The Bling

     I know you are wondering what Bling has to do with writing... right? Well, I'm not talking about jewelry exactly, but those things we add to our books or manuscripts that help to flesh them out. Things like maps, time-lines, family-trees, etc.
     I am very big on maps. Not just maps of these fictional lands, but also blueprints of buildings when those buildings play a large roll in my writing. I have probably mentioned this before, but I can spend hours, if not days, trying to come up with a design. I start with my mental image and plan the layout then add in some logic. By that I mean I build a house that fits the footprint rather than having more rooms than there is floor. Most houses are not the Tardis, (i.e. bigger on the inside.)
     Sometime things come together in an hour, like a recent castle for another story. Sometimes it takes days, and I have to walk away from it for a little while to get a better perspective.
     So recently I have been working on maps for the Chronicles of Odde Series. It's rather complex, because several books include a lot of traveling, one across the entire continent, so I like to plan where things are in relation to one another. It helps for future books as well, I can decide if I need the world map or something more localized.
     For the Chronicles I've decided on a style that is more representational than accurately spaced. I like the idea of being able to "see" the places I am talking about rather than the distance between point a and point b. I know the scale of the map is all off, but I like the art as much as I like the information it is portraying.
     That being said, here is a very rough draft of one of the maps. I am still working on several others for the series. This is the map of Telios, a land I will be visiting in the future. The story that accompanies it is still in the planning stages, but I had a very clear idea of what this placed looked like, and it was easy for me to put it to paper.

     As I said, this is a very rough draft, just paper and ink. I've scanned it in to clean it up. I might even hand I over to Melli and her Art degree to bling out. (I used some internet images to help with the style.) I really like the perspective. I am not so sure about the color.

     Well, that's all for now. Have a wonderful day and WRITE ON!

Back from Outer Space

     Yes, the real world has taken up most of my time as of late. I am sorry to have gone so long without posting. Not that I think you are missing my prose, but that I had made a promise to myself that I would commit to this and I have let myself down. Well, back on the band wagon!

Life Update:
     Writer's block! I am stuck with my latest book (don't even want to look at it. I am pretending it doesn't exist!), and while I let a friend take a look at The Beast of the Ruin manuscript I am avoiding my writer's block by working on other things. Most recently an older novel, my first official work, and trying to prepare it from printing. Thanks to NaNoWriMo I have two free paperback copies coming my way and I plan to have the book ready by the march deadline. On the other hand I am working on something different, a time-travel romance. Yes... it's been done, but not by me. I can't get enough of this genre on my own reading list, so I hope that someone else will appreciate my addition. Right now it is a lot of planning and research, but I enjoy those aspects as much, if not more than, the writing process sometimes.

     My organizational efforts have proved fruitful though somewhat unfocused. I am good at starting a project but somewhere in the middle I usually loose steam, yet keep pushing through. This means the job gets done, eventually, just not exactly as I might have first envisioned, i.e. there is something lost in the execution. Take for example my filing system.

     I recently went through my story files and school papers. I tried to group like things together, assign colored files to certain things, but I'm cheep and if I already had a plan vanilla folder for something , I am loathed to change it. And yet, I got rid of a lot of stuff I didn't need. Four garbage bags later I am somewhat more organized, though the Virgo in me is screaming to color code the crap out of everything, and I am currently figuring out just what that might entail. That is to say, I am looking at organizational how-to's on pinterest, youtube and the web. Let's just say my hours on the computer have doubled recently and leave it at that.

     In other news, my family has graciously put up a new shed for me and I now have an empty building waiting to receive the tubs of "really good stuff" that I can't find room for in the rest of my house. I am well aware that not everything in these said tubs is "keep" worthy by most standards and I have planned for that. I am calling this endeavor The PURGE! Yes, my predilection for naming things is rearing its head. And really even caps and bold italics can't convey the tone in which this title echoes in my mind in that deep narrative voice reserved for overly dramatic and sometime terrifying movie trailers. Really, it is great!

     The PURGE will consist of going through every box, every drawer, every canister and hidey-hole and evaluating pretty much everything I own into one of several categories: Keep, Sell/Donate, Garbage and Family. I plan to have boxes ready and the salvation army on speed dial. I am big about sharing the love, and so we give items away to family and friends or donate a lot of things. I preferred to recycle when I can. Though I am still in the air about yard sales. Yes, recouping some of the money I spent is appealing, they are just so much work and I am not looking forward to having to store the sale items until the warmer weather comes my way. I like donating because there are instant results. No mess, no fuss, no bother. Drop off and done!

     For now I have to wait from some sunny weather to start my project. I am so excited, I am literally smiling from ear to ear just thinking about it.

     Well, that's about all for the life update. I have to get back to my medieval research. Bring on the websites!