The Making of Neoterra
For the past seven years, I suffered writer’s block where I couldn’t go past three sentences in a manuscript or keep an attention span long enough to read a single page in a book. I used to have a mind that worked like a snowball— it’d roll until it grew into an idea large enough to formulate a novel. In 2024, I made a conscious effort to read. Where I thought I permanently lost my imagination, reading brought it back to life. Then almost instantly, Instead of a snowball, my imagination became an avalanche of ideas through the year. First, starting with the trilogy: Until Equinox.
It was a slow, dry evening at the cash register at my former retail job. I was stocking new decorations for the upcoming Halloween season, and it got me pondering about autumn and monsters. I thought of vampires, and how much I enjoyed movies about them, but I didn’t want to make another modern-day vampire series centered around romance likened to Twilight or Vampire Diaries. I didn’t want a thriller necessarily like Fright Night either. I always enjoyed writing dystopian stories, so I brainstormed a way to combine vampires with a dystopian society.
Most vampiric films involve humans oblivious to their existence. So I thought, what if humans already knew they existed? I translated some of the horrid Jim Crow elements of America’s real history into a futuristic fantasy world brought on by a plague that created a new evolved race known as Vampyres. The virus led to a war between the two species. For the sake of peace, the Vampyres are the catalyst to Neoterra’s revolutionary system that allowed them to co-exist with human peers without the need for more war, but through order, division, and hatred.
There were ancient/historical settings and small towns, but in the making of The Nightshades, I wanted a modern/futuristic urban setting. I didn’t want the typical flying cars, but I wanted enough years to have passed to enable a more realistic timeline for the vampiric evolution to make sense.
Worldbuilding is just as vital as character development, but it also depends on the genre you’re working on. Dystopia is a subgenre of science fiction, centered around an oppressive government (think Hunger Games, Divergent, Uglies). Those novels are dependent on both the world the characters live in and the characters themselves. For The Nightshades to work, I wanted a world that echoed the dark history our world faced. Worldbuilding isn’t as important if the genre is something like coming-of-age, romance, or drama. Those stories are usually more focused on the characters.
I must admit I added some personal experiences in the setting. I grew up mostly in the rural areas of North Carolina, the beaches of Virginia, the large urban city of Columbus, Ohio, and near the mountains in Colorado. So, I created Neoterra as a place of versatility. It’s a large coastal city with rock formations near the beach and rural outskirts. I always tried to find beauty in every place I lived in, so I wanted to build a world with those qualities despite its divisive atmosphere.
