Daily Archives: September 5, 2025

Building My World

I have been a published author for ten years. I need to pause at that number. I’m amazed I’m still in this space. I’m also surprised I still have several stories yet to tell.

Call me ill-informed. I thought world building was limited to fantasy and paranormal writing. When I started storytelling, I freely used real landmarks in my books, which was good, I thought. Listing familiar landmarks gave the reader a point of reference. But as time and the world changed, some of those landmarks ceased to exist. I felt keeping them in my books made the stories dated. I don’t write historical, although in time, today’s contemporary fiction will become historical in a sense.

So, I made an artistic decision to remove the real landmarks and replace them with fictional ones. I was now world building.

I was further encouraged to do this after reading through the catalog of another romance author. I love her style, but what caught my attention was how she cleverly interjected this one character through out most of her catalog. In some way or other, he and his family, and some of the locations are mentioned throughout her catalog. It was brilliant and got me to thinking how I could do the same thing. In a sense, I had dabbled with this when I pulled a barely mentioned character out of The Alex Chronicles and gave him his own story, A Southern Gentleman. Jeremiah and Avery were secondary characters in a couple of The Alex books. They are now part of The Alex Chronicles world. They may also pop up in another book or series later.

This author created a world with celebrities, gossip magazines, fashion designers, university, sports teams, a luxury hotel chain and some other businesses. Once you start reading her books, at some point you begin to wonder who might pop up, because she drops hints throughout the books. All you have to do is pay attention. It’s like that game Clue. In this case, most of the characters lead back to one family.

Reading her books really stirred my creative juices. I thought about the books I’d written and some in the works. I’m doing a rewrite now and I’ve brought over a couple of elements from another book. I also created a list of fictional New York and San Francisco locations, because most of my books are based in those locations.

I’m jotting notes for a new series that will be loaded with world building. It will also be the first time I do a sports theme, which is way off brand for me. But once I add a few fashion and faith elements with some heat, I think it will be good…I hope.

World building is easy when you think about it. All it takes is a little imagination and I’ve got a lot of that.

Some of Tracy’s Books