Note: First published in my newsletter on 1 March 2025.

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I'm juggling a few works in progress right now, including the first full novel in the Warlords of Zephyria Series. A couple are just-for-fun WIPs, spare-time stories I fiddle with to keep my creativity going when my main WIPs get stuck.

All of those stories need well-built settings, and because several are Science Fiction Romances, they also need settings that don't exist in the real world.

Take The Pruxnae Series, for example. Sweet Surrender, Book 2, takes place across four planets in four different solar systems: Domor, Lodem, Abyw, and Q, home of the famed Q-mercs (mercenary-soldiers). (I love Space Opera!) Readers of The Choosing, Book 1, have seen those first three already. For Sweet Surrender, I only had to revisit my notes on those worlds and expand as needed.

The planet Q, however, hasn't been visited yet within any story. The residents are very private and security minded. Other than dignitaries, not many outsiders are invited to visit, although some do find a way around the security measures and sneak in for various reasons.

Those security measures are fairly advanced. The Q have found a way to shield and partially cloak their planet. Its exact location remains a bit of a mystery to outsiders. Building that world entailed thinking through how a security-minded culture might approach protecting themselves. I don't have to think up the actual tech; my primary concern is in brainstorming various pathways of development. For example, what events caused the Q to react by cloaking their planet from outsiders? The answer to that question helped flesh out their security measures.

For near-future stories, I draw heavily on the research being conducted right now or in the past few decades. I knew I wanted a space elevator in one of my spare-time WIPs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I looked for white papers and articles freely available on the internet.

As it happens, someone presented a paper on space elevators at the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics 2000 conference and exposition. That paper detailed pretty much everything I needed to know to create a plausible space elevator setting. It also made for a fascinating read!

Then there are the real-life, already-in-existence settings. For The Alien Warlord's Surprise Mate, I decided to use Area 51, aka Groom Lake. What better place to hold a first contact-style meeting than the place rumored to house alien remains?

I did zero research for this, outside of the geography and climate of the surrounding area. Normally I'm a stickler for research, but in this particular instance, I wanted to feed into what people believe rather than the actuality. It's so much more fun to imagine Area 51 as an underground complex full of secret goings on rather than an ordinary military base, isn't it?

One of my other for-fun projects is a Paranormal Romance set in a fictional small town. At first, I wanted to set it in the Southern Appalachians, near where I live, but that just felt wrong.

Then I saw a documentary about the only grocery store in Silverton, Colorado, an isolated town in the San Juan Mountains, and I knew that location had the right feel for the story world. I fictionalized the town's name and some of the circumstances behind it to suit the story, but kept many of the more interesting features: a low permanent population (less than 1,000 people), similar geography and weather, a similar town layout, and so on. It's a carefully fictionalized real-world setting, but because I've never been to Colorado before, I'll have to do some additional research to nail the details, like how dry or wet the air is, the vegetation, and so on.

Settings are one of the key features of every story. Getting them right helps readers immerse themselves fully in the story. They're generally one of my favorite parts of worldbuilding!