tea and writing

Working with Myth Without Taking What’s Not Yours

/ RG Newhouse / Leave a comment

I love mythology like some people love true crime podcasts… obsessively, deeply, with a whiteboard, a lot of chocolate, and a steaming cup of green tea with peppermint. It’s a mess of names, symbolism, tragedy, transformation and just enough blood to keep it interesting. It’s the scaffolding under nearly every story I love and many I’ve written. But when you’re writing fiction that draws from real-world mythologies, things get complicated.

A softly lit writing desk near a window at dusk. An open notebook, a steaming teacup, flickering candles, and scattered greenery sit beneath a backdrop of bokeh lights and bare autumn branches.
Generated with Midjourney magic and exactly one too many cups of peppermint tea.


There’s something irresistible about mythology. It’s archetypal and raw and weird in all the right ways. It carries a current that hums under your skin. One obscure god or whispered folk ritual can ignite an entire novel concept. But it’s not a grab bag of “cool stuff” to mine without care. Especially when that mythology belongs to a culture you weren’t raised in.

Stories are sacred. And mythology? Mythology is a kind of living memory.

The trouble happens when we treat it like window dressing. When we turn someone’s spiritual practice into a costume, or flatten ancestral wisdom into a plot device. I’ve read stories that tried to be reverent but instead came off like the author skimmed the folklore section of Wikipedia, sprinkled a few foreign sounding names around, and called it homage.

I’m not interested in writing that kind of story.

When I pull from myth, especially from a culture not my own, I try to ask more than just “what can I use?” I ask, “what does this mean to the people who live it?” “How might it feel from the inside?” “Am I honoring this… or just wearing it?”

In the short story I worked on today, I drew inspiration from Norse death traditions. I didn’t want to copy and paste a funeral rite. That felt empty. Instead, I built around the feeling of being marked. I imagined two yew trees intertwined as a passage, and asked: what if this place remembered every grief that passed through it? What if the myth wasn’t a record, but a presence?

That’s the work.

Two massive yew trees with thick, entwined branches form a natural archway in a misty forest. Golden leaves, moss-covered roots, and faint lantern light create an ethereal, sacred atmosphere.
Midjourney conjured this. I just followed the path through the trees.


It’s not about erasing yourself or writing only within your lane, it’s about being a respectful guest in someone else’s house. It’s learning the stories before you retell them. It’s caring about more than the aesthetic.

Mythology is not a buffet.

It’s a language. A warning. A bridge.

And if you want to write with it, you better listen first.

If you love a culture’s stories, the best thing you can do is read the voices from within it. Learn from them. Buy their books. Amplify their work.

So I listen, with my notebook open, a candle lit, and cats occasionally trampling across my outlines. That’s where the myth begins for me.

Worldbuilding: A Cautionary Tale in Too Many Tabs

/ RG Newhouse / Leave a comment

Worldbuilding starts innocently enough. You name a kingdom. Maybe draw a map. Maybe throw in a couple of gods, a weird storm, a family tree with just enough trauma to be narratively satisfying.

A cozy, cluttered writer’s desk bathed in soft light. A black cat lounges across hand-drawn fantasy maps and scattered notes. A pink teacup sits nearby, surrounded by vintage books, wildflowers, and the charming chaos of worldbuilding.
Nyx, in her natural habitat: guarding the map she will never let you finish. Somewhere under that paw is a vital plot point. We’ll never know. Image created by Midjourney.

Then one day you blink and realize you’ve written a 3,000 word document on sky island crop rotation. You can’t remember your own birthday, but you know which fictional provinces export fermented windfruit and why their trade alliance fell apart in Cycle 617.

This post? It’s a love letter. And a warning.

People think you have to know everything before you start, but if you did, we’d all be frozen in “research” mode until the sun exploded. It doesn’t need to be logical either, it just needs to feel true to your world. And no, it’s not just for fantasy authors. If you made up a cozy town with suspiciously nosy neighbors and a bakery that mysteriously never runs out of raspberry scones… congratulations, you’re one of us.

Worldbuilding is part chaos magic, part archaeology. You’re not building a world, you’re excavating one you barely understand, with a pen instead of a shovel and caffeine instead of common sense.

It’s balancing six cultural systems, a magic rule you regret inventing, and a civil war you vaguely alluded to in chapter two that now demands three pages of backstory and a hand drawn battle map.

It’s naming things like a drunk linguist. It’s opening your notebook and realizing you’ve contradicted your own timeline in three different places and somehow invented a holiday that happens every thirteen days.
It’s divine, maddening, and wildly inefficient.

And sometimes… it’s dangerous.

A cozy cottagecore writing desk in warm, natural light. A long orange cat sprawls across open notebooks filled with fictional alphabets and scribbled translations. A tipped pink teacup stains scattered parchment, while quills, ink smudges, and wildflowers complete the scene of whimsical worldbuilding chaos.
Finnegan, master of stretching, spilling tea, and rewriting your language system with one well-timed flop. Chaos is his comfort zone. Image created by Midjourney.


Because once the worldbuilding black hole opens up, it sucks you in. Suddenly it’s 2 a.m., your eyes are dry, your tea is cold, and the story you meant to write has been sitting untouched like a gentleman caller you stood up on the porch, in the rain, with flowers. And bless it, the poor thing’s still waiting for you.

But despite all that, there’s this moment, if you’re lucky, when you zoom out and realize it all fits together. Like the world was waiting for you to stumble onto it. When a reader points out a connection between two pieces of lore and you’re like, Yes, I did that on purpose absolutely I am a genius.

Or when a character walks into a room and you know what’s on the walls, what year it was built, who buried a secret in the floorboards, and why the ceiling still leaks. I may not use everything I know in that moment, but in the future, who knows?

It’s tea-stained madness with a side of purpose.

Maybe it’s punishment. Maybe it’s passion.

Probably both.

Because let’s be honest, I don’t worldbuild because I have to. I worldbuild because I can’t not. I’m already asking “what if” a hundred times a day. I might as well write it down and charge my protagonists emotional interest.

A cozy writer’s desk in warm ambient light. A tortoiseshell cat sits curled atop an open laptop beside a pink teacup, gazing thoughtfully out the window. Scattered notes, wildflowers in a vase, and a container of pens and quills complete the soft, creative chaos.
Carmen, as she exists in spirit and judgment. Image created with Midjourney.

Also? It’s fun. Fungi-powered cities? Sentient storms? An economy based on literal hot air? I’m not just building a world, I’m raising it like a feral child I fully intend to unleash on readers.

What’s the weirdest rabbit hole you’ve fallen into while worldbuilding? Calendar math? Magical sewage systems? A military hierarchy based on fish?

Tell me in the comments. Validate me. Share the pain. Maybe bring snacks.

And stay tuned, I’ll be opening the doors to some of my multiversal chaos soon in a section called My Worlds, where you can marvel (or panic) at the sheer number of universes I’m juggling like a gremlin with a tea addiction.

Because why write one world… when you can write twelve?