Hello everybody!
Today, I’m really excited to share a guest post from author Jamie Smith on the theme of worldbuilding, as part of the blog tour for his book Frostfire. Onto the post!
Frostfire is set in a mountainous land of ice and snow. However, nothing else I write has been. I’m past ten draft books now, and few of them even share similar settings.
Honestly, I’m not sure I could maintain interest in writing if I could only ever travel to a single, uniform world. Maybe that makes me greedy, but there it is.
Of course, I cheat a little – all my fantasy books technically share the same world, they are simply set very, very far away from each other, with different characters and cultures in each. I love the process of making these places fit together though, so that the narrative and the world are intertwined. I don’t want my setting to feel like simple gloss on the story, but to be integral to it.
I get inspired by the sheer variety of cultures here on Earth (Frostfire has a few echoes of Tibet in it). So many of these places get little depiction in fantasy works. There are few African inspired worlds, or South American ones, or… well, you probably get the picture. That often leads to a kind of white-washed genre (in more than one sense of the word), and my interests lie in creating a magical mirror to our own world, not one that simply renders it duller but with more farm boys with destinies and inherited swords.
Magic for me is key to getting the fantasy to light up, once I’ve got that picture of a desolate desert, or a lava filled lake, or floating island in the sky. Frostfire’s icy companions are a prime example – I want no simple magic spell books in my work, only the weird and unusual, if I can find a way to work it in.
Hopefully you’ll see it the way I do – but even if you don’t I expect I’ll keep spilling the ideas out on to the page. I’ve got plans for books to keep me going for the next decade, and if anything, the pile just keeps growing. There are an infinite number of worlds out there to build, and I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.
FROSTFIRE by Jamie Smith, out now in paperback (£6.99, Chicken House)
Find out more at www.chickenhousebooks.com and follow Jamie @JamieHBSmith and jhbsmith.com
Golden Books Girl 
I love the idea of a whole, huge world where stories are set, where the narratives maybe never explicitly cross but there’s a what if chance.
This book sounds excellent and the cover is lovely!
Cora | http://www.teapartyprincess.co.uk/
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