Building a World That Answers to Me

I grew up inside other people’s worlds and studying how they work.

My father’s shelves were lined with science fiction and fantasy paperbacks — dense, dog-eared volumes whose maps and invented languages felt as consequential as history. I didn’t read them only for plot. I lingered over how things worked. Why the magic obeyed certain limits. Why political systems collapsed in some stories and endured in others. Even as a child, I was paying attention to structure.

I have always been drawn to coherence — to what allows a place, real or imagined, to sustain its weight. Fantasy fails when it drifts. It endures when its internal laws feel inevitable.

More than a year ago, I began testing a private question: what would it take to construct a world disciplined enough to resist convenience? One shaped not by spectacle, but by principle?

I began asking different questions — not for prose, but for architecture.

If memory were not recollection but infrastructure, how would geography respond?

If joy operated as a force, what would contain it?

If magic existed, what constraints would prevent it from eroding consequence?

In refining those questions, Wenna emerged — not as something generated, but as something clarified. The lore of Whimwillow developed slowly, through revision and resistance. I mapped governing rules before drafting scenes. I removed language that exceeded a twelve-year-old’s reach. I tracked continuity across chapters. I dismantled abstractions that sounded persuasive but lacked weight.

Architecture requires judgment — and judgment cannot be outsourced.

The emotional through-line, the restraint necessary for middle grade, the calibration of a child’s perspective — those demanded decisions shaped by lived reading and sustained revision.

Worldbuilding, I have come to understand, is less about invention than coherence. It asks a writer to decide what she believes about consequence, inheritance, repair — and then to build a terrain that answers to those beliefs.

After decades of inhabiting other authors’ imagined geographies, I set out to construct one governed by my own logic.

Whimwillow is not an escape from reality. It is an inquiry into it — built carefully enough, I hope, to hold.