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Revised Map of the Great Lands

Revised Map of the Great Lands

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Lately I’ve been working on back-history and geography for The Curse of Steel, and for the EIDOLON-based world-pack I’m writing for parallel publication. This has caused me to experience greater and greater frustration with the world map I built last fall . . . so yesterday I bit the bullet and got to work revising that.

Fortunately, the Wonderdraft tool makes this kind of work very easy. As of this evening, here’s the result – a full Version 2.0 of the Great Lands map:

Here’s a link to the DeviantArt page for the work, in case you’d like to look at or download a more high-resulution image.

This is a big step forward! Next I’m going to be using this map as the basis for a kind of “historical atlas,” a series of schematic images that will help me nail down the historical timeline. Some of those may end up going in the world-pack too, but we’ll see how well they turn out. If this does nothing more than help me visualize how Krava’s world evolved, mission accomplished.

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!

Status Report (15 October 2019)

Status Report (15 October 2019)

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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.