What I wanted to do with my first novella was to create a steampunk world. I had always loved the pseudo victorian aesthetic of steampunk and to a lesser extent, the not-quite world war one feeling of dieselpunk too. But how to write good fantasy stories without their being a history to back it up. It's one thing for Tolkien to write about Elves in middle earth. Our minds kind of let go of the fact that the races and places he writes about don't actually exist so we can relax and enjoy the show that his words paint for us. But the victorian age was a real-time and place. Tesla was a real guy and much of what is written in steampunk is alternate history. While it's fun to imagine historical figures like Tesla and Lincoln in fantasy settings. we know at the end of the day that Lincoln didn't in fact kill vampires and Tesla was reclusive and died in obscurity.
But what we can get behind is fictional characters in real-ish world settings. the reason we believe that Bella Swan and Edward Cullen had a sparkly vampire romance, is that while the general world setting was a real one. (Earth + Vampires) We didn't know Bella like a historical figure or a celebrity is known, so we could pretend.
That's what fiction is all about, pretending.
So I set about building some worlds to play in.
Let's take a look at some of them.