I have said this before, but life is like a blended margarita from the ice cube’s point of view. Every now and then, Ice Cube gets a little cocky, cruising along, thinking “The s**t-storm is over! Everything is going to be fine.” Invariably, that’s when the powers-that-be turn on the blender.
Let’s be honest. This is real life.
The s**t-storm is never really over. It’s just paused and lurking in the shadows, waiting to jump-scare you, turning the blender of life on … then off. On – off. The powers-that-be love a good blended margarita, so buckle up, Ice Cube.
This is why I write fantasy. Reality can be processed more easily when it’s set in a mythic alternate universe, one where the fundamental laws of physics allow the chaos to be tamed through perseverance and a light application of plot armor.
My personal plot armor has worn thin lately.
My husband suffers from late-stage Parkinson’s, with the accompanying dementia and myriad other health issues, and last week, emergency surgery. All is well for now, but the underlying problems are not going away.
The last two weeks have been difficult here. I spend three hours writing first thing in the morning. At nine a.m., I put on my “leaving the house” clothes (as opposed to my “hanging around the house” clothes) and don my raincoat. Then I make my way around town, accompanied by driving rain and clogged drains, getting groceries and taking care of other obligations. Daily, I drive through the gloom and poor visibility, visiting my husband, whether he is in the hospital or at the Adult Family Home.
During these two strange and chaotic weeks, I have written 27,318 words, according to the word counter at ProWritingAid’s Novel November challenge. Some of those words might even advance the plot, but I suspect most are just mental fluff.
For the writer of any fiction, real life provides fodder for world-building. Look around you and take what you know, and reshape it into the world of your imagination. Take the time to write a paragraph or two of description and save it in a file for random world-building. You might not use that environment today, but a story may come along that needs it.
If I were to write a page detailing the November weather in my town, I would open a new document and write what I see as a journal entry. I would title that document Scenes_from_November_Storms2025. That title tells me what is detailed, so later, when I need ideas for a day filled with blue skies over a wide field of daisies and birdsong, I don’t have to open file after file and get frustrated.
What would I write? I would write it as if it were a conversation with myself.
The streets everywhere are lined with brown, soggy, windblown cairns built from the corpses of leaves. Wind and torrential rain have stripped many trees naked. The tattered remains of their finery cover the sidewalks, making walking slick and a bit tricky. They fill gutters to the curb, blocking street drains and forming long, soggy, decomposing ridges down the centerline of streets and alleys.
The above paragraph is true. The street-sweeper trucks can’t keep up with the leafy onslaught.
This, I suppose, is the downside of living on the lush green side of the continent. Storms roar across the Pacific and stop here, heavy black clouds blocked by the high Cascade Mountain Range, dumping rain on the lowland cities.
One must be careful when traveling, always alert for surprises. Your vehicle “gets a bit loose” when you hit that innocent-looking puddle at 60 miles per hour. Jack-knifed semi trucks shutting down the freeway during each storm give evidence of that truth. Pooling water on the interstate, combined with the actions of inexplicably stupid drivers, has caused many wrecks over the last month.
I drive the slower city streets as I have no need to take the interstate. Even there, at speeds slower than the posted limit of 25 mph, driving through a surprise puddle can liven things up. The adrenaline almost counteracts the dark, depressing scenery.
Pumpkin Soup with Garlic Croutons
Once I am home and nursing a cup of hot tea, the rain pounding on my windows feels a little cozy. Pumpkin soup with garlic toast for supper pushes back the gloom, cheery comfort food made better when followed by an evening spent with a good book.
Sometimes, that good book is the one I am working on. Some evenings I feel rested enough to make a second stab at writing, adding another 700 to 1,000 words to my daily word count.
Currently, I have no need in my novel for a world covered in moldy leaves or parking lots ankle-deep in water. But someday I might, and I will have that brief description to boost my memory. If needed, I’ll use it to create the scenery and atmosphere that will serve as the backdrop for a short story or novel.
For now, drier days are on the horizon. Spells of sunshine will return, and despite the worry, darkness, and gloom of these last few days, life is good.
I will continue to write my fantasy stories and draw inspiration from the real world. And I will continue to log descriptions of the world around me for later use.
And I will leave you with an image of the beautiful mountains that halt the storms over the lowlands. This scene was found on Wikimedia Commons and is titled Sunset at Image Lake on Miners Ridge in the Glacier Peak Wilderness by Ron Clausen, August 2001.
It’s hard to justify complaining about the dreariness and storms of November when we of the Pacific Northwest are surrounded by such beautiful scenery the rest of the year. It’s times like these that make us appreciate the bounty that lies a few hours’ drive away.
Credits and Attributions:
IMAGE: Screenshot of ProWritingAid Dashboard © Connie J. Jasperson 2025.
IMAGE: Pumpkin Soup and Garlic Croutons © Connie J. Jasperson 2025.
IMAGE: Sunset at Image Lake on Miners Ridge in the Glacier Peak Wilderness by Ron Clausen, August 2001. Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Image Lake Glacier Peak Wilderness.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Image_Lake_Glacier_Peak_Wilderness.jpg&oldid=484627222 (accessed November 16, 2025).
First, what sort of world is your real life set in? When you look out the window, what do you see? Close your eyes and picture the place where you are at this moment. With your eyes still closed, tell me what it’s like. If you can describe the world around you, you can create a world for your characters.
What does the outdoor world look and smell like? Is it damp and earthy, or dry and dusty? Is there the odor of fallen leaves moldering in the gutters? Or have we wandered too near the chicken coop? (Eeew … get it off my shoe!) If an author can inject enough sight, sound, and scent into a fantasy or sci-fi setting, the world will feel solid when I read it.
What about transport? How do people and goods go from one place to another?
Names and directions might drift and change as you write your first draft. Also, if they’re invented words, consider writing them close to how they are pronounced.
We talked about getting a start on our characters in Monday’s post. Today, we’re going to visualize the place where our proposed novel is set, the place where the story opens.
All worldbuilding must show a world that feels as natural to the reader as their native environment. I used the forests and lowlands of Western Washington State as my template. The entire series evolved out of three paragraphs that answered the following question:
Seagulls are a good example of what could happen. They fly and do their business while on the wing, and sometime find enjoyment in “bombing” windshields.
Some of us (Me! Me!) will make pencil-sketched maps of our fantasy world or the sci-fi setting. I find that maps are excellent brainstorming tools for when I can’t quite jostle a plot loose. It’s a form of doodling, a kind of mind wandering, and helps me find creative solutions to minor obstacles.
Here, the shoreline of Puget Sound determines the path of the interstate highway. The major cities and towns are located where there are good deepwater ports.
If you are designing a fantasy world, you might want to make a pencil-drawn map. Place north at the top, east to the right, south to the bottom, and west to the left. Those are called 
Access to water is crucial to life and prosperity. Humans have long understood the value of clean water for drinking, and you can’t count on getting that from streams or pools. Wells and the technology to make them have been around for a very long time. Cisterns have too, collecting rainwater for drinking and irrigation.
Those birch trees were nowhere near as tall as the giant cedars and Douglas firs I was familiar with. But once you were away from the road, the birch forests became dark jungles, tangled and mysterious.
Every world in which every story is set is imaginary. This is true whether it is a memoir, a cookbook, a math book, a sci-fi novel, a contemporary novel set in London, or an encyclopedia.
When writing our narrative, we want to avoid contradicting ourselves about our protagonist’s world. Keeping it all in your head is not a good idea, especially if you’re like me—too much data means I regularly have the eternal loading screen when trying to recall something. (I’ll never forget what’s-his-name.)
Just like we do when creating our characters, we want to begin with a paragraph that might be the encyclopedia explanation of where the action takes place. I write fantasy, so here is the one paragraph I might start with:
If I were to write a thriller set in the current 
The internet has information about every kind of environment that exists on Earth. All we have to do is use it.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
