Building a world is more than paragraphs of description of a prairie town or the mean streets of steampunk London. It’s how your character sees your story world and how it in turn reflects him. It’s how the environment influences and changes your character-and how your character changes her environment-during the events of the plot. Award-winning author Adina Senft will show you how to build a setting from the top down and from the inside out so that your world becomes as much a character as your people. She’ll also talk about how to research a believable setting, even if you’re making it all up.
The author of 18 novels published with Harlequin, Warner Books, and Hachette, Adina Senft holds an M.F.A. in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, where she teaches as adjunct faculty. Writing women’s fiction as Shelley Bates, she was the winner of the Romance Writers of America RITA Award in 2005, a finalist for that award in 2006, and, writing young adult fiction as Shelley Adina, was a Christy Award finalist in 2009. Three of her books have shortlisted for the American Christian Fiction Writers’ Carol Award for book of the year. Of her books, publisher and industry blogger W. Terry Whalin says, “Readers will be lost in the vivid world that [she] paints with incredible detail and masterful storytelling.” A transplanted Canadian, Adina returns there annually to have her accent calibrated. Between books, she enjoys traveling with her husband, playing the piano and Celtic harp, and spoiling her flock of rescued chickens.