Welcome to My World

It is incredibly hard for an aspiring novelist to write a fantasy book when you have no name for the country, don't know what you want your setting to be, and whether or not you want a contemporary or a historical-type world.


I should know.  I've tried.


I'm about 9800-something words into CR.  Thus far, all the names are pretty normal, there's a slight Victorian feel to the book, and the only language that's named is the one only two of the characters speak.  And I doubt they'll be speaking it any further into the book.  (And no, I don't Tolkienize myself and make up linguistics.)  I put:


(Character name here) said "(something here)" in (whatever language).


I finally took the time to name the country and give it a birth year and stuff.  I defined the social classes.


I'll add more to the world as the story demands, but I've gotten a start.


Now, for my other story, SFKBS, I have a culture made as the story demanded, laws, transportation so horses weren't really necessary, running (sort of) water, security system, hierarchy, economy as the story demanded, history of the Continent with which my characters live, along with some other little tidbits of histories of other places, the way the faery exist in the world...


But I've also been working on that story since 2005.  


But I also always knew it would be medieval-type, and that the technology wouldn't go past the technologies of our 1400s (my characters have a printing press).   Plus, there's a few other things because I'm American and I value hygiene and my characters needed a running water system without having to haul buckets.  The Romans had a system and they were before the Dark Ages.


For CR, at first I thought about setting it in Contemporary America.  Or I thought about setting it in Victorian England (origin of the Tinkerbell-esque fairy).  I decided to build my own world around the story.  I love historicals about as much as I love fantasy, but I am not about to try writing it at this point in my writing journey.