When I started writing about the guardians, I thought I would make things easy on myself. I set the main characters in the sonoran desert where I grew up. I set them in the modern day world, set it up so that everything would be basically research-free. That did make things easier in terms of setting, locations, descriptions.
Then, I started adding magic. Shapeshifters, for one thing. That required all kinds of rules–do their clothes go with them, how does it look, what is the process? Not to mention the fact that not all my shifters live within the same rules, some have different ones all together. They use magic, accessing ley lines of energy. There are major and minor spells, each shifter able to use them to varying degrees. There is an entire religious system tied into this magic that required written laws, mythology, lore and backstory. I have a huge One Note notebook with tons of written notes and still it doesn’t encompass everything I’ve written yet. I need to get the main house drawn up, even, so I know whose room is where.
Add to these things the difficulty of following my own rules. Things as simple as times of day have to be carefully written, along with moon phases and travel. If my character shifted in the last scene, she’d better be naked in the next one, for example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to rewrite a scene for breaking one of my own rules.
Yeah. This is the opposite of easy. Oops.
