What are the Worlds of the Word Guardians?

Where the worlds came from

Where I started from with the Worlds of the Word Guardians was thinking about what I saw in my mind’s eye when I read. I picture the scenes and the story plays out as if I’m watching my own personal movie. It made me wonder… what if these places were real? How could you visit them? and the worlds (or realms) of the Word Guardians were born.

In the Word Guardians series the realms are absolutely real.  Think of them as magical other worlds, accessible through doorways. Readers co-create these other worlds as they imagine the scenes and the result is stages on which different storylines play out.

How the worlds of the Word Guardians are created

With readers unwittingly creating and shaping these realms, I realised that visitors could essentially gain access to readers’ imagination and if they so desired, they could influence them, for good or bad. The antagonists, the Controllers, were born and in turn this defined the protagonists’ goals, the Word Guardians. I feel that this is very relevant to today where there are so many influences for what we think and do and we’re not fully aware of all of these biases.

So, what actually powers the realms, I hear you cry. Imagination yes, but it has to take form and become physical. In the first book, The Battle for the Peacekeepers, I describe this as Yas discovers a realm for the first time.  Imagination fuels ‘magical ink’ and that creates physical structures, actors, landscapes and more. A storyline plays out and then the magical ink is fueled by the imagination of another reader, and the scene recycles to play out another storyline.

Why the realms are important in the book series

Visitors to realms can wield and interact with this magical ink, influencing and changing the scene and the storylines playing out around them (and I’ll touch on why magic is always word based in a later blog). This then has consequences as I mentioned above and is something that is played out in the series. The Word Guardians effectively need to employ something akin to Star Trek’s Prime Directive (Trekkies will know what I mean by this) to protect the freedom of the imagination of readers, and it becomes clear (as in Star Trek) that the best action to take isn’t always cut and dry.

So, that’s a summary (and introduction to potential readers of the series) of what the Worlds of the Word Guardians are, why I decided to write them this way and how it created the main dynamic between protagonists and the Controllers. To learn more about the book series, please click the button below.