L. Shelby

I guess I’m in a talkative mood, so I’m going to explain the steps I have been using to make a history for my Cultivator Universe.

1) I started by drawing myself a galaxy, and then I gridded it off into squares. (Fortunately for me, spiral galaxies are relatively flat, so it wasn’t too huge of a stretch to use a 2D map for this exercise.)

2) I then mostly randomly created 200 dots representing the worlds on which my civilizations started. (I randomize by rolling dice. I married an avid board-gamer and there are always dice around.)

3) I randomly assigned a Civilization Level to each of those dots. These levels told me which of those planets started developing technology the soonest, and therefore who had a “head start” when it came to spreading out among the stars.

4) I made an arbitrary guestimate of how fast the “reach” civilization would expand once its ships had achieved near light-speed capabilities, and based on how much “coverage” I hoped to achieve, decided how long ago my oldest civilizations started expanding.

5) I created a technological advancement chart that would give me a rough estimate of how long it would take each Civilization Level to achieve various technological benchmarks.

6) I split my total timespan into segments, and created map overlays that showed the “reach” of each civilization at the end of each segment in the form of transparent colored circles.

7) And then, checking each overlay one at a time, I have been figuring out which civilization encountered which other civilization in what order, and writing a quick one sentence explanation of what happened when they did.

Mirrored on My Website.

Cantata in Coral and Ivory is set on a world named Ialfa, which I had originally intended to be used for fairytale retellings, or fairytale-like stories. But I thought I wanted to do tales that featured a slightly more… er… sophisticated grasp of politics than ones where kings arbitrarily pass the rulership down to whichever of their sons brings back the golden fish, or where princes can get away with marrying kitchen maids just because they happen to have the smallest foot in the kingdom. I wanted the romance and the magic (and the happy endings!) but set against a richer, more realistic cultural backdrop.

Because of that, I had two main interests when I started working on this world: the creation of an elaborate historical background, and a magic system that had an organic feel to it.

I didn’t actually have a specific story in mind yet, just those two goals. So started on a very large scale. I created a solar system, and a world geography. Then I started mapping the rise and fall of nations, and worked out what exactly magic was here, and how it accomplished things. This established the “rules” of the world. But everything I knew was very general and grand and sweeping, and it wasn’t until I decided that I wanted to actually write a story in this world that I started to think on a smaller scale about what it might be like to live there.

The spot I rather arbitrarily decided was the location of my first story, turned out to be on the equator of a continent roughly the size and geographic position of Africa. So I started reading about Africa, as well as other tropical locations and civilizations—feeding the fabulator. The large-scale rules I had already established by creating my geography guided my search for smaller details, which then ballooned back out to large-scale rules again.

If the most common form of agriculture in my target climate is slash and burn, then what sort of civilization would emerge from that base? Would they have money? What would their religion be like? How about their courts and palaces?

One book I checked out of the library commented that Africa was home to the greatest variety of very large mammals still in existence, but that giant mammals used to roam all parts of the world. Africa’s abundance is merely because, for some as yet unknown reason, more large species survived extinction there. “What,” I asked myself, “would my world be like if I reversed that trend? What if this continent I was working with wasn’t the place where the most giants survived extinction, but the place where the fewest did? Then, if I had elephants, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses and giraffes here, what did that mean the rest of the world would look like?”

My world was gradually gaining depth. And although it didn’t look anything at all like what you’d expect from the word “fairytale”, it did have cultural richness, plenty of room for romance, and some nicely understated magic. Most importantly, it had achieved a unique personality all of its own, and was coming to life.

It became so much alive, in fact, that it did what most authors complain that their characters do.

My setting developed a mind of its own, and completely took over the story.

Mirrored on My Website.

Somewhat ironically, given how rarely I post in my own blog, I have just had a guest blog go up on Book View Cafe

It’s about how to make up slang for your invented cultures.

There are some other things that happened last week that I probably should have posted about. (And I would have if I didn’t have so many things happening at once!)

Lets see… I’ve been married two dozen years, now. There’s a nice number. I still haven’t had my anniversary dinner with my husband, however — life has been interfering.

My concertina and I went to a folk sing-a-long. They sing out of folk “Hymnals”, so I can usually follow along with the chords on my concertina. It’s fun, and great practice.

The brakes on our car died. Since we had been planning to replace it, we did that rather than having them repaired, and I am now co-owner of a vehicle (mini-van, seats 7) that is about half the age of our previous one. (So just over ten years old, instead of just over twenty.)

I joined an online tatting guild (tatting is my new hobby), posted pictures of stuff I was working on, and was asked to share the pattern for the little tatted dragon pendants I had invented. I did so, and had bunches of people wanting to try make them. So I have not only blogged, and I have been blogged about: here is one tatter’s take on my pattern (I’m linking to the central of three post so far.)

And here is the original:

Mirrored on My Website.

I consider myself a one book a year gal.

It took me a while to work up to that. For my first four and a half books I didn’t keep wordcount records, but according to my submission data this is my best guess for when I finished writing them:
1991 The Grand Abduction
1994 Harp & Gyre
1997 Rune & Fire
2003 Cantata in Coral and Ivory

At that point my records become more complete and my output became more consistent. The first draft completed dates for the next batch of books are:
2003-11-13 Talking With Winds
2005-02-14 Eyes of Infistar
2007-01-20 Pavane in Pearl and Emerald
2008-02-13 Dicing With Flames
2009-11-27 Sails of Everwind

Lately I haven’t felt very consistent, though. In 2010 I started writing a book, Lioness, that I got stuck on. I restarted it, but the reboot wasn’t working either. Near the end of the year I started a different book that ended up actually being three books…
2011-05-14 Across a Jade Sea (Serendipity’s Tide, Treachery’s Harbor, Fealty’s Shore)

Then I started Dancing With Stones, which didn’t stall like Lioness did, it just got pushed aside. Instead, I finished a graphic novel that I had been working on since 2006…
2012-01-13 Flag in Flames

Since then I’ve mostly been revising and getting stuff ready for publication rather than writing anything new.

But, in the years of 2003-2013, I did apparently finish ten books. And I did start working on Dancing With Stones again yesterday. As long as I do actually finish it this year, I am still on schedule.

Mirrored on My Website.