Raymond E. Feist

and all the things that I loved in boys fiction when I was 12 years old.

I think it goes by author.

You know, I mean, some people it's window dressing.

Some people get, you know, like doing their graduate thesis level of world building.

And I'm somewhere in between.

I ask certain questions that

are predicated on my love of history.

Probably I read more history and biographies than I do anything else.

It's like, okay, you have this army out there, and the king called his henchmen, his feudal vassals.

Who's paying for all this?

Well, I wrote a book called Rise of a Merchant Prince to exactly get into that story and about how, you know, in a fantasy world, a king marshals a great army and funds it.

just like the last book in the serpent war saga shards of a broken crown was about, okay, who cleans up the mess afterwards?

You know, when the great battle is over, who's out there picking up the trash politically and socially.

So I tend to like worlds that sort of at the foundation makes sense.

Environmentally, you know, you don't build a city out in the middle of nowhere that nobody wants to go to, you know, you don't have,

taverns in the desert.

You don't have inns lost in the woods.

You build your inn at the busiest crossroad you can find so you can get the most customers.

So my sense of world building predicates that human behavior sort of is common no matter where in the universe those human beings are.

And that, you know, there are common motives that we all experience, you know, love, hate, fear, longing, desire, ambition,