k_a_webb | Thoughts about bonus material (Reply)

February is going to be the first month this year where I focus on posting bonus material, because working on the World Walkers collection last year has made me realise exactly how much there is still to work on. I have fourteen different collections (which may go down to thirteen with what I now know about the ‘Astral’ World) and every one of them seems to keep growing. With every story I write, with every piece of bonus material, I learn something new about my collections, something new about the worlds I write about, and it feels like it’s a job that will never end. It’s something that is both wonderful and terrifying at the same time, because I want to write for the rest of my life so knowing how large the job I’ve set myself is makes me happy but at the same time it can feel like I’ll never get eveything done.

Even with all the work I did on the World Walkers there’s still much more to do. I have the worlds, but I have very little else, so I know that the next thing on the list is naming continents, cities, towns, rivers, and who knows what else. This isn’t something I only have to do for the World Walkers collection either. Every single one of the collections needs more fleshing out, because even though I thought of all these things before I started I didn’t do as much work as I probably should have done, but then I made my decision based on the feeling that I either needed to do something with my writing or find something else. At that point I knew I wanted people to read what I was writing, although I never honestly thought I was a good enough writer to have people actually want to read my fiction. So I jumped in at the deep end with some basic ideas and started going. There are things I wrote based on ideas that changed very quickly as I started exploring my worlds.

The Donor House was, when I started writing, going to have been open for decades when Morgan entered, but then things changed when I wrote the ‘Beginning of the House’. Everything I’ve done has ended up being an exploration of worlds I began with maybe one idea that probably came to me in a dream. One of the early ideas I had, because I wanted to be able to combine all the ideas I had at the time, was of someone who got trapped in their dreams and travelled through a number of different places within their dreams. There’s every possibility I might even start that at some point. I still have other stories that I want to start and post, but I know I need to focus on what I’m doing right now.

One of the advantages I’ve found with writing in so many different collections is how easy it can be to work on them. I don’t have a problem with writer’s block now, because I can leave one collection behind to work on another one if I’m having trouble, and then I often find it easy to go back to what I was doing before.

I enjoy writing the bonus material. I enjoy exploring the worlds I’ve created. Something I have been thinking about is writing a travel guide to each of my collections, because I think it would be interesting, but I need to know more about the worlds first. There are some that are simpler than others, like the world of the Donor House, but the entire world was changed when people realised there were vampires and I need to work out exactly how that happened.

I do have some lists of bonus material I want to write and other people want me to write, but I’m open to ideas at all times. Have a question about why or how something happened? Prompt me. Want me to write about a specific world, or setting, or learn more about the races of any world? Let me know. I try to write what people want to see when I can, so ask away.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.