Episode 132: Just a Small Town Worldbuild, ft. CHERIE PRIEST

Worldbuilding for Masochists

A lot of the time, fantasy worldbuilding invokes huge maps, spanning civilizations and continents, with characters traversing vast distances on their epic quests. But what about the worldbuilding that happens with a tighter focus on an intimate, even insular location? Guest Cherie Priest joins us to discuss creating small towns just ripe for gothic mysteries, peculiar traditions, and weird, haunting circumstances.

What does isolation -- either naturally developing, imposed by larger-scale conditions, or willfully chosen -- do to a group of people? What sorts of lore and habits will spring up in such areas? And how do you, as a worldbuilder, think about their infrastructure -- or the lack thereof -- and how that might affect your characters and your plot?

[Transcript TK]

Our Guest: Cherie Priest is the author of two dozen books and novellas, most recently the Booking Agents mysteries Grave Reservations and Flight Risk. She also wrote gothic horror project The Toll and haunted house thriller The Family Plot – as well as the hit YA graphic novel mash-ups I Am Princess X and its follow up, The Agony House. But she is perhaps best known for the steampunk pulp adventures of the Clockwork Century, beginning with Boneshaker. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and the Locus award – which she won with Boneshaker.

Cherie has also written a number of urban fantasy titles, and composed pieces (large and small) for George R. R. Martin’s shared world universe, the Wild Cards. Her short stories and nonfiction articles have appeared in such fine publications as Weird Tales, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies – and her books have been translated into nine languages in eleven countries.

Although she was born in Florida on the day Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, for the last twenty years Cherie has largely divided her time between Chattanooga, TN, and Seattle, WA – where she presently lives with her husband and a menagerie of exceedingly photogenic pets.