Plot Monkeys

I do remember the first time I met Jessica Andersen. It was many moons ago and I was flying into Boston to attend the RWA chapter’s conference in Natick. I was flying in at the same time as my editor, Brenda Chin, so she arranged for us to meet up and the nice person from the conference who was going to pick her up would take me along for the ride. That very nice person was Jessica Andersen! She was so funny and accommodating and SMART, I just knew she’d sell very soon. I wasn’t wrong. She soon sold to Harlequin Intrigue and her books ROCK. She’s now launching a brand new paranormal series and she’s here today, thanks to Carly, to tell us about how she built that world. I, for one, am fascinating. Over time, I’ve found that worldbuilding is not something only done by fantasy and paranormal writers. Every writer can benefit from the techniques, particularly when they are creating a series. Thanks, Jessica, for sharing your knowledge and your Saturday with us!

————–
From Atlantis to the Mayan Pyramids: Piecing Together a World

Hey Plotmonkeys! Welcome to my world… or rather a discussion of how I went from an idea to the universe that became Nightkeepers.

The ancient Mayan Long Count calendar ends on December 21, 2012. On that day, the sun, moon and earth will align at the galactic center, in a conjunction that scientists predict could trigger cataclysmic upheavals (sun spots, magnetic reversals, etc.). My new series, the Novels of the Final Prophecy, tell of the ancient Mayan myths that come to life in the last four years before 12/21/2012, and their opposition by the Nightkeepers, who are the modern-day descendants of an ancient magic-wielding race sworn to protect mankind from the apocalypse.

In the first book, Nightkeepers, the last king of the magi is forced to team up with a sexy Miami-Dade narcotics detective in order to reunite his scattered warriors and fight the gods of the Mayan underworld. Wielding ancestral magic based on bloodletting and sex, the king will have to choose between his duty and his love for the human woman who is the gods’ destined sacrifice.

Okay, so that’s the blurb. Seems simple, right? Wrong! It took me nearly eighteen months of research, writing and rewriting before I could hammer out a workable proposal, partly because it was a big-a$$ed idea, and partly because it wasn’t a mythology that’s really been done in-depth before within the genre (to my knowledge, anyway), so there weren’t any shortcuts. I mean, you say ‘vampire’ or ‘werewolf’ and you’ve got a common starting point for reader expectation, right? Not so much in this case. I built this sucker from scratch.

In the process of constructing the Nightkeepers’ world, I eventually realized I was using five major questions that are actually applicable to most story types, not just paranormals. They have to do with the way a reader is introduced to the world. . . and I think it’s important to remember that every story involves worldbuilding. Regardless of whether you’re writing an historical, a contemporary, an urban fantasy, or whatever, your reader needs to be grounded in the sights, sounds and smells that the characters experience. And that means building a world around them. So let’s look at the questions I leaned on when writing Nightkeepers:

Question 1: What major facts underpin the world?

Do dragons exist in your world? Is it set far into the future? Is it placed at a beach house on Cape Cod? What are some rock-solid facts about the world that shape everything within it? In my case, I had two major facts that informed my world:

Fact #1: On December 21, 2012, the sun, earth and moon will align in the precise center of the Milky Way galaxy, and scientists think this conjunction could precipitate some potentially catastrophic global events.

Fact #2: The five-thousand-year-long cycle of the ancient Mayan Long Count Calendar ends on that day, and some people speculate that this could signal the end of life as we know it.

Now, I’m a huge disaster movie fan, and I love it when a larger-than-life, super-sexy hero steps in to save the day. So I asked myself, if the end date does, indeed, signify the coming of doomsday, who is going to save the world?

Enter the Nightkeepers, a group of magi sworn to avert the 2012 apocalypse.

Question 2: What are some minor facts that inform the world?

Next, I sat down to really research the ancient Mayans and the rules of their world. I identified a number of details I wanted to include in the stories, including the characteristics of the Mayan underworld, Xibalba, and their gods and myths. In particular, I was fascinated with how they worshipped their dead ancestors as being next to the gods, and how there were two main ways for the ancient Mayans to talk to the gods: a near-death experience. . . or an orgasm. Hello paranormal romance!

Now the world was starting to take shape: the Nightkeepers are magi who draw their powers in a manner similar to the rites of the ancient Mayans, and for whom lovemaking is a way to access additional strength. However, they’re modern men and women, too, which means the needs of the rituals (blood sacrifice, sex) often conflict with their modern-day ethics and expectations.

Question 3: Are there any cool controversies?

Once I had the nature of my magi established, I looked to add interesting layers to their world. To do this, I searched for debates or controversies surrounding the ancient Mayans and the 2012 end date. I found several that added the potential for cool conflicts and backstory.

Debate # 1: Is the end date a transition to more global consciousness or Armageddon?
There is a great deal of debate over what the ancient Mayans actually thought might happen on 12/21/2012 (if anything). This has spilled over into modern day, with a large number of spiritualists believing that the end date actually signals a shift to an age of enlightenment rather than a planet-wide catastrophe.

Debate # 2: Could the Mayan shaman-priests tell the future? Numerous small horoscope-like prophecies exist within the three interrelated calendars of the ancient Mayans, many of which can be interpreted as having come true. The idea of a life shaped by culture and myth interested me, as did thinking about how my modern-day magi would deal with having their lives ruled by thousand year-old prophecies.

Debate # 3: Were the ancient Mayans somehow influenced by other, distant cultures? Back in college, I took a course on pseudoscience, which is basically the use of scientific methods to argue in favor of things like Bigfoot and Atlantis. The class included studying von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, which argues in part that the ancient Egyptians and Mayans were influenced by alien cultures, based on (among other things) hieroglyphs that appear to show humans sitting inside space capsules. And while there isn’t much evidence in favor of the alien thing (yet, anyway), there are certainly parallels between the ancient Egyptians and Mayans, and among other cultures worldwide throughout history, which I think is wicked cool. Which leads me to the next question…

Question #4: Where will the world deviate from the historical record?

My amazing editor, Kara Cesare, made the point that romance readers, especially those who are likely to be drawn to a book like Nightkeepers, are some of the smartest, most discriminating fans out there. As such, she warned, I’d better keep my facts straight and either get them right, or have a good reason for getting them wrong.

For the most part I stuck pretty close to the historical record, but there was one critical point where I did not, namely the physical appearance of the Nightkeepers. The magi have fiercely territorial natures and a protective streak a mile wide. . . and they look like modern Anglo-type humans, only bigger and more charismatic. In addition, some of the spell words and rituals they use are, by necessity, a mix of ancient and modern Mayan languages, with a hint of Egyptian and Hopi mythology thrown into the mix. So how does that compute?

Question #5: How can I rationally explain the deviations?

The answer lies in the answers to the questions above.

The first fact is the astral conjunction that will occur in 2012. The last time this conjunction occurred was in 24,000 B.C., and geological record suggests that there were some serious global upheavals around that time. Some pseudoscientists even point to the conjunction having triggered the sinking of. . . you guessed it. Atlantis.

Logically, then, I could craft a world in which the conjunction looses demons on the earth and sinks the advanced civilization of Atlantis. A few of the Atlantean magi survive, however, and drive the demons back behind the energy barrier that powers their magic. Then they vow to sustain their culture and magic until the next such conjunction, twenty six thousand years later, on 12/21/2012.

Over those millennia, they live with the ancient Egyptians, teaching them writing and science. When Akhenaten turns the kingdom of Egypt monotheistic and slaughters the priests of the old religion, the surviving magi cross the ocean and wind up in Central America, where they begin living with the Olmec and repeat the process, boostrapping the indigenous peoples into what becomes the Mayan Empire. When the Conquistadors and their missionaries once again drive the Nightkeepers from their homes, they take refuge with the Hopi, and eventually become assimilated into the developing US of A.

Thus emerged the picture of a group of magi who have been driven from their homes several times throughout their history, and who have been persecuted because of their polytheistic belief system. This persecution eventually drives them underground, until the Nightkeeper children are raised in secret, their powers known only to their blood-bound protectors, the winikin. And now, in 2008, the calls are going out, and the Nightkeepers are being reassembled as the barrier between the earth and underworld weakens in the years leading up to 2012.

In conclusion

Bringing this back to the more general sense, hoping to help you look at your own story in a bit of a new light, I think at least the first three questions could apply to worldbuilding in any genre. In addition, I’d argue that the fourth and fifth do, as well, if we replace the word ‘history’ with ‘expected’… and that in deviating from the expected, a writer will make her story far more interesting.

An historical writer might choose to use revisionist history, or think up an interesting explanation for why an anachronism works. A contemporary writer might change a fact or perception of our ‘real’ world. This is perhaps less concrete for a science fiction/fantasy/paranormal writer, who is generally making up his/her own world, yet there needs to be internal consistency.

Overall the upshot (for me, at least), and the biggest thing I learned while reading Nightkeepers is that romance readers are very smart, and they hate illogic. At the same time, they hate predictability. So the take home for writers as I see it? DO SOMETHING UNEXPECTED… BUT ONLY IF IT MAKES SENSE!

And, as always, have fun with it. I know I do!
————-
Julie here again…do go check out Jessica’s website. It’s about the coolest website I’ve seen in a very long time!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Julie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.