If you are an author or avid reader of fantasy and/or science fiction - or if you enjoy role-playing within either of those genres - then you already understand the powerful allure of entering into a Secondary World. You've experienced the joys of immersing yourself in your imagination, of exploring the freedoms and consequences of existence in an alternate place where the root assumptions differ from what we hold to be true in our world.

Fantasy can open the mind to possibilities seldom gleaned amidst our daily grind in "reality". It provides feelings of excitement and release that are difficult to explain to the uninitiated.

I will assume, since you've read this far, that you're already besotted with the creative impulse. But maybe you despair of ever giving the right form to your ideas - or believe that you'll never even conceive of any ideas that are uniquely your own. So how do you move from your initial desire to its realization as a fully-developed creation? Well, your first clues as to the road to take lie with what you most love. What themes in the stories you read, what eras of history, what cultural or personal issues really attract you? If you harbor strong feelings about any aspects of the human drama then it's likely that you have something to say about them.

Isolate those ideas. They will be your starting point, the seed ice-crystals around which you can form your own unique snowflake of a world.

When first I longed to write a fantasy novel, I had but two ideas. I wanted to follow a young lad's mystic initiation, a journey that would take him out of his homeland and thrust him into unknown terrain - both physical and spiritual. So the adventure would challenge not only his resources of body and character, but also his very beliefs about the nature of reality. This was theme number one. My second theme: the setting my character moved through should be strongly evocative of the American West circa early 1800's - frontier times. Since the "Wild West" is the romantic era of American history - and this is my country, for better or ill - I wanted to pay homage to the great American Myth. Also, I knew I could steer clear of many fantasy clich