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
My Son Was Murdered, The Killer Walks Free, Your Child Could Be Next!
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!
If you enjoyed this page, don't forget to share it on social media (share links in the hovering sidebar to the left) or place a link to it on your own blog or website. Here is a code you can use on your site, just change the all cap parts to match the page you are currently read:
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I am answering random questions today about world building, over on Reddit and decided to take my answers from there and expand upon them even further over here. So that's what this page is. Me rambling on about various aspects of world building techniques I use when writing the Quaraun series. The questions I am answering are embedded here. Clicking the link in the embedded question will take you to the original Reddit page where you can see the original answer along with other people's answers. If you wish to comment, you can do so on the Reddit page where a place to do so is provided.
What helps you maintain interest in worldbuilding? from worldbuilding
The Space Dock 13 WebRing
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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/
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
>What helps you maintain interest in worldbuilding?
With me, it's all about the characters. Worlds are interesting, yes, but it's the character who tells the story. The world is just the place the story happens. And when you get right down to it, any story can happen on any world, with only minor tweeks to match said world.
So for me, I always start with a character.
First...
Build a character that I know I'll fall head over heels in love with.... and figure out
and THEN... figure out:
Next...
Once I've got that figured out, then I create the world:
Next...
Now, once I reach the point of knowing WHO my character is and where he lives, now I figure out his personal background...
NOW...
It's time to go back to worldbuilding again... this time we take what we know about the people he grew up with and we ask:
Now we build a story ...
With the character in mind, now ask yourself:
And finally
Now go back over all of your answers to all of these questions and ask yourself... is there a story here that I want to expand upon?
Usually I find that by doing this, I end up fleshing out both my world and my character at the same time, and in figuring out my character's connection to the world he lives in, in turn inspires me to write stories about his life and his interactions with his world and the people who live in it with him.
By doing the world building in this manner, I am not just straight doing nothing but charting maps and designing geography, but rather, I'm building my character's origin story, and giving him a culture, and doing it in the world he lives in, building the world around him as I go.
For example, the main character I'm using now, is an Elf who was born in Inukjuak, Quebec, the son of the King's young brother, so he's a low level prince of sorts, but he has no political power and his title really doesn't mean anything either in his kingdom or out of it. However, in spite of his low rank, the King favoured him and named him heir to the throne, which caused his father (the king's brother) to hate him and become abusive of him. The boy's father/king's brother thought he would be the next king and hates his own son out of his mad drive for power. So he kills the boy's mother, then hires a squid-headed demon priest to kidnap the boy (the boy is 9). The priest does as he's paid to do... in this world it is common for priests to kidnap young boys and force them into horrific lives as slaves to the church.... so basically the boy is sold into slavery by his own father.
The priest takes the boy to a temple in Persia, where at first he's a slave, but he learned fast and proves very adapt at their religion's magical ritals, so soon, even though he's an Elf and they are Demons, they teach him the priesthood and he grows up to become a powerful Psyonic Wizard-Priest. Even though he's a French Canadian, he lives a very Persian/Muslim influenced lifestyle because of having been raised by the priests.
As an adult he later goes back home to Quebec, the King is overjoyed to see him alive (they had thought him dead), but his father in infuriated that his "long lost" son has returned and immediately begins plotting his death. He developed this huge plot to marry his son to a princess, then kill the king (his older brother), then once the son is king, kill him, his wife becomes queen, then he marries the widow and becomes king. (The girl is in on the plot with him.)
The son however, has lived with the Demons for so long, he has no clue how to act like an Elf or live in Elf society, and being a priest extremely devoted to his religion, he wants nothing to do with becoming king or marrying the girl, and instead goes off with a non-Elf commoner lover, who the king's brother then has killed... which devastates the wizard-priest, causing him to question his religion, turn to Necromancy to resurrect his lover and then turn around and kill his father and the king, just so he doesn't have to deal with them fighting over who the next king will be.
The story STARTS with the wizard-priest and his now resurrected undead lover on the run, because now he's a murderer. The story is his fight to survive in a wor;ld that sees him as a villain and his lover as a monster. The entire story following the now homeless vagabond wizard as he and his undead lover trek the planet in search of a place where they can be allowed to live their lives in peace.
All this is just backstory that I used as a way to build the character and the world he lives in. Now that I have this backstory I can look at who he is today, and how his past shaped him, how his world effected him, how various cultures he encountered in childhood influenced him, and now I can ask myself... "So what is he doing today, right now, and how can I turn it into a story?"
The answer took 40 years and 130 novels to answer and I'm still answering it... the series has been going since 1978 and has no end in sight. Over the years the characters changed. I started out with Roderic. Then after a few novels about him, I switched to writing stories about his son. Then a few novels later I wrote stories about his other son. Then a few novels after that I wrote stories about his butler. Then a few novels later I wrote stories about the butler's father who turned out to be Roderic's uncle. Then a few novels later I started writing about Roderic's grandfather, who is the current character... the one whose backstory you just read.
What started out as me writing the story about one man and his haunted house back in 1978, turned into a series of 130+ novels written over a period of 40 years and constantly evolving along the way.
As I write new stories about each member of the family, I end up creating new things about the world around them. I'm constantly expanding their world. For example, most of the series is set in cold Arctic regions along the coast. Then one day I discovered, Roderic's butler had a collection of shrunken heads and had to answer the question, how did he get them. Turns out he was a missionary of sorts to an aboriginal headhunting tribe in a rain forest jungle. So of course now I had to research the Amazon rain forest to figure out how to build a rain forest for my world. I discovered the Rupa-Rupa Cloud Forest of Peru in the process, and ended up creating this vast cloud forest civilization that I had no clue existed in their world, but now is an integral part of the economy to the world they live in as a whole.
>Basically, what you should do is imagine and dream your world instead of writing it altogether, and draw from natural people, events, tales, and phenomena to help you piece an original world in your mind. Of course, you will need to write down what stories and events you imagine in your mind, but brute-force-writing your ideas as soon as they come to mind without giving them figurative water to grow gives shriveled and uninteresting "world"-plants.
I completely agree with this.
Back in the early days when I was a pre-teen and just getting started in writing. The very first thing that got me into writing was the movie "A Year Without a Santa Claus."
It was the scene where Heat Miser and Frost Miser are fighting. One is sending blizzards all over the world to freeze everything, while the other is sending heat waves. Their friend Santa Claus is like "Hell with it, I don't want to deal with any of this any more, I'm retiring. Christmas is canceled. I'm sick of all the fighting in the world. I'm out."
I'm not sure what exactly it was about that segment of the movie, but it sparked this idea in my head...
The idea was: "What if Spock and MaCoy found these two planets side by side, one made of fire, the other made of ice, and both planets were dying because a comet had changed their obits, but niether planet knew it, so both planets were fighting with each other."
Next thing I knew I'm writing Star Trek fanfiction, about the Pirate Ship Rent A Prize on Planet Flame and Planet Crhystonia, trying to save the people of both planets before both planets cease to exist, but the Fire Elves and the Frost Elves are too busy fighting each other to realize theirs a crew trying to save their lives.
That was the very first story for the Quaraun series. A far cry from what it evolved into and became in the decades to come.
Now there is an entire galaxy with multiple solar systems and multiple planets, and Space Elves with intergalactic pirate ships zipping back and forth between time and space, in very Doctor Who methods to visit extremely Star Trek planets, with blatantly SpellJammer populations right down to Squid headed psycho priests and giant space hamsters, characters ripped out of InuYasha (Quaraun is unashamedly Lord Sesshomaru) prancing around with My Little Pony on the Great Space Coaster (is any one here, other then me, old enough to remember that LSD induced hippie feast Saturday morning live action cartoon of the 1970s? If you've never seen Great space Coaster - it's on YouTube - go look for it - most psychedelic show ever made), and the whole thing set in the house from Rocky Horror Picture show, complete with a family of human-eating transvestite vampire Elves from outer space who periodically like to drop everything to break out into drug induced song and dance for no reason at all, other then singing the Time Warp s a fun thing for psycho Elves from space to do. The Twighlight Manor series described in a single paragraph! LOL! (It usually takes me a few pages.)
Okay... now that I've mentioned them, I had to go look for them. Here they are:
Great Space Coaster....
...and...
here you go...
...a family of human-eating transvestite vampire Elves from outer space who periodically like to drop everything to break out into drug induced song and dance for no reason at all...
...
The series started out as fanfiction so when it went to mainstream publication, I had to totally rewrite it - create all new character based off the copyrighted originals, create a whole new none copyrighted world.
The Quaraun series is HEAVILY influenced by Rocky Horror Picture Show.
In the end it became an adventure of building this massive, super insane hippie feast world about Elves in Space, and filling that world with lots of people, and then finding stories to tell about each character.
It requires a lot of imagination and daydreaming to do that.
But that is where the fun comes in, because the world itself is just an empty place until you fill it with people to visit all the amazing places the world has to offer. And once you toss a bunch of people together, things are going to start happening because the people have to interact with each other, which results in events happening. And each event that happens causes even more events to happen, and soon it's a snow ball effect of one thing leading to another and before you know it, you'll be writing more stories the you know what to do with and you get so "into" your world that you'll never want to leave it. Or at least that's what I did.
For me I think the thing that helps the most is just having a character you can fall head over heels in love with and then digging deep into every aspect of that character's life to tell every story you can about them, then just build the world you need to tell that story about the character.
>My most recent worldbuilding (and true worldbuilding) projects focus more on a theoretic approach to viewing societies I create. Since I cannot bring myself to write mere descriptions of the world, I decided to go another way and explore, in a very in-depth manner, cultural aspects that shape it, so instead of writing about the linear, factual history of a city, something which I absolutely loathe doing, I went and wrote a long essay on how that city's inhabitants view the notion of body and its relation to space and being. I plan on doing that with multiple issues that spark my interest, and I think it makes me reflect and learn more about the world I'm creating.
I do this as well.
I think it is fascinating to write essays on the cultures of the world.
A thing I often do all well, is to at some point in the story, have a character use part or all of that essay as well. Maybe it'll be a newspaper report he'll read, or perhaps a paragraph from it will become a paragraph in some spelbook he's reading, detailing the location of some plant he needs to find that only grows here in this place, but is protected by the people of that region for being sacred, so the book contains the passage about the culture and how to get into their society to get the plant.
Something like that, allows me to take small passages from the world-building essays I write and use them to tell the reader little tid bits about the world, while being important to the plot and not being an all out info dump.
I am wondering why has Amazon moved the Quaraun books to the category "Transgender Romance" and also "Gay Erotica"? The base story is a deeply depressed, suicidal, drug addict Elf who's lover commit suicide and he's trying not to do the same. It's an old Elf in a tavern, monologuing a lot of flashbacks and back story scenes of his youth. These stories are dark, bloody, angsty, full of drug use, murder, rape, Medieval torture, mental/physical/emotional abuse, and references to depression and suicide - no romance in it, unless you count the occasional (and usually brutally violent) rape scenes that show up in nearly every volume - sorry - no clue what Amazon is thinking or why they moved these to Romance and Erotica, but these books are NOT even close to being Romance or Erotica on any level at all. When I published these books I put them in "Dark Fantasy" and "Yaoi". If they show up in any category other then "Dark Fantasy" and "Yaoi", it's because Amazon put them there without my authorization or approval.
~EelKat
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The 4 door white truck continues to sit at the end of my drive way (146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine) near every night around sunset, reeving it's engine and squealing it's tires, with the driver yelling anti-gay threats and obscenities out the window. He continues to do the same thing at my dad's apartment building (Biddeford Maine) a few times a week, usually in mid to late afternoon time. He continues to follow me to shopping to various stores in various towns throughout the states.
Phrases he yells from the truck include:
"Kill or be killed remember Saco Shaws all transsexuals are alike"
"I keep a gun under the seat of my truck, I'm gonna use it to shoot you in the head, you transvestite freak"
if cars are going by he yells to them: "that thing is Ken's son, look at how's it's dressed; it's insane, it has autism, we can't allow that thing and it's gay cars in our family friend town of Old Orchard Beach"
He often babbles deranged ramblings about something he calls "the gay-pocalypse", raving lunacy about how "all the gays are gathering" on his doorstep. He raves some crazy nonsense about how Armageddon is coming and the war to end all wars will be "the gays against the Christians" and Christians have to be ready to "kill the gays"
My car is the Autism Awareness Car and had 2.5million marbles glued to it (I have Autism - savant - Kanner's syndrome) he claims tat my car "is gay" because of what it looks like. My car has been vandalized several dozen times, including to have the tires slashed 7 times in 6 months.
After dark often around 10PM, he stands at the end of the logging road across the street from me and shoots at my motohome (in February 2014 he shot holes in my neighbour's barn while doing this). I have video footage of 3 of his shootings at me here: https://youtu.be/NUebzJ9sz9U and here: https://youtu.be/C4dZbgG-Smw
This has gone on since August 2013 now, in addition to all the vandalism, hate crimes, pet beheadings, etc that has happened, including the bomb that blew up our house in 2006.
As you know, that whole time I had not been able to get a plate number on the truck. He as just here again, and I just realized why I could not get a plate number... there are no plates on the truck, either on the front or on the back. However, as he was driving away today... I noticed, there is a plate, stuck up in the back window of the truck, where it can barely be seen, deliberately obscured from view behind a silver tool box.
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