One of the things I love most about writing – apart from creating the characters I am writing about – is creating the world that the story takes place in. While it may be the case that the story is set in the “real” world, a world that is set and has its own rules, I still have know the rules for the “unreal” creature I write about dwelling in it.

These are not the rules of the society – the ones that characters can change. These are the rules of nature, the ones defining their very existence. They’re the limitations on each species. The limits of the world.

One example would be for Blood Bound and having to decide the rules for my vampires. There are so many attributes attached to vampires, especially in modern fiction, that you can pick and choose when making your “breed”. Vampires tend to face the same “problems”, it’s just they can (or don’t) handle it differently. Some of the questions I had to ask myself were:

• What does sunlight do to them? Kill them? Hurt them? Weaken them slightly? Nothing? Make them sparkle?
• How can you kill them? A stake to the heart? Chop of the head? Expose them to sunlight (see above)? Make them listen to Hannah Montana over and over?
• What other weaknesses do they have? Silver? Garlic? Holy water? Crosses or will any religious object do? Disco?
• What about their strengths? Are they stronger than humans? Faster? Do they have better senses? What about special powers?
• What kind of blood can they drink? Human-only, and has to be straight from the source? Human-only, but can be swiped from a blood-bank? Can they have a diet that is mostly animal, but they have to top it up with human blood every so often? Or can they go solely on animal blood? Or are they psi-vampires?

Those are some of the questions I had to ask and answer myself while setting up the rules for Blood Bound. I have had to do that with all my other ideas too: superheroes for The Superhero Diaries, ghosts for Bones… the list goes on.

You can break the “standard” rules set up by other fictional works or even myth, so long as you explain it. If you do it with the rules you set up, well… anyone remember the backlash for Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn? One of the major complaints by fans was that it broke all the rules, and in manners that made no sense. Imagine if JK Rowling had ended Harry Potter with it suddenly being discovered that you could bring the dead back to life, and everyone who was good came back and it was all sunshine and kittens and marshmallows, despite it being clearly and repeatedly stated that no magic can truly bring back the dead? Yeah… no.

For some people, setting up the rules at the beginning (if they do consciously do it) is one of the less enjoyable aspects of writing. I, on the other hand, love it. It’s probably one of the reasons I enjoyed setting up RPGs more than actively maintaining them. That rush, that explosion of creativity is one of my favourite parts of writing. Starting a novel is easy. Finishing it is hard.

And finishing a novel is a law I really do have to lay down for myself.