I recently took a part-time job at the local newspaper. It’s been years since I worked in a newspaper office, but it’s been fun hanging out in one again. My job is basically that of a glorified typist–taking the little meeting notices and “look what I did” photos people e-mail in, and making them fit AP style. I don’t have to do any of the fact verifying–if they send in the science fair winners with their names all misspelled, it goes in the paper that way.
The thing about newspapers, though, is that they have to be factual. They frown upon reporters making stuff up. (Opinion falls into a different category, okay?) Which is probably the main reason it’s been a long time since I’ve worked at a newspaper. I’m more of a natural maker-up-of-things. Moreover, my romance sub-genre of choice (at the moment, anyway) is fantasy.
The nice thing about fantasy is that you get to make it all up. The tough thing about fantasy is that you have to make it all up. My first series takes place in a fantasy universe with societies that operate in distinctly different ways from most human societies. While my characters look human, they aren’t.
I created two complete societies in The Compass Rose, with individual governmental systems, religions, family structures–the whole nine yards. By the time I got through, I was so sick of making stuff up, I decided we were going to have horses and cows and cats and dogs, and we weren’t having any elf/gnome/tengu variations on the humans, either. Only one kind of people. It’s truly fantasy.
And at the same time, there have to be touchstones of reality–something to allow the reader to believe the story might be real.
So the characters travel across a vast plain much like the one where I lived until recently, and cross into mountains like where I used to live. I used elements drawn from my studies in history–military tactics from the early days of gunpowder, river travel, and other little tidbits that got stuck in my mind from somewhere–just bent so they’d fit in my “world.”
Then I started working on a new series. After much consideration and procrastination, I decided I didn’t want to create a whole new universe with a complete new history. I took familiar history and twisted it just a bit. That meant I had to do more research so I could get the twists coordinated with what really was going on in Victorian England in this era.
But actually, that’s less work in a lot of ways than making it all up. I can use the attitudes and mores of the time to create more conflict, without having to develop an entire new history to explain it. We know about the Victorian era, or we think we do, so I can begin there, and just explain the twists. Which are pretty twisty, since in my Victorian England, they use magic and spells as easily as–well, patent medicines.
This is where normally we ask a clever question and try to get people to comment. But darn if I can think of one. I’m just trying to share a little bit of what’s involved in–well, making stuff up. To illuminate the twisty insides of a romantic fantasy author’s head (which must be a scary place, except, you know, I live inside it, so maybe it’s not that scary to me, except for sometimes).
So–comment anyway, if only to tell me what question I should be asking. Or ask a question yourself. This blog has a lot of smart authors. Somebody’s bound to know the answer. 
