In my mind the world of Radio Arcanum, which encompasses the Musimagium, is a sprawling, expansive world that I am exploring through various projects such as the short stories I provide for my membership group, the young adult I’m working on and hope to have live on Patreon before the end of the year, and just everything I have planned. In truth, I could probably write for a solid eight hours a day for the rest of my life and never fully explore this world. Honestly, that’s how it should be.
It’s a world that I’d love to lose myself in, and a world that I would love for my readers to lose themselves in. Nothing would please me more than cosplay, character drawings, fanfiction, all those things that I fell in love with when I discovered Valdemar and the fan club Queen’s Own, that I would love to create in my own world. But, as I and some other authors were talking about, it can be difficult to get readers to notice your work, let alone create the kind of community that helps feed and sustain authors.
Some would probably say that I shouldn’t think that way about my world, that I should probably reach a certain threshold of sales or notoriety before I think about fandom and reader enjoyment. And yet, part of my own personal enjoyment of writing, the part that makes writing my happy place is that I get to play in this expansive world. What does that mean for me?
It means that Through the Portal Storm deals with portals and alternate worlds.
It means that The Search for Apollo’s Chalice is time travel.
It means that Finding Pack takes place in the early 20th century, while The Crows Know takes place in the future.
And it means that I can think of other eras, other times in which the magic and organizations would exist and how that would look, even if those times would be before the development of ham radio technology, which is the basis for Radio Arcanum.
Exploring all of this is part of what keeps me excited about the fantasy I’m writing, and it’s part of what I hope, draws readers into the world.
