Today my friend Kaz has a guest post about world building in her book The Complete Check Your Luck Agency. (Scroll down to the next post or click here to read my review) Before you read how she cheated you should know a little about her.
After you read her post be sure to leave a comment as Kaz is giving away a $25.00 Amazon gift card to one lucky commenter on the tour.
KS "Kaz" Augustin loves writing human
stories, whether set on Earth or out among the stars. Malaysian-born, she has
travelled a goodly portion of the world and lived to tell the tale! Her urban
fantasy release, The Complete Check Your Luck Agency, consists of five books,
exploring the myths and legends of the melting-pot that is south-east Asia.
Come for the food, stay for the monsters! (Ghosts included at no extra charge.)
Worldbuilding and Checking Your Luck
I'm supposed to talk to you about world-building today; specifically, how I did it for The Complete Check Your Luck Agency. That's easy and will take two words: I cheated.
You see, the idea of The Check Your Luck Agency came to me when I was listening to a taxi-driver. We were on our way to Suntec City in Singapore, and had to pass the Marina Sands resort, still under construction. I'm not sure if I can fully relate the kind of modern, skyscraper newness around Singapore. The towers of blinding white and blue tinted glass rising out of thick greenery, cut through by six-lane freeways. Arcs and bubbles, bridges resembling nets, theatres looking like thorned fruit, all gleaming and polished to the last square centimetre. And, in the middle of all this modernity, my Indian taxi-driver was telling me about the curse on his newly-born son, the brother and sister-in-law responsible for it, and the priests and bomohs (witch-doctors) he had been consulting in order to get the curse lifted. I'm a writer so I knew there was a good story in all this. What my taxi-driver was telling me was no different to other stories I'd heard since coming back to live in Malaysia. All I had to do was open my ears and eyes, listen and observe.
And that's what I did. To be honest, I had to leave out more material than I put in, and I still ended up with 227,000 words, spread across five books! This is in complete contrast to how I normally work, where I build up elements of my universes and then populate as I see fit. (So sorry, Jo, no great insights in this particular post!) South-east Asia is just so...huge, so full of myths and legends that I had to be honest with myself from the beginning and come to terms with the fact that I was barely going to scratch the surface of the region.
As an added benefit, you'll also find an extensive glossary at the back to help the reader, and explanations and descriptions of the local food. One reviewer said that the Check Your Luck books are “food porn”, a term that really tickled me, so I'll mention that here. I've also tried to keep the characters and way of speaking as authentic as possible. If you're interested in an urban fantasy that takes place absolutely outside of a Western setting, with lots of food (lol), I'd be happy for you to join the Check Your Luck gang and try your luck against the latest bad guy set to take over the world!
Remember, Kaz is giving away a $25.00 Amazon gift card to one lucky commenter on the tour.
Follow the tour and comment; the more you comment, the better your chances of winning. The tour dates can be found here:
Links:
The Complete Check Your Luck Agency is available
from:
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