the deep moans round with many voices

December 30: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]

These last maps are for worlds that have no accompanying story of any sort... or at least, not yet. Let's jump right in!



The above map is of a continent I call Gramarye. The basic premise behind this world is that long ago -- by which I mean somewhere between five centuries and a millennium -- there was a great war in which the two strongest magicians then alive fought on opposite sides. (The proximate cause was a king trying to unite the continent; one magician thought this was a way to create peace, particularly once the king's heir would eventually inherit, while the other thought peace imposed by force was impossible and also that the king in question was a tyrant and the heir had no reason to be any better.) The fighting ground on for years. Finally the conqueror king and his magician were defeated, but not before the majority of the continent was devastated, the land and seas poisoned for generations.

The king's magician had tried to contain the damage by twisting the entire continent and its coastal waters out of phase with the surrounding world. The other magician tried to raise new land from the ocean floor to give refugees a new home. Unfortunately their spells interacted badly, to put it mildly, and any further details would be massive plot spoilers if I ever get around to writing the story.

In the present day, a mysterious wanderer comes to the eastern edge of the Old Country (which is beset by mutated beasts) and takes a boy and a girl on a quest through the Waste. Meanwhile a traveling storyteller arrives in a small village in the New Country (which is beset by magical echoes of the great war) and strikes up a friendship with a local woman who works in a magician's household. These stories are related, and ultimately end with the breaking of the spell that has kept Gramarye locked away since the war, prevented its wounds from healing, and largely drained magic from the rest of the world.

The world-building I've done for Gramarye is mostly linguistic and genealogical, oddly enough. You can tell from the notes and corrections thereof above that I originally started with a gimmick idea of using Anglicized versions of Biblical names for people in the Old Country and Anglicized versions of Celtic names for people in the New Country, but later decided that was stupid. As for the plot, I am still quite vague on vast swathes of events and motives, and have never written even a tiny exploratory noodling snippet of actual narrative. But I'd like to get back to this world someday.

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Moving on! I have mentioned, at various points in these map posts, that I occasionally draw stuff for Vicky (my sister). This can be as simple as a sketch on a piece of scrap paper when she wants a layout for three countries with a particular set of borders and relative isolation levels (which I am not going to show you because I gave her the paper in question years ago), or as complicated as the following two images:



As you can see, Vicky gave me a few basic parameters -- things that were involved in a story idea she had -- and asked me to make a map to support them. I got a little carried away and drew her nearly a third of a continent.



(Note: the city in the lower right corner that got cut off by my scanner -- which has been really weird and temperamental since I got my new computer this spring -- is named Zeharra. Also, the city of Nemora and its surrounding lands have been traded back and forth between Alaria and Espiola for centuries. I'm not sure which country currently rules that region.)

This world has no name, so far as I know, and Vicky never did anything about the story. In fact, I'd forgotten about it myself until I went looking through my file folders for maps. I don't know much about the countries in this world, though I suspect the latitudes on this map are roughly comparable to Europe and northern Africa.

I took the hard copy down to D.C. last week and gave the map to Vicky as a little additional Christmas gift. I have no idea what she'll do with it, but it was always meant for her and now it's in her hands. :-)

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December Talking Meme: All Days

December 28: given all your fandoms, is there something that unites your pan-fandom interests? (for rthstewart) [Tumblr crosspost]

Ack, this is a hard one!

I don't think there are any hard and fast rules, but two general principles are that 1) I am unlikely to write much for a fandom unless it is print-media based (whether books or comics/manga), and 2) I am unlikely to be interested in a fandom in the first place (for writing or for reading) unless it has an aspect of the fantastical. Or, more accurately, unless it has some aspect that is clearly and obviously removed from everyday modern life in America. For instance, historical fiction occasionally clicks for me; relatedly, I tend to like 19th century literary classics more than any literary fiction written post-1950. And recently I've been watching Hannibal, which is so stylized and flat-out weird that it trips my "this cannot be real life" interest meter despite nominally claiming to be set in modern America. The print media thing is because of my difficulties with audiovisual media in general, and also because if I'm going to write in a fandom, I want to have ready access to canon so I can spot-check titchy little things as I write. It is a lot easier to flip through a book in search of one specific page than it is to find a particular scene in a movie, let alone a multi-season television show.

I am pickier about writing fandoms than reading fandoms, and not just because of my audiovisual media woes. I need a sense that the canon in question has unfinished corners. Unanswered questions. What-ifs. I need a rough spot to grip. Sometimes this is as simple as a non-POV character's experience of some situation or event, but more often it's a world-building issue. I love creating and organizing worlds, and I don't much care whether the original creation was mine or someone else's.

I also have an interest in female characters, but that's a factor that comes into play more after I've already fallen in love with a fandom and am wondering what specific story to write. The falling in love itself is not a logical process.

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December Talking Meme: All Days

December 26: formative stories you read as a kid (for Vicky) [Tumblr crosspost]

Um. If I talk about why, we'll be here all day, so I guess I'll just list a bunch of titles and series. My cutoff age is twelve, since one has to define childhood somehow and becoming a teenager seems a reasonable break point.

C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, most particularly The Tombs of Atuan. Also The Dispossessed. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, most specifically The Silmarillion. Also Smith of Wooton Major. Grimm's fairy tales. Andersen's fairy tales. Children's books of Greek myths, Norse myths, and Christian myths (aka, a child's illustrated book of Bible stories). Every single one of Andrew Lang's colored Fairy Books. Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. The Burgess Animal Book for Children, by Thornton Burgess; less critically, his various Old Mother West Wind books. The picture books of Holling Clancy Holling, especially Paddle-to-the-Sea and Seabird. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy, Moon-flash duology, and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. Robin McKinley's Damar duology and Deerskin. Oz, all of it, by all official authors, plus Baum's Sky Island and The Sea Fairies. A child's collection of Arthurian stories, based on Mallory. Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel and The Firebringer (not their sequels, which I didn't find until later). Tamora Pierce's The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (I read the quartet out of order). Piers Anthony's Xanth, annoyingly enough. Seaward and the Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper. Every juvenile adventure Heinlein ever wrote. Asimov's Foundation trilogy (not so much the later sequels). Clan of the Cave Bear and its first three sequels, by Jean Auel. Whatever encyclopedia edition my parents owned. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. Every horse book Marguerite Henry ever wrote. Walter Farley's The Black Stallion and all its sequels, even the weird one with the aliens. (You may think I am kidding about the aliens; I am really not.) Caribou Traveler, by Harold McCracken. Shy the Platypus, by Leslie Rees, which came with an accompanying stuffed toy platypus that I lost at my daycare center.

I am probably forgetting a dozen more.

...

I was not remotely a balanced reader. If it didn't have animals and/or fantastical elements, I wasn't much interested. I mean, I read tons of Sweet Valley books (because Vicky had them in the house), and stupid amounts of R. L. Stine "horror" books (again, because Vicky had them in the house), and a fair amount of "realistic" fiction (because I was deathly bored and needed to read something, anything, even a cereal box...), but most of that just went in and out without sticking. I am still a highly unbalanced reader, though I've read a few pieces of the standard Western literary canon since my late teens, and I have taken to reading nonfiction more often than fiction.

I am not sure what influences I carried away beyond that pre-existing bent toward the fantastic rather than the realistic. Probably a love for logistical accuracy and an interest in ethics, but again, I don't know how much of that was learned versus how much was innate. It is also obvious that I overdosed on fairy-tales and myths, to the point that those storytelling patterns are deeply ingrained in my subconscious.

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December Talking Meme: All Days

December 24: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]

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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December Talking Meme: All Days

December 22: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]

This world happened because of a high school writing assignment. No, seriously! I wrote a really terrible story about a woman and her lover fleeing into the western wilderness, and a confrontation they had with corrupt local law enforcement which ended when it turned out the woman was a witch and magically clobbered the asshole who had been threatening to rape her and kill her lover. Then I couldn't stop thinking about the world I'd implied around the edges of the narrative, and it got a little out of hand.

World-building has a tendency to do that around me. *wry*

( a lot of blather and then a bunch of maps )

I really need to get back to writing in this world. I remember enjoying it a lot!

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December Talking Meme: All Days