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On the one hand, I am delighted that I was able to finish the Realist’s Guide to the Fantastical World. As an idea, a travel-guide to a fantasy world has been rattling around in my brain for years, and when completing anything has been a struggle for me, to actually finish something is a significant victory.

On the other hand, I fought with myself while writing it. I struggled between writing a guide that was more accessible, and connected to the real world in some exotic or esoteric way; and a much more extravagant world full of different species, monsters, magic, and more.

In the end I chose to go for the more “realistic” form,¹ where the Fantastical World lives alongside our own. This gave me some structure, as well as a method of grounding the reader in familiarity, rather than cutting the audience loose to wander among the completely foreign.

The magical setting, on the other had, became The Myriad Worlds, in all its surreal glory; the setting of The Poems of Madame Albithirst as well as The Ever Lord series. The Myriad Worlds is a far more alien setting: there is no connection to our real world, and therefore more flexibility with things like different flora, fauna, climate, and technology/magic.

I don’t regret the choice; the Myriad Worlds was beginning to look more and more like an RPG setting book than a fictional ‘guide.’ All the same, Since I went back and forth multiple times, I came up with several ideas that fit in one setting but not the other. A lot of these places and peoples fired my own imagination, and I’d like to share them.

So, rather than ignore these creations, or working to shoehorn the different styles and narrative concepts into a single mess, I’m instead going to publish the un-collected pages of The Myriad Worlds here. Perhaps someday I’ll go back and combine the two into one big Atlas/Compendium.

All of this is to say, there are some names that are shared between the two guides — a byproduct of when they were in the same book — and I don’t see any real need to fix that.

If you like, you can look at the following posts as a part of the Realist’s Guide, or as its own work. Either way, I hope you find something interesting in them.