Ask the Author: Lynn Buchanan
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Lynn Buchanan
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Lynn Buchanan
I’ve always had a soft spot for fairy tales—they can be both simplistic and brutal, straightforward and nuanced, and they mix whimsy and darkness in a way that I enjoy immensely. I wanted to emulate that intersection between fairy tale-like charm and brutality/horror in The Dollmakers, and part of my method for accomplishing that was in how I chose the place names in the book—the country called One, the city called Ports, the road called Wide, etc. Labels that are simple, descriptive, and straightforward, similar to the sort of names you’d find in a fairy tale, but existing alongside the devastation caused by the weeping, demonic monsters that periodically terrorize the people in the book.
In terms of how I chose the place names themselves, I tried to think of the most logical thing to call certain places—for a seaside city that specializes in world-wide commerce and trade, “the city called Ports.” For a city known for its beauty and black pearls, “the city called Pearl.” For a town known for silking spiders, “the village called Web.” And so forth.
In terms of how I chose the place names themselves, I tried to think of the most logical thing to call certain places—for a seaside city that specializes in world-wide commerce and trade, “the city called Ports.” For a city known for its beauty and black pearls, “the city called Pearl.” For a town known for silking spiders, “the village called Web.” And so forth.
Lynn Buchanan
Yes, I have plans for more books set in The Fallen Peaks series! The Dollmakers itself is a standalone in the sense that I don’t plan on writing a direct sequel featuring the main cast of the book, but I have several more books written and/or planned set in the same world, in different countries, with new casts of characters interacting with the magic system of the world in different ways. There’s one character who’ll be in all the books (I bet you can guess who), and in general my plan for the series is to write it as a sequence of standalones, similar to the structure of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, with each novel capable of being read independently, but with an overarching story/narrative laced throughout the series.
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