From the Vault
Dear me, another long break between posts. My apologies; I know the world wilts and the colours are not quite so bright in the absence of my recondite musings. Yes, it does. It does, truly. You just haven't been paying attention. Trust me, you've really missed me. Oh, suit yourself.
So, what have I been up to? Well, I have been largely tidying up one of the novels I finished last year (One of the three. I've mentioned that already, have I? Oh. Well, anyway. THREE). It's one of the two non-Cabal novels, and is pretty good fun. It will be interesting to see if I'm alone in that judgement. I'm waiting on notes for Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute, so in the meantime I'm going to write a short or two and polish the third novel.
None of this is very exciting, I'll grant you, so in an endeavour to give this post some sort of interest, here's an artefact of sorts.
I do find myself concerned that, after I've won every literary prize imaginable and they build a new wing to the British Library to hold my archives for the wonderment of future generations, it is going to be quite a small building. Probably about the size of an outhouse. The reason for this is that I write almost purely in electronic form and, apart from a few notebooks and some fitfully notated MSS, there is limited wonderment to be had from gazing at old hard drives.
Marvel, then, upon one of the few times I've had the cap off a pen to do anything other than notes. I should point out that the following contains some mild spoilers for Johannes Cabal the Detective, so please be warned.
This first stab is notably different from the published version in that the "Inland Sea" (later the Gallaco Sea) is much smaller or, at least, the mapped section is much smaller. This changed for a variety of reasons, particularly because I didn't want Mirkarvia to have two land borders with enemy states, and because I wanted Senza to have access to the Gallaco. This map is the first appearance of Polorus. As originally drawn, Polorus was all sea and there was no good reason why the Hortense need not have flown to Katamenia over the sea, staying out of Senzan airspace the whole time. When I realised this, I shrank the sea and called the reclaimed land Polorus. Then, in subsequent drafts, I shoved Polorus further north and opened out the sea again, thus
Actually, this isn't quite the finished version as it still includes a scale bar. I bunged this in as a place holder and then decided to dump it altogether rather than redefine it to fit with the travel times and implied distances of the voyage. Getting rid of it represented a last small concession to my initial plan to leave the geography entirely undefined.
I have a few scraps of paper lying around with similar notes (you can see from the crumpling on the map just how carefully preserved that one was), so if anybody's interested, I can slap one or other of them on the scanner for a future episode of "When Idiots Doodle."
So, what have I been up to? Well, I have been largely tidying up one of the novels I finished last year (One of the three. I've mentioned that already, have I? Oh. Well, anyway. THREE). It's one of the two non-Cabal novels, and is pretty good fun. It will be interesting to see if I'm alone in that judgement. I'm waiting on notes for Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute, so in the meantime I'm going to write a short or two and polish the third novel.
None of this is very exciting, I'll grant you, so in an endeavour to give this post some sort of interest, here's an artefact of sorts.
I do find myself concerned that, after I've won every literary prize imaginable and they build a new wing to the British Library to hold my archives for the wonderment of future generations, it is going to be quite a small building. Probably about the size of an outhouse. The reason for this is that I write almost purely in electronic form and, apart from a few notebooks and some fitfully notated MSS, there is limited wonderment to be had from gazing at old hard drives.
Marvel, then, upon one of the few times I've had the cap off a pen to do anything other than notes. I should point out that the following contains some mild spoilers for Johannes Cabal the Detective, so please be warned.
This first stab is notably different from the published version in that the "Inland Sea" (later the Gallaco Sea) is much smaller or, at least, the mapped section is much smaller. This changed for a variety of reasons, particularly because I didn't want Mirkarvia to have two land borders with enemy states, and because I wanted Senza to have access to the Gallaco. This map is the first appearance of Polorus. As originally drawn, Polorus was all sea and there was no good reason why the Hortense need not have flown to Katamenia over the sea, staying out of Senzan airspace the whole time. When I realised this, I shrank the sea and called the reclaimed land Polorus. Then, in subsequent drafts, I shoved Polorus further north and opened out the sea again, thus
Actually, this isn't quite the finished version as it still includes a scale bar. I bunged this in as a place holder and then decided to dump it altogether rather than redefine it to fit with the travel times and implied distances of the voyage. Getting rid of it represented a last small concession to my initial plan to leave the geography entirely undefined.
I have a few scraps of paper lying around with similar notes (you can see from the crumpling on the map just how carefully preserved that one was), so if anybody's interested, I can slap one or other of them on the scanner for a future episode of "When Idiots Doodle."
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