I’ve been the person who rolls my eyes at any book that features horses and maps.  As a creative writing teacher, I always warned wannabe fantasy writers about the dangers of getting so swept up in the detail of their worldbuilding that they never got around to writing the actual books.

I deliberately set the Creature Court trilogy in one city, with no travelling.  No horses.  Back in the Mocklore days I deliberately created a fantasy country small enough that people could reasonably walk everywhere, and promptly gave my heroine a magic ship to make sure there were no horses required, and no one would need a map to find their way around.

I’m still anti-horse.

Of course, even fantasy books without maps have maps.  The author needs something to keep track of their imaginary landscapes, to make sure they don’t accidentally end up with their characters walking in the wrong direction, or a city miraculously appearing on the wrong side of a continent.

Trust me, it happens.

With Mocklore, I had a nice little island sketched out in coloured textas.  It was rough, but no one was ever going to see it but me.  Likewise, when I was constructing the city of Aufleur for the Creature Court, I scrawled a general impression of what went where, for my own reference.  I used two colours of biro.  It – wasn’t good.  But hey, no one was going to see it but…

Yeah, so apparently the publishers want a real map.  My first reaction to this was to squee heartily because they were making me maps and obviously they would call upon the pet cartographers they kept on retainers for just such an occasion – ah, wait.  Apparently maps are not in the least like cover art, and it’s up to the author to provide them personally.  If I hadn’t had my very artistic mother present during the discovery of this information, I might well have hyperventilated.

The process is actually kind of exciting.  Mum managed to take my extremely dodgy map sketch and turned it into something that looks like a real city.  She even coped valiantly with the fact that Aufleur is based on Rome, not the Rome that exists in other books of maps, but the Rome that was lodged in my head after staying there for a month back in 2002.

(apparently that Rome does not actually exist, I know, it made me cry too)

We had a map meeting today which basically consisted of me panicking because my theatre is on the wrong side of the city, and hang on I think maybe it has to be on the district it shares a name with because that would make sense, right, only that means I have to change the actual text, and I don’t know where that street is at all, and oh god EVERY time I open the ms document I find some other reference to a map-related thing that bears no relation to the biro sketch I made a million years ago and I don’t actually KNOW how lakes work, why would anyone need to know how lakes work, and I have two different names for the gates of the city and can you have gates without actually having walls and maybe I do have walls, I don’t know because my characters have never walked past them, and OMG MY RIVER HAS NO NAME.

My mother at this point is giggling madly at me.  “How do you write a whole book and never name the river>?” she asked.

“THEY JUST CALL IT THE RIVER!”

Ahem.  Long story short.  Forget what I said before.  Get your map sorted long before you reach edit/proof stage of the manuscript.  Seriously.  The drawing it up and making it look pretty is not the part that takes the time.  It’s the failing to recognise that you’ve lost a road somewhere and you can’t remember what it was supposed to be called anyway and if you refer to docks then you should probably know where they are and TRAIN TRACKS ARE SUPPOSED TO GO SOMEWHERE!

*breathes*

Also, my mother is awesome.  That is all.

Tags: creature court, mapmaking, mocklore, worldbuilding, writing