CREATING UNFORGETTABLE WORLDS: WORLD-BUILDING IN SPECULATIVE FICTION

For the writer of any genre of speculative fiction, world-building can be the most vexing or the most rewarding aspect of writing. How to build the world? What to do with all of these details? When to stop building? How to make the world clear and alive for your reader without bogging
them down in details? All of these questions and more play a part as you, author/god, create the world in which your characters live, love, act, and die.

In this workshop, you will learn the main strategies for world-building, guiding principles that will keep your world building relevant and lively for both you and the reader, and different methods for working details about your world into your novel.

We’ll help you set up organization for your world-building, in addition to providing a number of activities to flesh out the culture and mechanics of how your world works.

Together, we can create worlds that your readers won’t ever want to leave.

Midnight Voss has been writing stories since she was eight years old. More recently, she has worked for several years as a successful ghostwriter and taught and worked with writers on academic and personal projects for over a decade as an instructor and a consultant. Together, she and Ivy Quinn co-authored a dragon-shifter urban fantasy, Frozen Ashes and Smoldering Shards, which appeared in the USA Today Bestselling Sirens and Scales boxset. She prefers to live in fantasy and dystopian worlds rather than contemporary and has taught world-building classes for Maryland Romance Writers. Currently, she is collaborating with Ivy on a revised and expanded edition of Frozen Ashes and starting Lavender Dusk, an f/f vampire series, and an m/m and f/f “Southern Pack” shifter series through Sapphic Alliance Fiction.