WIP - Aronbor... or Perdon

[Gandwarf]

Looks great! I must say you got me really interested in your world...
When is your novel coming out?

[Ramah]

Looks great! I must say you got me really interested in your world...
When is your novel coming out?

Hehe. I wish I could finish the damn thing, I really do but I've actually had this story in my mind, in one form or another, for 18 years. I remember telling a good friend about it the night my first daughter was born and it all started with just a title which I thought sounded pretty cool and which suggested a story to me.
Since then it's been through numerous partially successful attempts to get it down on paper, most of which get halted and then changed when they reach the 200 page or 50k word mark (which is where I am on my most current version I should say, and that fact is worrying.) I don't know how everyone else manages it but I always seem to get bogged down with one or two details that begin to gnaw at me until finally, when I realise the answer to my problem, it demands an almost complete redesign. The story I am writing now is far, far removed from the original story I had and I'm not exactly sure it is better for the change. :S Ah, well... I probably couldn't class myself as a wannabe writer if I didn't have doubts.
So I guess the quick answer to your question would be, probably never. The more hopeful answer would be - with this and any other map I draw as a visual aid I can start to flesh in some of the details or visualise where exactly the characters will be going next to pull me out of my slump before I decide to start from the beginning again.

[Gandwarf]

Ha, I can certainly relate to your troubles getting things on paper.
It looks like you are trying to write your first novel and have decided it should be the masterpiece you are going to be remembered by. Maybe you have set the bar too high for yourself...

Looking back at the current story I am writing since 2001 I see lots of stuff I would like to change. But I decided not to tweak and fiddle anymore. It's just too timeconsuming and I would never finish...

[Gidde]

Ramah, I feel your pain. I'm sitting at 60k words with almost the exact same problem. Gandwarf's got a point on the masterpiece suggestion, but ... I don't know. I feel like I took a wrong turn 10 chapters ago

[Ramah]

I don't think it's so much as I want it to be a masterpiece as that I want it to all make perfect logical sense within its own boundaries. I always had the beginning and ending to the story but was always kind of fuzzy about what exactly happens in the middle. As the years have passed this middle section has been fleshed in with various plot threads and backstories with varying degrees of success but always seems to contain plot holes large enough for my imagination to fall in to and remain stuck inside. The only way out of them always seems to be tunnelling back to the start, to the place where the particular thread became unraveled and change it enough so that the original plot hole is bypassed. Of course... further along the thread I find another plot hole and it all begins again.
If I'm totally honest with myself, I may be too close to the story. I wonder if I step back at look at the whole thing objectively if I'm not just flogging a dead horse and what I need is an entirely different story. But it's just too hard to give up on the commitment of time already given over to this. So I'll just continue plugging away at it until either it's finished or I die of old age.
I haven't been working at it solidly for 18 years of course. There have been times when I've let it sit for a year and more, eventually digging it out to have another stab at it. I once (about 10 or so years ago) got quite a long way through another story set in the same universe before running out of steam (I'm considering actually having another stab at writing that story, starting from scratch and doing it as a project for this years NaNoWriMo.) And I occasionally manage to finish a short story or two. But I always end up coming back to this, this damn millstone around my neck. Hehe.

[Karro]

Oh yes... your pain is my pain; your fears my fears.

I've been working on the same novel since I was the age of 9. No joke. That was some 20 years ago, now. Of course... it is now nothing at all like the novel that I began writing in my childhood: the world has undergone some tectonic movement, the characters have changed, matured, and changed again and the plot has been completely overhauled, rewritten, and overhauled again.

In College, I was in the midst of a major effort to get this thing finished. In fact... I had something like 130k+ words written over about 33 chapters (which I considered at the time to be about 2/3 to 3/4 of the book).

Then, about a year or two after graduating college... work slowed, then at about 3 years after stopped altogether. All through this time, I'd also been developing a backstory and a detailed history for the world. And suddenly, I'd come across what I thought was a great idea for 'how the world works' that had huge implications for the plot of the novel as a whole... at the same time I began seriously second-guessing my use of a number of standard fantasy tropes (i.e. nearly all of them) and whether my story added anything of real value to the fantasy genre oevre. (It's hard when you realize that no matter how fun you think your story is, how interesting its world or compelling its characters... ultimately what you've just done is rewrite every fantasy story ever written and not done anything new at all.) Then, my laptop (or rather, my sis's, since I was borrowing hers) was stolen and, with it, all my notes on the world and its history. That's what drove my work to a dead-stop at the 3-year mark.

Ultimately, that precipitated another, closer look at the world (which lead me here, as part of that closer look was a desire to get a realistic world geography in place as a necessary component of a realistic world history), a closer look at the characters, a complete restructuring of the plot, and a complete rewrite, from scratch. The map, now, is almost halfway done, and I've recently begun writing up some fresh notes on the world and its history. Actual new work on the story... that remains a ways out, at least until after Grad School and the initial impending baby-induced insomnia passes.

Long story short: good luck and keep working. Statistically... few enough of us is ever going to write that semi-masterpiece/good-enough-to-get-an-editor-to-look-at-it novel, but ultimately it may not be about the destination, but the journey along the way. In the mean time, you've got some pretty awesome looking maps to really be proud of as a part of that journey!

[Ramah]

That was a really great post, Karro, thanks for that.

It actually makes me feel a little better about my own writing situation knowing it's not so uncommon - misery loves company, as they say. And man, I'm sorry to hear of the loss of your notes in that laptop, it's made me realise I've been too long backing up my document files myself - I really ought to keep copies of them off-site. I used to fancy myself as something of a budding artist in the distant past until one night, a few months before the millennium, I was at work on the night shift and there was a fire in my house and, amongst other things, I lost just about everything I had ever drawn or painted. Since then I haven't painted a single thing and drawn nothing bigger than a doodle. So I can kind of understand how hard it is to pull yourself back from losing something you've put so much into.

Anyway, good to hear you've managed to get back into your world and I'm sure your story will be the better for the added development.

[Karro]

That was a really great post, Karro, thanks for that.

It actually makes me feel a little better about my own writing situation knowing it's not so uncommon - misery loves company, as they say. And man, I'm sorry to hear of the loss of your notes in that laptop, it's made me realise I've been too long backing up my document files myself - I really ought to keep copies of them off-site. I used to fancy myself as something of a budding artist in the distant past until one night, a few months before the millennium, I was at work on the night shift and there was a fire in my house and, amongst other things, I lost just about everything I had ever drawn or painted. Since then I haven't painted a single thing and drawn nothing bigger than a doodle. So I can kind of understand how hard it is to pull yourself back from losing something you've put so much into.

Yeah, if there's one thing I've learned from all this, it's that you have to get back on the horse; if for nothing else than for your own sanity! I've found that regardless of the final outcome, I am compelled by the nature of who I am (and apparently who I've been since childhood, when I first started work on this thing) to tell these sorts of stories, even when nobody else is listening, because these stories tell me something about myself. I imagine the same to be generally true of others like me.

Anyway, good to hear you've managed to get back into your world and I'm sure your story will be the better for the added development.

Hey, that's the hope! Yeah, maybe the statistics of success are weighted against me, but that can't stop me from trying! Or, for that matter, to wishing good luck to my fellow travelers on this road!

[Ramah]

A new update.

Added some more marginalia. I'm gonna play around with positioning and legibility some more so it may move etc. I'm not sure whether to really go to town with the amount of text I put on the map but in order to decide whether to or not I first need to do it, if you get my meaning.
Added a cartouche which is mainly copied from the Vaniya map and then tinkered with to fit in more with the new colour scheme. I tried adding a compass rose too but it just seems to detract somehow so I'll probably go without one.
Added a bunch of new towns, forests and labels.
I added all the sealanes, lived with them for a few days and now I've removed them again because I just don't particularly like them. I don't really think there's a need for them anyway.

I've still got a load more labelling to do. I'm gonna add some more small forests in there and maybe one sizeable one around the South Midgen label. I still need to do the icons for cities and keeps.



It may seem like a small point but I'm dithering around, unsure what to do about the "Grey Sea" label, which I don't particularly like. I may just remove it altogether as I cannot get it into a position or even font that I find pleasing.

[Steel General]

It may seem like a small point but I'm dithering around, unsure what to do about the "Grey Sea" label, which I don't particularly like. I may just remove it altogether as I cannot get it into a position or even font that I find pleasing.

Maybe its the color and/or orientation of the text that's 'not quite right'.