Witches' Brew Completed! Do I Smell a Contest?

Hello Beardies,

A few posts ago, I announced that I was cooking up something good for all of you.  After days of planning and getting all my ingredients together, the Witches' Brew is complete.

If you recall my post on May 20th, I announced the release of Michael Scott's The Enchantress, which hit store shelves on May 22nd.  Before closing the post, I--half-jokingly, might I add--announced the following to all of you:

"With any luck, perhaps The Bearded Scribe will someday feature an interview with Michael Scott. If you have specific questions you'd like to see asked, please leave them in the Comment section below."

I was happily surprised the next day when I received a Direct Message on Twitter from Michael saying that he would love to do an interview.  Of course, I slung my cauldron on the fire and begin brewing immediately.

After a few messages back and forth and an email to a publicist at Random House, I finalized the details of my brew...

As a preliminary post to Michael's featured "Author Spotlight" and Interview, I decided to launch a contest.  The prize:  An Autographed copy of The Enchantress.  The winner:  selected at random from the qualifying candidates.

How to Qualify

1. In order to be considered for the prize, the contestant MUST be a registered member of The Bearded Scribe blog.  You can sign-up easily by clicking the "Join this site" link on the left sidebar.  You are then qualified.  Doing the following steps will not be considered an entry until this first step is completed.

Additional Entries

2. Once you are a member of The Bearded Scribe on Blogger/Google Connect (or if you are already), please click the links to the left to Follow The Bearded Scribe on Facebook & Twitter (or simply click the embedded links).  By following you will receive another entry (each) in the contest, but you must show that you are following because of the contest.  Otherwise, I will not be able to track the traffic.

To verify that you are Following due to the contest (or if you already Follow on Twitter and wish to enter), please reply to The Bearded Scribe with the following: "@beardedscribe Please enter me in the #beardedscribecontest-enchantress."  No exceptions will be made to be considered for an entry.

To verify that you are Following due to the contest (or if you already Follow on Facebook), please leave the following comment under the "Witches' Brew Completed" post on the page: "Please enter me in The Bearded Scribe contest to win a copy of The Enchantress."  No exceptions will be made to be considered for an entry.

3. The third and final way to gain another entry into the contest is to leave a comment on this post (on the blog) with a question that you would like to see asked during my interview with Michael Scott. 

(Note: repeated questions will not be considered qualifications for an entry, so please read through the other questions before submitting your own.)

It does not matter if the usernames for each of the sites match, as each entry will be considered regardless of username, providing, of course, that you are a registered member of the blog.

The contest ends at midnight on June 5th (UPDATE!!! the contest ends at midnight on June 10th), at which point I will place all entries in a randomizer software which will choose the Winner.  Remember, the more entries you have, the greater your chances are of winning.

I am excited to see how many people begin following The Bearded Scribe, and I am very excited to read all of your questions.

Good Luck to All & Happy Scribing!

World Building Series: The Rules of Majick

Hello Again Everyone,

Welcome to the third installment of my World Building Series of posts -- The Rules of Majick.

There have been many fantasy books out there that include their own majickal system--rules, principles, limitations, et cetera--that govern the usage of majick and its consequences... and each with unique answers to specific questions their authors were forced to ask in order to set the basic building blocks for the systems.

Some books that come to mind, just to name a few, are J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (of course), Larry Niven's Warlock series, and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series.  In the first and third series, the majick is driven by language: Harry Potter by a Latinesque (if only that were a real word) language--specific words spoken to evoke specific purpose (Rowling also requires the use of a wand or staff in order to produce the spells); and in Earthsea, Le Guin uses the concept of an original, primordial language by which the creators of the world originally named things. People who learn these names are able to control the things named, an ability shared by both the wizards who study the language, and the dragons whose native tongue it is.  And in the second series mentioned above, the majick is derived from mana--an exhaustible resource in the environment surrounding the caster which can be depleted.

In creating the majickal system for my first series, The Chronicles of Aesiranyn, I asked myself question after question in order to narrow down how my characters would use and manipulate majick and also what the results and consequences of that usage would be.  Like Rowling and Le Guin, I decided to use language (perhaps for the mere fact that I am a self-confessed linguaphile).  I also, like Rowling, decided to require a wand or staff in order to produce a spell (more on that later), and like in Earthsea, the spells are derived from an Ancient (even protected) language that must be learned in order to produce the proper spells.  There are limitations (as there should be), though if the character is a member of the Imperial family, then their limitations are less--and even more so if they are the ruler because their majick is derived from the throne upon which they [figuratively] sit.

My majick system is simple, yet it is complex in all of its different parts. It is elemental majick, of sorts, and it is also broken down into general color categories and then more specific types within the category.  As I mentioned before, the majick in Aesiranyn requires a wand or staff, which is crafted by a wandmaker.  The intended recipient of the wand/staff must make a blood sacrifice, and then the majick within his/her blood chooses elements, which also hold their own majickal properties.  Aside from wands being required, there are other specific spells as well that require other majickal artifacts in order for them to work.  I've probably given away too much... but hopefully it was a teaser for the future readers of the books!   :)

The greatest advantage a writer can have is to know their own world inside and out (without overbuilding, of course), and in order to do that, they must constantly ask questions before beginning to write their stories--and just as importantly, while they are writing it!

Below is a link to the list of questions I asked myself (a page that will remain a permanent resource on this blog), which I am offering to all of you in your own quests for the ever-illusive realm of majick.

As always... any Comments, Feedback, and Questions are Welcomed, Needed, and Encouraged!

Good Luck in this and all of your quests,

World Building Series: Introduction and Fundamentals

Greetings Readers!

While writing on my current project, Valkyrie, the other day, an idea for a post started to formulate in my mind.

World Building.  

Fantasy and speculative fiction or not, every book (and movie/screenplay) has it.  Even non-fiction has a bit of world building involved.  An author must know the limits and facts about the world in which he/she is writing before he/she can construct a believable, fully-formed story.  If an author's facts have inconsistencies or flaws, he/she can discredit his/her knowledge of the craft, and by doing so, quickly lose readership.  Simply put: if you don't know the world in which your story takes place, how are you supposed to describe it to your readers in its fullest capacity?

I have been pondering at how to go about writing on such an extensive topic--or even how to begin doing so, for that matter.  After much deliberation, I decided that breaking it down into several posts would be the most practical option, not only for my personal choice to put constraints on post lengths, but also to get more detailed and concise, content-related posts for you, my readers.

This first post will focus on the initial steps to world building, intertwined with my own anecdotes of trial & error with my own writing, and will also introduce the next post in this specific series.

Before I ever knew what world building was, I was unknowingly creating my own worlds.  After reading books like The Egypt Game, The Bridge to Terabithia, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, I became obsessed with creating worlds of my very own.  I sketched maps galore, created languages (minor undertakings back then), secret codices with which I could write notes to my friends, and planned out entire cities in which to create my stories.

Of course, those worlds failed me; more correctly, I failed them because I didn't know enough about my creations.  Sometimes I would sketch pages and pages of maps with great detail, but I neglected to populate it with creatures and characters that were believable for the setting.  Sometimes, vice versa.  Other times, I forgot to ask myself important questions whose answers would have provided me with a connection between the different aspects of my worlds.  I constantly wrote myself into corners--or worse, circles.  My writing was all jumbled--mismatched additions, not all too dissimilar from the Winchester House--without any coherence whatsoever.  I neglected to make the full blueprint before building the house; but fortunately, with training and practice, I realized the errors and remedied them.

The Winchester House - Santa Clara Valley, California

Most ideas for stories usually develop long before a writer even thinks about world building. Unfortunately, I feel that this leads to weaker stories in the end.  I am saying this from experience because the first few starts at my now-finished manuscript were torturous.  My characters and my world felt disconnected and, to be honest, a bit contrived. In my opinion, it is much easier to build believable characters inside of a defined world than to a build a foreign world around a cluster of characters.

Asking yourself fundamental questions will help guide you in creating the blueprint; and creating a basic blueprint for your world before you go any further will save you a lot of headache.

The first set of questions we will discuss have to do with Earth settings and their variations/possibilities:

1. If this story takes place on Earth, does it occur in the Past?
2. Present?
3. Future?
4. Some alternate version/history of Earth? [for instance, an Earth that has been decimated by a nuclear war or asteroid? A post WWII Earth in which Hitler had won?]

Each answer should and will produce more questions for you to consider, and each answer will also narrow down the genre/category of your manuscript.  Let's take our two examples from above, starting first with a post-asteroid collision.

5. When, where, and how did the collision happen?
6. How did it change the landscape/structure/rotation/orbit/population/technology of the Earth?
7. Were there any alien life forms or microbes on the asteroid?  Or maybe some advanced technology?
8. If yes, how did that change the landscape, environment, or population?  Did it change the genetic makeup of humans/animals/plants? On the negative side, did it bring disease or famine?  On the positive side, did the asteroid's introduction create a superior human/animal/plant?

As you can see, each answer spawns a whole set of additional questions, which then defines the conflicts and plots.  Placing characters within this constructed world is now a breeze.

The questions for our second example might look a little like this...

5. How had Hitler and the Axis forces defeated the Allied?
6. Did Hitler continue his mass genocide?  And if so, how has this affected the population of Earth? Did Hitler succeed in creating an Aryan race? Does everyone speak German?
7. How long after the defeat does the story take place?  Within Hitler's lifetime? Twenty years later?
8. Are there secret Allied forces still hiding out from the Nazi Regime? Are they physically hiding out (in, say, underground caves) or pretending to blend in with society while maintaining their Allied lifestyles in secret?  Are there plans to overthrow the government?

Literally dozens of scenarios with an exponential amount of questions can arise from the first 4 questions above, and that is only dealing with Earth or Alternate Earth settings and plots.  The second part of this post will deal with all other settings.

1.  If the story does not take place on Earth [or any variation], is the setting a known one (i.e., Mars, the Moon, or the Andromeda Galaxy) or some distant or unknown planet/moon/galaxy?  Is it even part of our known universe?
2.  If unknown setting, how was the setting formed?  Evolutionary (like the Big Bang Theory)?  Or Mythologically (created by omnipotent beings)?  Or a combination of the two?
3. How does the setting differ from Earth?  How is it similar?  Landscape/flora/fauna differences and similarities? Does it still have earthly forces (like gravity)?  Does it have unearthly forces, i.e., majick (more on this later)?
4. Is it populated by more than one race/species?  Are they humanoid?  Are all of them intelligent?
5. Are there areas with concentrations of certain races, or do all the races live together?
5. If there is majick, where is it derived from (sun, moon, water, earth, air, blood, artifacts, etc)?  Are all the races majickal?  Only a few?  One?
6. Are the majickal races exalted or suppressed?  Is a majickal race the ruling race?  Does it view the other races as unequal because of its lack of majick?  Or vice versa?

The questions are endless, and so are the answers.  And each answer lends itself to a different aspect of your world--from character races, history, politics (power struggles, classes), mythology (creation myths, deity current involvement and interaction), languages (spoken, written, ancient), majick (source, limitations, how it's produced and used), et cetera.

The list is infinite, and I know I barely touched the surface when it comes to introducing World Building, which kind of brings me to introducing the topic of the next series in this post:  Overdoing it!

I welcome any questions or comments and would be happy to respond to them.

Stay Tuned for the next post in this series,

P.S. If you are here visiting the page and reading this post and are not yet a member, please click the links to the left to sign-up. It's quick and simple.