Yesterday evening the Royal Festival Hall let us borrow a corner of its second-floor foyer. Plenty of people gathered—some with graph-paper notebooks, others with nothing but the itch to ask “how.” We pushed the chairs close enough for ideas to hop from one sleeve to the next and began teasing apart a city that doesn’t exist.
🔍 What actually happened
The talk was billed as “Building Worlds Beyond the Known.” Very quickly it shifted into a mini-master-class on story architecture. Instead of reading excerpts from Shattered Horizons of Tarveran (my 2023 novel about a metropolis cracking along invisible fault lines), we reverse-engineered its bones:
drafting a civic history that no reader will ever see but every character will feel;
deciding where corporate glass ends and rust begins—then asking what that border does to loyalty;
letting physics argue with ethics until both give up something valuable.
Someone suggested that the city’s rifts behave like “gravitational guilt.” That definition is now scribbled on the back of my travel card.
“The moment a made-up place starts pushing back, you’re halfway to believable,” I said, and half the group began sketching arrows between their own notes.
📖 Why Tarveran matters to the exercise
The novel is an excuse to test how ambition, fear and infrastructure share the same oxygen. Towers negotiate with torn-up suburbs; back-alley philosophers trade rumours about space folding in on itself. A setting that tense teaches its storyteller discipline—every decorative detail must earn its keep.
🛠 Where we go next
The energy in the room made it clear one evening isn’t enough. I’m mapping out a series of small, hands-on sessions: drafting fictional geographies, stress-testing cultures, building moral weather systems. Announcements will land in the Events section of this blog, alongside the original Meetup listing:
https://www.meetup.com/fiction-philosophy-with-anastasia-dubinina/events/307581421
✉️ Echoes so far
Overnight emails mention half-finished games, experimental comics, even a proposal for an audio walk that tracks the sound a street would make if it were folding. Keep them coming—worlds improve when strangers leave fingerprints.
Thank you for lending your curiosity to a place that can only live on paper (for now). See you atthe next threshold.
— Writer Anastasia Dubinina