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November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

NEVER FORGET:

My Son Was Murdered, The Killer Walks Free, Your Child Could Be Next!

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FAQ: What are the most visited pages on this website and how many visits do they get?

Several years ago, I wrote an article on how to write different types of magic uses, or rather how I personally write various types of magic users within the context of my Quaraun books. Today that page is one of my top ten most visited articles. It gets 50 to 500 views/reads/hits/visits per day depending on the time of the years and has had over 200k visits total since it was published.

Amphibious Aliens: Debunking The Atwater Family's Alien Abduction Hoax with more then 30MILLION reads since 2007 and The GoldenEagle: Debunking Stephen King's World's Most Haunted Car Hoax with over tenMILLION reads since 2007 still rank as the two most visited articles on my website, but, neither of those are writing related.

Writing Medieval Servants is my most visited writing related article with over 7MILLION reads.

This website was started in 1996 and has 1 to 3 new articles (all written by me, I am the only writer on this site) published almost daily. In 2017 we crossed ten thousand articles published. As of 2023, EACH article gets MINIMUM 10 to 70 reads PER DAY, with the high traffic articles getting 500+ reads per day.

And since December 2019, my website now gets three hundred thousand to 7 million reads per month - well over ONE HUNDRED MILLION PAGE READS PER YEAR, making it not only the single most trafficked site in the State of Maine, but also one of the most visited websites in ALL OF NEW ENGLAND!

{{{HUGS}}} Thank you to all my readers for making this possible!

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 TRIGGERED! I'm a Straight Cis Woman, but I am deemed Too Gay For Old Orchard Beach, Are you too gay for the bigoted, minority harassing, white power, gay hating psychos of The Old Orchard Beach Town Hall Too? 

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EelKat's Guide to
World Building For Fiction Writers -
Creating a Fantasy Realm

Are you writing a fantasy novel? Have you joined NaNoWriMo and don't know what to do next? Do you need to know where your characters live? Need help creating that new world? You can find help here! In this series are some things that I do when creating a new world. My own genre is a blend of dark science fiction-fantasy romance. Over the past 30 odd years I've created not only alternate realms here on earth, but also two complete solar systems, with four planets capable of sustaining life.

The Twighlight Manor series started in 1978 with a the talking Diontite cat named EelKat and her Crystonite friend, Emperor Blue. By 1983, I had created an entire solar system for these two characters, and added more than 70 other characters, each complete with a family history. With hand drawn star charts and atlases lining my bedroom walls, my tiny little solar system jumped out of my head and went on paper, and at one point began to take over as a full scale 3-D model, complete with dollhouses and dolls of the characters themselves. When it came to world building, I took my world building very seriously.

Well, in the 28 years since then (35 years as of 2013!), I have continued to expand on my Twighlight Manor Universe, which now holds multiple solar systems and a whole bevy of planets and races inhabiting them.

My fantasy realms for The Twighlight Manor series have ranged from:

The Twighlight Manor: a flesh-eating haunted house;

Planet Flame: a volcanic realm where water turns to lava by day;

Crystonia: a planet driven to apocalypse after a comet sent them into an instant ice age;

An unnamed undersea realm of merpeople;

Diona & Ptarmagin: a world with it's smaller twin planet: one ruled by science and the other by environmentalists cats;

In this series of articles I'll look at what it takes to make a fantasy world come to life.

When creating a fantasy realm for your story, the first thing you must ask yourself is: Why?

Why are you going to create a fantasy realm?

Are there any real benefits to creating a fantasy realm?

Why would I need to create a fantasy realm when there are so any billions of REAL places to write about?

Creating a fantasy realms is fun. For many the act of creating a fantasy realm is so fun and becomes so time consuming that they never get anything written down story wise. This a very common problem, especially with writers of High Fantasy and Science Fiction, where the realms are inherently more fantastical than realms one would find say in Romance or Westerns.

All to often authors will get hung up on drawing fashion designed, charting maps, inventing new languages, writing recipes, building cities, and setting up government systems that they forget the reason they were doing this was to write a story.

The problem is compounded when writers can not tell the difference between creating a fantasy realm and writing a story. Charles Dickens was famous for this, Tolkien had this problem and so does Stephen King. It's the reason why everybody buys every Tolkien and Stephen King book they see, but than never actually reads though to the end of the book.

Tolkien and King are both great storytellers and fabulous world builders, however, their stories always end up being 200 to 400 pages longer than needs be, because they simply can not stop describing every detail of every branch on every tree, every wrinkle on every face, every caw of every crow, every word of every song every character signs while they are at the tavern, every detail of every person sitting at every table in the tavern...they just go on and on and on and the reader can't stop asking "So when are we gonna get back to the story? I know the Hobbits are signing, I know the tavern is crowded, why is he telling me every word of the song, are the lyrics giving me hidden clues about the Ring? Why is he describing all these dwarfs and elves, will they ever be seen again outside of the tavern?"

No, and No.

The song lyrics are nice and we are all glad Tolkien had such a song writing talent, but the song lyrics have no bearing on the plot at all, and removing them could easily have cut 50 to 80 pages of utterly pointless text. And the Hobbits only meet one person in the tavern who will be a character the reader needs to be aware of, so a simple "the tavern was filled to the gills with patrons of every race and size" would easily have sufficed and cut another 15 to 20 page of pointless text. There is no reason why the Lord of the Rings need be longer than 200 pages and yet, it tops out at just under 800 pages, because Tolkien could not tell the difference between story telling and world building.

This is an important thing for you the writer to be aware of this when writing your story. Sure, you want to weave in details and let your reader know facts about the world your characters live in, but not at the expense of story flow.

When you sit down to write your story, think about this. If you find yourself writing page after page of detailed descriptions about what color the leaves are this time of year, stop an ask yourself is there any reason the reader NEEDS to know this?

If your characters is describing every ripple of the river, ask yourself "Do I really want to bore my readers the same way Charles Dickens did?"

If you really feel it is important for readers to know every detail of the world then write a reference book to sell with your story an let the readers go look stuff up on their own.

But than, one thing to ask yourself is: Do I NEED to create a world at all? Unless you are writing High Fantasy or Space Opera, you very likely have no real reason to create a fantasy realm at all.

In a Western, you'll only need a single town or group of towns. In a Romance you'll likely only need a single neighborhood or even only a single house, and at most 4 characters.

For MOST stories creating a fantasy realm may be as simple as visiting a local state park or Googling a tourist town and making note of what they look like, who's there and changing the names. If your characters living in a fishing village, drive to the nearest port and make notes of the locals, the location of buildings, and the workings of the lobster boats, than give them all new names and your down and ready to write your story.

Or you could do what I do: head to Art.com or AllPosters.com and look at the landscape prints. Just look at the mill print here. ---> (NOTE added April 4, 2017 - Art.com no longer does affiliate links to posters so the original pictures that appeared here on Squidoo in 2006 are removed)

I could easily come up with several stories set here at this mill, without any need to create anything more than a history of the mill.

Now I'm not telling you not to do massive detailed world building. If that's what you want to do, than by all means do it. I'm simply pointing out that it's not essential for every story. I point this out because, often I'll receive emails saying:

My point is, yes, you can build worlds as big and as detailed as you want, but you don't have to feel obligated to build worlds in order to write a story.

More:

Fantasy World Building...Writing Fantasy Books 
| World Building For Authors |
My Answers To The Zaharam-Chapelle-Parunas 
Ethnographical Questionnaire and More...

This article was originally written on: April 2006

This page was added to EelKat.com: November 2013

This page last updated on: April 2017

EelKat's Guide to
World Building For Fiction Writers
The Complete Article Index

The list below are the original pages written in 2003 for a WordPress Blog, and republished on Squidoo in 2007:

Even more articles have been written for this series since then:

• Question Everything Before Putting It In Your World 

As there are now more then 100 articles for this series, it now has it's own index page on which to list them all, as there are just too many to keep adding them to this end of article list. You can find the complete listing of all the World Building articles here now:

Books I Use When Creating Fantasy Worlds:

What do you want to become? 
What did you do today to step closer to that goal?
Whatever you do, be your best at it!
And remember to have yourself a great and wonderfully glorious day!

~EK
EelKat.com
pinterest.com/eelkat/

By EelKat Wendy C Allen

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the destruction of my farm, and the illegal selling of half of my land to Colliard, you shall lose your land.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my being homeless since 2006 - YES, I AM still homeless in 2023, you shall become homeless.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the backhoe driving over my house, you shall lose your house.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my car being cut in half, you shall lose your car.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my becoming crippled, you shall lose your health.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the murder of my son, your child shall die an equally horrible death.

Evil men go out of their way to try to drive a person to suicide.

Are you an evil man?

Are you sure you're not?

How many people have YOUR hate filled words killed?

Next time you go to do a mean thing to a fellow human, stop and really think about the consequences of your actions.

Did you ever notice how every one has a story to tell about me, yet not one of them ever speaks the truth?

What lies has YOUR gossiping tongue spread about me?

Did you know...

October 16, 2006, bomb blew up my house because of YOUR lies.

August 8, 2013, the house which replaced the one the bomb blew up, was driven over by a backhoe.

November 14, 2013, my 8 month old infant son was murdered because of your lies.

November 14, 2013, I was beaten up, paralized for 5 months, spent 18 weeks relearning to walk, I'm now crippled for the rest of my life, because of YOUR lies.

Are you proud of what you have done?

Enjoy your eternity in Hell. You earned it. You've certainly worked hard for it.

~EelKat

If you have any information about any of these events, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322