You know how it is. One minute you’re minding your own business, writing stuff and hoping it’s not sludge.

The next, you’ve got an entire fantasy world complete with a compendium of unique humanoid races, maps, a magic system, religions, and a dream.

Here’s what happened.

Project Name Malthea

Way back in the day, when The Silverwing was my only novel project (I can’t even imagine), I watched Mike Flanagan’s Oculus and it gave me an idea.

I’ve always been intrigued by genre-mashing, and for some reason Oculus got me thinking about a potential horror-fantasy. I was in the shower (where most of my ideas show up) when my brain went, “What if instead of a mirror, it was a sick-ass golden sword in a high fantasy world?”

Thus was birthed what was originally Project Name Malthea, about a race of docile, peace-loving elf-like guys with grey skin and pointy ears that wiggle like a horse’s when they’re irritated or amused. I saw a strange, murky world with a brown sky, and a seemingly socialist utopia society, where the draura (those grey guys) live in peace and happiness, with a flat population rate and a Ruler who actually has their subjects’ best interest in mind.

They’re also watched over by their gods, who actually speak to them and are quite real.

I wanted to play around with the basic family unit. I’ve always been fascinated by “primitive” societies where the family unit was more than just a heterosexual couple and their children. I wanted to see if, by putting the sexes together in exclusive households called Circles, much of the strife and friction of society would be eased, as competition for “mates” would be virtually nonexistent. Instead, I decided that the draura only mate with intent to reproduce once a year, and the rest of the year they stick with those of their same-sex households, usually comprised of three to five others.

Now, in my casual but enthusiastic study of anthropology and history books, a very common factor in the “decline” of a people is overpopulation: resources become abundant due to farming, specialized labor develops, with that comes social hierarchy and thus inequality, where the food and resources are hoarded by the top and wanted by the bottom.

So that’s why I thought I’d have, now stay with me, the draura all technically be homosexual.

If they only mate with the opposite sex once a year, the population growth is very slight, and if about the same amount of children are born every year, one would reason that, in a society devoid of much crime and poverty, roughly that same amount of elders would also die every year.

Thus the flat population.

So that was the basis of my worldbuilding here. In a theoretical society devoid of the problems that result from population ballooning, how would everyday life look for a people living in such a utopia?

And also… what would happen if I introduced chaos and destruction to said utopia via a cursed golden sword?

Thus Project Name Malthea took off, and I used it as a welcome reprieve whenever The Silverwing had me stumped.

I never set out with intentions to write more in this world I’d created, but I was also much more focused on The Silverwing to give it much future thought.

That’s why Project Name Romantasy got me so excited.

Project Name Romantasy

A few months ago, I had a random idea (most of them are completely out of the blue) to try my hand at writing romantasy. Not because I’m particularly passionate about the genre, but because I’ve read enough to know that the genre is getting flooded and bloated with a bunch of the same thing over and over. Anyone who’s been on Bookstagram has seen those fantastic reels of people making fun of the romantasy formula.

How can I do something fresh and new in the romantasy genre: do something I haven’t seen a million times?

I was also just recently finished with All That’s Left in the World and had been thinking about queer representation in genre fiction. It can be a mixed bag, but a lot of the time (enough that people have noticed and pointed it out), queer characters in romantasy are usually only queer for representation and it doesn’t change the story at all, and they’re almost always side characters that have little bearing on the main plot. Saige has a great article about a specific example of this problem here.

These two elements got together and had the baby that was Project Name Romantasy, where I would create a fresh and new story following queer main characters- there are no Fae, no fated mates, and no stupid inexplicable magic systems that change depending on what the author wants to happen. Just two guys, a looming war, and an unwilling partnership.

I sat down and started to plan it out- my plot, my main conflict, the big reveal. The prospect of building an entire high fantasy world from scratch really intimidated me.

Then I realized I’d already done that. I had a perfectly good high fantasy world just full of untapped potential.

Thus was born Scrolls of Malthea.

Scrolls of Malthea

One of the reasons I never set out specifically to do a series is because I, as a reader, get really exhausted only ever reading massive series. Sometimes all the books aren’t out yet, sometimes only books 1, 3, and 6 are “worth reading”, and so forth. What I do like are fantasy standalones or duologies. It’s simple, and forces the author not to dawdle *cough Rebecca Yarros cough*. But you know what’s really cool?

Fantasy series with lots of books, but you can jump in anywhere. Think Redwall. It’s all set in the same world and a lot of the time, the same place, but you can jump around and read basically wherever you want- you don’t suffer from lacking prior knowledge of four books before, and it’s low commitment. The Chronicles of Narnia are a bit like this- you can read Prince Caspian and The Horse and His Boy and not be confused at all if you haven’t read the others. They’re good standalone stories that just take place in the same world.

That’s what I decided I wanted for this.

I created a timeline. I plotted my two active projects (Project Name Malthea has been re-dubbed Cursed Sword) along the timeline and started thinking up other occurrences throughout the history of this world involving the different humanoid races and how I imagine they would interact with one another given their temperaments and tendencies. I’ve since conjured the concept of a third novel, taking place after the events of Romantasy. You don’t need to have read any of the other books to understand what’s happening in each, and you can skip around depending on what you want: a cursed object horror story, a romance, or a nautical adventure.

Cursed Sword currently sits at about 18,000 words, and it needs a bit more plotting before I can fill in the rest, though I know how it’s going to end. Romantasy is flying out of my fingers, current word count 23,000 and I only started it in November. I’m having a lot of fun writing the two simultaneously, and with each plot point I add a little bit more lore and worldbuilding to the other (I take breaks from those with Stasis).

While I would never claim to be as good at worldbuilding as Brandon Sanderson or Christopher Paolini, I can admire it for how much damn fun it is.

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Monthly Writing Goal Update

13,559 / 20,000 words

Active Projects

What a week! I tend to let my attentions wander where they like to naturally, much like letting a horse graze while riding it, and this week I found myself grazing on an inactive project.

There’s a blog post about it coming in a few weeks, but in short, I realized what was holding me back on my gothic novel Kaja, and since that moment, I’ve been pounding away at the keyboard getting this thing to take shape. I realized it wanted to be a novella this whole time, and now I’m basically just channeling the story like Stephen King on a hot streak.

I did also get some words down for Venetian Mask, but the count is still so small for that one that it’s not even enough to put on a progress bar yet. But it’s good to know I’ve got it going now too!

While I do have both Scrolls of Malthea stories all plotted out til the very end, they are taking a bit more time to cook, as high fantasy tends to do. So it’s been great to lower the heat a little bit with my fun, lower pressure projects like Stasis and Kaja.

Can’t wait to see how far I get by the end of the month!

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