A few months ago, I had the chance to speak to a group of MFA students about my second novel, Last Seen Leaving. One of them said, "I know that so far you've written literary thrillers, but I see that your new book is a fantasy novel. What did you find to be the biggest difference between writing crime and writing fantasy?"
This question, I'm embarrassed to say, had never occurred to me. "One has magic and the other has cell phones," I said, joking, and quickly moved on to the next subject. Afterward, the question nagged at me, in the way the best questions do. Worldbuilding, after all, is a concept we mostly associate with fantasy and science fiction; google it, and you'll find endless How-to guides, lists of tips, even entire seminars devoted to it. There's even a subreddit, r/worldbuilding, which is ten years old, and has more than 475,000 members.
