2012 saw the releases of two new novels and a novelette, following up on the series that began in 2011. In December 2012, he began a new military science-fiction/space opera series with SINS OF THE FATHER. A proud member of the Genre Underground, his heroes of literature are those who are fearless in telling stories that truly mean something to their readers. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and monstrous black dog.
Today, Christopher tells us about building the world of Eisengoth for his ELEMENTS OF SORCERY series. At the end of the post, check out the Rafflecopter giveaway and enter to win a FREE copy of the ELEMENTS OF SORCERY series!
Eisengoth: Building a World
THE ELEMENTS OF SORCERY focuses on the tale of how Edar
Moncrief, a maker of love potions and wart remover (and competent sorcerer in
his own right) gets tangled up with an Arbiter, and how his life gets
irrevocably screwed up from that point forward. It's swords-and-sorcery written
with an urban fantasy sensibility—like if Jim Butcher (author of The Dresden
Files) wrote stories based on Robert E. Howard's Conan and Solomon Kane. There
will be five installments when it's finished; each is novelette to novella-length,
ranging between 14,000 and 19,000 words so far, and they've been getting
steadily longer.
About four and a half years ago now (give or take), I
embarked on my 2008 NaNo project. I'd been reading Robert E. Howard (the author
of Conan) and a few of his contemporaries and successors, and I really wanted
to write something in the swords and sorcery vein. At the end of November,
2008, I had a 50,000 word manuscript entitled ELEGY.
It was originally intended to be a stand-alone.
Fast forward a couple of years to 2010. ELEGY was very
nearly published in an e-zine as a serial piece, but unfortunately the e-zine
went under even before it launched. I did a lot of revision to prepare for that
publication, but after the organization behind it crumbled, ELEGY went back to
sitting on my hard drive.
So, when I came around to 2011 and was struck by the idea to
go indie with my work, ELEGY was the first thing that came to mind. It was
polished (or so I thought at the time) and ready to go. However, as I
mentioned, it was originally supposed to be a one-shot. I hadn't even really
begun to develop the world around it, which is odd for me, because I'm always
world-building (even in my sleep, I think). All I knew about it was contained
within those 50,000 words, but I knew that it could be something more.
From the moment I decided to publish ELEGY, I began building
the world of Eisengoth around the city of Calessa, the primary setting of that
first book. It didn't take me long to put in the first few details; a free league
of cities, far removed from the older parts of civilization. The Free Cities
was the first thing I really nailed down, and after that the next block came in
easily: why were the Free Cities free? Well, because they'd broken away from
the tyrannical authority of the Old Kingdoms.
I really wanted a sort of decaying, decadent feeling in this
world. It's not a very nice place, honestly. Something really bad happened
about five thousand years in its past, and ever since then it's been kind of a
wreck. The world itself tries to kill the people who live there, and the
monsters aren't much help either. The Free Cities, I decided, were a sort of
frontier land, whereas the Old Kingdoms had existed for centuries, or even
millennia. Within the text of ELEGY I had mentioned a city called Aldur, north
of Calessa, so that was easy.
The next major part of the worldbuilding really came in when
I made my first attempt at writing a sequel to ELEGY. (It didn't go well.) I
laid down some landmarks as I began to write a travel story (I'm no good at
writing travel stories, so I don't know why I thought that was a good idea) and
set up the outlying areas.
When the draft failed, a lot of the details got scrubbed,
but the core remained. That was what allowed me to build the tiny border
kingdom that D'Arden visits in THE CORPSE KING, and what eventually led me to
exploring the Old Kingdoms when I wrote SORCERER'S CODE, the first entry in The
Elements of Sorcery.
As I wrote SORCERER'S CODE, pieces of the world kept falling
together. This was my first attempt at getting across that sort of desperate,
decaying feeling that infuses works like Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and the city
of Elenia was the perfect place to do it: a city where the monarch changes
every few months, and every time it does, the whole place gets incredibly drunk
and attempts to kill each other in merriment.
Like I said, it's not a very nice place.
With each installment of The Elements of Sorcery, I've tried
to explore different and contrasting locations while driving the story forward
with my snarky and clever protagonist, Edar Moncrief. So far he's visited three
separate locations, each stranger than the last, and there's two more
installments to come! Seeing the dangerous and unpleasant world of the Old
Kingdoms through Moncrief's eyes lets me paint a picture of a terrible place
that a reader actually wants to continue reading, because his voice draws the
reader in and shows them the world from the perspective of someone like them: a
guy who's just trying to get along without getting killed, or skinned alive, or
worse.
For all the places I've explored in Eisengoth, there are
many more which have names and general concepts, but have not yet been
detailed, and others which exist but only in sketchy visions inside my own head.
One of the things that I love to do is to find places and learn about them
within this world as I write along. If I already knew every detail about the
world before I set to writing the next installment, there wouldn't be anything
left to discover!
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