Hello everyone,

I'll just take a moment to introduce myself and tell a bit about my background, as a way of saying hello. My name is Joop, I'm Dutch and in my daily life I am a network engineer. I have been interested in maps for as long as I can remember. I think, when someone in elementary school had asked me what my favourite book was, my answer would probably have been "my parents' atlas". They had the Winkler Prins Atlas of the World, which showed some old maps. I think those were my favourite element of the book. I now have a copy of the Times Atlas of the World, which is huge, heavy and absolutely beautiful. :-)

It didn't take me long to figure out that I could make my own maps and all through my childhood and early teens I spent plenty of hours with pencils and large sheets of paper, drawing islands, entire continents and once even an entire fictional world. In my late teens, I discovered fiction writing and I started doing that more and more, kind of forgetting my passion for maps.
Then, a little while back, I had an idea for a story set in a fictional world. I felt the need to map out that fictional world so I started off with pencils and paper before I though: "Wait a second, I am in IT...there must be a way to do this on the computer..." So I started searching around, found a link on how to maps in The Gimp, clicked it and up popped this site. The rest, as they say, is history.

Oh, the writing bit? Well...err...no, I am not published. At least, none of my fictional work has been published. But who knows, in the future...