The End of the World (Building)

Last night, I finished my world building expedition in the realm of Urban Mythos. Initially, my mission was simply to get the reader grounded in the mythological world much earlier on--move the bits of world building toward the beginning of the book.

HAH!

I shall repeat. HAH!

Much like the star ship Enterprise, I set my course, but like Captain Kirk, I found a need to beam down to several planets littered with green-skinned babes, tribbles, Apollo, and a few sentient rock creatures. In other words, I had more stuff to do than I originally thought.

First, I needed to delve deeper into the society in which Zydeco Cashcan and the other Mythos live. How do they get along in our world? Why is it no humans have noticed they're a bit ... off? Is there some kind of social pecking order for these former mythological creatures?

Second, I wanted to give the reader better insight into Parable, the mythological world from which our characters arrived years before. This was a bit tricky, because the novel doesn't take place in Parable. It called for a liberal sprinkling of information throughout the book, without appearing to be an information dump.

Third, how and why did our friendly, neighborhood Mythos find themselves exiled on earth? In the context of developing Parable as a society, I had to ensure it all made sense. The absolute best part of doing this was it gave me an opportunity to introduce the council of Parable as a malevolent "presence", not just in the past, but in this book and hopefully going forward. *winks* Also, this really helped me with the bad guy's motivations. Phineas Malice has a much more plausible reason for doing what he's doing, and boy he needed it.

Fourth, and probably closest to the original aim, I needed to do a lot of this much earlier on in the novel.

While revising, I watched the word count creep, then shoot up. Fortunately, I was able to cut some of the less important, and frankly more confusing storylines. In the end, the total word count increased by only about 5000 words. It's at 80k now, which is on the high end for a YA fantasy, but still within the realm of reason. I'm off to resubmit the first 50 pages to an agent who offered to take a second gander after I revised. Fingers crossed!