Fantasy author Kalyn Josephson’s debut fantasy novel The Storm Crow is published today by SourceBooks. In this short piece, the San Francisco resident talks about the benefits of her background in creating her story’s unique creatures

I still remember my college advisor’s face when I told him I wanted to major in English and Biology. He thought it an unusual pairing, but it worked for me, not least because the two degrees ended up supporting each other. Creating a fantasy world is never easy, but my bio background honed a lot of skills I use in my writing, particularly when it came to crafting the crows in The Storm Crow.

Having studied ecology and evolution, my degree essentially gave me a shortcut when it came to research. Not only because it taught me to parse dense, complex material quickly, but also because I knew right away what kinds of things I’d have to define about the crows: diet, shelter, hierarchy, etc. I also already had an idea of what kind of answers I’d find, as this wasn’t the first time I’d dug into bird biology.

But most importantly, I knew what kind of questions I’d need to ask. Things like: how many eggs do they lay and how often? What kind of impact would they have on the natural environment around them? That familiarity really accelerated my research process, enabling me to focus instead on finding where that information fit into my developing world.

It’s in that worldbuilding and the development of the crows that you can see the largest impact of my bio background. All the information and questions established a platform for me to build my world on. I extrapolated from them to answer questions like: how would the rate at which the crows reproduce impact the ways riders are chosen? If there was only a limited number of crows, then not everyone could be a rider. Or what happens if they lose a couple earth crows? How would that impact their ability to produce enough food for the kingdom and support an army of giant hungry birds?

How the crows impacted their environment was only one side of the coin though. The reverse question was equally as important: how would a crow’s environment impact it? What kinds of things would develop in the species through environmental influence? Crows already aren’t big hunters. Would massive, magical crows hunt at all if they’re domesticated? Or would they become lazy balls of feathers?

Being able to ask and answer such specific questions helped me really understand my magical crows and I hope, made them feel a little bit more real to my readers.

 

The Storm Crow is out now from SourceBooks; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk