Writer's Notes! Maps!

Normally I have these posts written up weeks in advance, but this one ended up being a last-minute throw-together, so please forgive me if it's a bit choppy.

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I like drawing maps. I don't know why, but I do. It's not a new thing for me either. I used to really like drawing dinosaur-themed maps:

Sadly, cartography was not a major skill taught in middle school.

I probably ought to draw more maps, actually. Possibly the most persistent problem in successive drafts of Rise of Azraea has been dealing with the elements of time and space - concrete dimensions you'd think were fairly straightforward to manage.

Rise of Azraea was the first large work I wrote which I intended to be large from the beginning, so it was the first time I really needed to think in depth about the geography of my setting. I thought it would be a fairly simple matter of designing the setting at the beginning, and then writing the story on that stage.

That's not impossible to do. When I wrote the first draft of Wild Justices, I scoured the internet for every period map of Boston and Massachusetts I could find, and wrote inside the limits set by a real space at a real point in time.

But I've discovered that if you're writing a pure-fantasy story, it's not sensible to place those sorts of limitations on yourself. Writing is super-fluid - you may be working on chapter 9, think of something great to happen in chapter 11, but realize that it conflicts with something you wrote in chapter 4, and decide to go back and rewrite chapter 4 so that it will be consistent with chapter 11. Whenever you get around to writing chapter 11. With that sort of chaos involved in the creative process, I quickly realized that carefully planning a world's geography was nearly pointless - you end up revising it constantly to match whatever idea you've most recently come up with.

HOWEVER, when you finish your masterpiece, or at least that first draft, and hand it off to a critical reader, certain questions start coming up.

"How many days were they walking?"

"How long would that take?"

"Are you sure?"

"They're next to a river? Again?"

"Did they cross the river? Where did it go?"

"Where DOES the river go?"

When you write the sequel, and have the characters traveling back across the same physical space under different time constraints, the questions mount even further. Canny readers will also wonder how the mountains wound up where they are, and how the river gets to its destination. So, yes, it turns out having maps is kind of important, and nearly as important is thinking about the natural history of the world you're working on, and (seemingly) useless trivia like average human walking speed over long distances, speeds for horses and wagons, etc.

Now, honestly, I still don't have a finalized map for Caelia. I'd like to eventually take the time to learn my way around some actual map-making software, but so far I've been churning out less than professional efforts. Let's call it brain storming.

I started by going back and plotting out a map based (loosely) on directions described in the first draft of the book.

First concept for Caelia's layout, following events in book.

Of course, a lot changed after I plotted out that map, and the world got bigger as some of Caelia's neighbors got fleshed out...

Zoom-in of first map, with important locations noted. 

... especially the Gnoman Empire.

Zoom-out of previous map.

Of course, that map is just the Mediterranean viewed upside down with some higher water levels. That's just lazy.

Though, that's not to say that using existing geography isn't a good place to start. That's how I eventually wound up at this, which is essentially the closest thing to a final map of Kaleida's western hemisphere I have.

Details given in the book describe Caelia as small, but place it just north of the semi-tropical sea controlled by the Gnoman Empire, and just south of the polar ice Azraea's ancestors crossed coming to Caelia. They also put it at a latitude where the summers are as hot as the winters are cold. It's also described as small, but having oceans to the east and west, yet it has a river running southward through it. All of those things are essentially contradictions - with oceans so close on either side, how does the river flow south, rather than east or west?

Honestly, I ran into a situation where I had to choose between the plot points in the book, and faithfulness to climatological and geographical realism, and I chose plot over science. Nevertheless, I tried to narrow the gap between fun and reality as much as possible, and the solution I finally arrived at was making Caelia a land bridge.

That still left the question of how a river flows south through a north-south land bridge?

Basically, I decided Caelia wasn't just a land bridge, it was (implausibly) a giant aqueduct, draining melt waters from the ice cap north of Caelia, to the sea in its east. But how could a land bridge end up with high walls along its coasts?

Close up, unmarked map of Caelia.

... The best thing that occurred to me is that - implausibly - the Caelian land bridge is also a crater. The oceans on either side of Caelia rest on tectonic plates moving towards each other, creating a mountain range between them as a sort of  'crease'.

However, a disastrous event in Kaleida's prehistory hollowed out a deep basin in the mountain range. Ice thawing to the north, and in the surrounding mountain ring, feeds a river that carves its way through the 'crease' to the south, and on down to the Gnoman Sea.

Since then, I haven't drawn up a more detailed map of Caelia, but I did invest considerable time plotting this out for the second book.

So if you're the sort who likes spoilers, there you go - writing the second book required a color-coded map of the capital.