Max Moyer, author of 'Zodak - The Last Shielder' - Fantasy author talks world-building, stopping for 18 years, and why you don't need to be completely original
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2024
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
One of the most frequent requests to writersroutine.com is for fantasy authors. World builders. Authors with the ability to take you on an adventure across times, dimensions and brand new maps.
This week's guest, Max Moyer, has figured a way to do that. His new book 'Zodak - The Last Shielder', is the first in a new series, 'Tempest Rising'. There is a prequel novella already out, 'Throne Born', and this properly sets up a new world that's been in Max's head for 30 years. It started as an idea for a board-game and fantasy series with his brother, yet when life got in the way, Max left it untouched for 18 years. Now, alongside his sibling, he's created a brand new world with new lands, strange magic, and unusual creatures.
We get right into the detail of world-building - how to get the specifics right, how to create lands, magic, even accents. You can hear whether the plot comes before the world and how organic the world is created. We discuss whether it provides an easy get-out for a character in danger, and why he went back to his idea after 18 years away.
Max runs a law-firm and has helped raise a big family, you can hear how he's created time to do this, and what big plans he has for the series.
This week's episode is sponsored by 'Who is the Cheese Wire Killer?', a brand new podcast series you can binge now.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to a brand new episode of writers' routine, where this week we are joined by Max Moyer. |
| 0:15.0 | Max has just started a new fantasy series. |
| 0:18.4 | Zodak, The Last Shielder, is the first book in the Tempest Rising series. |
| 0:24.4 | We discuss the very detailed specifics of world building, also why you don't have to be |
| 0:30.7 | completely original, and you can hear how he works with his brother to create the world. |
| 0:36.7 | He will write a very dense, very academic encyclopedic account of a carnivorous moss that's found in a wood. |
| 0:45.9 | And he does it by typewriter. |
| 0:47.5 | He loves to do it by typewriter. |
| 0:48.7 | So I've got a bunch of these files from the encyclopedia Yidwean is the name of our world. We've got these different entries. |
| 0:55.8 | So that's the kind of material we pull on. And again, it's always evolving. You know, the maps we're |
| 1:01.9 | creating, it's easy to do a sort of 30,000 foot map of the whole continent. But if you're working with the scale, and that's been an interesting exercise, too, is really |
| 1:14.5 | nailing down scale. |
| 1:15.4 | But when you're working with a scale, an area that's as big as France, when you zoom in, there are a |
| 1:22.2 | million things going on that you don't see from that high-level view that if you're really |
| 1:27.3 | going to create an authentic world, |
| 1:29.6 | there's towns, there's villages, there's smaller cities, |
| 1:32.5 | there's all sorts of interactions at a micro-level, |
| 1:35.9 | all the way up to the macro level. |
| 1:37.3 | So there's a lot more to create, even that we've started creating. |
| 1:41.4 | There is more with Max in this week's writer's routine. |
| 1:52.5 | Yes, welcome along to the show. This is the podcast where we take a look through an author's |
| 1:56.7 | working day. We see how, when and where they get to work. How do they give themselves the best |
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