It never fails. As soon as I am hip deep in chaos, the muse decides it’s a great time to dump plot bunnies on me, en mass.

Right now my day job is still in chaos. I’m trying to learn a new job discipline in a very busy team where I’m supposed to solve all the problems of multiple years overnight. Plus I have to take several days away from the office to work at home because my youngest son’s daycare is closed. Not the best combination in the world.

I’m really late on one story and actively hiding from my editor. I have a 20k non-fiction chapter to turn in asap. I have several other stories waiting in line for attention. I have the Friday Flash. I have a special edition of shorts for the Fiction with Friction blog for Labor Day.

I have my own edits of Giving Thanks to do, which causes me to hide from another editor (I’m not really here, Nik).

I have editing, though my gracious EIC’s have let me cut back on it considerably.

I now have a cat in the vet hospital to worry about. He’s got a pancreatic infection and we’re praying he responds really well to the antibiotics he’s been on since last Thursday. If he does, he might be able to come home to a long regime of antibotics and a hope of recovery. It’s FAR better than the fears of cancer, lymphoma or such that had been near the top of the list.

Oh and I’m already fretting over Soldier Son who hasn’t even left the country yet. I’ll probably be completely freaked out when he actually gets deployed. Friends are going to have to take turns talking me down from emotional cliff.

I’ve started a weight loss and exercise effort.

And now what happens? The muse starts to dump story ideas on me. World building ideas. Character concepts. I seem to be walking around in a be-mused daze part of the time.

I was sitting today, impatient with the ideas I kept having to jot down, and realized that this is actually TYPICAL for me. My imagination seems to do its best work when I’m overwhelmed or way too busy. I’m starting to wonder if it’s a conspiracy or something. Maybe I’m exceptionally masochistic?

When do you get the most ideas? Is your muse as mean to you as mine is to me?

I’ve been writing for just over a year and I seem to get one question more often than any other:

How do you create your paranormal worlds?

Honestly, I often start with a little plot bunny of an idea and see where it will take me once I add some spice from my knowledge of modern paganism, mythology, and a dash of just being wacky. Sometimes the additions are from a single resource but sometimes they are from all over.

I do have a few cardinal rules for myself when I build a world:

The reader must be able to relate to the world.
I find it difficult to read stories where the world is so alien that it has nothing in common with my real world frames of reference. Would the life of a space-going amoeba call to me? Probably not. In order to not have the reader too off balance, it’s good to make sure the paranormal world is near enough to seem famailiar but different enough to be exciting and interesting.

The world must be consistent within itself.
The world has to make sense. I get really frustrated with worlds where rules contradict themselves and seem like they could never make a cohesive, unified world. If the people worship trees, should they cut down trees to use as fuel?

The world should be different
The world I build should not be like every other paranormal world out there or it loses its luster. The more similar it is, the more readers will expect it to behave the same way as similar worlds, as well. I really enjoy taking the more established paranormal mythos (vampires, werewolves, etc) and giving them a half twist to see what comes out.

The characters must be part of their world, not mine.
The ways the characters behave or act, the phrases they use, etc must be integral to the world they inhabit. This paranormal world must be their natural environment and not a departure that would cause them to make note of something that should be normal. So someone living in a world where vampires are the norm and aren’t hiding wouldn’t freak at just seeing one. A pagan character would probably not use “Hotter than Hell” if their belief system didn’t include a Hell that is believed to be hot.

This can be especially tricky because we all have a tendency to fall into commonly used phrases or slang and that’s something that will throw readers right out of a story.

When I’m developing “rules” for a world, I write them down. Sometimes in painful and annoying detail, even. Then I ask my ever-so-helpful husband to read through them for me and look for things that don’t make sense. Sometimes I make changes based on his feedback, but not always, I admit.

I use this written record to then write the story but new situations or ideas often emerge as I do so and I add those to the world notes and make sure they don’t clash with anything already there before I submit the story.