Every world starts with a feeling. Okay, so as I progressed with the plot for Fated Mated Mine, I started thinking deeper about the magical systems at play and the hierarchy of who leads which pack... and what happens on a full moon. But the mood and the feeling came first.

And for my Amsterdamaged series, I felt it standing on a canal bridge at dusk, watching the light turn the water gold. Maybe I'd read too many paranormal romance books but I thought, something is hunting in this city. Something is haunting it! There's so much going on that we probably can't see!

Amsterdam did the rest.

The city is already halfway mythical

Here's the thing about Amsterdam that tourists sense but can't quite put their sticky stroopwafel-covered fingers on... it feels layered. The canal houses lean into each other like they're sharing secrets. The water is dark and still and reflects a world that looks  like ours, but might not be... a secret underworld, perhaps? 

The streets in the spider-web canal ring seem to loop back on themselves. And there's a sense that around any corner, something extraordinary could be happening, unseen to anyone human. 

For a writer building a shifter world, that's a pretty cool backdrop to build on. I didn't really have to make Amsterdam feel magical, I just had to play on the magic that's already here.

Architecture as character

Wolf shifters need territory to stalk around in. They need shadows, thresholds, places to claim and defend. Amsterdam's canal architecture gave me all of that in abundance... think about it! The narrow townhouses with their crow-stepped gables looming over the rippling waters, hidden courtyards behind ordinary-looking doors, bridges that connect worlds as well as streets.

Every location in Amsterdamaged was developed around something already in existence. If a scene happens on a particular canal or in a specific building, it's because that place means something to the pack, or to the story, or to the atmosphere I'm trying to build. The city is basically a character with its own agenda.

Gritty, but never without beauty

The tone I always come back to is gritty but romantic! It's why I fell in love with Amsterdam when I moved here almost ten years ago. Amsterdam is a city of contradictions. It's beautiful and dark. Historic and raw. Stunning canals running alongside streets that have seen everything over hundreds of years, and that push and pull lives in my wolf shifters too. 

The pack is dangerous, territorial, complicated and capable of a devotion so fierce that one action in the name of love can literally rewrite the city's story.

Where the real and the supernatural bleed together

The rule I never break is that the paranormal world has to feel like it was always there, hiding just underneath the surface of the real one. I wanted Lukas, Ruben and Lars's world to feel woven in to the real one. Amsterdam kind of makes that easy. This is a city that has been an empire, and a refuge. It's seen resistance and reinvention. 

A wolf pack that's been running these canals for centuries belong here. It's almost like they were always here. You just didn't know where to look.

Are you a fellow world-builder? I'd love to know — do you start with the place or the people? Tell me!