Book Helpless in My Clutches 11/10/2025

What it takes for my crazy imagination to do the job.

The Book Helpless in My Clutches
by Tee M.

World-building is no small thing. When I started shaping the landscape of my book, I quickly realized I needed more than words—I needed a map. Several, actually. Rivers had to run somewhere. Towns needed names. Even the airports demanded their own stories.

To keep everything straight, I began sketching floor plans for key buildings and noting what surrounded each place—a pond, a forest, a ridge that caught the moonlight just right. It wasn’t about perfection on paper; it was about being able to see it all in my mind. Only then could I describe it honestly, as if I’d walked those streets myself.

And then came the characters.
So many characters.

Each one needed a full life—details, histories, bloodlines. I found myself creating ancestry charts just to remember who belonged to whom. Their names often stalled me, because naming is intimate work. A wrong name feels like a wrong soul. But once they’re named and living in my imagination, they refuse to be forgotten.

Sometimes I look at this growing collection—maps, floor plans, lineages, notes stacked like tiny universes—and I laugh. The book is completely helpless in my clutches. But that’s the beautiful part. World by world, character by character, it’s finally coming alive.