Anya Bast

So right now I’m building a world. (In my head I’m hearing Let’s build a word! Let’s built it! Let’s build it now! which you won’t understand unless you have a child who watches Word World on PBS Kids.) Ahem. Anyway, right now I’m building a world (and some words too).

This world is new for me, having wrapped up the end of my Dark Magick series with Midnight Enchantment (Jan, 2012). I’m now hard at work on the first book of my new series for Berkley. It’s based in large part on Nordic mythology and I’m breaking my brain (honestly, not the strongest organ of my body anyway) on a whole bunch of books about it.

I’m not creating a who’s who of Nordic myth, though. I’m using it as a foundation. I’m weaving in legend from many countries and then adding my own twist. My “twist” is pretty significant. I’m hoping that my world is much different than others of authors who have also used these traditions to build their worlds.

It will be. Because that’s the really cool thing about minds. They’re all different. We all interpret things differently, “read” texts differently, ect. We all have different filters through which we view our worlds that are created as a result of just about everything that’s happened to us since we were born (well, and our basic genetic makeup) It’s what gives every author her individual voice.

So I’m wrestling with some significant questions like, what kind of religion exists for these people I’ve created? How are laws made and enforced? What are the conflicts between the different types of supernaturals within this world? Lots of questions. So far I only have partial answers for some of them, but it’s amazing how more answers evolve as I write. If I sit there with the questions in front of me, trying to answer them like the essay section of an exam, I can’t do it. But if I put myself in the world, write from inside my character’s heads…it develops. That means a bit of rewriting, of course, but whatever is most effective, right?

Sometimes I wish I could rearrange my real world like that. Just a little rewrite over here…no more homophobia! Gone! Hit the delete key and make a little change over there…ethnic cleansing? *poof* Racism? Goodbye! Famine? Disappear! People putting melamine in baby formula? Never happened! You get the picture.

Aw, it would be nice anyway.