E Is For… Emerald Keep!
I am very excited. This Wednesday, our book Emerald Keep is out into the world. In celebration of its release, I figured I’d take today and share a little bit with you. If you are a long-time reader of ours, then you may already be aware of the book’s release; if this is your first visit, then hello, and welcome.
The most exciting part, to me, about writing a science fantasy novel is that I get to create a world. My coauthor, Rachel Wilder, and I worked hard to build a place that is both foreign and familiar. We asked ourselves, what would it be like to live somewhere, 400 years or so after humanity colonized the place? What would the culture have evolved to be like? That required us to know something about the culture of the original settlers. That’s a good question. What kind of a person travels for long, long distances, probably years, and lands on a hostile planet with few easily-accessible resources other than breathable air? The surface of the planet is blisteringly hot all year round, and completely uninhabitable one month out of every year.
Which begs another question: how long is the year? A year on Earth is twelve months. A year on Mars? 687 days. Jupiter? Twelve years. (Well, okay, twelve Earth years.) So we had to know how long the Persis year is – which we decided, incidentally, is fourteen months. It’s punctuated by Daymonth and Nightmonth. Those of you living near the poles will be familiar with a month of sun, and a month of moon; because of the planet’s tilt, that happens up there (you’ve heard of the Russian White Nights, yes?). Daymonth, like it sounds, is a month of days: and because the surface is so hot, the residents have to live underground, much like they do on Earth at Coober Pedy, a town in South Australia and the hottest one, by all accounts, on our planet. The homes there are built underground.
Not so alien after all, then, this Persis of ours. When one looks at a problem objectively, as a logic problem, one is able to world-build more easily. Ask yourself, if I had to go somewhere to settle, somewhere completely new, like the wagon trains did when settling the American West, what would I bring?
Well, Dear Reader? What would you put in your imaginary colonizing go-bag?
And, especially for you, I also want to remind you that the Rafflecopter is open until April 8th; please feel welcome to join in even if you are here for the A-Z Challenge and not for the book tour. Whatever your reason for visiting, we’re glad you’re here!