After a week of reading other people’s work and providing feedback on the Chapterbuzz site, I’ve swung back to working on The Curse of Steel. The feedback I got was a little thin, although three or four people did offer at least a few suggestions apiece. I’ve already gone through and done revisions in accordance with those, and now I’m back to writing new material. As of today, I’ve reached the projected half-way point in the draft – over 60k words!

Meanwhile, over the weekend I picked up a new map-making application, called Wonderdraft. This is an indie production, designed as far as I can tell by a single coder. It doesn’t have nearly the feature list of my usual toolset (Photoshop), but it’s geared almost entirely toward drawing fantasy maps, and for that purpose, it’s pretty slick. The fact that you can “paint” areas of the map with things like mountain or forest icons, and the tool will automatically change up the current icon and make sure there aren’t any collisions with other symbols? Good Lord, that’s useful. I can’t begin to count how many hours I’ve spent in Photoshop, laboriously clicking through mountain or tree icons and placing them one . . . at . . . a . . . time.

Here’s an example – this is the current partial draft of the main continental map for The Curse of Steel, which I’m using to plan out the back story and plot on the largest scales.

Not nearly finished, obviously – I’ve got a ton of layers to paint onto this yet. But the above took a lot less time than it would have in Photoshop, and the tool is doing a nice job of freeing me from drudgery so I can concentrate on being creative. Those mountain ranges, for example, took only 15-20 minutes to plan and paint onto the map. Looks like a hard recommend from me.