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!