December 24: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for
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When I was a kid, I used to walk our family dog in the rain sometimes and look at the little runoff streams that formed along the sides of the streets, racing along until they encountered a storm drain or, in one case, poured through a little concrete channel under a hedge and vanished into the scrubland that separated my neighborhood from the nearby golf course. I gave a bunch of them names and decided that they were the waterways of a fantasy kingdom, which I very creatively named Small, because it was a small land. (It was a small neighborhood, too.)
I elaborated on Small over the years. I worked in some ideas from a rather plotless fantasy scenario I liked to think about while I was in the shower or falling asleep, and also some stuff from the games Vicky and I played with two of our neighbors. In 1998, when I was sixteen, I drew a map. The village names are awfully English and somewhat twee, which may be Tolkien's fault -- there's some influence from the Shire, though the conception of elves and dwarves I was working with was quite different from Middle Earth. I had them living in a sort of sideways dimension accessible through occasional natural gateways, one of which was based on that little gap in the hedge that let a runoff stream vanish into the edge of the golf course.
Here is that initial map:
Vicky knew about Small, of course, and at one point we tried to cowrite a story in that setting. That is the source of the marker scribbles on the original map -- she was trying to diagram the journeys various characters would take over the course of the plot. That fell through. Our attempted collaborations have always fallen through. We think too differently about narrative. (I also hated her character names. I mean, Darkhead the evil wizard??? No. Not in my world.)
Anyway, I took the opportunity to make a tidier map and change some names so they made more sense. (The two Norburys are still inexplicable, though, since neither is anywhere remotely near the northern end of the country.)
These two maps are a little unusual for me, in that they are illustrated/symbolic. Villages are marked by tiny houses, forests are marked by tiny trees, etc. The occasional horseshoe shapes are tunnel entrances into the realm of the dwarves, and the little doubled horizontal lines mark gateways to the realm of the elves. (Note that Meadowbrook flows
out of Faerie and then right back
in, after passing by a rather interesting standing stone structure. Yes, that is the same old runoff stream that vanished under a hedge.)
I never did much with Small. I tried to write a story about a girl who lived in Stratham-by-the-Tunnels, but that never clicked. I made some vague gestures toward designing a religion and wrote fragments of a couple folk songs. I wrote a genealogy of the royal family, but that didn't spark any plots. I followed a foreign-born princess back to her original home and did a little world-building there, in the city of Shajento in the land of Qatham'bal, but the Ladyhawke-esque story I was vaguely poking at never coalesced into something workable.
However, those failures were not the end of this world! Note how the northern tip of Small -- which is at the bottom of the map, because we are in the southern hemisphere -- is bounded by the confluence of two rivers, which form the Great Mother River. You know where the Great Mother River goes as it flows northward?
Past Ochre Varos.
Yeah.
Small is the origin seed of Camia, aka the world of
Finding Marea: Truth and Change in the Circle of Kemar. Small is one of the nameless lands of the southern pagans that Sister Harai mentions as a minor aside to her main narrative.
It's amazing how ideas mutate over the years. :-)
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