RynRaven didn’t start with an outline; my stories rarely do. There were no plot beats or character bios. Though I do occasionally start with those. No, this one came from a single scene. I didn’t know it back then, that scene would become RynRaven. Nina didn’t even have a name yet.

She was just a woman who woke up in a room with no idea how she’d gotten there. A room that was breathtaking. Lace in every window, a canopy bed with lavender silk wrapped around the posts. Cherry wood furniture topped with delicate doilies and flowers. A giant window that looked out over a small balcony set beneath a blue sky with enormous puffy white clouds.

Only the blue was too blue, the white too bright.

A room she couldn’t possibly be standing in.

Because it had burned seventy years ago. When they’d come to take her away to the Academy. When her mother had flown into a rage, her power had ignited everything around her.

No one alive now could know what this room looked like, yet she was standing in it.

World-building, the way I do it, is a journey of discovery. The stories already exist, somewhere. My job is to brush off the dirt and try not to break anything. I wish I had been gentler with RynRaven the first time around. I didn’t break it, per se, but I rushed it, and that ending, well, it sort of took a nosedive off a short pier. Into concrete. Not my finest writing. I’m correcting that mistake because I’ve learned a lot over the past six years.

I’m forcing myself to slow down, let each scene breathe the way it needs to. Allowing the characters to develop as they should, while also enriching their surroundings. Even putting back a whole character I shouldn’t have removed in the first place. If you know me, you know patience doesn’t come naturally to me. I rush through everything.

RynRaven was born the moment that scene wouldn’t let me go. I keep having to come back to it because it showed me who Nina was and how big the story really needed to be.

Her Gilded Cage.