I've been penning a manuscript for over a decade that began as nothing more than a romance set in a fictional world. As I got older, and some suppose, more wiser... what I wanted out of the world I was creating became larger in scope.

The world I'd created became more than just a simple backdrop for my characters it began to take on a life of its own. And a need of its own.

The world became a realm. Then it became one of many and they demanded proper histories, proper mythologies that were all their own.

I was daunted by the idea of mythbuilding at first. The very idea of it smacked of heresy, I was raised Orthodox Catholic then converted to Islam at nineteen. Yes, I'd had a fascination with polytheism as a child, but the monotheistic beliefs I was raised with raised their hackles at me. Create your own gods and goddess, tales of how they and mystical and magical kind came into being. Who do you think you are? How dare you.

But the story that had been roiling around inside of me for years refused to quietly lay itself down to my conscience, and eventually, I came to realize that creating my own mythology had nothing to do with creating a new belief for myself. It is simply, in my opinion, artistic expression.

I would love to hear the thoughts of women with the same interests that I do. And I would also like to find readers for my work to gauge it's "interestingness" and "readability".