When you set up a fantasy world, you have three choices as to where to put it. Backwards, Forwards, or sideways. I had to decide which to use. Some writers use the distant past, like Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. I knew that wasn’t going to work for me, as I am going to have characters quote Shakespeare and other great writers. The Future? Some fine writing is done with fantasy worlds set in some sort of post-holocaust world. e.g. Terry Brooks’ Shannara series. I’d like that better as it lets me keep my Shakespeare quotes, but that gets into other issues an involves some sort of depressing holocaust. I decided to go sideways through the looking glass like Lewis Carroll.
This begs the question: how do you make a fantasy world real while putting it ‘elsewhere’. I didn’t want a world with no obvious connections at all to our world. I wanted a world with faint, but tangible connections. Since I’m a history fan, I was drawn to the lost Roanoke Colony in Virginia. What if they weren’t really ‘lost’ but had gone through the looking glass some how?
That was the basic idea for where to put my fantasy world. For reason’s I’ll explain in the next post, I made it a bit more complicated than that, to make it more realistic. But that was the hub of the idea.