Cartographer’s Blues

Sometimes there’s a lot of drawing involved in being a writer.

One of the artifacts we generated in our pre-writing for the Ghost Series is a map of the principle setting. It’s a rather complicated map, not only because the setting itself has many interesting quirks but also because the map shows how things change over the course of about a century.

But, Kent didn’t mind taking that on. It let him relive his dungeon-master glory days a bit, and simultaneously offered an excuse to use lots of layers in the Illustrator file.

We’ve included maps in some of our actual books. So far, this one is for our own use during the project, and we haven’t really decided about sharing it with our readers. All we know for now is that it’s going to be a living document that will be updated as we make new discoveries about our locale. In other words, the map that shows how things change over time will, itself, change over time.

Another trick we might use is building it in 3D with modeling clay. The terrain is quite unusual, and flat drawings might not suffice for making sure we both picture it the same way. This is something we haven’t done on past projects, but it fits our penchant for the tangible and the colorful.

A writing partner is someone who’ll help you chart the unknown.