Photo by Ylanite Koppens at Pexels.

Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

Today it is time to start the first week on a new topic, moving back to digging into our own heads, as opposed to discussing outside influences. This may be a shorter blog posting, since it is more of an introduction. Clevenger and I wanted to get into where this whole book project started. I was working after hours security around 2018, after my life completely crashed around me the year before. I was in a horrible headspace and Clevenger knew much of what I was feeling. We spent many evenings chatting about ways to boost my mentality and give myself other things to dwell upon. He and I were both involved in an online roleplaying game together with some friends, but we were really looking for something we could do together, something that would give us an excuse to talk more often, with a pre-established topic.

We settled on the idea of writing an epic fantasy novel together. The idea was that I had some experience writing stories of my own, and he loved plotting and organizing. I don’t know if he will admit it, but I kind of think Clevenger’s idea might have been that him being involved in my writing would be to force me to have structure and deadlines to my process, therefore forcing me to concentrate more on the project. We will have to ask him about that. Whether he intended it or not it worked, doing a lot to help me break out of my funk and begin taking better care of my mental health.

As to the actual writing project, Clevenger and I have our own arenas of world building we prefer to specialize in. He really enjoys the concepts and rules to a good magic system and has designed several. Me, I’ll go for a cool look for a few spells, and I am good to go. My world building preference is for the governments, guilds, businesses and organizations that make a world operate. I love designing the races, the cultures, and especially the maps. You should expect city, nation, and region maps in all of our books.

George Lucas may not be able to write dialogue or really even direct, but he is my idol when it comes to creating a world, a society, a setting, a place where you care what happens. I don’t expect to have the skill to recreate Star Wars, but it is a goal to aspire to. To date I’ve created the vague outlines of a few worlds needed to write some short stories and built some serious world building for various roleplaying games. One of the regions I have put the most work into is one I intend to use as the setting for a future story.

Next, we will hear Clevenger’s take on how the whole process got started, and then next week we can delve into the core ideas that we each brought to the table. It should be an interesting discussion. Until then…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham