Traveller's Tales

Okay, so it’s not exactly writing for the novel, per se, but it is important writing work that I’ve been putting off, and it’s all part of my master plan to get myself properly back into the swing of things. The Codex Vocrotha, you may or may not know, is my work-in-progress repository for backstory, historical information and bizarre trivia relating to my stories. Worldbuilding for me isn’t just helpful, it’s as utterly necessary as the stories I write, the characters who take part in them and the ridiculous levels of research I do to make sure real-life details don’t break the fiction due to my own negligence. An example: if I put in a magical suspension bridge, then I had damned well better know how suspension bridges are supposed to work in real life, at least in a general sense, so when I describe a bridge, a real-life engineer reading my book doesn’t say “Oh for crying out lout, that’d never work!’ but instead says, “Huh, that’s kinda neat, that material would have to have incredible tensile strength, but imagine what you could do with it!” Well, that sort of detail carries over into backstory with me — thus, the Codex.

Anyway, I know, ultimately, that I’m writing fiction, but internal consistency is incredibly important, and setting down the details for the histories, the characters that have come before, the special magics and all that other wild stuff is as important to me as telling the stories that use those details as their foundations. So in that spirit, from the brand-spanking new entries from the Codex, I present the Nightmare Imperium and the Maltharian Kingdom. Both of these feature in The Grey Knight, if historically (in the first case), so they are absolutely relevant to the current stories, but if you start following links I can’t promise you won’t end up somewhere utterly bizarre, thinking to yourself “Where the hell is THAT in the book?” Not only is it possible that I may not know, but there may not actually even be an answer, ever. Yeah, it’s like that.

(And yeah, it looks like a basic uncustomized wiki. Sorry ’bout that. I really don’t have time to customize it myself just now. Maybe soon.)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Worldbuilding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.