In The Beginning...

In 1989 I decided to create a world I could use as a setting for a series of stories concerning a young girl who somehow finds a portal to travel from her world to ours and back.

I had long been a student of the various legends and myths concerning the Bermuda Triangle. I kept waiting for someone to write stories about the place where the people who were lost in the Triangle supposedly ended up. Unfortunately, none ever surfaced - at least to my knowledge. The world I wanted to create would change that situation.

I also bemoaned the fact that no one had ever written a story about someone from that world coming to ours. The Triangle seemed a one-way street. I wanted to address that issue as well.

This premise was all I possessed in the beginning. It wasn't much to hang your hat on and I realized I had a lot of work in front of me. I felt the world had to be created before I ever began writing stories about it. I doubted I could give the consistency to my work that would be required if I just started popping out stories and poems. So I set off to design the world of Erde. Well, I didn't actually call it Erde back then - that came a bit later.

I figured it this way - people from here went there. Surely people must already had existed there so our people would have had to interact with them in major ways.  That's the kind of people we are, isn't it? Control freaks who have to change everything to suit ourselves.  I decided the takeover of Erde by the OutSiders would pretty much run parallel to the European conquest of the Americas, our people being the kind of people we are and all.  It took the better part of 400 years for the Europeans to take over the Americas from the indigenous peoples who called this land home.  That would be from the 1500s to the late 1800s.  However, the influx of our peoples to this strange land would not happen as fast as the invasion of the Americas by the Europeans over those 400 years, so I stretched out the time frame so the influx of our people would take place over a 4000 year period. I also gave the newcomers to my created world a slight advantage.

I admit I stole that advantage from the Bible.  I linked my newly created land with the pre-flood times of the scriptures.  When someone from here went there, they would live as long as 900 years.  This would give them the time to father many generations of children even though the number of newcomers coming to this world at any one time would be few.  The children of the newcomers, however, would live only the normal lifespan of 70 odd years. 

The opposite of this rule would also be true.  Any native of my newly created world, whether indigenous or the offspring of our people, who traveled from there to here would also acquire an expanded life expectancy.  That people could live over 900 years is evidenced by the early patriarchs of the Scriptures. 

I wanted to base my created world as closely as possible on our own world to keep the stories believable.  I felt this was necessary if our people could exist there and their people could exist here.  They would have to be mirror worlds to some degree.

So a history started to develop from this.  I thought about what it would have been like being some of the first OutSiders to end up there from here.  Who would these people be?  I decided that they would probably be Norsemen, people who roamed the Atlantic far before the Europeans got around to it.  I figured that like most explorers they would tend to name places after their cities back home.  Thus I used the names Uppsala and Sigtuna as the settings for the dawn of OutSider civilization.  The other place names in the land came from different languages of the people who came to live there, or were taken from the languages of the indigenous people.  I decided to use the German word 'Erde' as the name for this world.  The word 'Weald' is an Old English term for a densely forested area.  Things were starting to fall into place now.