Traveller's Tales

I’ve been told several times now that I need to make a map for my novel. It’s one of those tired old cliches that every fantasy novel needs a big scribbled-upon map for people to stare at and refer to during the course of the book. I could be a cynical bastard and say it’s because the names are so wacky and the narratives so poor that without the map the average reader would be completely lost, but as a matter of fact I quite clearly remember a sense of youthful wonder, even magic when I first saw Tolkien’s map in The Hobbit. Part of that magic, certainly, was the undeniable fact that the fellow had a sense for the visual as well as the verbal, but it’s enough to force me to ignore my cynical thoughts and remember what drew me to fantasy in the first place.

That said, Napoleon Dynamite has as much artistic ability in his left pinkie finger as I do in my entire body, so the question immediately goes from one of necessity to one of execution. How the devil to do a thing like this? Truth be told I do have worldmaps, created in the extremely early 90s in Lotus Freelance Graphics, horrid polygonal things that, while accurately describing the relation of cities and landmarks in my world, do absolutely nothing magical in terms of appearance.

Enter the technology of the new millenium, or more precisely the software of ProFantasy Software. Stubborn, bull-headed software that absolutely requires that one do things in ways that appear at first to be utterly counterintuitive and highly annoying, but ways that I must admit grow on you. Having scanned a copy of my old maps, I plopped the bitmap in as a background and then proceeded to struggle with Campaign Cartographer to try and make a decent map out of the thing. After several ruinous attempts and one trip to the net to find a font I was missing (BudHand, if you must know), I’ve finally come up with something that’s not horrid, and at least is a damned sight better than what I’d started with.

So now I’ve got a map, or nearly so. I like the tool more the more I use it, though I do honestly think that some of their design choices are a bit overly stubborn. That said, so am I, so perhaps that’s why it’s growing on me.