In creating this world for my novel I quickly discovered that I do not have a novel for this world. I have myths and legends and conflicts and Oathkeepers and Oathbreakers. I have cultures slowly forming and spreading across the world. I have a Theocracy and an empire separate from the Theocracy but beholden to it in the eyes of her people. I have magic and it is held by the church in a vice so tight that it might well as not exist. I have characters spread across this world with no solid way to bring them together that does not seemed forced or contrived. I have a beginning which now seems to have no place in story or perhaps it is not the beginning at all but instead a part of the story in the middle or later still. I have racial and cultural parallels that are unintended and should be unwritten. I have a world that needs a story that tells a great deal of the world itself.
So, I have nothing. Except perhaps for opportunity.
I don’t know why I expected this process to be fast. Like everything in life I want it now. I say to myself, “I’ve waited 30 years. This is long enough.” But I was waiting idly. I was not slowly building world and story. If anything I was forgetting story and character. Earlier in the day I was at an outdoor mall looking at leather wrapped notebooks and I remembered that I have one like that and it is filled with information about this world I am creating–information that isn’t being ported into the story of the world or the map of the world because I entirely forgot the book existed. As I write I realize that there are in fact two books of this sort in need of my eyes and integration. Opportunity.
I am going to put focus on this novel world and make it a priority. I feel the story is there and as the world reveals itself to me bit by bit, so shall its story.