Blending Fantasy With Reality - guest post by Misha Gerrick

Blending Fantasy With Reality

Thanks for having me over, Christine!

I’m a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to genre. Endless, my current book, is Urban Fantasy. My previous one was Epic Fantasy. I think the next one will probably be Historical Romance.

I basically write and work on whatever I feel like, and often don’t assign a genre to the book until after I finished a rough draft. Some people might think it strange, but I think it comes in handy.

Why? Because my mind automatically goes into world-building mode regardless of genre. And because I come from Epic Fantasy, I know how to make it happen. You’d think that my Urban Fantasy world would be simpler to create than my Epic Fantasy one.

Urban Fantasy takes place in our world. So it just simplifies things, right? Eh… no. I’ve found that fitting a fantasy element into the reality everyone knows can be a tricky thing.

Because now there are a lot of things that people can correct me on. I had to create the cultures of my fantasy, but blend it with real aspects to life. Such as medical procedures as well as police procedures. Even then, I bent the rules every now and then and shifted the focus so that the procedures faded into the background. I wasn’t writing Gray’s Anatomy or Bones, even though one character’s a doctor and the other’s an FBI agent.

But I still needed to understand those procedures in order to understand how the characters would function in their jobs. Which choices they would make in a given situation and why. I needed to know the rules so that I could know when and why a character was breaking them.

In short, it’s all about balance. Yes, I had to create a world in which my fantasy elements could exist, but I had to overlay it with reality in order to make my story take place in a place that’s recognizable as our present Earth. Creating a fantasy without throwing away the rules, and knowing the rules without making them obscure the fantasy.

Anyone else have to combine reality with fantasy elements? How do you go about it?

About the Book

“First, do no harm.” Blake Ryan swore that oath to become a doctor. Ironic, given that he spent most of his thousand year life sucking souls out of other immortals.

Things are different now. Using regular shots of morphine to keep his inner monster at bay, Ryan has led a quiet life since the Second World War. His thrills now come from saving lives, not taking them.

Until a plane crash brings Aleria into his hospital. Her life is vibrant. Crack to predators like him. She’s the exact sort of person they would hunt, and thanks to a severe case of amnesia, she’s all but defenseless.

Leaving Aleria vulnerable isn’t an option, but protecting her means unleashing his own inner monster. Which is a problem, because his inner monster wants her dead most of all.

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About the Author

Misha Gerrick lives near Cape Town, South Africa, and can usually be found staring at her surroundings while figuring out her next book.

If you’d like to see what Misha’s up to at the moment, you can find her on these social networks:

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