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Author: Sharrukin

Proposing a Patreon

Proposing a Patreon

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I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last couple of weeks considering how to re-activate my Patreon campaign. It’s looking more and more like that will be a thing in the new year.

My objectives here are, in no particular order:

  • Offer patrons a steady and predictable stream of creative products that they will find entertaining, and (in some cases) useful at the game table.
  • Raise some money for my creative work, specifically to help offset the cost of professional assistance in editing, cover art, or other aspects of book production.
  • Build up the potential audience for my books and RPG products when those are released.
  • Possibly gather some feedback for my creative projects while they’re still under development.

That first bullet used to be a serious problem, as when I kept an active Patreon through 2015-2016. Back then, I tended to flit from one project to another as time and inspiration moved me, so I had a hard time producing work on a steady and predictable basis. I really couldn’t justify charging anyone money for that!

Now, however, I seem to be in a position to plan my creative work more decisively and effectively, sticking to a small set of projects and producing regular output for months at a time. So that obstacle may no longer be relevant.

So, here’s the rough draft of a plan for how to structure my creative output in such a way as to sustain a Patreon campaign.

I foresee three “product lines” from my workshop:

  • Original fantasy and science fiction: This will be centered around a series of full-length novels, each of which will be published (possibly with some hired professional assistance) via Amazon. I can foresee producing and publishing at least one novel per year. There may be occasional shorter pieces as well, from short-story up through novella length.
  • Tabletop-ready fantasy and science fiction world-building material: This will most likely shake out as a series of short books, in the area of 25,000 to 40,000 words each, published in PDF form by way of DriveThruRPG.com or a similar outlet. Naturally, these are going to be closely tied to whatever novel I’m currently working on. I can foresee producing two or three of these per year.
  • This blog will continue as an outlet for status reports, scraps of material that will eventually go into products for sale, one-off articles, maybe some short fiction, discussion of potential future projects, and so on. Pretty much the same content I produce here now. At most, I might commit to making sure I produce at least one substantive blog post per week. I’ll continue to post to this WordPress site, but cross-link posts to Patreon so my patrons can read there if they want.

Along with this structure, I think I’ll maintain a loose plan for future projects, so patrons will know what to expect. So, for example, when people come to my Patreon front page they’ll see something like:

  • The current novel in progress, with a plot synopsis, links to an excerpt or two, and a tentative release date, similar information for the next novel in the queue, and mention of two or three novels I might work on a year or more out.
  • Similarly, the current RPG product in progress, its status and tentative release date, the next one in the queue, and maybe a list of what might be forthcoming after that.
  • The “back burner” – a list of possible novels, settings, and other major projects that are in the stage where they’re just percolating in the back of my mind during spare cycles. May turn into releasable products at some point, but it won’t be soon.

With a dashboard like that in place – possibly as a sticky post that’s visible on Patreon? – potential patrons will be able to tell if I’m actively working on something they’ll be interested in, and make their level-of-support decisions on that basis.

Meanwhile, I need to think about how to structure the actual release of material to patrons. I’m thinking there will be a low-cost tier that’s basically the “thanks for your support” level and only gets access to this blog, a medium-cost tier that gets access to monthly partial drafts of both fiction and RPG material, and a high-cost tier that also gets free copies of finished e-books and PDFs. Still considering how to set that up, especially that middle tier – I want to be sure I can define a sustainable flow of output that will justify the cost to patrons.

Watch this space!

New Creative Directions

New Creative Directions

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It’s not the end of the year yet – that being when I usually take stock and make plans for upcoming creative work – but a few things have happened recently that may turn out to be productive.

The Obvious Task: The Curse of Steel is finished in the first draft. I’ll be spending the next few months on a second-draft rewrite of the novel, with a planned milestone of having it ready for publication in the spring. After that, I’ll be getting started on the second novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands.

Preparing for Patreon: Now, as one element of preparing for publication, I’ve been thinking about re-opening my Patreon campaign, which has been shut down for several years. Hopefully, that can help me gather an audience for the novel(s), as well as raise a little money to help pay for professional cover art or editorial services. With the novel series underway, I certainly won’t have any problem producing material that patrons can enjoy for the foreseeable future.

World-Building Material for Patrons: However, while working on the novel series, I’ve been coming up with a lot of world-building material: maps, constructed language, cultural descriptions, character writeups, and so on. Most of that material hasn’t been posted here. I imagine some of my readers would be interested in it, either on its own or as support for tabletop gaming.

The stumbling block here is that when I frame my own world-building notes in terms of a tabletop game, the game system I normally use is GURPS. Steve Jackson Games is fairly strict about licensing the GURPS system for third-party publishers – there’s no Open Gaming License for it, for example. It’s possible to work with them to get a license, and several publishers have done so, but for someone like me who would just be publishing material for a small audience via Patreon, that’s not worthwhile.

Fortunately, a solution came to me a few days ago: publish game-ready material using a “generic” character description format of my own design, one which could easily be converted to GURPS – or to any number of other game systems, for that matter. That way I can publish the material for patrons and still avoid any danger of infringing on SJG’s online policy.

Just as a trial balloon, I’ve started pulling together the design I have in mind, and it’s surprisingly simple. I suspect I could publish a reference document, under a Creative Commons license, that’s no more than a dozen pages long. So that looks like it’s going to be part of the strategy.

Some New Simulations for Evaluation: Entirely unconnected to the above, I received a shipment from Sierra Madre Games earlier this week – two games that I ordered many months ago and that have finally been released.

Bios: Origins (Second Edition) is the final game in Phil Eklund’s Bios trilogy, which began with Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna. This game picks up where Megafauna left off – at the point where the primitive human species (or some other pre-sapient species on an alien world) first attains a spark of consciousness. It’s a Civ-like game, which traces the history of a world from the Paleolithic all the way to the dawn of the Space Age.

As with Phil’s other games, this has oodles of thematic interest, and I suspect it could be used rather handily as a world-building tool. You may recall that I did a series of “world-building by simulation” articles a while back, using Genesis and Megafauna to design an alien world and its dominant sentient species. Now I think I’m going to tinker a bit with Origins and see if I can turn it to similar purposes. There may be a fair number of blog posts about that over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Pax Transhumanity is a game by Phil Eklund’s son, Matt Eklund. It’s a thematic simulation of future history – the period over the next century or so, during which technology is likely to completely transform human society (again, still, as always). It fits in well with the Transhuman Space setting I helped design for Steve Jackson Games back in the day.

I’ve been waiting for Pax Transhumanity for a long time, hoping to use it to re-inspire me for another of my creative projects: the “Human Destiny” setting, in which humanity becomes part of a polyspecific interstellar community over the next couple of centuries.

The Human Destiny stories started off reasonably well – I actually published one of them via Amazon a while ago – but I ran into a brick wall with them. Largely because, in the current concept for the setting, human beings have very little agency! They’re the passive subjects of an alien empire, which came to manage Earth and human destiny because we proved unable to succeed on our own.

Okay, I will admit that I’m fairly pessimistic about human prospects. My evaluation of my species is that we’re just smart enough to get ourselves into a world of difficulty, but not smart enough to save ourselves from the consequences. That doesn’t make for very hopeful or interesting storytelling, though.

So for a long time, I’ve been trying to find ways to convince myself anew that humanity actually has a hopeful future, preferably without divine intervention or helpful aliens to save us from our own folly. I want to develop a fictional world in which we muddle through and eventually manage to solve the problems we cause for ourselves. Going back and re-reading Transhuman Space has helped a little, since that’s exactly the assumption we made for that setting. Tinkering with Pax Transhumanity might help too.

All of which means that I might be re-working the Human Destiny setting over the next few months. More material for this blog, the Patreon, and eventual publication, hopefully.

Architect of Worlds: I still need to get back to work on the Architect of Worlds project, of course – that’s been stalled for a lot longer than I originally planned. Even so, every once in awhile someone comes across it and gets good use out of it, even in its incomplete state. One of these days I’ll have to set everything else aside and just get the next big section written . . .

Hmm. This is reading a lot like a “prospects for the new year” post, isn’t it? Even if the above list is all I work on, that’s more than enough to keep me busy for months. I suppose that’s okay. When the muse calls, you answer, no matter what the calendar says!

“The Curse of Steel” Complete in First Draft!

“The Curse of Steel” Complete in First Draft!

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As of about ten minutes ago, The Curse of Steel is finished in first draft, coming in at just over 90,000 words.

For me, this is a pretty remarkable milestone. I’ve written and published a couple million words over the years, but this is the first time I’ve managed to write a full-length genre novel that is:

  1. Mature enough for a general audience (as opposed to the first novel I wrote, when I was twelve);
  2. Publishable (as opposed to the second novel I wrote, which used a whole pile of problematic tropes); and
  3. Not fan-fiction (as opposed to the third through seventh novels I wrote, which got lots of readers but will never earn me a dime).

Now the hard work starts. The first draft is the “plot draft,” where I work out the story for the first time. It’s certainly readable as is – I flatter myself that my prose style is fairly clean – but it’s not as tight as it needs to be. Now I need to go back and do an almost complete rewrite, turning the bare-bones narrative into something that will grab and hold readers’ attention.

Still. I think I will take a few hours and celebrate.

A Welcome Bit of Publicity

A Welcome Bit of Publicity

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Timothy Pike, the editor of Books & Buzz Magazine and the associated Chapterbuzz website, offered me the chance to be the subject of a cover article in an upcoming issue. Since I had done well in the October writing challenge on Chapterbuzz, and The Curse of Steel was making strong progress, he thought I might be a good subject for an interview article. He sent me a bunch of questions, about a week ago I sent him back a few thousand words of responses, and now here we are.

I was pleasantly surprised at the article – Mr. Pike did a pretty good job of pulling my comments together and building a pep-talk for other would-be authors out of them. I’m certainly not going to argue with a bit of free publicity!

Here’s a link to the article itself: How author John Alleyn gets lost in his own worlds. It’s free to read at Books & Buzz.

Status Report (28 November 2019)

Status Report (28 November 2019)

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It’s been a while since I posted here, but there hasn’t been that much new to report. I’ve been making steady progress on the first draft of The Curse of Steel, and I strongly suspect I’ll be finished sometime this holiday weekend. At that point, I’ll be taking a short break, and then launching myself right into the second-draft rewrite.

Oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about reviving my Patreon account. The main reason I let that lapse, a few years ago, was that I wasn’t producing content consistently enough to warrant asking anyone to pay me for it. I was mostly writing fan-fiction (which I can’t legally accept payment for), or doing research for the Architect of Worlds project (which didn’t give rise to useful content on a consistent basis), or generally messing around with one-off world-building or writing projects. Why should anyone want to support that kind of desultory work?

On the other hand, now I have this novel I’m working on, and world-building and constructed-language material to support that. Since I’m going to be self-publishing the finished work, patronage could help me gather an audience, and might also help offset some of the costs of professional support. That might be a thing in the new year.

One odd thing did come up over the past few days.

Apparently, about a year ago, someone downloaded the complete text of one of my fan-fiction novels (Memoirs: The Reaper War), reformatted it as an e-book, slapped a cover image on it (also stolen), and published it to Amazon UK under their own byline. They even stole my blurb for the novel! Naturally, this did not work out well for them. Within a few days, someone noticed that the e-book was fan-fiction, with no sign of consent from the Mass Effect IP owners. The violation of Terms of Service was reported to Amazon, and the e-book was taken down in short order.

(It still appears to have a Goodreads entry, though. I wonder if Goodreads has any mechanism for taking those down, if the book turns out to be fraudulent?)

One annoying part is that I didn’t hear anything about the incident at the time. Several people apparently looked closely enough at the plagiarized e-book to recognize that I was the original author, but none of them thought to let me know what was going on. I only came across the discussion on Reddit by accident, earlier this week while I was searching for something else entirely.

More annoying is the thought that this could put me in a very bad position someday. Suppose Amazon puts two and two together and concludes I was the idiot who tried this in the first place. The last thing I need is for them to decide to pull the original work I’ve actually published with them!

No news is good news, I suppose – if I didn’t notice this situation in over a year, it’s probably not going to blow up in my face. Still. I’ve dropped a note to the Organization for Transformative Works, to see if this kind of thing has ever come up before and if they have any advice for how I should handle the situation.

Meanwhile, if I ever find out who “Cole Price” or “C. P. Price” is, we are going to have words.

Status Report (11 November 2019)

Status Report (11 November 2019)

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Not much to report from the last week or so. The Curse of Steel is still moving strongly toward its conclusion – I’ve passed the climax of the story and am now well into the denouement, setting up the next novel in the series. I might even be finished with the first draft before the end of this week.

A small surprise. Timothy Pike, the fellow who runs the Chapterbuzz website where I’ve been posting the draft, has asked me to be the subject of the cover feature in an upcoming issue of Books & Buzz Magazine.

That’s probably not as big a deal as it might sound – as far as I can tell, the magazine’s subscriber base isn’t all that large – but it should be an interesting adventure. It’s not costing me anything but a little time, at any rate. He’s sent me a pile of interview questions to respond to; I think what he’s really looking for is the kind of story that can encourage other would-be authors to push forward with their own projects. I can certainly speak candidly about my own journey as a writer. If and when that comes to fruition, I’ll post a link here.

A Change of Plans

A Change of Plans

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As I work on The Curse of Steel, I’ve become increasingly aware that my original plot outline was a bit too ambitious. I had a certain amount of the overall story arc that I thought I was going to tell in a single 120-kiloword volume. Actually writing the story, though, has worked out differently.

Right now I’m at about 72 kilowords, and I’m just getting to what I originally thought of as the midpoint of the first novel in the series. More importantly, the dramatic beat that’s coming up soon is feeling more like the climax of a novel’s story, not so much like a mere mid-second-act plot twist.

I think the solution is obvious: treat the upcoming dramatic moment as the climax of a shortened novel, then push a chunk of the original outline into the first sequel. I think the tone of each story will end up feeling more coherent as a result. The move leaves The Curse of Steel unified as a story of heroic action, intrigue, and tribal politics, whereas the next book will be almost entirely about long-distance travel on a quest.

The upshot of all this is that I’m reducing my estimate for the total word count for The Curse of Steel, to 90 kilowords. Which means I’m a lot closer to being done with the first draft than I thought.

Earlier I was thinking of using November (National Novel Writing Month) to crank out 50 kilowords of content for The Curse of Steel. That would have brought me pretty close to the end of the story as originally planned. Now, it looks more likely that I won’t be formally participating in NaNoWriMo. Instead, during November I’ll finish the first draft of this novel, start working on revisions, and also start doing some world-building and constructed-language work for the second novel in the series. I’ll need at least two more naming languages; Kráva will be visiting two new major cultures in the course of that story.

It seems even more likely than before that The Curse of Steel will be finished and ready for release very early in 2020. The working title for the second novel in the series will be The Sunlit Lands.

Two Demigods

Two Demigods

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I’m taking a bit of a break from working on The Curse of Steel directly. One of the things I’ve done is to tinker a bit with representing some of my characters in GURPS terms. A bit of a challenge, since these are clearly superhuman characters (they’re the descendants of gods, in a setting where that basically makes you a superhero). As a sample, here are what are shaping up to be my two lead characters, at least so far:

Kráva the Swift (400 points)

Age 20; Human; 6′ even; 160 lbs.; Strong, athletic warrior-woman, usually wearing fine-quality clothes decorated with raven feathers.

ST 22 [120]; DX 14 [80]; IQ 12 [40]; HT 14 [40].

Damage 2d/4d; BL 97 lbs.; HP 18 [-8]; Will 14 [10]; Per 12 [0]; FP 14 [0].

Basic Speed 7 [0]; Basic Move 7 [0]; Block 9 (DX); Dodge 11; Parry 11 (DX).

Social Background

TL: 2 [0]. CF: Tremára (Native) [0]. Languages: Tremára (Native) [0].

Advantages

Ally (Raven sent by Sky Father) (25% of starting points) (12 or less) [2]; Ally (Raven sent by Sky Father) (25% of starting points) (12 or less) [2]; Ally (Tarankláva) (150% of starting points) (15 or less) [30]; Appearance (Attractive) [4]; Blessed (Heroic Feats of ST) [10]; Charisma 2 [10]; Combat Reflexes [15]; Enhanced Move (Ground) (1/2) [10]; Fearlessness 2 [4]; Patron (Sky Father) (6 or less; Highly Accessible; Minimal Intervention) [15]; Status (+2) [5]; Super Jump 1 [10]; Wealth (Wealthy) [20].

Disadvantages

Bad Temper (12 or less) [-10]; Code of Honor (Tremára) [-5]; Enemy (Servants of the Dark God) (medium-sized group, some formidable or super-human) (9 or less) [-30]; Vow (Hold and defend the Thunder Blade unless its rightful owner should appear) (Minor) [-5].

Quirks: Chauvinistic; Headstrong; Proud; Vow (Shield-woman’s oath) [-4].

Skills

Animal Handling (Equines)-11 (IQ-1) [1]; Area Knowledge (Ravatheni Lands)-12 (IQ+0) [1]; Bow-15 (DX+1) [4]; Broadsword-14 (DX+0) [2]; Climbing-13 (DX-1) [1]; Current Affairs/TL2 (Ravatheni Lands)-12 (IQ+0) [1]; Hiking-13 (HT-1) [1]; Intimidation-13 (Will-1) [1]; Knife-14 (DX+0) [1]; Leadership-14 (IQ+2) [2]; Navigation/TL2 (Land)-12 (IQ+0) [2]; Politics-11 (IQ-1) [1]; Public Speaking (Oratory)-14 (IQ+2) [1]; Riding (Equines)-15 (DX+1) [4]; Running-13 (HT-1) [1]; Savoir-Faire (Tremára)-12 (IQ+0) [1]; Shield (Shield)-15 (DX+1) [2]; Spear-13 (DX-1) [1]; Stealth-13 (DX-1) [1]; Survival (Plains)-12 (Per+0) [2]; Swimming-14 (HT+0) [1]; Teamster (Equines)-14 (IQ+2) [4]; Throwing-13 (DX-1) [1]; Tracking-12 (Per+0) [2]; Wrestling-13 (DX-1) [1].

Kráva is very much a physical hero – very strong and fast, with a bit of Extended Move (Ground) and Super Jump to make her very mobile. She’s by no means stupid, but her talents mostly involve punching (or cutting) her way through problems.

A couple of notes about her Allies: I’ve drawn up her raven familiars as characters, and they both come in well under 0-point characters, so they’re fairly cheap.

I’ve also drawn up Tarankláva, her sword, as a character. As a practical matter, it works as a fine-quality broadsword with a bonus to skill rolls, but it also has certain powers of its own, which it uses to feed her information. The “curse of steel” has to do with the fact that it doesn’t feed her all the information it could in theory gather for her. On the sword’s character sheet, that’s set down as Reprogrammable and Slave Mentality, with a Divine Curse that prevents the sword from telling its bearer everything it sees.

Lóka the Clever (400 points)

Age 25; Human; 5′ 7″; 150 lbs.; Well-built man in a white vaita‘s robe.

ST 11 [10]; DX 13 [60]; IQ 15 [100]; HT 12 [20].

Damage 1d-1/1d+1; BL 24 lbs.; HP 11 [0]; Will 15 [0]; Per 15 [0]; FP 12 [0].

Basic Speed 6.25 [0]; Basic Move 6 [0]; Block 7 (DX); Dodge 9; Parry 9 (DX).

Social Background

TL: 2 [0]. CF: Tremára (Native) [0]. Languages: Lake Country (Native) [6]; Sea Kingdom (Native) [6]; Tremára (Native) [0]; Vaita Script (None/Native) [3].

Advantages

Appearance (Attractive) [4]; Blessed [10]; Cultural Adaptability [10]; Detect (Divine presence and children of the gods) (Rare) [5]; Eidetic Memory [5]; Magery 2 [25]; Modular Abilities (Cosmic Power) (Per point of abilities (+6); Trait Limited: One specific trait (Languages Only)) [30]; Musical Ability 2 [10]; Patron (Kórsata) (6 or less; Highly Accessible; Minimal Intervention) [15]; Social Regard (Respected) 1 [5]; Vaita Rank 1 [5]; Voice [10].

Disadvantages

Secret (Child of a god) (Utter Rejection) [-10]; Sense of Duty (Friends and companions) (Small Group) [-5]; Social Stigma (Second-Class Citizen) [-5]; Vow (Never admit his divine ancestry or the name of his divine parent) (Minor) [-5]; Xenophilia (12 or less) [-10].

Quirks: Congenial; Despises slave-owners and slavers; Likes to show off his cleverness; Proud [-4].

Skills

Current Affairs/TL2 (Ravatheni Lands)-15 (IQ+0) [1]; Diplomacy-15 (IQ+0) [1]; Esoteric Medicine-14 (Per-1) [2]; Fast-Talk-16 (IQ+1) [1]; History (Tremára Lands)-15 (IQ+0) [4]; Knife-13 (DX+0) [1]; Law (Tremára)-15 (IQ+0) [4]; Literature-15 (IQ+0) [4]; Musical Influence-15 (IQ+0) [2]; Musical Instrument (Harp)-16 (IQ+1) [2]; Occultism-15 (IQ+0) [2]; Performance-18 (IQ+3) [4]; Poetry-16 (IQ+1) [4]; Politics-16 (IQ+1) [1]; Public Speaking-18 (IQ+3) [3]; Religious Ritual (Tremára)-14 (IQ-1) [2]; Riding (Equines)-12 (DX-1) [1]; Savoir-Faire (Tremára)-15 (IQ+0) [1]; Singing-18 (HT+6) [4]; Staff-12 (DX-1) [1]; Swimming-12 (HT+0) [1]; Teaching-14 (IQ-1) [1]; Theology (Tremára)-14 (IQ-1) [2]; Writing-14 (IQ-1) [1].

Spells

Analyze Magic-15 [1]; Apportation-15 [1]; Counterspell-15 [1]; Create Fire-15 [1]; Cure Disease-15 [1]; Detect Magic-15 [1]; Detect Poison-15 [1]; Dispel Magic-15 [1]; Divination (Oneiromancy)-15 [1]; Enchant-15 [2]; Extinguish Fire-15 [1]; Find Weakness-15 [1]; Great Voice-15 [1]; History-15 [1]; Identify Spell-15 [1]; Ignite Fire-15 [1]; Know Illusion-15 [1]; Lend Energy-15 [1]; Lend Vitality-15 [1]; Light-15 [1]; Loyal Sword-15 [1]; Major Healing-15 [2]; Minor Healing-16 [2]; Rejoin-15 [1]; Relieve Sickness-16 [2]; Repair-15 [1]; Restore-15 [1]; Seek Air-15 [1]; Seek Earth-15 [1]; Seek Fire-15 [1]; Seek Magic-15 [1]; Seek Water-15 [1]; Seeker-15 [1]; Sense Danger-15 [1]; Sense Emotion-15 [1]; Sense Foes-15 [1]; Sense Life-15 [1]; Shape Fire-15 [1]; Simple Illusion-15 [1]; Sound-15 [1]; Thunderclap-15 [1]; Trace-15 [1]; Truthsayer-15 [1]; Voices-15 [1]; Ward-15 [1]; Weaken-15 [1].

When I was developing this story, and considering how to represent magic, I messed around with a bunch of different models. In the end, I decided to go with bog-standard GURPS, at least for now. Some characters will have superhuman powers that are innate to them, represented by very high Attribute scores and Advantages. Other characters will be able to use “charms” or “spells” that are learned, powered by personal resources – hence, standard GURPS magic. So far, that seems to be matching the story I want to tell pretty well.

One note about Lóka: in the story, it’s a plot point that he seems to be able to understand, speak, read, and write any language he encounters. That’s kind of difficult to represent in GURPS, but the Modular Abilities trait used here seems to be the best way to proceed. As it stands, Lóka knows two or three languages by natural means. He can also “miraculously” use other languages that he’s never encountered before, although it takes him a few seconds to switch to the new script or tongue (he has to “get the trick of it”). At the moment he could get native-level fluency and literacy in one language at a time, or speak two strange languages like a native and act as a translator (without being able to read either of them), and so on. Useful!

More characters to come, I think, and I may make a post or two about world-building assumptions. This setting wouldn’t make a bad GURPS world-book, actually.

Some Map-Making Techniques

Some Map-Making Techniques

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Having produced the continent-scale overview map for Kráva’s world. my next step was to produce a narrow-focus map for the region in which (most of) the story of The Curse of Steel takes place. After a fair amount of tinkering – and a remarkably timely suggestion from my wife – I’ve developed a workflow to do that.

As a reminder, here’s the overview map:

It’s important to note the projection this map is in. It’s in an equirectangular projection, with the standard parallels both on the equator. That means the scale only works along lines of latitude and longitude, and it only consistently represents degrees of arc. What you cannot do with this map is to assume that it has any kind of consistent distance scale.

That’s a problem for any local map, where I might want to conveniently measure off distances to estimate travel times, or the size of occupied territories, or some such thing. What I want to do is “zoom in” on a much smaller region, then change the map projection so that a flat map with a constant distance scale can at least approximate the real situation.

I spent a few hours on Saturday messing with Photoshop, trying to approximate the coordinate transform that would take me from an equirectangular projection to (say) a gnomonic projection. Much frustration followed, with several pages of trigonometric scratchings and a great deal of button-punching on my calculator (hooray for my reliable old Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus, which has been a standby for twenty years now).

At which point my wife, bless her, looked over my shoulder, listened to my explanation of what I was trying to do, and said, “Why are you messing with all of that? Hasn’t someone developed a tool to do it?”

At which point I (figuratively) facepalmed hard enough to give myself a concussion. Because, indeed, someone has developed a tool to do that.

Witness G.Projector, a Java-based application developed by NASA at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), available for free to the public, which is all about making quick seamless transformations from one map projection to another.

Turns out that it’s trivial to load any map or image that’s in equirectangular projection into G.Projector, after which it will begin by showing you, by default, an orthographic projection of the same image – as if you were off at a distance and looking at the image spread across a globe:

Now, that much I already knew how to do – G.Projector has been in my toolkit for quite a while. What my wife’s suggestion drove me to do was to see whether the tool could do the rest of the job – move in on a specific region, and then change the projection to one more suited for making a flat map of a small region.

Turned out, that wasn’t all that difficult. A very few minutes of directed tinkering, and I was first able to zoom in on the region I wanted, and then change to a gnomonic projection instead:

From there, it was just a matter of saving that result as a JPEG image, then importing the JPEG into Wonderdraft as an overlay. A few hours of work later, and I had a very fine map to track Kráva’s progress on:

I took a few liberties in the translation, of course – added a few rivers and a terrain feature or two that weren’t on the continent-scale map. Hey, this is my world, I can fiddle with it if I want to. I suppose I might go back to the large-scale map and add in a few details, but that’s not going to become necessary unless – by some miracle – the novel actually finds a substantial audience.

More importantly, I now have a workflow I can use to produce useful, consistent maps for the expanding story, with just a few hours of work and no painstaking mathematics. Thanks, sweetheart!

New Map for Kráva’s World

New Map for Kráva’s World

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Stayed home today with some kind of ick, which let me catch up on sleep . . . and also gave me a chance to play with Wonderdraft a bit more. Lo and behold, with a little work, I’ve been able to finish the top-level reference map for The Curse of Steel. Here it is:

If you’re interested in more of the technical details, or a more high-resolution image to look at or download, here’s a link to the pertinent page on DeviantArt.

This will be my primary reference map from now on, while I work on the story. I plan to produce some regional maps too, so I can keep locations and distances straight in my head. With Wonderdraft that should be a snap. The only trick will be converting from the plate carrée projection here, to a more conformal projection for the little local maps. I think I’ll be able to do the requisite transformation, or at least approximate it, in Photoshop.

In the meantime, I’m very pleased with the results. This map took a lot less time to produce than similar efforts using only Photoshop, and the result looks better. Wonderdraft is an excellent tool for this kind of work!