The Guns of the Alchemist started as a group project several years ago. Vincent Rospond, publisher, friend, and mentor, reached out and asked how I would feel about creating a world that we could share with many different writers, moving forward. I had been working with two writers in particular, C.L. Werner, or Clint, and Robert E. Waters, or R.W., on Wild West Exodus for a couple years at that point. It would be fun to bring them in to work on this new idea, and so the team was formed.
Vince and Brandon, his son and partner, Clint, R.W., and I began with a series of Skype meetings and email chains. We built a world to our own specifications, feeding off each other’s creative energies. We wanted to do something with alternate history, but change things drastically enough that entirely new stories could also be told. We had all enjoyed working in the weird Wild West, and Vince had decided, early on, that he wanted magic involved as well.
I began putting all of our ideas together and assembling a coherent history, atlas, and almanac. I created a working manual for how magic would function. I then turned toward the physical world, starting with a simple map of North America and an idea I thought might create lots of chaos through which we could weave our stories: What if the U.S. had never come to be? What if instead, North America was broken into many different nations, somehow, each with its own objectives, cultures, languages, etc.?
And so, first, the Kingdom of Albion was born. Under the direction of a far more sinister and effective Benedict Arnold, the American Revolution had failed, but then England, too, was defeated in turn, and eventually Arnold established himself the king of our new realm.
But who else might inhabit the continent? Where did the original revolutionaries go? And why hadn’t Albion spread west? Was someone else out there? If so, who? And what if something had happened that made westward expansion much harder and less rewarding than it had been in our timeline? Clint came up with the idea of detonating the Yosemite super-volcano in the not-so-distant past and shattering the continent. This gave us a recognizable map but with some great, dramatic changes.
Soon, the rest of the map fleshed itself out. History is full of little hints and glimmers of possibility. What if Napoleon had ended up in New Orleans? The brief, bloody history of the Empire of Haiti, with dark hints of zombie magic, was ripe for adaptation. The Comanche Empire of the Summer Moon promised vast potential. And we didn’t want to lose that Wild West feel, either. So, the western boundary of Albion became recognizable enough, and the Western Marches were born.
Once we had gone back and forth over the different stories we wanted to tell, Vince gave me the job of writing a novel (or two, because, you know, why use 100,000 words when 200,000 would do?) that would establish our world and its rules for readers and future writers alike.
The mandate was a bit daunting: I needed to establish this new world and communicate the altered history we had created. I also needed to introduce the reader to as many of these places, cultures, and people as possible. And magic, of course; I needed to articulate our rules of magic, and inject that into the altered timeline in a way that made sense. I knew at once that my story was going to have to take the form of a Hero’s Journey: We would visit many places, meet many new creatures and characters, but not get to know most of them in any real detail. It’s a classic structure, but can be tricky, trying to get the reader invested while not spending too much time on any one area, foe, or aspect of the world.
We knew we wanted to shape the world around a larger than life figure, a Wizard of Oz, so to speak, and the Alchemist was going to be the guy. He would bring magic into the world, he would be the source of the mystical traditions and powers we had imagined. He wouldn’t be in all of the stories; in fact, he wouldn’t feature prominently in most, if any of them. But he would always be there, looming in the distance, shadowy and mysterious. By the era in which we wanted to set our stories, he would already be an established force, a reality our protagonists would be well aware of.
But HOW did he come to be where he was? WHY was he looming over the world? WHAT was he trying to accomplish? We wanted to create a world with a high-level conflict, occurring 30,000 feet over our own protagonists’ heads that might impact them, might not, but would shape the world around them in very clear ways.
So, I needed a character that would travel across our new world, meet many new people and visit as many places as possible. I needed a reason for this character to take that journey. At the same time, our Alchemist would be in the infancy of his or her power, and we needed to not only know where the character would end up, but how they would get there.
Each nation we visited needed to have currency, established (and sensible) attitudes about a whole range of topics, and recognizable touchstones that would connect them with our own world and history. Each of us had our own pet regions; cultures we wanted included, concepts we felt needed to be built into the foundations of the world.
And I had to plant the seeds of as many of them as possible.
All while telling a story that would be interesting in its own right. The book NEEDED to exist as an introduction to the world of the Alchemist, but it COULDN’T be JUST that. It needed to be an engaging, interesting story in its own right.
How to do that? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out…
~CLG
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