Owl Editing #2 – Maps

Right: I was ill this week and stuck at home, which meant that I really didn’t have an excuse to not get any editing done. I did also have work to do, alas, largely of a literary bent but not directly on my own manuscript. More editing, more proofing, just not mine.

But I got it done. I finished the edit list for The Owl in the Labyrinth, at least for now: I want to run a few bits past my ever-suffering proofreaders to see if I have in fact managed to properly do what I’ve intended. I have expanded the ending, with an extra chapter and a half or so of breathing-room before the grand finale. I have gone back and seeded just a few extra hints at one ending reveal, just to make sure you, dear readers, might see it coming, or at least won’t feel like it came out of nowhere when it does. I have reviewed some fight scenes, I have added some gods.

I have run out of words to finesse for the moment, which unfortunately means I have to move on to the next vital step. I want to get an eBook version of the book ready and formatted so I can send it out to whatever mad handful of reviewers have either already read the first two Boiling Seas books or are willing to take on an entire trilogy. I expect this to be a fairly small number of people, but that’s all fine with me. (If you are one of these people, or would like to be, please drop me a line!) But to do that, I need three things:

A finalised manuscript – which is almost thereA front cover – which was actually done well in advance for onceThe map at the start

This means that I, writer extraordinaire, must draw the map. This presents a problem, because I am not very good at drawing… well, anything, really. And the place that, for this book, I actually need to map is not exactly conventional. It’s a location. It’s just got absolutely none of the other conventional features of a map, like coastlines, or settlements, or hills. On the one hand, I’m rubbish at drawing these; on the other I’ve still got to draw the other stuff that goes in their places, which might be significantly harder. And I’ve got to make it both look hand-drawn and not look like I hand-drew it, and still be clear enough to read and understand – and I need to do all this, and add in enough detail for the map to be useful, without actually spoiling some significant portions of the book. I’m resigned to doing so very slightly, because if I just left off all the interesting stuff then it would be the world’s more boring and useless map, and it’s not like I’m going to explain what all these weird little annotations mean – you’ll have to read on and find out – but there are whole sections of this map that I simply cannot draw yet at all, lest I give a big chunk of the game away.

Am I overthinking this? Probably. Most people will likely glance once at the map and never again. But I still want it to be there, and I still want it to look good. I regret not doing a map for Nightingale’s Sword; maybe I’ll go back and add one in to a future edition some day. This is the end of the trilogy, though. I want all the fantasy bells and whistles I can squeeze in, and that means this weird, not-really-a-map-at-all map. And I’ve got to do it.

Because maps are important, even if they are just set-dressing. They give that sense of reality, of this being a real world that’s really lived in, with real places and real geography. Fantasy is full of strange new worlds, and having those visual guides to even the smallest sliver of those worlds has always been a thing of great immersion for me. I love a map. I love the idea of this map, even if that may not translate to paper.

So I’d better rough up a few more drafts to see if it’s going to work.