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Monday, June 7, 2010

World Building and Query Tuesdays!

I write mainly Fantasy and Science Fiction and World Building is a very important part of that genre. If say in fantasy you are setting the story in your own world, it is critical to describe the scenery, the smells, the unusual creatures, without over doing it. This is the trick and this is what we gotta do.


Personally I hate when world building is over done but also I hate when I pick up a book and after reading 30 damn pages, I still don't know what the hell a mesonur is (I still didn't find out by the way.) Maybe its the authors way of keeping us engaged in the book and making it interesting enough for us to want to find out what the heckle that is.

For me its essential to weave in exotic smells, noises and feelings that are only felt in my world, but with paragraphs of description we all start to skim through. So what is the key to world building even in non fantasy literature?

- Dropping key clues. Readers love clues and they do like to do some of the thinking work but hey, don't make them figure out what a mesonur is...That just isn't going to happen.

- Providing some background Information. Again don't over do it.

- Describing senses. Noises, feelings, voices, scents. It all brings us into your world.

- Appearance. Hey if you have gotten and rubber zombie (Whatever that is) as your lead character i want to know how it looks!

- buildings, Technology and Shrubbery even...Describe this all short and clear and again don't start talking about a shrub for ten pages. Been there done that. JK. Anyways that is my take on my world building, what's yours and have you read any books that throw you in and totally confuse you until the ends?

Query Tuesdays (That's tomorrow!)

And a little update for today. I got into contact with that guy that works at Penguin and he offered to critique 1 query every week on Tuesday! Isn't that awesome? I just got my query critiqued by him and it really helped, yet now comes revision time.

We can dissect it on my blog and you can get comments on what everyone thinks! His comments will be in red and I will add bits of mine in blue. So the way Query Tuesdays will work will be like so...Firstly Tuesday is tomorrow so I am not sure you guys will volunteer just yet, so if I won't get a query I won't send it his way or make a post, but if I will, yay! First come first serve here, I thought that would be fair. So whoever first sends a query to my e-mail at arielemerald (at) rocketmail (dot) com can get one tommorow. If you don't sorry, next week is always there. Also there will be a contest for him to critique a full proposal (query + 1st chapter) once I get 100 followers, so keep following and a big THANK YOU for following!

4 comments:

  1. Congrats on getting the nice lure for followers.

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  2. lol Kay :) That just may be it but I know what hell it is to write a damn good query and if I can help with contacts I will!

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  3. Ah, the joys of description... Everyone wants that hint of the exotic, told through the perspective of the protagonist, in a psychologically revealing way, and in 25 words or less.

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  4. What an awesome opp. I'd love to participate. I'll send you my query.

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