The process of creating an underwater world was both incredibly easy and impossibly hard. I absolutely loved writing about a city that rests along the ocean floor, but it was probably the hardest thing I’ve done to date. Worldbuilding itself is hard to get right. Too much detail and you bore readers (and yourself). Too little? And everyone is confused.
After all that, I did even more research on technology that would be needed to make a facitily completely self-sufficient. And to do that I asked myself some questions, starting with the important ones: How do they get fresh air? Fresh water? Food? Then working to the less important. How do they stay entertained? Then I went on to important for the story items. And this was the fun part. I needed to spend hours and hours doing weapon research. Which weapons could my characters use that would do the most damage without creating more problems than I wanted to write about? LOL. And the most important question to that? What weapons would they use in confined spaces with lots of glass. AND if a window (glass) did break, what safety precautions would be in place to prevent a major catastrophe? And also would my characters even be able to use the weapons in the first place? So that meant hours and hours of time at the range.
After all that research—and time playing with kick ass guns--I finally wrote a bare bones rough draft that included almost no world-building, but using my map to determine how my characters would move around and remembering what I learned. I wanted to get the story across without it being loaded down with all the world-building.
After a few weeks break, I went back in and spent hours adding and removing pieces of world-building, using my crit. partners and beta readers as guinea pigs to determine what was necessary, what was too much, and what parts needed more explanation.
The hardest part was making the city feel like it was taking place underwater instead of in a cave or some other enclosed place, but doing it in a way that wasn’t intrusive to the character’s narrative. A character that has lived her entire life in this place and has no way to compare it to the Surface and where most things are common place to her and she doesn’t even think about it anymore.
That was, of course, easier said than done, and required a lot of tweaking of character narrative between Evelyn and Gavin. I used Gavin for a lot of these world-building pieces, because it’s ALL new to him.
After all that tweaking, I finally sent it to my agent, who had her own notes about the world-building and when we sold it to Tor, my editor had even more questions and notes about it.
Even after all that, there are TONS more I know about Elysium that never made it into the story. Some is just waiting to be used in further installments, while some will probably never make it into any part of the series, but all of the hours of research and writing and rewriting was worth it, because I’m fairly certain that the world-building is the strongest part of Renegade. And I’m extremely proud of how it all turned out. J
Renegade Blurb
Since the age of three, sixteen-year-old Evelyn Winters has been trained to be Daughter of the People in the underwater utopia known as Elysium. Selected from hundreds of children for her ideal genes, all her life she’s thought that everything was perfect; her world. Her people. The Law.
But when Gavin Hunter, a Surface Dweller, accidentally stumbles into their secluded little world, she’s forced to come to a startling realization: everything she knows is a lie. Her memories have been altered. Her mind and body aren’t under her own control. And the person she knows as Mother is a monster.
Together with Gavin she plans her escape, only to learn that her own mind is a ticking time bomb... and Mother has one last secret that will destroy them all.
Author Bio
J.A. Souders was born in the heartland with an overactive imagination and an over abundance of curiosity that was always getting her into trouble. She first began writing at the age of 13, when she moved to Florida and not only befriended the monsters under the bed, but created worlds for them to play together.
Because she never grew up, she decided she’d put her imaginary friends to work and started writing. She still lives in the land of sunshine and palm trees with her husband and their two children and is an active member of the RWA, CFRW, YARWA and SCBWI.
She is represented by
Natalie Lakosil of the Bradford Literary Agency. Her debut book, RENEGADE, surfaces Fall 2012 from Tor Teen.
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