Today I have author Gennifer Albin on the blog to talk about Crewel's world building and how she came up with it. I've always been fascinated with Arras ever since I've read the book summary and Gennifer is sharing her thoughts about world building in this awesome post, check it out below!
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When I set out to write Crewel, I wanted to create a world that wasn't anything you might expect from a story about girls weaving the fabric of life. Weaving, sewing, and other needlecraft have always been considered womanly arts, so I chose to build Arras into a glamorous, but very Mad-Menesque world. There I could explore how girls feel about traditional jobs and responsibilities as well as the temptation of luxury and fame. And let's face it, writing characters in fedoras and pin curls is fun.
To do this I coupled the world of film noir with science fiction, but unlike an old Hollywood movie, nothing in Crewel is black and white. The world of Arras is vivid and beautiful, but underneath the polished glamour lies secrets and deceit.
In many ways, building Crewel’s world became an amalgamation of things I love from the cuisine to the style to the dialogue. Years spent watching screwball comedies helped me write the repartee between characters. A love of various cuisine pushed Arras’s dishes toward the exotic. But ultimately, the world of Crewel is built on the dynamics of power at play between the Spinsters the Guild, a self-reinforcing cycle that lends itself to a world of smoke and mirrors, looms and thread.
Thanks for hosting me, Kai!
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Now isn't that an interesting thought? Thanks for stopping by our blog, Gennifer!
Crewel (Crewel World #1) by Gennifer AlbinAdd to your Goodreads list!
Published October 4th 2012 by Faber & Faber
Incapable. Awkward. Artless.
That’s what the other girls whisper behind her back. But sixteen year-old Adelice Lewys has a secret: she wants to fail.
Gifted with the ability to weave time with matter, she’s exactly what the Guild is looking for, and in the world of Arras, being chosen as a Spinster is everything a girl could want. It means privilege, eternal beauty, and being something other than a secretary. It also means the power to embroider the very fabric of life. But if controlling what people eat, where they live and how many children they have is the price of having it all, Adelice isn’t interested.
Not that her feelings matter, because she slipped and wove a moment at testing, and they’re coming for her—tonight.
Now she has one hour to eat her mom’s overcooked pot roast. One hour to listen to her sister’s academy gossip and laugh at her Dad’s stupid jokes. One hour to pretend everything’s okay. And one hour to escape.
Because once you become a Spinster, there’s no turning back.
Check out the AMAZING book trailer:
* Over the summer The Spark ran a competition to find a young singer-songwriter, band or musician to create an original soundtrack to the official Crewel book trailer. The standard of entries was very high, but one track really stood out. The lyrics of fourteen year-old Roisin's O'Hagan's haunting song 'It's a Lie' allude to the themes of the book in a really intriguing way, and the music itself stays with you – everyone will be singing it to themselves for weeks! Artist Carolina Melis created the trailer and you can download the track here for free!
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