I think, at times, that there are some maps that just aren’t meant to be, and this map seemed to be one of them. After several weeks of frustrating attempts to edit the land masses and get them where I wanted them to be, along with repeated problems with that “high point” I mentioned before, I was about to close the book on this project.

Then a strange and rather wonderful thing happened.

As part of one of my monthly cleaning projects (I’m a bit of a pack-rat), I started sorting through unlabeled CDs. Most of them are music mixes that I listen to when I’m on the road, but I came across one CD in particular that wasn’t a music mix. I can only imagine that I must have used it when testing a new R/W DVD/CD drive I had recently installed and, as it happens, I had selected an early stage version of the original map for this project. I had only just started filling in the interior land masses, so most of the world was nothing more than deep oceans and continental shelves.

This has opened the door to “fix” some of the things I didn’t like about the original version of this map and let me get back to working on both a local and global scale. The best part of all of this is the fact that most of those things I want to “fix” don’t exist yet, so I won’t have to delete them in order to re-build what was “wrong.” Even better is the fact that with the hardware upgrades (after the disk drive disaster) is letting me work at a much higher resolution than before, so I can be a bit more detailed about things.

So, again, no real update in terms of the map itself, but more of a progress report of what’s been going on since my last post. My focus is still on this map, and even if it takes me another ten years to finish it, that is exactly what I’m going to do. Hopefully, though, it won’t take that long.

GW