Creating a new world in our own.

[logansrogue]

I love writing my own story. There's something very thrilling about carving out an adventure and a world entirely from your own mind - no 'canon' to fall back on. You have to make your own.

Amaryllis is really turning out to be a deeper and more exciting book than I'd imagined. All these underlying currents to the seemingly frivolous chick-lit facade (a mermaid and a human swap souls) that I think pushes it quite firmly into the realm of modern fantasy.

I'm really loving creating the Mermaid People. I am basing them on the worldwide myths and stories of mermaids. It thrilled me that there are even mermaid tales in Aboriginal Dreamtime stories. Isn't that fantastic? I'm making a catalogue of all the different mermaid races from different parts of the world, taking note of their anatomical differences, their local names, a diagram showing their tail and body patterns so one can tell which race they are, and their basic cultural structure (politics, lifestyle, etc).

I've got this book that I'm all sticking this into. There's a map there right now indicating where the Mermaid territories lie. I've researched the hell out of marine biology, so that there aren't any mermaids living in areas where it wouldn't be appropriate. Brightly coloured mermaids in tropical zones, plumper, fatter mermaids in the colder areas, things like that. And I've made subtle alterations to the 'human' half of the Mermaid, like a slightly streamlined skull, smaller nose, nostrils they can close with muscles, ears that they can do the same with. They're beautiful but they're not entirely human. :)

I'm also laying down the backgrounds of all the characters, digging into their pasts and trying to discover who they are, why they are, all that sort of thing.

The beauty of this is that it's *mine*. All of it! Amaryllis is mine. Miri is mine. Felix and Genevieve and Errol and Neryssa and Olga and Hadrian and just - all of them. All of them are mine. I get to choose their fates. And I'll write them out, and then share them (somehow, even if I can't get it properly published) and then, if I'm lucky and I've done my job right, they'll live in other people's minds too.

I just hope I can do my characters proud. :)

Comments

[tha-prez.livejournal.com]

i sense some bitterness there. Although if she did let her characters do what they wanted then they'd all be either dead, pregnant and voldemort probably would have just said meh at the end and it wouldnt have been satisfying. hehe

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Lots of bitterness. I own my bitterness. Bitterness FTW! :D

Naah, Hermione wouldn't have married Ron, I reckon. LOL!

[tha-prez.livejournal.com]

hermoine would have been the old woman with too many cats.