For those interested, I’m putting the final touches on the first book of my series, The Tales of Reagul, of which A Season of Kings is going to be released in the next few days. One of the fun things about this book is that it combines my passion of history with my love of speculative fiction. The land I’m writing about has been colonized by people from the times of the Roman Republic. What makes the book so much fun to write is that when these people start spreading out in this new land, they come across the survivors of previous colonizations from previous civilizations, including the Egyptians and Sumerians. This gives me the opportunity to play with the “discovery” aspect of the people who come to the new land, as they have no idea who these other people are, and when they do discover them, they are even more confused by the fact that they’re dealing with people they know so little about, and those that do know something of their civilizations are even more confused as to why they’re in this land in the first place.
This is the kind of thing that becomes so much fun to the process of writing. As I’ve already developed the historical process of the planet, I know why certain things are happening, but the people who are interacting in that land know so little about it, which makes it that much more fascinating to see it from their perspective and wonder “how would a stranger to this environment handle such a situation?”