I knew a lot of things going into writing Wraithkeeper. I knew I wanted to blend some of my favorite genres (fantasy, horror with a side of mystery) into one story, and I also knew that I wanted to get the worldbuilding right. So, for my first time as a writer, I decided to start not by plotting out the story or building characters, but by building the world around them.

This wasn’t because I wanted to deliver a dense, lengthy fantasy book with lots of infodumps. Wraithkeeper is a slim volume by...