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✅ Arcs that stay intact
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✅ Tools to rethink structure, not overwrite your voice

It’s not a shortcut. It’s a framework for authors to build something solid.

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Author Spotlight: Josiah Akhtab

I write. I workout. I make Youtube videos. I play Basketball. I meditate. I journal. I read either Fantasy or Philosophy. Oh, and did I forget to mention that daydreaming about a story is more entertaining than writing it? But hey, if I don’t write the story who will, right?

Josiah Akhtab has been writing for over ten years, and has published ten books. His first novella, Confession, was published in 2017 with Dorrance Publishing, and his first novel, The Jake Matthews Saga: Ascension, was published in 2019.

Website: www.josiahakhtab.blog

Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Josiah-Akhtab/author/B08WRYSJVL

Instagram: josiahakhtab

CashApp: $josiahakhtabofficial

It all began with Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and The Olympians series. A story of adventure, emotion, world-building, and fantastical creatures. It captivated and inspired me so much that I wanted to create a story of my own with those same elements. 

As for my publishing journey, it began with me traditionally publishing a novella, Confession, in 2017 with Dorrance Publishing. After that, I decided to take more control of my journey and venture into self-publishing which has taught me more about the writing world and helped me become more then just an author. 

I would say Animes like Dragon Ball Z, Bleach, Naruto, One Piece were large influences for both works. I prefer action packed, gritty, fast- paced, and dark and those animes are the top examples of all those elements. 

The signature tropes of my work are often zero to hero or The Hero’s Journey. The four core elements I try to have in every story are darkness, grittiness, loads of action, and fast pacing. Those are the things I focus on with all of my stories.

Vampires have two key interpretations, monstrous and/or seductive. I used to watch movies like Van Helsing and Interview With A Vampire, Vampire Diaries, etc. and I wanted to find a way to combine all those qualities and put a unique spin on the traditional interpretations of the mythical creature.

My personal take is that vampires are often seductive, debonair, and alluring. They also have a sense of dynamism that makes them distinct and uniquely human despite their predatory nature. 

I see my take being a unique fusion that has elements of all the traditional genres but is not easily classified as any one genre specifically. My personal take focus on vampires being dynamic, relatable yet still monstrous and seductive to the human audience. 

I would like to develop the core elements of my stories being dark, action-packed, gritty, and fast paced. I want to fill my stories with as much of those elements as possible to maintain a vice grip on my audience. 

What is next for my work is to complete the series that is The Jake Matthews Saga and Immortal. I would like to create the demand for the second instalments first before writing the second books so people have an amazing series to look forward to. 

My latest work is The Adventures of Fleeting Grace which centres around a fourteenth-century girl of North African descent adopted by European parents, who dies and becomes a tangible spirit with a magical cape and finds a portal that leads her to different worlds on a series of adventures. It is set to come out on Christmas this year (25 December 2024).

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I Hope Your First Book Doesn’t Go Viral

You don't deserve it yet. Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/i-hope-your-first-book-doesnt-go-viral-91cc85bada2

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Want to Make Your Book a Page-Turner? Avoid This Common Mistake

Agreement is polite in real life, yet on the page, it kills momentum Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/want-to-make-your-book-a-page-turner-avoid-this-common-mistake-94ef239f856

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Worldbuilding Chat with Rob Mitchelmore (aka Guillaume Velde)

Worldbuilding Special

This final bonus episode features the return of Rob Mitchelmore who played Guillaume Velde in S01’s bonus episode on Pagham-on-Sea’s history, and contributed to a blog post on the same topic.

Beyond his day job and various computer-based hobbies, Rob is a musician, short fiction writer, and poet, who was part of the queer-as-in-unhinged indie band The Thrusting Sensations, and wrote several fiction vignettes for the band’s website under the pseudonym Artaxerxes. Listen to their album Knight of Infinite Resignation on Spotify.

Introduction

CMR: Welcome back to Eldritch Girl and today we have a really special bonus worldbuilding episode featuring Rob Mitchelmore, who you may have met before in season one, playing the part of Guillaume Velde. Rob, as Guillaume Velde, has also contributed to blog posts about Pagham-on-Sea, and also contributes to discussions on my worldbuilding because he’s married to me and he has to.

And I’ve used a part of his poem fragment, He Did Not Kill the Dragon, in The Day We Ate Grandad as an epigraph, and also his world and one of his characters, Dr James Zen, and the setting of the University of Basingstoke, have been mentioned in the Pagham-on-Sea books as the university that Katy wants to go to and Dr James Zen is someone she wants to study under, so parts of Rob’s world are now ‘real’ in inverted commas in the Pagham universe as well.

One of his stories is The Marriage of the Fire Under Water and Gale, which is a work in progress. It features a woman called Gale, spelt G -A -L -E, like the wind, who is a PhD student at the University of Basingstoke and studies an ancient culture of people called the Fritil, which is a name given to them by 19th century scholarship, fictitious, and is not what the people called themselves. And Katy will probably study the Fritil too, if she’s working with Dr. James Zen on her dissertation in third year.

But we will read an extract from this work in progress as a jumping off point for world building discussion. So this is largely how we do world building and how you could do world building maybe as an idea. Hopefully it’ll be interesting. There’ll be a lot of ancient cultures and actual academic scholarship discussed. So if you are trying to create a fantasy culture that mirrors an ancient culture, or you’re trying to work on something that is completely new, hopefully this will be useful to you in some way.

So Rob, say hello to everyone.

RM: Hello. I also make tea.

CMR: He does. It’s a very important part of the world building process. So we’re going to start with an extract, which is from The Fire Under Water and Gale. It’s in two parts, so it’s for two voices, and we’re going to each take a part. So we’re going to read that now to you, and then we will launch into the worldbuilding discussion. Okay.

Extract from The Marriage of the Fire Under Water and Gale

This is set out in two columns on the page, with the text blocks zig-zagging visually down the page. To narrate, we each took a column of text and flowed on from one another.

(RM) In the water, phosphorescence. Night again, a watching light.

(CMR) And she walks along the shore, the clay-soaked shore, by moonlight, to be on her own, exploring the fresh landslips. The clay is liquid and she feels it around her feet.

(RM) The clay dissolves and he tastes it in the rollers. He can feel her feet on the sand where the sea meets the beach. He shifts his attention into the creatures which live in the rock pools.

(CMR) The rock pools are shining and still. The river runs over the beach and trickles into them. She walks to the nearest rock pool and looks in.

(RM) She walks to the nearest rock pool and looks in. Several tiny eyes crane upwards, compound and simple individually. She starts back.

(CMR) She starts back at the sudden movement, so her shadow moves quickly over the surface of the water. She shivers, feeling momentarily watched. She walks away.

(RM) She walks away. He waits. There is salt in the air. The moon sets. The waves rise.

CMR: And that’s it. So… Rob, welcome to the podcast.

RM: Thank you.

CMR: You are the very first cishet man on the podcast to be under his own name. Well done. Don’t let me down. [laughs]

World Building: Where To Start?

CMR: So how do you begin the process of world building a new world? So in this specific instance, what was the seed of the idea?

RM: Well, all worlds begin with a point of departure from what you know and the real world that you live in. What that point of departure is varies, of course. It could be historical. which is how you get what if alternative history kind of stuff. It could be cultural, a viewpoint. It could be a way that people tell stories.

A good example of the last one, which is perhaps a little more abstract, is Cordwainer Smith’s science fiction, where his storytelling technique is very different from conventional science fiction. They’re very lyrical and very sing-song style of storytelling. And in doing that, he doesn’t only mark out his stories in that style, but he makes an assertion that that kind of storytelling style is what the culture he is talking about uses.

Your point of departure could be almost epistemological. Tolkien is kind of an example of what I’m talking about here, because Tolkien was obviously reacting to events in the world of his time, and he was a scholar of Anglo -Saxon history and myth, and one of his… projects was to kind of create an alternative mythology for England.

So you’ll put you need that point of departure and it needs to be zoomed out enough that consequences can ripple out from it in complex and unexpected ways but at the same time small enough that the reader can actually understand it it can be either part of a story, a seed for a story, or it can it can live in someone’s head.

The seed of the specific world that we’re talking about here, the Fritil world, really crystallized when I was reading a book about the Oxyrhynchus papyri, probably about 15 years ago. The Oxyrhynchus papyri is a big trove of waste papyrus that was found, preserved in the desert of Egypt, and preserved because the conditions were so dry that it didn’t rot.

And it’s this huge dump of just corresponded as the people had finished with, jotted down poetry. It really is a rubbish tip. They’re still working through it now. I can’t remember when they found it, but they’ve been working on it for well over 100 years at this point. And there’s just so much there from every part of everyday life for the people who lived there.

So the seed for this really was, what if there was another trove found from a culture that no one knew much about at all, as opposed to Greek Egypt, which is… I’m not going to say comparatively well understood, because I’m not sure any ancient culture is really well understood, but it is to an extent familiar.

What if there was another trove found from a culture that was wildly unfamiliar, from a culture that no one really knew much about until now, and what if that trove was really confusing and weird? Not in a Weird Fic kind of way, just in a “what on earth are they writing about this for?” kind of way. And it all grew from there.

So the basis is that there was another culture, another city-state on the north coast of Africa, sort of one stop along from Carthage.

What does their city look like? What’s their culture like? How do people live in this city? How are they distinct from the cultures that surround them? And these are the people who wrote the texts and… discarded them or buried them in the desert and they make things and archaeologists find the things.

So you’ve got material for two sets of stories going on. One set at the time in the culture with members of that culture as characters, and the other set in modern times with academics trying to work out what they found through the lens of the culture, what they know about the culture and through the lens of the writings they’ve discovered.

Doing Research & Using Source Material

CMR: Okay, so yeah, so the premise is that Gale is researching this culture and the Fire Under Water is potentially a deity in the culture and… she may or may not be interacting with it.

Let’s discuss the ancient culture that Gale is researching, and then possibly becomes entwined with (because it’s all quite ambiguous). So that gives us some context to that culture. And tell us a little bit about how you’re designing it from scratch.

RM: Okay, so we’re in Antiquity. We’re in North Africa. This is a city-state kind of arrangement. So it is a city and some hinterlands. It does not have multiple cities. It does not have complex arrangements between settlements. It’s fairly small. It is a city-state. The local language is a member of the Indo-European language family.

The culture that goes with that carries on the cultural and religious traditions inherited from that prehistoric group of people. So they’re distant cousins to the Greeks, the Romans, Celtic peoples, ancient Iranians, etc. But not the same as any of them, and distinctly different from all of them. Totally separate branch of the family.

The process used to construct this culture is essentially to go and read a lot of the academic literature on the early history, theology, mythology, etc of these ancient Indo-European speaking peoples and then where there were divergences, where there are postulated historical points where one culture took one path and another culture took another path, try and come up with a third and take that instead, and by doing this you end up with something that has very strong family resemblances to all of them in the same way as they all have family resemblances to one another, but without being just a copy of any of them, because you’ve deliberately created something that isn’t any of the others.

So talking about the use of the academic materials here, the first thing to remember is this is fiction, and so whether the source material… whether the academic source material is actually historically true is at best partially relevant. We are already deviating so hard from strict historical accuracy on the grounds this is fiction we don’t have to worry too much about getting everything right everywhere else, especially in the interest of making things
interesting.

Writing Fiction Is Not Ethically Neutral

RM: However… You’ve got to be a bit careful because, as with a lot of history, and especially ancient history, there is strong biases in the academic material. And especially Indo-European studies has famously been abused by fascist regimes and fascist factions. And that has left scars on the discipline. If you are using the material, it is always wise to look at the date, among other things. and to follow modern historiography. The discipline itself talks a lot about this and thinks a lot about this. And you want to be careful not to accidentally use elements that are ahistorical, but ahistorical in a way that is designed to justify fascism, rather than merely being wrong. It is not necessary to be correct in fiction. But it is morally necessary to try not to prop up harmful, ahistorical ideologies.

But also, it is important not to let this kind of thing make you scared of not writing a utopia. Ancient cultures especially were nasty. There was a lot of stuff in them that you wouldn’t want to live through. Modern cultures are pretty nasty too. And you cannot shy away from your invented culture including injustice and violence, in order just to avoid possibly being read as glorifying that violence.

CMR: Yeah.

RM: Does that make sense?

CMR: Yeah, that makes sense.

RM: Some myths are cruel. Lots of social systems are cruel. Some academics have been accused in the past of being fascist sympathisers because the cultural patterns they reconstructed looked a bit fascisty. And that even when the researchers’ own opinion was that this was an awful way to run a society or organise a society, but from their research, this is what they thought happened. Societies are awful, and you have to allow people to be awful. And you’ve got to bear all of that in mind.

Another thing to bear in mind is, since you’re writing fiction, you have the luxury of being able to avoid unnecessarily causing pain or offence to the reader or anyone else.

I stress unnecessarily because, although I don’t personally like polemic and I don’t write it, I’ve yet to be convinced there isn’t a place for it in the world somewhere. But that does not excuse being an arse through laziness.

There is a big difference between targeted polemic and lazy writing.

Example: Developing Fritil Sacred Fire Systems, Temples, and Topography

RM: So let’s look at a worked example here. So we’re looking at sacrificial ritual. So we’re looking at how the people in the city give offerings to their gods. Most ancient European peoples, this was essentially a fire ritual.

So depending on which academics you listen to, in the real world, some reconstruct the primitive fire sacrifice rituals with a single fire as the focus of activity, and these people claim that later rituals which involve three fires are an elaboration of that that came later.

Other academics reconstruct three fire rituals back as far as you can see, beyond the point where the daughter cultures separated off from the theoretical proto-culture that gave rise to these wandering bands.

A lot of which of these you go for depends on how you interpret the Roman evidence, but again we are writing fiction, and there are living communities today that take the one or three fire systems as holy, or their modern descendants.

So in this fictional universe, the ancestral condition was two fires.

Now, no real world academic has to my knowledge postulated a two-fire ancestral system but by taking that as part of the universe it allows me to play with things and invent ritual without accidentally infringing on things that people legitimately find sacred.

And as I said, again, it’s fiction, so it doesn’t matter [that the two-fire ancestral system isn’t real/accurate to the period in real life]. It also provides another way in which the Fritil are distinct from the cultures around them, in that most of the cultures around them that are Indo-European speaking will have either a one or a three fire system, again, depending on how you interpret the Roman evidence.

CMR: Okay, so what’s the logic behind the two -fire system, which obviously in the real world nobody suggested, and how did you justify having that in-world so that you could play with it?

RM: These cultural structures never exist for only one reason. They never have a single hook into a culture, even when they’re viewed synchronically at a single cultural moment. People will view and interact with this structures differently. They will think about them differently. They will integrate them into their lives differently.

You can see this very obviously in modern religions in the varying ways that people interact with that, and there’s no reason to suspect this wasn’t the same in ancient religion as well. Even in the more codified bits, even in the social bits, there was still a wide range of the ways people actually interacted with and dealt with this stuff. So none of these things have a single logic. Instead, they’ve got this kind of cloud of logics that gathers around them, and people use different sets of logics at different times and in different contexts.

And this of course isn’t true of only theological elements, it’s true of many things in culture. People are far less consistent than they think they are about the application of their ideological and semiotic machinery.

So the two -fire system in itself… the two -fire system is a division really between the earth and heaven.

There is a fire which is in theory never allowed to go out. If it does go out it has to be rekindled with a certain amount of respect, ritual and a fire drill. And this represents the divine fire or the fire in heaven.

From this another fire is kindled which is allowed to go out and this represents the fire on earth. It’s a microcosm of all earthly sacred fire.

From this you can obviously extend out the stories and talk about how the heavenly fire has connotations of immortality and connotations of things bigger than people. And the earth fire, into which sacrifices are actually put, gets a cluster of meanings around the possibility of communication with humans and the divine. It itself becomes proof of the possibility of communication between earth and divine.

So it becomes a symbol of the communication with the gods itself. It becomes the symbol of the fact that gods want the sacrifices that are being offered.

It also represents historical continuity and the ways that the Fritil thought about their own past. So their ancestors would have been wanderers, either fully nomadic or seasonal, wandering between pasturing places at various points in their past. And to a great extent, their simple architecture represents a permanent version of the mobile sacrificial spaces they would have carried with them and set up where they needed them, because if you are a wandering people you are very unlikely to develop permanent temples until you have largely ceased to be a wandering people, for if nothing else purely logistical reasons.

But because the temple represents and originates in this portable sacrificial space, the temples retain the landmarks and the structures that were used to orient that sacred space and to think about the way that people interacted with it.

So some temples have a big sand pit at the back which is essentially a microcosm of the desert that was outside the sacred boundary when they were wandering. Many other temples have a pool, a pool of salt water. If the temple also has a sandpit, this is at the other end of the temple from the sandpit. This is a microcosm of the sea. And so from this you can get a bit of a handle on the way the people think about themselves as a sacrificing community caught between the sand and the sea.

And this is important enough to them and to their self-image that they have encoded this in the architecture of their religious buildings. This again sets them apart from the cultures that are around them, and gives you something to talk about compared to, say, Egypt just up the coast, which is of course very river focused, and focused on the Nile and inwards, and the fact that the water in the temples represents the sea sets it apart from that and makes it obvious that you are not just writing Egypt under another name.

You also get to explore how the culture has grown and how its resources have changed, by tracking the elaboration of the religious system. By the period when the story is set, this is quite a wealthy city, through trade, generally, and their public buildings and their temples are quite rich, and they are quite impressive.

But they have one temple called the Temple of the Fire in the Sky, and that specifically keeps the oldest and simplest layout for a temple and keeps as close as it can to the old mobile arrangement. That is not to say that the people who use this temple accurately perceive the history of the design, but it is to say that they think it is old; that it is old matters to them; and that they have deliberately kept it simple when they could have elaborated it considerably.

Other temples have changed more, or have kept more elaborate ancient elements. So, for example, by the time the story is set, the Sky Fires in all the other temples are in fact not fires that never go out anymore, because you’re allowed to bring a Sky Fire from another Sky Fire.

What actually happens is the only Sky Fire that never goes out is the Sky Fire in the Temple of the Fire in the Sky, and that fire is brought to the other temples every morning.

This, of course, has both pragmatic and theological implications that you can play out in the story. The Temple of the Fire in the Sky is also my trick to avoid having a knock-off Zeus as head of the pantheon, because although in Greek and Roman religion, Zeus, Jupiter, their names are cognate and at some point they probably referred to the same deity, are the head of the pantheon, that’s not necessarily the case in other Indo-European speaking cultures. [Rob thinks he wants his pantheon head to be a goddess, who is also the patron of the city, but she’s still tbc].

The corresponding god is almost a cypher, and so the guardian of the Fire of the Sky in the Temple of the Sky is the Zeus equivalent, and I have literally just parceled him off into a corner in the smallest, simplest temple in town, in order to avoid having him be too important in the rest of the system.

Developing Plot from the World, and World from the Plot

CMR: Yeah I love we were talking about this and I really love the implications of comedy as well, because you can have an Incident with a capital I, where the eternal fire does go out and then the priests are running around trying to relight it in the appropriate and richly constrained way because they’ve got they’re on a clock because they’ve got to bring that fire to all of the other temples in time in the morning, and then you’ve got all these priests running around with lit tapers and stuff. I really love that as an image.

RM: Yes… there’s that James Thurber quotation of him misquoting Wordsworth, where he says that humour is emotional chaos recalled in tranquility.

And that definitely has the elements of emotional chaos recalled in tranquility. It’s very recognisable as a situation, I think.

But even this thing about letting fires go out and the potential comedy inherent in that hints at wider social change. And you can use it to tell stories, maybe, about wider social change.

For example… is this partly due to Roman cultural influence? The Roman model was that the whole city was one big sacred precinct, one sacrificial ground. Whereas in the Fritil model, each temple is its own sacred ground, its own sacrificial space. But is there here evidence of a move towards thinking of the city as a sacrificial ground, and a dilution of each temple, so that the only bit of the temple that matters is the Earth Fire, as opposed to each temple being an autonomous sacrificial center?

Now these kind of things are not just abstract theological conceptions, because once you have the concept of the temple as an autonomous sacrificial space, that starts to tell you how the temple should be built.

So something that seems to be common among people that speak Indo-European languages [in real life] is that the sacrificial ground is delineated by a furrow and that furrow is plowed out at the time the sacred ground is inaugurated.

A lot of academics consider this to be the origin of the the sacred boundary of Rome, the ditch that was dug by allegedly Romulus. But this suggests that in Fritil City, in our fictional world, individual temples would have a plowed boundary around them a sacred furrow. The sacred boundary of the temple’s ground is this furrow that would be plowed in a certain way, and suddenly you’ve gone from theology to topography. You’ve started to get a feel for what the buildings in the city look like and how they are arranged and what the profile of the landscape is.

Your temples exist as buildings that have certain features, certain alignments, certain shapes. They are split in ways that allow for the two fires to exist. They will have a furrow dug around them, which may in time become quite a deep ditch. And they will have an earthwork or a bridge approaching them across that ditch or furrow, just because people have to get in somehow.

That suddenly gives you quite a good element of how the city looks to walk around, how it feels to live in.

So you can spread this out and look at other decisions that have been made, other theological points, other cultural points.

Deeper Dive into Fritil Religion & Theology

So Fritil religion is largely uniconic, so it doesn’t involve images very much. So where you would perhaps in Greece or Rome find a statue of a deity, you would not find that in a Fritil temple. All religious gifts are sacrificial. All religious giving is sacrificial. Also, all religious gifts are sacrificial.

This applies to a farmer who is giving some food to the gods and in doing so casts the bread into the fire rather than putting it aside for later consumption by someone else. All the way up to the rich giving gifts in the prestigious temples of the city. And nearly all those sacrifices are done into the fire. So there is an equivalent of, say, the Roman habit of giving statues or the Greek habit of giving art to temples. But that is the sacrifice of made things. And the made things are burnt just like the food or the wine.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the end result of that can’t be useful. Say, an object made of precious material could be burnt until the gold is melted, and then that gold could be used for the temple’s purposes. So it’s not that the temples are poor, but the insistence upon sacrifice as the only way to give to the gods means that you do not have the rich, bestatued, be-arted interiors that you would see in other situations, so here sacrificial rituals produce a specific physical material architectural environment that comes from a theological point so in summary really the look and the feel of the city to live in is the result of hundreds of tiny interacting stories and beliefs and systems and ways in which people conceptualize space and the way they interact with space religiously, secularly, and in hundreds of ways.

This was really brought home to me quite a long time ago by a paper I read by Duarte et al. I have horribly probably massacred that person’s name. And they did a model of the Medina of Marrakech in Morocco starting from the cultural pressures of things like inheritance law and turning that into a way to generate cities that look like Marrakech, and that’s a real world example of how narratives and obligations and ways of thinking about space produce different and recognizable shapes of cities, and a city that’s a different shape is different to live in.

World-First World Building & Adding Characters

CMR: Yeah, thank you for that. That’s really, really interesting.

Can you tell us why then do you world build first and then insert characters into that world? So I know a lot of people do it the other way around.

They create characters and then they insert a character into a world. They shape the world to fit the character. Why do you do it the other way around? What is it for you about world building first?

RM: Mostly because it’s a good way to avoid your characters just being a cultural avatar for the reader. It’s a good way to avoid that ghastly phenomenon where your alleged Roman or Greek is just a Brit or an American in a funny hat.

Now, you can, of course, be writing a fictional universe in order deliberately to draw parallels with the current universe. And in that case, of course, you deliberately want those cultural parallels there.

But if you are not trying to deliberately write a straightforward parallel of the culture that you as the author inhabits, you need to examine the unconscious biases that you as an author bring to this.

So you might wish as the author to have your character make a specific choice, or choices in general. You might want them not to be constrained in the choices they can make. But how does your character actually think about choice? Do they even think they have a choice here? Do they think they have reaction? Models of agency differ wildly in different times and different places. And most people have limited executive function, frankly. And when you run out of executive function, you fall back on either cultural norms, or behaviours you’ve learned, or strategies you’ve put into place, to mean that you can still function when you run out of executive function.

Most people do not go through life making conscious decisions for everything they do at every moment of every day, because that would drive you mad. And if you as an author don’t know what the fallback choices are for your character based on the culture they are embedded within, you will unconsciously insert your own fallback behaviours, and you’ve lost the ability to do something interesting with that situation.

And by doing this, you’ve taken your own rather parochial assumptions, and all of our assumptions are parochial, and you’ve imposed it on a world where at best it’s unnecessary, and you could have done something more interesting, and at worst it’s actually inappropriate.

Maintaining Ambiguity in the Narrative

CMR: So how do you fit Gale into this world as an academic while also maintaining the ambiguity of the narrative?

So we as readers are not supposed to know what happens to her at the end. It is meant to be quite ambiguous. I do know what happens at the end, but I’m not giving it away. We don’t know whether the Fire Under Water is a real deity. We’re not sure what is watching her from the rockpool in the extract, if anything. Is it just an unusually inquisitive whelk? We don’t know. And her motives at the end for doing what she does, and I won’t give spoilers, are also left to the reader’s interpretation and imagination, which I really enjoy.

So how do you maintain this tone and this effect while also having an academic as your main character?

RM: Having spent quite a lot of time with academics, If you want to take a situation that looks clear and sensible, and then demonstrate how ambiguous, unclear and chaotic it actually is, an academic is exactly the person you want at the core of the story.

Good research is often, hmm, this looks like we have a very clear model for this, but there’s a little loose string in the corner. If I pull this, how much will unravel? And all of modern physics owes its existence to this phenomenon. Serious research is about quantifying uncertainty as much as it is about finding things out. You put bounds on how likely a theory is and accept you’ll never achieve 100% certainty.

In the case of ancient cultures, even those which have left us writing, all the ambiguity and uncertainty is actually very large and when you’re trying to reconstruct early stages of history or look at cultures where they didn’t leave explanations of themselves, that uncertainty becomes enormous and academic research should acknowledge and work within that uncertainty.

So in academic research there are always multiple theories flying about at any one time, and those do not have to be mutually compatible. Some people will adhere to one, some people will adhere to the other, some people will find neither convincing, some will aim for synthesis between them and so on and so on, but you have to have a handle on that whole landscape of theory, contradictory and illogical in places as though it may look, in order to interact with the field of scholarship that you’re in.

And of course this can get quite personal as well. Flann O ‘Brien’s The Third Policeman parodies this beautifully. It has an entire footnote-based subplot about academic disputes getting increasingly nasty over trivialities.

So if you have an academic as a main character, you can have ambiguity because you have conflicting ideas in the historiography, you have academic beefs, you have people not talking to other people, you can play it for laughs, you can play it for tragedy, or in this case, you can play it to maintain the central ambiguity as something that is debatable. Some authorities think one thing, some the other.

So a concrete example of this in the Fritil world: one of the most prestigious sacrifices offered is the wine sacrifice, which is not just a sacrifice of any old wine. Instead, special wine is used in the sacrifice, and every stage of that wine’s production, from the planting of the vine, the picking of the grapes, pressing the juice, etc., is put aside and dedicated for that purpose. There are rituals for every stage in the production, and that wine is never used for anything else. It is put aside, it is sacred.

And eventually, after the wine is made, it will go into the fire in a temple.

So this is obviously a prestigious sacrifice because it’s kind of high effort. You have to be quite well off to put aside the resources to grow wine that you deliberately do not need and deliberately make the process of growing that wine more complicated than it needs to be in order to provide this sacred wine. And this is one of the reasons why it is at the top of the hierarchy of sacrifices that can be offered.

It is a better sacrifice to offer than the horse. It is a better sacrifice to offer than a bull. It is a better sacrifice to offer than a sheep. It is a better sacrifice to offer than a goat.

But for the fictional scholars in our fictional modern day, there is a question about where this comes from, and what theological work it is actually doing. So some fictional academics think this is related to soma and haoma, which I am horribly mispronouncing, I’m sure, sacrifices of ancient Indic and Iranian speaking peoples, and use this as evidence of an old complex cult of a sacred beverage, possibly a drink of immortality related to Celtic conceptions of mead.

Others say, no, this is a later elaboration of rules like the ones that tell you what wine you can and can’t use in religious rituals in ancient Rome, which are much simpler and not connected with that at all. We’ll have to put references in for this kind of thing, won’t we?

CMR: In the transcript, yeah.

RM: And part of their evidence is that the Fritil one isn’t tied to immortality or any of the ideological apparatus of the soma sacrifice. Both of those can’t be true at once.

But as the author, I don’t need to take a position on that because I’ve got the academics to argue about it for me. So I can shape the ritual in such a way as to keep the academic controversy going, keep the fictional academics busy, and they will find it harder and harder to unpick the problem while I turn reluctance to commit into an authorial virtue.

Interlocking Worlds

CMR: So lastly, I guess, is Gale real in the Pagham-on-Sea universe or is this an alternative alternative universe that we’ve got going on?

RM: I mean, I don’t know. People interact with each other, especially people who aren’t around at the same time as each other, interact with each other in these complicated, partially fictional, partially real ways anyway, construct models of each other.

You know, maybe Gale existed. Maybe Gale is just a rumour that’s being spread around about the incident that happened. Maybe someone’s friend of a friend of a friend knew her. Maybe not. It’s very difficult to tell. And personally, I don’t intend to make it any easier to tell.

CMR: Yay.

References for RM’s Interview

Medina of Marrakech: Duarte et al.: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220306611_Unveiling_the_structure_of_the_Marrakech_Medina_A_shape_grammar_and_an_interpreter_for_generating_urban_form

Possibility of a three-fire system behind the Roman system: Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion part II chapter 3 and subsequent prolonged arguments; worth noting also Roger Woodard, Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult

Complexity and enmeshedness of rules about wine: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370173352_Festus_and_the_Role_of_Women_in_Roman_Religion

Switching Seats – CMR on Character-Driven World Building

RM: So I think at this point, we should bring this back to Pagham-on-Sea and we should swap seats.

CMR: Okay. So I’m a character-driven author, like a lot of people I’ve interviewed on the podcast this season. But I use a lot of the same world building techniques that Rob does. And I discuss Pagham-on-Sea with Rob a lot, especially for the later books and the ongoing character arcs.

So I wrote the first version of The Crows before I met you. And then I rewrote it in 2018, 2019? And I didn’t think about a sequel really until that had come out and everyone was asking for one. And then I was like, oh, OK. And then I’d kind of written it to be more of a standalone. So Thirteenth had a lot of different iterations. And that was when we started talking about world building feeding into the character arcs and that sort of thing so I could work out what was going to happen and I think this is picked up more in The Day We Ate Grandad because we settled on thinking of Katy and Wes and Ricky as members of the triad, and that all became much more dependent on the world building for plausibility, so yeah.

Rob is now going to interview me about being a character -driven author building plausible worlds, and how those worlds have an impact on narrative structures and character arcs.

RM: Yes, I am. So to start with, can you give a concrete example of how this kind of thing has shaped your character arcs and your narrative structures in Thirteenth and The Day We Ate Grandad?

CMR: Yeah, so we were talking about mythological triad structures, which meant that I… cannot at this point simply make up what Ricky and the others will do next, because now I have to have them move in line with world building constraints and logical progression for their characters within the world building that I have set up, right?

So I started to look at Dumézel’s trifunctionality, this concept of sort of having Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus as a triad. So Jupiter is a priest, king, lawyer. Mars is offence and defence, not just a god of war. Quirinus is about fertility and agriculture and then kind of mapping those triads onto the triad that I have, but doing it in a little bit of a subversive way.

Where you would have triads like this, not just in ancient Rome, but across different cultures, you often have the agricultural, the fertility angle is usually
a goddess, not always, or represented by women, not always. And this, in this case, is represented by Wes, who is also bordering on hypersexual, but he plays into different mythological dynamics as well. So he represents multiple types of fertility and social cohesion, but he also is not fertile in the sense that he has a lot of kids. He’s fertile in other ways, sort of the spores and all of that kind of thing, you know.

Mars is typically a very kind of macho image, that’s kind of like the Western civilization concept of Mars. And that is a very skinny, athletic 17 year old girl who can’t put on weight and is quite self-conscious about the fact that she’s flat chested. I just quite like that, that she’s the strongest of the three of them in a physical sense.

And Jupiter who’s the priest king and the lawyer is the wheeler dealer chav…

RM: …eating people and selling bits of their car on eBay…

CMR: Yeah exactly, eating people and selling bits of their car on eBay… uh well, to Uncle David’s dodgy garage obviously, um so yeah and I quite like that his arc is that he’s going to end up as the the priest king and keeper of the family law in a way that Katy is not going to do even though you think that she should, or you think that perhaps Wes should, but that’s actually going to be Ricky’s thing.

So their arcs are now kind of running along these tracks. So I have to then create the means by which these tracks can move forward and the characters can move forward along these pathways.

RM: So what does this kind of world building permit you to do now that you otherwise might not have been able to do?

CMR: So… I think of genre as a very arbitrary set of boxes and lines in the sand that only really exist for marketing reasons and reader expectation management. Whereas what I do tends to blend genre elements, tropes, and I do enjoy subverting expectations and genre conventions where I can.

So I think that by adding mythology to the cosmic horror mythos, for example, world building using these methods gives me a new set of constraints. So I can play at 90 degree angles to what my natural inclination would be as an author working within that set or subset of expectations.

So I don’t have to follow weird fiction tropes if I don’t want to, because I’ve got other pathways that I can examine and other routes that I want to take. And it will logically work and be cohesive within the world that I’ve created. So I can bring magic into it, but I can bring magic into it in different ways.

So I can bring Merlin into it, for example, and make him a key part of Ricky’s
backstory and a key part of his arc. Whereas he doesn’t usually come into a gothic horror. He doesn’t usually come in as an archetype in weird fiction. He’s not part of that because fae are not part necessarily of those sorts of genres, but I’m enjoying playing with those, and I think that that’s something I wouldn’t have thought of doing if I hadn’t been thinking about world building in this specific way.

So by focusing on the world and my world structure, and what underpins the magic and the reliance on fate and deciding that I wanted my characters to follow a very specific structure and take on these roles, I think I’ve been able to tell much more interesting stories and develop the dynamics in ways I may
not have even considered before. And it’s definitely shaped the way that I plotted Thirteenth.

That had a completely different plot, which wasn’t as good, quite frankly, before I started doing the world building to underpin it. And I don’t think that The Day We Ate Grandad would have really existed all in the form that it is now without that world building at the back.

So ultimately, what it allows me to do as an author is to create familiar pathways for my characters to follow that readers might recognise, even subliminally, from these mythological structures and deepen the dynamics between those characters in the same way, while also mixing in the cosmic horror and gothic horror elements and settings.

RM: I love that you’re talking about pathways here, because there’s a wonderful bit in Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode where he actually takes this and talks about mythology as shortcut in a very geographical way. This is Calvert Watkins’ translation.

CMR: We’ll put a link in the transcript.

Translation and discussion of Pindar passage: Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon, p. 365.  Highly recommended book for world builders thinking about deep time.

The high road is long for me to travel and time closes.

I know a short path.

I guide many other in the craft of singers.

By guile he slew the green-eyed serpent of the burnished scales.

RM: And what he’s talking about here is that telling the story straightforwardly will take too long. He’s pretending he’s in a hurry. But he knows the shortcut because by just saying “he slew the dragon”, he can drag in all the cultural… all the cultural stuff he needs into his reader’s head and he is good enough that he knows what phrase to use to take this shortcut around having to tell the whole story.

CMR: Yep.

RM: So in this case you are using the existence of the shortcut to infer the existence of the road.

CMR: Yeah.

RM: And the story exists with the shortcut hiding behind it for the people who want to look for it.

CMR: Yeah. So in this case, you know the pathway of the myths that I’m playing with. And then if you know that, you can guess what the end game is going to be. I have just given it away. But if you’ve got the clues, you’ll kind of work out where the end game of these arcs is going. And you can kind of extrapolate from that. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, more about using the myths to shape the story, rather than using myths as stories themselves. That’s kind of what I was aiming for.

RM: So if another more character-driven author were interested in using any of these techniques, what advice would you give them?

CMR: I would say the most important thing that I’ve learned is to hold all your ideas about where you want the character arcs to go very lightly. And don’t be precious about a single idea. Because once your character is in your mind as a fully fleshed out person, that character… now has all the abilities to go off-road and do whatever that character, as a fully fleshed -out person, could do. Okay?

So, you’ve got your character in your mind in this single moment. It’s before
the narrative begins and your world has been constructed without referring to that character.

So, in this case, the world has not been created for the character. The character is just about to be placed into this world. And as soon as it’s dropped into it, Your character is then suddenly bound by all of those constraints and conditions and that will change them as a person.

And that will impact what happens to their worldview.

And your question there is how can they have the worldview or come to have the worldview that you want them to have, in a culture that perhaps doesn’t allow for it? So how do they learn it? What situations will this world allow for that will set the character on the path of change, of growth, of managing conflict, coming out the other side, and all of these questions that you have to hold in tension.

So you can still be a character driven author, but now you’re developing your character within a set of world constraints, almost like a science experiment looking at variables and adjusting variables, and you can see how many different ways you can get that character where you want them by the end and which is the most plausible within the world you’ve created and which is the most interesting for the reader within the world you’ve created.

So for example, Ricky was a very late addition to The Crows. He was an addition to the very almost like the final zero draft, because I’d already written a whole version without him in it. I went to rewrite it, and it didn’t really work as it was, and I thought no, I want to bring in something else, and so I’d [already] had this idea for a character who lived in Bramble Cottage. And I wanted to keep Bramble Cottage, which was a completely new addition to the Pagham-on-Sea universe in the world building that I was doing.

And I thought it wouldn’t make sense for Carrie to have bought The Crows and then not know who lived in Bramble Cottage, which was its nearest neighbour. And that was where Ricky came into it. But when I was creating Ricky and I had these ideas for how he was being under-socialised and very much because that Fairwood is the Phantom of the Opera figure, right? And Ricky couldn’t be the same thing. But he could be almost like a Rapunzel figure.

So he was going to be very socially isolated, very under-educated, like educated but in the way that Sherlock Holmes is educated, so he knows very specific things relevant to his hyperfixations but doesn’t have a clue that the world goes around the sun, do you know what I mean? Very much like that. but also I put him in a situation where he doesn’t have boundaries because he’s never really learned them he thinks of other people and himself as objects to be used, or bits of people, and bits of himself are essentially just scrap that he that other people like to use, like his farsight is a tool. And he hates being called a tool and he hates being called, you know, he hates being
thought of as just something that other people can use. And yet that’s exactly what he is. And even though he’s got a very vehement reaction against that, he still, that’s one of his core beliefs that he can’t quite shake no matter what he says about it.

But I also put him in a situation where his mum has a lot of girls, because she
always wanted girls, and she just had the one boy. And she abducts them and they become zombies. She nails them to the floor and she plays with them like dolls. And I realised very quickly that what I had created was a character who, unless I gave very, very, very, very good reasons not to, would be an intensely unpleasant character to write to the point that it wouldn’t make sense and I would just have to scrap him, because there is no world in which sexual assault does not occur between a lad who is like that, who has no boundaries, who thinks of other people as spare parts, and these girls that are just abducted, that he doesn’t think of as human anyway, so how do I get around that, and how do I get around that as an extension of what he would do to Carrie?

So I didn’t want to write that story. Like I wasn’t writing extreme horror. I wasn’t writing about how terrible it is. You know, I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t writing like an abduction scenario. I wasn’t really writing a story about sexual assault, right? That’s not what I wanted to write about. And then I realised the most obvious thing was that he’s just asexual.

He isn’t sexually attracted to anybody, doesn’t have any sexual urges [in that context]. And in fact, he’s sex repulsed. And he doesn’t understand sex or why anyone would want to have it. And he doesn’t understand flirting, doesn’t like it, makes him intensely uncomfortable.

And all of a sudden I had a much more interesting dynamic because he is supposed to have all of the power in any kind of given situation between himself and Carrie, because he is much more powerful than she is. And all she has to do to turn the tables on him is accuse him of flirting, and he suddenly, because he’s under socialized and he doesn’t know how to respond to things like that, he starts blushing and he gets flustered and he doesn’t know what to say, because that’s the worst thing that you could accuse him of doing because he just doesn’t understand it.

And all of a sudden that became funny, and I could play that for laughs, and I could also play it within the development of their relationship, and all of a sudden I had a dynamic that I actually wanted to write and I didn’t have to scrap him and I didn’t have to think about how I was going to work my way out of, you know, a potentially very difficult or very messy or very extreme horror situations, because all of a sudden all of that was dealt with.

So that then made it a lot more interesting to think about in terms of his development because all of the kind of characteristics of a ruler or a priest king or like you know all of that, he could embody that in a much more interesting way than being just another kind of macho guy, I guess, and I thought he that also made him a very interesting contrast to Wes who was going to be a much —- When I introduced Wes I realised he was going to be a very difficult character to write because Ricky is such a strong personality, and Wes needed to be interesting to stand up against somebody as complex and —- well Ricky’s not complicated he’s a very simple guy, but he’s just very interesting with a lot of layers. And Wes had to be unique as a character and stand up against him in different ways, and so I made him almost as contrasting to Ricky as I could, but because Wes is much more, or considers himself to be much more ethical, you know, he’s a vegan, he doesn’t kneecap people anymore, like, you know, he’s also incredibly sexual, like he’s verging on hypersexual, possibly is hypersexual, he’s pansexual, and he’s just, very open about everything, um he’s polyamorous, he is, you know, he’s a swinger, and he is everything Ricky just does not fundamentally understand.

When you put them together that was a really interesting point of conflict and difference without making it really, I don’t know, like tacky? I’m not sure
what the word is, but yeah, like so that wouldn’t have happened if I had held Ricky in my head as this, you know, I had this idea and I was going to put him in this world and then he was still going to be the character I imagined even though it wouldn’t make any logical sense and it would kind of defang him, do you know what I mean?

So I kind of um… So that’s, I think, how you do it.

If you’re a character driven author and you’re interested in using a lot of world building and you’re doing your world building first, you do have to hold your characters a little bit looser and be prepared to think of other ways they could change.

Don’t have them kind of fully formed in your head and put them in the world and then go, right, now they have to do this, because they won’t. And that’s what’s interesting about it.

You know, you have to try and work out what they would logically do, and how you can avoid things you want to avoid within the constraints that you’ve constructed.

So it’s also important to avoid cliche and identify what pathways are considered cliche, and think about how to subvert that or do it differently. Also think about if you’re going to use mythological characters, mythological
figures or archetypes that you want to align your character with, how would you then pick out the bones of that mythology and apply it to your own narrative context?

Mythologies are not ethically neutral. So Rob touched on this before. You have to understand what ideologies that mythology is bundled up with. So you have to be very careful about how you use myths that are tied up with notions of, for example, cultural purity or bloodline purity.

So you’re not re-perpetrating the injustices of the past or creating stories that could be read as propping up current ideologies like eugenics, for example.

So how do you grapple with that? How are you going to critique that within the character arcs and their dynamics?

How are you looking at the narrative as a whole to make sure that you’re not walking down a pathway that has some highly questionable moral and ethical underpinnings or leads you to a very highly questionable conclusion?

And that’s where your subversion kind of comes in as well. So you can have fun playing with that. But you also have to be aware of what you’re playing with. I think this feeds into the whole discourse of, oh, books shouldn’t be political. But everything is political because myths are political. Politics come from myths as well as myths coming from politics. And you can’t ignore that. That’s just a fact. So, yeah, it’s just something that you have to think about.

And I think… If you want to do this sort of thing, and you want to do world building versus a character, or if you want to use mythology, you have to think about it. It’s not just vibes.

And actually, you know, the fun part of this is doing some research into the mythology and the cultural stuff that you’re not familiar with. And also try not to appropriate somebody else’s. It’s like a key feature. And always try and make whatever you’re using your own in some way so that it’s you know a little bit different there’s a little bit of twist on it there’s lots of different ways you can do that.

I’m thinking about Jackson P. Brown’s interview and the way that she used very common paranormal entities like werewolves and vampires but put her own spin on those and put her own spin on witches and warlocks and stuff.

I would encourage you to read The Reaper when it comes out because I think that’s going to be an awesome urban fantasy adventure set in London. So yeah, there’s all this different kinds of stuff that you can do.

Robert, do you have anything to add to that, actually? What advice would you give for someone trying to do worldbuilding this way?

RM: Read lots of nonfiction. Don’t just read about individual cultures. Read about relationships between cultures. Read about the ways people tell stories. Read the histories of how people tell stories. Histories of ideological structures. History of worldviews. History of mindsets. Because we’re trying to write fiction, and the cultures one creates in fiction are members of families of cultures that include cultures that exist or have existed. And that’s whether you intend to or not.

High fantasy cultures are members of cultural families. Every culture written without thinking about it is a member of a cultural family. So by reading about the differences and different choices that have been made historically by different groups of people, you can get tools to build cultures that are more plausible, which are alien enough to be interesting, but also ethical to talk about.

CMR: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think like, Yelen & Yelena, which is this current podcast season, we’ve talked about Pagham-on-Sea a lot today, but Yelen & Yelena came about through me thinking specifically about the 18th and 19th century Industrial Revolution in England and France with a bit of the French Revolution, and a bit of the English Civil War of the 1640s in there.

Those were deliberate things that I put in there and I wanted to connect to those cultural families, but I also wanted to think about the religious and theological implications of different religions and mainstream religions in that universe, so we talked a lot about that didn’t we?

I’ve done a few world building specials on the end of episodes just talking a little bit more about that yeah and I think that that’s just really important, like, if you want to know how something would logically work, your best bet is to look at a real world example and see how it actually went down.

And then you’ve got something to base your ideas on, and to keep it sounding plausible so people don’t have to suspend their disbelief at the wrong moment. You’re not asking someone to believe something that clearly wouldn’t have happened in the in-world logic or that just doesn’t make any sense. You know, you’re literally just asking someone to suspend their disbelief because dragons exist. Do you know what I mean? That’s it, as far as it goes. Everything else, they can believe because it all sounds very plausible. And because that sounds plausible, of course there are dragons.

Do you know what I mean? Like, it all works in that sort of a way. So, yeah, I would agree.

And I think that’s about all we’ve got time for. So I hope you enjoyed that worldbuilding special. I hope that gave you some ideas to think about. Thank you very much, Rob.

RM: You’re welcome.

CMR: I’ll see you next time for the next season, or our next bonus episode! Bye for now.

Like This? Try These:

Johannes T. Evans and C.M. chatted about worldbuilding and character arcs in a previous season of Eldritch Girl! Catch up with that interview and an extract from his novel Powder and Feathers.

Listen to a different perspective on character-first worldbuilding by multi-genre author E.A. Noble, and listen to an extract from the audiobook of When Blood Meets Earth, narrated by A’rese.

Listen to a folklore special on African folklore with tales from across the continent, with folklorist, podcaster, writer, and artist, Helen Nde.

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#worldBuilding #worldbuilding #writingProcess #writingTips

5 Hard-Earned Lessons That Made Me a Better Writer

Writing advice hits different when you've learned it the hard way Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/5-hard-earned-lessons-that-made-me-a-better-writer-dde6dbd8d6d

#writingprocess #writingadvice #creativewriting #writingdiscipline #writing
@indieauthors

A #WritingTip: remember no story really exists before you start #writing it. Not even in your own head. You're not transcribing a preexisting, flawless #text. What you do #write may not "sound" like the images or notions you had in mind, but that's inevitable. That's #creating. Embrace it.

#CreativeWriting #writers #WritersOfMastodon #WritingTips #WriteNow #WritingProcess #WritersCommunity

"…the biggest impact was from the #writingprocess itself.

The initial draft is a representation of your argument laid out in front of you. Rewriting and editing that text so that it flows requires constantly engaging with the thoughts, ideas, and arguments in it. Clarifying the language also clarifies the thoughts. Let the text then rest a bit and then start the process anew when you revisit it. Repeat this often enough and the mud you started with becomes a cohesive logical argument.

It took a lot lot longer than when I’m not foggy, but it mostly worked. A clearer argument is a by-product of having to hone the writing."
@baldur

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2025/foggy-feeds/