God Rested on the 7th Day

So what took God 6 days to do for real, has taken me years to do in make believe, and I am still not done. Originally I just started writing, sitting down for long marathon sessions where I would crank out 10,000 words. I got about nine chapters in when I realized I had a real problem - consistency. Its funny how the details sneak up on you but ultimately they are what make the forms that hold up the plot and character interaction. In some places, I noted, it took three months to travel a certain place, and in others three weeks. Then there were the moments of, "What was the name of that city again?" Or my most egregious mistake, having scenes occur on the same night with the same players thousands of miles away from each other. EEEK! Stop it now. I had to put the writing on hold and begin to do the dreaded "w" word - World Build.

Now, I know enough about writing to know that authors can get bogged down in world building to the point that they can develop their world to have nations with great histories, geography, and any number of neat little details only to have the narrative suffer. I didn't want to go down that path, but I quickly figured out that for me, I couldn't do any more writing until I mapped the world. Thankfully, years and years of playing role playing games with my friends had kept my creative juices flowing and prepared me for the task at hand.

At first, I was working off a map I had drawn in high school, but much of the direction and scope of the story had changed since then. So I moved to a simple hand drawn "this goes over there, this goes over here" map in a journal that I kept for ideas. I quickly learned that I needed something more robust.

If you know me, you know that I can't draw to save my life. So drawing a map just wasn't going to work. Luckily I found a software program that would allow me to "draw" the map on my computer, which I was much more suited for. The program already had predrawn cities and points of interest, all I had to do was draw lines, figure out a rather complex layering system, and paste in predrawn mountains, cities, towers, runes, relics, and the like.

Today I have a map of Terrene, the name of my world, that is getting fleshed out as the narrative continues. As I run across a need for a named forest, or a new city/village I place it on the map and no more inconsistencies! Most fantasy books come with a map, that I assume was drawn by a map artist after the book was written. I may have the first map that was drawn by the author as he wrote! Of course I'll probably hire someone to make it look nicer than it does now, but all the same, the World of Terrene is being built and I have yet to rest...