Behind the Stories: Building Vemados

Behind the Stories: Building Vemados

After two years of dedicated research into writing craft, reference material, mythology, and folklore, I came to a conclusion that changed everything:

I needed to build my own world.

At first, it can seem easier to write stories set in our own world. There are fewer maps to draw, fewer histories to invent, fewer rules to define. But once I made the decision to create a secondary world — maps and all — I felt completely free.

Vemados began with tectonic plates.

Before I knew the names of every country or the shape of every empire, I wanted to understand the bones of the world itself. How would the landmasses form? Where would mountains rise? Where would oceans deepen into trenches? How would rivers, canyons, lakes, islands, and coastlines emerge from those ancient pressures?

I had several stories turning over in my mind by then, but the world was the missing piece. Once I began building Vemados, those stories finally had somewhere to belong.

For months, I worked on my maps by hand, tracing and expanding them as best I could. When I needed to copy or enlarge a section, I used the flashlight on my phone as a makeshift light table. It worked — barely — until I finally reached the end of my patience with working on such a small scale.

That was when I started looking for a proper backlit drafting option.

Everything I found online was far too small. Helpful, maybe, but not the answer. Then my mother, who spent more than twenty years in the newspaper publishing industry, did a quick search on Facebook Marketplace. She knew what I needed before I did.

By a massive stroke of luck, she found a backlit drafting table.

It was thirty years old, originally from an architecture firm in Portland, Oregon, and had later been used by an artistic craftsman after the firm closed. We drove three hours to pick it up and bought it for $100.

Few three-hour drives have ever paid off so well.

After we got it home, I cleaned it up, my dad replaced one of the lights inside, and suddenly we were in business. That drafting table remains my most prized piece of furniture. More than that, it has become essential to my work.

Over the years, Vemados grew around that table.

I developed foundations for several stories, but when it came time to focus, I had to weigh them against each other and decide which one would serve as the best beginning. Funny enough, I was thinking less about what would make sense for a debut author and more about which story would best introduce readers to the world and the characters inside it.

Either way, the story that became Of Salt and Sigils has evolved beautifully over time. It now feels like the right doorway into Vemados.

My love of worldbuilding goes back much further than the maps, though.

As a child, I was fascinated by mythology and folklore. Ironically, I often preferred nonfiction. Whenever my father took me to the bookstore, I made a beeline for the mythology section. I wanted the old stories, the strange creatures, the gods and monsters, the beliefs people carried across oceans and centuries.

When I was about fifteen, I picked up a book about mermaid myths from around the world.

My books do not actually contain mermaids, but that book still changed something for me.

Until then, I had been very practical about my future. I researched colleges, majors, and possible careers from a young age, but nothing ever felt quite right. I loved learning. I loved research. But when I imagined myself doing any of those jobs for years, I always had the sense that I would eventually grow bored.

Then, one day, while reading about mermaids, I had a thought that startled me:

I could write stories myself.

It sounds simple now, but at the time, I had never seriously considered writing as a career. Creative work seemed unreliable, uncertain, and difficult to trust. The thought frightened me enough that I actually put the book down and avoided it for a while.

Because I knew that if I chose writing, it would ask a lot from me.

More than any other path I had researched.

But I also knew something else.

I would never be bored.

For about two weeks, I walked past that book, thinking about the possibility. Eventually, I picked it up again and decided that yes, I would consider this path. From there, I never really stopped.

I took notes as I read. I wrote down ideas, wandering thoughts, fragments of scenes, character possibilities, and things I had seen in movies or read in myths that sparked something in me. I bought books on writing and screenwriting. I read every article I could find. I started stories, changed them, built characters, killed them off, let heroes succeed, let them fail, and tried to learn how stories worked from the inside out.

Those early musings were for me. They were study. They were practice. They were the beginning of a framework.

Eventually, I realized writing was not simply one option among many. It was the one that made everything else make sense.

And not long after that, I began building maps.

That was when the whole world opened.

Suddenly, all the research I had been doing had somewhere to go. Everything I had learned — from mythology and history to geography, economics, war, ecology, and geology — became useful again. It all had a place.

Since then, I have collected shelves of books: old world atlases, histories of war and trade, books on economics, geology, architecture, folklore, and far more. I do not let myself get trapped in every possible detail. I am not the kind of worldbuilder who needs to know who takes out the trash in every city.

But I do care deeply about the tectonic plates.

Every single one of them.

I care where the mountains rise, where the rivers cut through the land, where the ocean trenches fall, where islands appear, and how wind and sea patterns shape travel, trade, and conflict.

Those details matter to me because they do more than decorate the story. They can become the reason a story exists at all.

Geography shapes culture. Oceans shape politics. Mountains shape borders. Magic shapes power. Trade routes shape ambition. A hidden island, a dangerous sea, or a forgotten civilization can change the fate of nations.

That is part of why I want Vemados to feel lived in.

The world is fantastical, but I still want it to feel reasonable. I want its cultures, environments, histories, and magical systems to have roots. There are laws behind the mountains and the magic, the wind and the sea.

I have been lucky enough to travel to some of the places that inspire my settings, but research does a great deal of the heavy lifting. Visual reference has also become essential to my process. Pinterest, in particular, has been one of my favorite tools for gathering atmosphere, architecture, landscapes, clothing, color palettes, and character inspiration.

At this point, I have more than 36,000 pins and counting.

Most of them are still private, but I have begun creating public aesthetic boards for anyone interested in the visual foundations of Vemados and The Summit Series. As I continue through this current round of editing, I plan to make more of those boards available.

I also hope to share more posts like this — glimpses behind the stories, the maps, the research, the inspirations, and the long process of building a world from the ground up.

Because Vemados did not appear all at once.

It began with curiosity.

Then mythology.

Then maps.

Then tectonic plates.

Then a thirty-year-old drafting table from Portland.

And somewhere along the way, it became a world.