Worldbuilding
People often ask me how I come up with the places and ideas for my stories. Frankly, I find it extremely easy to come up with ideas. The outdoors is where I draw most heavily from. Hunting, horses, and fishing are deeply woven into me. For me, the year goes by as seasons of what I can do outside. Spring is turkey hunting in the Black Hills of South Dakota, summer is horseback riding and fishing, fall is the start of a marathon of deer hunting that runs from October first through the end of December. Then winter hits and I take a break.
When I create a world in my head, I draw from places that I know. The Black Hills of South Dakota is the place that I take most heavily from. Recently, I was thinking about why that is…why a state I don’t even live in and only visit a couple of times of the year? I do have family out there, but I have family other places too.
I still don’t have a great answer, but one thing I realized is that I KNOW the Hills. At least the places that I hunt. There’s a phrase that goes your knower knows what it knows, and I have to say that is one hundred percent true for how I feel about the Black Hills. I KNOW the mountains, the grass, the birds, the air, the soil. I can feel them in my bones. They don’t surprise me. I understand them, which sounds silly, but it’s true!
When I imagine the mountains in my fantasy world, I don’t see the Rockies, I see the Black Hills. We have unofficial names for many of the places that we hunt; God’s View, Little Round Top, the Altar, the Pond With the Dead Tree, Transmission (Trany) Alley, Windmill With the Purple Flowers being some of the most entertaining. I see the grassy prairie flat of the Altar running into it’s deep canyon when I envision the Wilds of Arda. The top of God’s View is how I envision the view from the Tiered Mountain of the dwarves.
Place after place speaks to me. Trany Alley is a rocky nightmare to drive your truck through. In my stories, I see it as a challenging maze of rocks that my characters must scale to reach their destination. In my stories, Lonrach Lake, next to Amaroth, comes from Angostura Reservoir at the bottom of the Hills.
Then there are the sounds and smells. I hear the birds happily trilling away, bluebirds sitting on a fence post or the noisy meadowlark singing his proud song. The shriek of a red-tailed hawk above me makes me dream of dragons bellowing in the sky. The smell of sagebrush after a rain is so strong in my mind, I can taste it just thinking about it.
All of this goes into how I feel about the world of my stories. I know I am far from a perfect author! But I hope that I can give my readers a taste of the places that I love through my stories.