No really, I am God. And so are you. Don’t believe me? Then you’ve not actually accepted the idea that you are an author because when you are and you know it, you realize that in your world, you are the supreme being.

That guy at the bar is a real bastard and needs to die, right? The protagonist is high on her pedestal and needs to be brought down with a glorious crash to earth? The Earth is in peril an only one decision will lead to deliverance or destruction? Who decides if any of that happens?

Where does this all begin. Well for my co-author and I it began when we realized we didn’t even have a world. We had a story and events and characters but they were all floating in the nebulous space of our brain. Where the hell were they doing all the things? And when was it happening?

We had a lot of decisions to make. We knew the genre and as with script writing (which is my primary writing background) there were tropes that were pillars not to be changed lest we try and re-invent the genre but there were also a lot of areas we could change. How do we take a well established genre with elves, dwarves (don’t get me started on the dwarves or dwafres aspect), humans and halflings and make it our own while remembering we are treading on a path well paved by giants of the genre who came before us?

It took weeks of discussions, ideas rejected, tweaked, reworked and completely transformed. And like the proverbial loose string, once you pull it the whole bloody lot starts coming unraveled.

We’d make one physiological change to the High Elves and that led to a question about another physiological aspect of the dwarves. Why do humans hate the Elves and everyone hate the halflings? What about the deities they worship?

Names were always something I struggled with. I was in awe when I’d read Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” series at the ability he had to come up with the names of all the characters and places. “How’s he do that?” Now, I’ve drawn the map, named a lot of the places, as well as the days of the week (10 days for our world), the months (15 in all), the deities of four races (good and bad totaling 28) and come up with the name of the Empire. I look back on it and to be honest, it was hard, but not really as hard as I thought it would be. Why is that?

Simple. Because it is OUR world. The one my co-author and I created. And the short and sweet of it is, there are no wrong answer. Only things we don’t like. No one can tell us it’s not right because I am God. I share this ink stained Olympus with another God and we cooperate.

And as an author, you damn well are too. So create your world as you will. There are no wrong answers. You need only about getting the execution, the plans of it all, right. But the world isn’t wrong. Make it!