Picking up where we left off with mammals and birds, we now move on to reptiles and amphibians.
Remember, like mammals and birds, your world would not be complete without reptiles and amphibians. If you've read the rest of this series up to this point you are probably wondering if you have to include all of these things.
No.
You don't.
You don't have to turn your novel into a zoo.
You don't have to list every single type of animal in your world.
None of that is the point.
The point is to pepper enough of those things into the story, that the reader feels the world is a real place that they can visit.
Reptiles and amphibians are one you see less often then birds or mammals, as they are found n fewer places in the real world, and where they are found, they tend to hide. Thus they do not become as important of an impact on the every day life of every day characters.
This however does not mean they do not, like birds and mammals, cease to fill your novel with the flavours of life.
What would a spring evening be, without Spring Peepers (tiny 1/4 inch long frogs) croaking from the treetops?
What tells the reader it's a hot summer night, better then bullfrogs booming throating bellows booming across the lake?
What hot tropic river would be complete without a croc slowly drifting by?
Snapping turtles didn't start crossing roads with the invention of motor-cars. They crossed roads in front of wagons and horses too. And a big enough snapper will survive the crash, while the wagon wheel is splintered beyond repair, leaving your characters stranded beside the road in the middle of a Faerie infested swamp, just as sunset approaches...
Never underestimate the power of a turtle.
Snakes fall out of trees, or jump out of boxes, or get found in shoes.
Did your characters camp in a strange woods for the night? Did they take off their shoes? If so, you can be certain the first thing they doin the morning is grab a long stick and ram it in their shoe, to chase out any snakes, before they dare slip their foot back inside.
These things may not be plot important and many not have any effect on the end result of the story, but they will certainly draw your reader into your world and help them feel a sympathetic connection to your characters.
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:
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:
Fantasy World Building...Writing Fantasy Books
| World Building For Authors |
My Answers To The Zaharam-Chapelle-Parunas
Ethnographical Questionnaire and More...
*UPDATE: ADDED November 7, 2013 - I suppose one thing I should point out at this point, before we go any farther, is my use of the word fantasy throughout this series. The bulk of this set of articles was written 7 years ago in April of 2006, parts of it appearing on EK's Star Log and other parts of it appearing on my personal Squidoo account. In the 7 years since writing this I've received hundreds of emails regarding it. A common question asked being: "Why do you talk of building a fantasy world if you don't write Fantasy?"
ANSWER: Fantasy with a capital "F" is the name of a type of fiction, in other words Fantasy is a genre. I do not write Fantasy fiction of the Fantasy genre, that is correct. I do however create fantasy realms for my Science Fiction and Horror works. I write Dark Fantasy, which is a sub-genre of Horror and Space Fantasy which is a sub-genre of Science Fiction.
Did you see it? No? Let me point it out: I write about fantasy worls as the exist in Horror and Sci-Fi but I do not write about fantasy world as they exist in Fantasy Fiction.
If it is not real it is fiction, if it exists only in fiction it it fantastical, if it is fantastical it is a fantasy item, because it is not a real item, however being fantastical does not make it part of the Fantasy genre, just as not everything in the Fantasy genre is always fantastical in nature.
The word "fantasy" with a lower case "f" is a word that means "not real" and has nothing to do with the Fantasy genre (capital "F") at all. And therefore when I say "fantasy realm" I mean a world that is NOT the Earth on which you and I live on in the real world, and am in no way, shape, or form referring to the Fantasy genre.
The methods I use to create my fantasy realms can be applied to ANY genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Romance, Western, etc.
2013 World-Building Series UPDATE:
Due to issues with content scraping, outright plagiarism, some of my articles appearing on OTHER Squidoo member accounts without my permission, and many of my "Squidoo articles" being stolen off Squidoo and posted without my permission on various blogs and sites including Wikipedia and Helium; all of my articles are in the process of being removed from Squidoo.
This series of World Building articles in one that has been heavily plagiarized over the years and as of September 2013, it can only OFFICIALLY be found here on EelKat.com - if you find it posted elsewhere, know it was stolen and I am not receiving royalties for it.
2014 Update:
As you know, or not, Squidoo owners Bonnie and Kimberly-Dawn stole thousands of Squidoo articles from Squidoo members, and tried to pass them off as their own, resulting in the lawsuit against Squidoo owners for the theft of tens of thousands of articles.
More than 100 of my articles were transferred off my Squidoo account and moved to Bonnie's account,
while my authorship and writing articles, including this world-building series were deleted off my Squidoo account and transferred to Kimberly-Dawn's account!
!!!!!!!
I am shocked and flabbergasted at what these 2 women have done. That they thought they could get away with stealing so many articles from so many authors! Buying Squidoo from Seth Godin, did not give then the rights to our articles and these two horrible women had no right to delete them off of our member accounts and republish them on their own accounts, trying to pass them off as their own.
More then 100 Squidoo authors have gathered together in lawsuit against Squidoo owners, Bonnie and Kimberly-Dawn. The result of that is, Bonnie and Kimberly-Dawn, to avoid their asses being sued to hell and back, have now transferred the Squidoo lenses back to their original owners and deleted the entire Squidoo website.
Squidoo is officially gone. It exists no more. Squidoo is dead. Most Squidoo writers have opted to move to Hub Pages as HubPages has bought the remaining shambles of what is left of Seth Godin's Squidoo after Bonnie and Kimberly-Dawn massaquered it in their article stealing frenzy.
While I do have a HubPages account and my remaining Squidoo Lenses can be found there temporarily, they are being moved here and deleted off HubPages as I move them
April 2017 UPDATE:
As of now, all on my 600+ Squidoo pages are now moved here to EelKat.com and no more are remaining on HubPages.
It's hard to believe, Squidoo has been gone for 4 years now. It was such a big part of my life for a decade.
I'm an author. This is an author home page. It's about me, my life, my books, my hobbies, my home town, and anything else that applies to me and my life.
Since starting my writing career in 1978, I have written 130+ novels, 2,000+ short stories, 6,000+ non-fiction articles (ALL are found on this site), a few dozen stage plays, 12,000+ blog posts, and a few comic book scripts for Disney's Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck (I only worked for Disney one year (in 2005) and only wrote a few stories for their Danish comic books).
NOTE: I ONLY write the Quaraun series (aka The Twighlight Manor series aka The Adventures of Quaraun the Insane). In recent years there has been an issue with impersonators trying to pass books off as written by me, notably several non-fiction and Erotica books. I write neither nonfiction nor Erotica.
ALL of my books and their cover arts are listed on my website here. Beware of any books you find claiming to be me. If the books are NOT listed here on my website, they are NOT my books.
In fiction works, I specialize in Weird/Bizarro Tales set in 40th century CyberPunk-Quasi Medieval, Cozy Dark Fantasy and Science Fiction worlds featuring an intersex Elf and his Faerie husband main characters. I DO NOT WRITE ANY OTHER SERIES - THIS SERIES IS THE ONLY ONE I WRITE.
Non-fiction (found ONLY here on my site) is daily updates of events in my life, and how-tos on how I write my novels.
I DO NOT write Erotica.
I DO NOT write books with HUMAN characters.
The Erotica books and books with Human characters, that you are finding, are written by scammers trying to impersonate me.
There is an ongoing FBI investigation into this matter. If you find any such books, please report them to FBI Agengt Andy Drewer @207–774–9322
| Index |
How did you build your audience?
Not online, that's for sure.
aka How to sell ten million books
aka How I sold ten million books.
The Park Bench Method of Writing
(just the article)
or
The Park Bench Method of Writing
(with the list of 10k writing prompts - takes a LONG TIME to load - SEVERAL MINUTES!)
Crazy Woman Just Attacked - No Clue Why or Who She Is
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