am* the queen of spreadsheets, so what I do keep track of is partly on spreadsheets, yes. The scary truth, however, is that I don\u2019t do much detailed tracking of my worlds at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of it is in my head.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a few reasons for this. The first and most relevant is that I believe time spent on world building tracking is time better spent writing. I know some writers, especially fantasy writers for some reason, spend HUGE amounts of time on building their worlds. They do tons of research and write thousands\u2014sometimes hundreds of thousands\u2014of words in world bibles. It\u2019s fun for them, so great! But I know people who\u2019ve spent YEARS working on their worlds. And don\u2019t yet have a novel they\u2019re happy with, if a completed one at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, I begrudge that time, and I spend as little of it as possible on recording world-building details. That said, I know I\u2019m lucky because I am able to keep a lot of it in my head. I\u2019ve always had a vivid imagination, and an active daydreaming life, so my worlds are very real places to me, ones that I can mentally enter and wander around in.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few things that I do when I need an answer to a world question.<\/span><\/p>\n

Write <\/u><\/span><\/p>\n

I write for discovery, which means that by the act of writing, I can enter the world and look around. If I need to know something I write about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Daydream<\/u><\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a huge fan of \u201cwhen you\u2019re not writing you\u2019re still writing.\u201d I\u2019m going to caveat that as when I\u2019m not doing something like research, which occupies brain space. I mean while washing dishes, or cleaning house, or driving, or gardening, or even sleeping. I daydream about my worlds and that fills in fun details.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ask My Assistant<\/u><\/span><\/p>\n

This is my big cheat. I don\u2019t want to spend my time recording details, but I\u2019m perfectly happy to pay my assistant to do it! She keeps track of stuff. And if she doesn\u2019t have it written down, she goes and looks it up in the books and comes back with an answer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ask My Readers<\/u><\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes I throw a question out to my readers via the private Facebook group we have (https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/JeffesCloset\/), or sometimes on my public pages. I\u2019ll do this when I\u2019m looking for a nuance that\u2019s not easy to look up, like if I ever gave the impression one character was another\u2019s aunt or their cousin. I also ask my readers to name stuff if ideas aren\u2019t coming to me. Their suggestions are always a kick.<\/span><\/p>\n

Record Timelines<\/u><\/span><\/p>\n

The one thing I *do* resort to spreadsheets for is calculating ages and timelines. Especially with The Twelve Kingdoms and The Uncharted realms books, I\u2019m looking at about three generations now, and characters acting simultaneously in different parts of the world. I have to extract from what I\u2019ve written and do the math from there. This feels very much like the conversations I have with my mother when we try to remember where we spent a family birthday celebration in 1996, and who was there. Only I can\u2019t go back to the novels to piece that together!<\/span><\/p>\n

But that last detail is revealing in that my imaginary worlds are as vivid\u2014sometimes more so\u2014than my memories of real life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes I think they\u2019re very much the same.<\/span><\/p>\n

About Jeffe KennedyJ<\/strong><\/p>\n

effe Kennedy is an award-winning author whose works include novels, non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. She has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award.\u00a0Her award-winning fantasy romance trilogy The Twelve Kingdoms<\/em><\/a> hit the shelves starting in May 2014. Book 1, The Mark of the Tala<\/em><\/a>, received a starred Library Journal review and was nominated for the RT Book of the Year<\/a> while the sequel, The Tears of the Rose<\/em><\/a> received a Top Pick Gold and was nominated for the RT Reviewers\u2019 Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2014<\/a>. The third book, The Talon of the Hawk<\/em><\/a>, won the RT Reviewers\u2019 Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2015<\/a>. Two more books followed in this world, beginning the spin-off series The Uncharted Realms<\/em><\/a>. Book one in that series, The Pages of the Mind<\/em><\/a>, has also been nominated for the RT Reviewer\u2019s Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2016 and won RWA\u2019s 2017 RITA\u00ae Award. The second book, The Edge of the Blade<\/em><\/a>, released December 27, 2016, and is a PRISM finalist, along with The Pages of the Mind<\/em>. The next in the series, The Shift of the Tide<\/em><\/a>, will be out in August, 2017. A high fantasy trilogy taking place in The Twelve Kingdoms<\/em> world is forthcoming from Rebel Base books in 2018.<\/p>\n

She also introduced a new fantasy romance series, Sorcerous Moons<\/em><\/a>, which includes Lonen\u2019s War<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Oria\u2019s Gambit<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>The Tides of B\u00e0ra<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>and The Forests of Dru<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> She\u2019s begun releasing a new contemporary erotic romance series, Missed Connections<\/em>, which started with Last Dance<\/em><\/a> and continues in With a Prince<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2019, St. Martins Press will release the first book, The Orchid Throne<\/em>, in a new fantasy romance series, The Forgotten Empires<\/em>.\u00a0Her other works include a number of fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of Thorns<\/em><\/a>; the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of Passion<\/em><\/a>; an erotic contemporary serial novel, Master of the Opera<\/em><\/a>; and the erotic romance trilogy, Falling Under<\/em><\/a>, which includes Going Under<\/em><\/a>, Under His Touch<\/em><\/a> and Under Contract<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine.<\/p>\n

Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com<\/a>, every Sunday at the popular SFF Seven blog<\/a>, on Facebook<\/a>, on Goodreads<\/a> and pretty much constantly on Twitter @jeffekennedy<\/a>. She is represented by Sarah Younger of Nancy Yost Literary Agency<\/a>.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/jeffekennedy.com<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Author.Jeffe.Kennedy<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/jeffekennedy<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/1014374.Jeffe_Kennedy<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Save<\/span>Save<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s always a pleasure to \u201cvisit\u201d Brenda here. If only we lived closer in real life! But, since we can\u2019t meet for coffee to chat, she\u2019s asked me to talk a bit about how I do my world building. I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319,315,9],"tags":[54,322,320,273,49,321],"class_list":["post-1279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasy-romance","category-guest-post","category-writing-tips","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-fantasy-romance","tag-guest-post","tag-interview-with-jeffe-kennedy","tag-tips-for-writing","tag-world-building"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1279"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1283,"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions\/1283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.writingwhiledistracted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}