Contrary to popular belief, I have not actually met my demise.  Having spent the entire month of November focused on NaNoWriMo, I have not been giving the WordPress daily prompts the slightest.  It was an exhausting month of work, writing for as long as I can keep my eyes open, and resting.  In the end, it was worth it— I wrote 50,000 words!!  I have a quite a few more to write before the story is complete, and then some editing.  I will consider sharing a chapter from the book at some point, but I am going to take a short break first, before I get back to it. 

After spending a month writing science-fiction, coming back to fantasy is…. well, an interesting feeling, to say the least.  In sci-fi, there is a certain kind of freedom.  You can make new things, new races, push certain boundaries.  Really, you just have to follow a few laws of science.  You get to write out the future, to create something that hasn’t even happened yet.  In fantasy, it’s the other way around… especially with Lorata, which really is a medieval world.  You have to research history, to learn how they did things back then. It’s the difference between torchlight and LEDs, wagons and hoverpods.  I learned the names of different pieces of armor in order to write about Lorata, as well as the progression of certain scientific discoveries and advancements.  I can change a little bit, sure, since Lorata would focus on different areas more than Earth did, but for the most part, there is a limit to what I can make up.  The magic, yes… the faeries and dragons and deities are all mine to design, but the noble hierarchy is based on my research.  Certain logistics, like borders and knights obeying their rulers, remain fixed. 

In a way. it’s nice to have certain rules you can fall back on, things that you can be sure about… it’s like security.  For me, fantasy is just the right mix of history and make-believe.  But sci-fi is not less fun to play around with– and to expand your horizons!