I’ve read that a great way to learn more about writing quickly is by joining some kind of writer’s circle or critique group. So, I’ve been looking around, and found there’s only one local group around where I live, called “Wordsmiths by Night” (named such because they all have day jobs, and gather together at night after work to write at the local coffee shops). That sounded really nice, but I guess I was hoping for a fiction-only group. Maybe even a fantasy-only group. I checked at my college and, to my dismay, they didn’t even have a writing club! Realizing how limited my options were, and not having the free time to run my own, I took my search online.

I joined writing.com and critiquecircle.com, but the upgrade-to-paid-membership schemes there were a big turn-off. Luckily, I came across a blog that mentioned Forward Motion (fmwriters.com). I was surprised I hadn’t come across it before, considering it was founded by Holly Lisle. It’s been around for more than ten years and the group is tightly knit. It houses a treasure-trove of knowledge and the people there are very friendly, patient, and willing to help writers of any skill-level. Their mission statement is basically to guide its members to a writing level suitable for being considering for publication. Despite the website’s archaic appearance, it’s one of the largest writer’s communities out there. Considering the friendly, inviting atmosphere, I’m not surprised!

They post challenges every month as writing warm-ups, and this month was haikus. I dove right into their challenge and had a lot of fun. And, as usual, critiques are welcome!

Dare I rhyme haiku,
Even though I don’t have to?
Dare to rhyme, I do.

Scratches on the wall …
In a jail cell … in a jail
Cell … in a jail cell…

To him, it was like
A morganatic union;
Left us with nothing.

Read the rest of this entry »

For me, this whole process was exciting! Seeing your imagination come to life - turning the world in your head into something more tangible - it felt like a sneak-peek into what it might be like for an author to hold their bound, published book for the first time.

So begins the map-making tutorial!

Mapping out a fantasy world:

Step 1: Unceremoniously draw a map on some scrap paper. I drew mine in a spiral notebook. Author Holly Lisle does this, only she recommends you do this step with a pen. That way, any mistakes cannot be erased. The argument being ‘mistakes’ can become good world history or back-story, such as a sudden unnatural right angled jut in your river could have been man-made: Maybe the nobles redirected the water away from the poorer cities. Or maybe the poor people channeled the water away from the nobles! Maybe a tear in the paper could become a rift to another dimension. Maybe a coffee ring could become a land that has been cursed for centuries. Well, you get the idea. I was more concerned with approximate placements for cities, so I drew arrows with some paths some of my characters have taken. I also liberally X’d out parts I didn’t like.->

Step 2: Re-draw your map on similar paper based on what you learned. Try to make it a rough draft of your final product (try to make it look natural). A pencil and an eraser is highly recommended at this point.->

Step 3: Draw the outlines of your landmass(es) as large as you can on good sketchbook paper. I selected paper about the same size as my scanner bed, and drew on it using a mechanical pencil.->

Step 4: Draw terrain. Try to draw it lightly - preferrably lighter than the outline of the landmass(es). In fact, you may want to use a lighter-toned pencil entirely.
With my terrain I tried for an overhead 3-D effect, but simple upside-down V’s for mountains work just as well. Snaking lines coming off of mountains still work for rivers, and speckled dots still make great deserts.->

Really, at this point, you can just label your cities, maybe color it with colored pencils. The rest of the steps are going to be more about trying to make this map looking nice using digital rendering.

Step 5: Scan it at 200 DPI (or higher) and save it as a good, non-lossy format. I chose PNG, but BMP would have been another good choice.
JPG is an example of a lossy format: good for saving pictures to view later, but bad for pictures you want to work with digitally.
Whenever I have a drawing that is too big to scan, I take a photo of it with a 7.2 Megapixel digital camera and crop it - seems to work just as well.

Step 6: Open the file into your favorite image editing program. Some great ones out there are OpenCanvas, Adobe Photoshop, and The Gimp. I loaded mine into Adobe Photoshop CS2. There are actual map-making programs out there that use vectors, such as AutoREALM. Frankly, I wasn’t very impressed with them. At first, the fractal edges look impressive, but the end effect is a map that doesn’t look very organic.

Step 7: I’m going to assume you are using Adobe Photoshop or know your way around whichever program you are using at this point. Go to image->adjustments->brightness/contrast. Bring your brightness level to about -50 and your contrast level to about +50. You should start to notice your mechanical pencil lines will look more like they were done with an ink pen! Another great effect you get: the paper’s imperfections become magnified, giving it more of an old map look.->

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I heard an old man say something that got me thinking. It made me realize I had been taking something very dear to me for granted: I typically don’t care what time it is.

We’ve all seen it before, or been a part of it; a group of people so enveloped in some kind of project, they end up completely losing track of time. You might be the first to notice and speak up, saying, “Hey guys. You realize ten o’clock passed by twenty minutes ago, right?”

And, after regaining their grasp on reality, one of them might say, “Crap! Glad you said something. My wife was going to make me sleep on the couch if I came home late one more time this week.”

There are many people out there, always stuck on the outside of this phenomenon looking in. They can’t imagine what it’s like to simply not care about the time.

Most of the time, I feel care-free. And with a healthy dose of stern-handed guidance every once in a while, my life stays on track (thank goodness for my wife), all so I can keep loving, keep doing what I love, and keep sharing my love for life with others. I’ve transformed escapism into an outlet for communication to the world. :)

Even if moments where time doesn’t seem to matter are commonplace for you, they typically become the best moments of your life, especially in retrospect. Those moments should definitely be recognized and treasured before they are gone. Fortunately, writers get in that lovely trance-like state every time they write!

After that train of thought, I happily wrote for … a long time … and enjoyed it while it lasted.

P.S.: I got the Wacom board in the mail the other day, and the map-making progress is moving ahead, full-throttle!

Prev: Just an update: | Next: Cartography! -part 2-

I wanted to post an overview of what I’m planning in the near-future, because I’m getting antsy (!) and I feel like typing a casual, yet somewhat pertinent post.

Through negotiations with my lovely wife, a Wacom board is officially on its way and
should arrive some time this weekend! I will finally be able to do the finishing
touches on my map and post the (long overdue) map-making tutorial.

Afterwards, I think I will go into designing a timeline, talk about the concept of
‘five rings’, talk about how I go about creating key scenes (and bridging those scenes
together), and then go into what I’ve discovered works well with the editing
process.

At some point, I figure I’ll start up an official wordcount and start adding characters and
cities to those empty webpages (on that right side, over there->) as I go. I may do
illustrations for some characters and make more maps, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not a writer should write in such a way that risks offending some of their readers. I know I’ve watched movies or read books where it seemed like the political or moral points were painfully transparent. People often say they are too preachy, trying to shove their ideals down their throats. But the secret is, almost every movie and book out there has an opinion; fiction, non-fiction, whatever - Some writers are just more skillful at disguising it with metaphor and plot than others.

Hearing opinions challenges people; forces people to think - to face things they have never faced before - to look in the mirror and finally admit “That’s me”. It’s my contention that people need to hear opinions. It is both healthy and necessary for humans to explore their opinions, state them, and try to understand why somebody else’s might differ, without losing their temper. It takes practice. Read the rest of this entry »

To truly believe in something greater than yourself, do you have to surrender to trust?
How can you trust what you see?
How can you ever trust in what you don’t see?
How far can you trust someone you think you know so well?
How much trust is needed for a relationship to work?
Giving yourself an honest look, how much can you be trusted?

My storyline attempts to analyze all of these questions and carefully explore the possible answers.
I get excited just thinking about it!
~
Also, I wanted to share a few interesting techniques I’ve read lately involving freewriting…
When you don’t know what to freewrite, it may sound crazy, but you can freewrite about ‘not being able to freewrite’.
Another thing you can do is listen to a song that brings out your emotions, then try to transpose those emotions into words.
I’ve given both techniques a try - they are great ways to break writer’s block.
~
Thirdly, I wanted to show you some of what I’ve done with my map-making endeavor so far.

Some things I’ve taken into consideration (and they helped my story make more sense, too!):
1. The average person can travel on foot 10-20 miles per day - At least, they can in a culture where travelling on foot is normal.
2. A highly experienced traveller can even travel 70 miles in 24 hours, but cannot do it without feeling very exhausted afterward.
3. On horseback, a traveller can go 40 miles easily, 50 normally (with consideration for food, water, rest, etc), 60 is hard on the horse and cannot be done consecutively for long.
4. A horse-drawn wagon can travel 20 miles per day.
5. A mule-drawn wagon = Also 20 miles per day.
6. Ox-drawn wagon = 12 miles per day.
7. English Flying coaches = 100 miles per day.
8. Pony Express riders travelled up to 200 miles per day.
9. Viking Longboats could travel 100 miles per day, all other ships were slower.

For obvious reasons, it’s probably a good idea to know roughly how long it should take for your characters to traverse your map. If a horse can travel x miles in a day if it is pushed, skipping camp for y consecutive days, those are things that will come in handy for positioning cities. It wouldn’t make much sense to place a reclusive, hidden village a day’s ride away from one of the biggest cities in the world (unless it was hidden very well).

And, while not necessary, it definitely helps to know a bit about physical science and the geological time scale ~ how wind behaves ~ how volcanoes form at certain shorelines ~ or what happens after an iceberg melts.

I drew a rough map with paths that my characters travel and the miles they travelled to each destination in a spiral notebook. Then I went ahead and drew out the way I would like the main continent (tentatively called Aerthai) to look. I really wanted to get a Wacom tablet to draw the details on my map (I’m still negotiating with my better half on getting one), but I figured out a way to do it with just a mechanical pencil, a sheet of fairly heavy paper from a sketch book, and a scanner.

As an experiment, I loaded it up in Adobe Photoshop CS2 to see what kind of cool things I could do with it.
I came up with this:

Now I’m going to go back to my original map and draw in a compass, terrain features, and locations before rendering the map. I think it might turn out pretty cool! I’ll go ahead and post the entire step-by-step process next time.

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