July Thoughts
This has been an insane month. Well, no. June was insane. July has only just gotten started.
In June, I went hiking with my sister, but that's only personal. On a professional front, I finished Worldbuilding Blueprints Volume I! You can follow on it on Kickstarter right now and the Kickstarter launch will kick off on 19 July 2025.
Besides that, my graphic designer and I have completed the paperback covers for Sangwheel. You'll note the base art is the same, but the actual covers have changed quite a lot. More on that below.
And of course, the work for Just In Time goes on. Check out all the details below.
Table of Contents
Worldbuilding Blueprints
After writing for more than four years, I am no longer intimidated by the thought of churning out content. But content alone is not enough, no matter how good it is. There is simply too much content out there in the world. So your content must also be packaged to attract people.
For me, this was a hard skill to learn.
I still don't have that much of a graphical eye, but I'm getting better at seeing what works and what doesn't. Fortunately, I have great friends as well. One of them, Guy Sclanders from How to be a Great GM, helped me with the layout of this book, specifically the hardback layout. And boy are those pages sexy.
Check out these samples:
The book is based on the Worldbuilding Blueprints Podcast season 1, which is almost complete. Backers of the book will also be able to vote on what season two of that podcast, and hence Worldbuilding Blueprints Vol II should be about.
All that and more on Kickstarter, where you can currently follow the project so you're among the first to know when it goes live. Backers who grab their spot in the first 48 hours will be thanked in the book!
When this process completes, I'll write a blog about my experience in taking this whole thing through Kickstarter. So that will be coming to a blog near you soon enough.
Fantasy Politics Revisited
Political intrigue isn't just about scheming villains in dark corners. It's also about friends, allies, and even heroes pulling in different directions because they disagree on history, clash on visions, or can’t compromise on tactics. Anyone whose played a roleplaying game with a paladin and a thief in the same party has felt that pain.
And, in my opinion, those three questions are the heart of political fantasy.
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1. Where did we come from?
You know that saying: History is written by the victor? Well, this is it. History is the battleground of legitimacy, myth, and memory. People fight over what happened in the past, but also what it means. Consider what Shakespeare wrote about King Edward VI, turning the man into an evil hunchback because the ancestors of Shakespeare patron, Queen Elizabeth I, had won the War of the Roses.
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2. Where are we going?
The future is a war of ideals, destiny, and vision. Everyone wants a better world, but their versions of “better” often can’t coexist. Example from the real world again: Napoleon imagined a better world as one where Europe was unified under his rule. The rest of Europe did not feel that this was a better world. And so, war, which is the ultimate political act.
The most important thing to remember here is that most people really do believe that they will make the world a better place and you will create a more realistic story if even the villains believe in their future vision.
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3. How do we get there?
Even when characters agree on the past and the future, this is where things fall apart. Remember that thief and paladin combo? They both agree that they're friends. They both want to end the mad king's reign. But the thief thinks they should steal the Grand High Scepter of Mandate. The paladin believes they should confront the king in honor.
Is there any way to resolve these two viewpoints?
Consider in our world: Marx and Kropotkin agreed on utopia. But Marx trusted the state as an intermediary, and Kropotkin did not. That small difference split the communist movement, creating the anarchists who believe in praxis (there can be no intermediate step).
The Big Takeaway
The best political fantasy thrives by really hitting these questions hard and mixing up these tools. Conflicts are layered, heroes clash with heroes, villains also believe in their cause and so on.
So as you build your world, ask:
🔹 What fractured truths do your different factions believe in?
🔹 What conflicting visions drive apart people who would otherwise be allies?
🔹 What compromises, or refusals to do so, define the path to factions shattering?
Sangwheel Update
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I am currently consumed by how things look. One of the most interesting aspects has been the difference between the artist and the graphic designer. Feby Hermawan (https://www.fiverr.com/febyhermawan) drew the illustrations of the book covers, but my graphic designer, while she loved the art, said his backgrounds where too much like a comic book. Fortunately these days, everything art related comes in layers, so she extracted the core images from the background and changed the whole thing to be more epic fantasy. The above will be the new covers of Sangwheel Chronicles. I'd hoped they would all be out by now, but said graphic designer person is still tweaking fonts and colors to fix discrepancies I can't see :P
By the way, you'll be able to add-on Sangwheel Chronicles books to the Kickstarter as well (I said my life was consumed by that Kickstarter, didn't I?)
Check out Feby original art below, you can see the elements the graphic designer lifted out of them and where she changed the art to match a more epic fantasy feel. The whole process took two months. One month for Feby to draw the art digitally and then another month for the graphic designer to change it.
It was fascinating to me to see the change. In the gate for example, I asked her to show me what she did. She took the original gate image and then stripped out the parts that made it "fat", creating the more slender look. Then she made the whole thing darker. I can see the difference between the two images and I watched her do it, but I swear it's black magic to me.
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In other news, I have decided that my newsletter subscribers (that's you!) will get a free novella a year from me, including character art for that novella from Feby (those black and white images he draws, not the full color ones).
Those novellas will come out in December of every year. I'm currently working a novella where Giselle and Gilliam are the point of view characters, set in the Empire about three years after the events in Keeper of the Gate. In that novella, I'll be exploring how the politics and structure of the Empire has changed due to the events in Keeper.
I'm really enjoying writing it, despite the limited time I have available for fiction writing right now, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it.
Questions and Answers!
Here are the questions asked since my last newsletter. Remember, you can always submit questions via my website for the newsletter!
While the videos are in members first on YouTube, I can't watch them in background play?
I know :( You've just discovered one of the most annoying bugs on YouTube and one that I've repeatedly raised with support. For some reason, even with YouTube premium, you can't watch members-only videos without having the YouTube app open and your phone open as well. It frustrates me no end because I'm a member of a few channels I love listening to podcast content while I run, so not being able to close the app while playing members only content frustrates me a lot.
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What are your thoughts about Dragons? Please be detailed.
In mythology, dragons are the ultimate OTHER. Beyond even divinity, they represent our primordial fears and hopes.
In the Eastern tradition, dragons are wise beyond human ken, and are symbols of our longing for meaning, our hope that there is something greater beyond ourselves.
In the Western tradition, they embody chaos, destruction, and despair, essentially our deepest fears made flesh.
African and American traditions tend to cast dragons as balancing forces, divine or even beyond divine, tied to creation and cosmic cycles.
Fantasy, having roots in mythology of course, draws on all these traditions. In fantasy, we've seen a plethora of dragons: from terrible foes in Western tales, to godlike beings in the East, to D&D’s color-coded taxonomy, to mounts, mentors, and magical allies. Yet always, they are something OTHER.
If I had to define what dragons represent in fantasy, it would be that:
Dragons are the thing you can’t explain, can’t outthink, can’t reason away. They represent fear or hope, chaos or safety, but always something deep, primal, and raw. At least, that's the true for the dragons I remember, and I think that's what important to me.
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I did actually do a video on the topic of dragons, which you can check out in the information card.