Time can get a little mushy when I am winging it through a manuscript. I discovered early on that keeping a calendar and a map gives me a realistic view of how long it takes my characters to travel from point A to point B.
Also, the two combine to help in deciding how long it will take to complete a task.
It helps to know what season your events occur in, as foliage changes with the seasons, and weather is a part of worldbuilding. But there are other reasons for keeping a calendar as well as sketching a map.
A calendar helps you with pacing and consistency. In conjunction with a map, a calendar keeps the events moving along the story arc. It ensures you allow enough time to reasonably accomplish large tasks, enabling a reader to suspend their disbelief.
They ensure you don’t inadvertently jump from season to season when describing the scenery surrounding the characters.
The calendar keeps the timeline believable. Here is where I confess my great regret: in 2008, a lunar calendar seemed like a good thing while creating my first world.
- Thirteen months, twenty-eight days each,
- One extra day at the end of the year, which ends on the Winter solstice.
- Winter solstice is called Holy Day. Every four years, they have two Holy Days and a big party.
That arrangement of thirteen months is easy to work with because it is on paper. However, the names I assigned to the dates and months are problematic.
While I had finished the RPG game’s plot and the synopsis, I didn’t have some details of the universe and the world figured out. So, in a burst of creative predictability, I went astrological in naming the months. I thought it would give the player a feeling of familiarity.
We were only beginning to design the game when it was scrapped. Fortunately, I retained the rights to my work. Unfortunately, the calendar I had invented for the RPG was incorporated into the world of Neveyah, and now (while I wish it wasn’t) it is canon.
In a bout of desperate unoriginality, I went with the names we currently use when I named the days, except—I twisted them a bit and gave them the actual Norse god’s name. The gods and goddesses of Neveyah are not Norse.
I could have changed all of that when the game was abandoned, but it didn’t occur to me. That lapse is an example of how what seems like a good idea at the time might not be workable in practice.
One thing I did right was sticking to a 24-hour day and a standard 12-hour clock. Experience is a cruel teacher. I can’t stress enough how important it is to keep things simple when we are world-building. Simplicity minimizes chaos when the plot gets complicated.
Time has a tendency to be elastic when we are writing the first draft of a story where many events must occur. Sometimes, many things are accomplished in too short a period for a reader to suspend their disbelief.
Calendars are maps of time. They turn the abstract concept of time into an image we can understand.
Even though I regret how I named the days in Mountains of the Moon, I have a calendar, so my characters progress through their space-time continuum at a rate I can comprehend. I can adjust events in the first and second drafts, moving them forward or back in time by looking at and updating their calendar. The sequence of events forming the plot arc remains believable.
I heartily suggest you stick to a simple calendar. That is the advice I would give any new writer—stick to something close to the calendar we’re familiar with, and don’t get too fancy.
Speaking of fancy, what about distance? Stories often involve traveling, and in fantasy tales, one could be walking or riding a horse. The distance a person can walk in one hour depends on the walking speed and the terrain. People can walk between 2.0 miles (3.22 K) and 5.0 miles (8.47 K) in 1 hour (60 minutes) depending on walking speed. A healthy person can probably walk 5 to 7 miles (8.04 to 11.256 K) in two hours of walking at a steady pace.
What if your fantasy world uses leagues as a measure of distance? A league is 3.452 miles or 5.556 kilometers. Generally speaking, a horse can walk 32 miles or 51.5 K in a day.
Thus, a day of walking or riding a horse on a level road can take one quite a distance.
But roads are NOT always level, and they don’t always cross flat ground.
As I said above, the distance a person can walk in one hour depends on the walking speed and the terrain. But let’s say you settle down and walk at a steady speed. If you go at the typical walking pace of 15 to 20 minutes per mile, it could take you 2–3 hours to get to your destination if it is ten miles (16 K) away on a good road.
If you are writing sci-fi or fantasy, calendars, and rudimentary maps work together to keep the plot moving and believable. Will your characters encounter forests? Mountains? Rivers?
Maybe they live in a city.
Each of these areas will impact how long it takes to go from one place to another. This is where a calendar comes into play.
Many readers have a route they walk or run daily to maintain their health. These readers will know how long it takes to walk ten blocks. They will also know how far a healthy person can walk in one hour on a good road.
This is where the map comes into play. You can’t travel in a straight line over mountains or forests. Sometimes, you must travel parallel to a river for a long way until you come to a place shallow enough to cross.
The part of the world where I live has large tracts of forests, many wide rivers, and is mountainous, with numerous volcanos. Our roads are often winding and sometimes travel in switchbacks up and over many of these obstacles. It takes time to go places even though the original road-builders plotted the roads through the most accessible paths.
And we’ll just toss this out there – while you can drop a tall tree across a narrow creek, building bridges over rivers requires a certain amount of engineering. Cultures from the Neolithic to modern times have had the skills needed to make bridges.
We are creative, and archaeology shows us that our ancestors were capable of far more than we have traditionally believed. Archeology and history both tell us that humans, as a species, are tribal by nature. We band together for protection, shelter, better access to resources, and companionship, and these gathering places become towns.
Humans have always created communities where resources are plentiful, but climate changes over time.
Your maps should take into consideration all the terrain your characters must deal with.
Travel and events take time. A calendar, either fantasy or the standard Gregorian calendar we use today, and a simple hand-drawn map will help you maintain the logic of your plot.
Author: László Mednyánszky (1852–1919)
Sometimes, a first novel is well-received, with engaging characters and a plot arc that moves along to a satisfying conclusion. People want more, and so the series begins.
The episodic series is like a television series. Each novel has a new adventure for a previously established set of characters. In some ways, these are easiest to write, especially when each book features established characters in an established world. (Sorry about the repetition there.) Many cozy mysteries and fantasy series are episodic. They are an infinite series of standalone stories.
The story usually has a strong theme that unites the series. It might be a theme such as the hero’s journey or young people coming of age. Or it might follow the life of one main character and their sidekicks as they struggle to complete an arduous quest. 
Prequels are one of my favorite kinds of novels. I am always curious as to how the whole thing started.
Once you have figured out the entire arc of the series, make an outline of book one. This allows your creative mind to insert foreshadowing. This will happen via the clues and literary easter eggs that surface as the series goes on.
Next week, we will look at creating a calendar for stories set in a speculative fiction world. We will look at some of my failures and see why simpler is usually better.
Technically, I am a full-time writer. For about ten years after I retired from corporate America, I had regular office hours for writing. Nothing lasts forever, and now I am drawing on the habits I developed during my years as a hobbyist. I write when I can and devote the rest of my time to caring for my family.
So, let’s talk a little more about what we write. Most of us don’t intentionally write to preach to people, but the philosophies we hold dear do come out.
We each grow and develop in a way that is unique to us. Sometimes, we are hardened by our life experiences, and our protagonists have that jaded sensibility. Other times, we accept our own human frailties, and our protagonists are more forgiving.
The battles we fight on the home front don’t have to be serious all the time. Sometimes, they can be hilarious. When your spouse has Parkinson’s, life is like a 
Suddenly, some joker turns the blender on, and everything goes to hell. They turn it off, and you think, “Okay, disaster averted. It’s gonna be okay.”
Life is like a blended margarita. It’s all in how you look at it, so stay cool and enjoy the party for as long as it lasts.
Artist: Carl Julius von Leypold (1806–1874)
The more frequently you write, the more confident you become. Spending a small amount of time writing every day is crucial. It develops discipline, and personal discipline is essential if you want to finish a writing project.
Maybe you plan to write a novel “someday” but aren’t there yet. Writing random short scenes and vignettes helps develop that story without committing too much time and energy to the project. This is also a good way to create well-rounded characters.
However, 
The Lascaux Review is one of the best contests around. It is exceptionally open to writers who are just beginning their journey. Their fee is reasonable, $15.00 in every category, and submissions are accepted through Submittable. 
A way to get a grip on these concepts is what I think of as literary mind-wandering. For me, these ramblings hold the seeds of short stories.
I break down the word count to know how many words to devote to each act in the story arc. I allow around 25 words to open the story and set the scene. Then, I give myself about 50 – 60 for the heart of the story. That leaves me 10 – 25 words to conclude it.
Extremely short fiction is the distilled essence of a novel. It contains everything the reader needs to know and makes them wonder what happened next.
I have been busy on the domestic side of things and enjoying life as a Townie. Lovely Instacart delivers my groceries from any store I choose. If we have to be out after dark and it’s raining, I can’t see well, so Uber does the driving. We are living a life of luxury and grateful for it. I have a “passel” of grandbabies and great-grandbabies, so when I have nothing to write, I have needlework projects to keep me busy.
Writing drabbles means your narrative will be limited to one or two characters. There is no room for anything that does not advance the plot or affect the story’s outcome. Also, while a 100-word story takes less time than a 3,000-word story, all writing is a time commitment. I will spend an hour or more getting a drabble to fit within the 100-word constraint.
Artists: 
This is the heading at the top of each page of a word-processed or faxed document. It contains page numbers, the title, and the author’s name. You won’t need one for most contests. However, if you plan to submit work to a magazine or anthology, you will want your header to follow their guidelines.
So, what do they do if they don’t go over your work line-by-line? Magazine editors look for and bring new and marketable stories to the reading public.
This is because they shouldn’t have to. Before submitting your work to an agent or submissions editor, you must have the technical skills down.
When you have a story that you believe in, you must find the venue that publishes your sort of work. Read the magazines you hope to submit work to. That way, you will know what publishers are buying in your genre.
Those who can’t afford to buy magazines can go to websites like
For the most part, the requirements are basically the same from contest to contest, with minor differences. Most contests charge a submission fee but have a cash prize if your work is chosen. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your story is; if you don’t follow their guidelines for submission, you will have wasted your money. Non-conforming work will not be read, so follow their guidelines!
You don’t want fancy. Stick with the industry standard fonts: Times New Roman (or rarely Courier) in 12 pt. These are called ‘Serif’ fonts and have little extensions that make letters easier to read when strung together to form words.
To remove tabs from a manuscript in MS Word or most other word-processing programs, open the “Find” box (right side of the ribbon on the home tab). In the “Find” field, type in ^t. (
FIRST: SELECT ALL. This will highlight your entire manuscript.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 