The malevolent squirrels in restful response, during our brief cease fire earlier this year.
Now if there's one thing that you should know about me, at least as a writer, is I do not like to plan anything at all, if it can be avoided. And let me tell you, I avoid planning/outlining my stories like it was a dirty piece of cutlery.
I think this abject hatred of outlining anything stems back to my high school days, where I had an English composition class and the teacher always wanted what she would call "details" to an essay, but would never elaborate on just exactly what they were. So I did my best and garnered a few flags (as Fs' were called back then). Ultimately, I barely passed that required class but never did figure out what she meant by "details", even 45 years later.
Back to the story.
This story, based on the character I was writing and the story idea I was executing, was going to need more than the drib-drabbling I was doing previously. It was going to need a world of some kind.
As I said previously, I knew of the concept called 'world building'. and have seen it executed very well throughout all kinds of fantasy and sci-fi genres. But with me being mostly a pantster with just a hint of planning in my veins (for my previous novels I would print out a previous chapter so that I wouldn't ever too far off course), this was going to be uncharted territory for me.
However, I did make a promise to myself early on, which was to meet every challenge head on and rise to the occasion, and world building was definitely out of my comfort zone by an urban mile.
Now I did have a sparse outline of an idea on what kind of world I needed to build, which was based on two characters that were introduced early on in the novella: a country with a monarchy based society and a Queen at the apex.
Now to be perfectly honest, I have no genuine idea as to why I originally chose to have a Queen as a ruler, but I would like to think it was keeping in the same structural viewpoint of doing things differently just for the sake of doing things differently.
Speaking of doing things differently, I'm from a generation where reading and learning about other cultures was actually a normal thing to pursue, and just because things are a certain way now, doesn't mean they were always that way.
to be continued
{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved
