[pinit]I’ve been bashing away at our new fantasy series ‘Knights of the Red Band’. It’s a unique fantasy world where the sun remains stationary in the sky and life can only thrive on the ‘red band’ between the eternal sun and everlasting night.
One of the fascinating things in fantasy world building is that even a single change to how the world works can have deep ramifications … especially for a writer! As I began work on the series, I almost immediately realized that one cannot simply stop the sun in the sky (regardless of how reasonable) and still be able to provide a working narrative. Consider, for example, the following crisis that I immediately ran into as I sat down to write this world.
- My hero had to travel an enormous distance to get to the start of the book. If the sun is stationary in the sky, how do I describe how long it took him to get here?
- For that matter, how do I describe how far he has actually traveled? How would he know how far he traveled since there is not moving sun by which he can mark the time?
- And, since he would NEVER have seen any stars, how could he possibly navigate any appreciable distance across this world’s surface?
- And, more practical still, if I make up a really complex system of navigation and time keeping unique to this world — won’t that make my text practically unreadable? (“Navril had spent the last forty gobaks traveling nettleward more than a thousand hehaws…”)
Well, sometimes these are challenges that are the real fun in writing a fantasy world. You can see the my solution here … and I hope you can see how much fun I’m having in this new world. I can hardly wait to introduce you to it!
