Expanding Vanovsk

This week I expanded a country.  I started working on my next country, Vanovask, and its short story.  As I began to work with the map, I realized that in my mind Vanovsk was a much larger kingdom than the little country I had marked out on my map those many years ago.  So I expanded it.  I don’t know why it tickled my fancy so much to jump in and erase borders and add islands.  I am after all creating an entire world in Idhua.  But I found it enormously liberating.  Perhaps it is because I have set myself some ambitious goals which require discipline to complete.  Sometimes I can feel hemmed in by deadlines of my own creation.  It is very nice therefore to remember the creativity inherent in the project and to suddenly decide to change the outlines.


Vanovsk is in the north-eastern most corner of Idhua.  I have been reading Russian Fairy and Folktales for inspiration, though I already have a good idea of my short story.  Years ago I had a dream in which I was a young woman who was captured by goblins to be the bride of their king.  I wrote it down, but never finished working it into a story.  Vanovsk seems the place to set it, so I have dusted it off and set about figuring out what happens down in the goblin kingdom.

Vanovsk before Expansion

Vanovsk after Expansion

Westercon 65

While I really enjoyed Westercon, I was surprised at how small it was compared to Norwescon. I wondered if this was a result of being a moving convention in a bad economy when people are re thinking their leisure travel expenses. I chatted with someone who was involved in organizing the Writer’s Workshop and she said she heard that the organizers had achieved the numbers they were aiming for, but she didn’t know how it compared to previous years.

The result was that there were less panels and events I wanted to go to, but the ones that I did go to were very interesting.

I particularly enjoyed “Inventing Culture” and “Magic & Religion” though I would have liked to have a more intensive conversation in the second.

Perhaps the most useful part of “Inventing Culture” was the discussion on strategies to avoid an information dump on the reader when you, the author, has years of history and culture figured out.  Additionally, one of the panelists, S. A. Bolich, said “History is full of secrets.” This is a huge idea to unpack and mine for plots and twists, etc.  It’s one of those things that I used without thinking about it, but having it said makes me conscious of the opportunity it presents.

In “Magic and Religion” there was a long discussion about the definitions of magic and religion in a fantasy context.  It was interesting because it was easy to see who on the panel was religious or comfortable with religion or other people being religious, and who was very uncomfortable with religion and, I suspect, despite their politically-correct open-mindedness, didn’t understand what it means to be religious other than acting in ways that seem arbitrary to the non-religious. 

One of the panelists, Gregory Wilson, sort of addressed this when he said “Religion is the underpinning of culture.  Even anti-religion is religion.”  I agree with what he’s getting at: the narrow viewpoint and absolute adherence to a doctrine is just as possible and visible in a scientific or atheist mind set as it is in a religious, and though the content is different, the way both groups of people approach outsiders and the wider world can be remarkably similar.

The panelists left the audience with the advice to be open minded, respectful and listen to other people’s experience.  Always good advice.

The most useful part of the event was participating in the Fairwood Writers Critique group.  I got a lot of good feedback on "The Silvered Sword" and am diving into a rewrite.

World Building - 2: Landscape

Once I have a rough map of a country, city or town I start thinking about its landscape.  This might involve creating a topographical map or making notes about its climate and terrain.  I often start looking at pictures at this point – there are so many lovely photos available on the web!


Landscape has always been a source of inspiration for me – the giant trees of the redwood forests, the misty sweep of Puget Sound, the old castles I visited in Scotland.  One of the big differences I have noticed between landscapes in the United States and those in Europe and Asia is that the obvious layers of civilization are far more noticeable on the latter.  Though we have ancient native civilizations here, they are much smaller, fewer and less elaborate than in other places around the world.  Landscapes in the US often fell much wilder for this reason. 


At the moment I am working on the country of Hynovia which is somewhat based in the eastern Mediterranean. For inspiration I have been looking at pictures of Turkey which has both stunning landscapes and fascinating ancient buildings.  Here are a few of my favorites - they are linked to their original sites:

       

World Building - 1: Maps

I always begin world building with a map.  I sit down with a piece of paper a draw a country, a city or just a field with a house on one side and the entry to a forest on the other.  Even when I start a story without a map, the moment I have to figure out something about the physical space, I start drawing a diagram of the house or the path of the river or the city streets. 


I drew the map of Idhua a long time ago - spreading out sheets of graph paper on the dining room table and shading in woods and rivers with my mother's Prisma Color pencils.  Eventually, I decided I wanted the ease of editing on the computer.  I didn't have a scanner so I took digital photos of the map.  

Jigsaw of the Photos

Since then I have generated political, historical and topographical maps - zooming in to country or city, zooming out to mark oceanic currents.


I like to know where I am located.  I have a good sense of direction and am usually correct when I try to locate north.  I like it also when I am reading to look at maps and diagrams on the cover leaves and trace the journey I am reading about.  Perhaps this is why I seek to understand the space I am writing in as the entry into my fantasy world.  I want to know how far it is to the sea or how close to the edge of the Forest, as the physical landscape is a powerful anchor and influence for a person.  As I am rooted in the various landscapes of my childhood, my adulthood and my travels, so I want my characters to belong somewhere – or if they don’t, to be able to explore where it is that they don’t belong.

Recent Topographical Map