Impressions Map

For the amount of fantasy I write, you would think I make a lot maps; I even make maps and diagrams for some of my science fiction, as I discussed in a recent post.  It’s true that I have a few maps in a drawer in my writing desk, but I somehow wrote almost all of Impressions, which features a significant amount of travel for Raven, and lots of luxuriating in the worldbuilding, without even a sketch of a map.  Only when my writing group began going through the story did I think to rectify the story’s tardy cartographic situation.

As is quite clear, I am no expert cartographer.  This is also a rough draft, and does not entirely reflect my vision of the world, never mind how I might want the finished product to present: Soferand should be larger, there is no room in the north for the Ici peoples, most of the rivers are not labeled, nor are most of the cities, et cetera.

Also worth noting, this is intended to be a region map, and I may need to include an addition, more detailed map just of Higintsborough.  Such a detailed map would be more period appropriate.  World maps, and even large-scale regional maps like this one, were uncommon, if they existed at all, until after the fourteenth century, and then they were more works of art and political or cultural statements than they were useful cartographic renderings.  Local maps were far closer to how we today think of a map as something intended for the purpose of useful navigation.  I will soon be reading a book called Atlas of Medieval Europe, which I thought would be a collection of such local maps, but it is another example of a book I picked up at a used bookstore that is not quite what I expected from a brief glance through its pages – it has modern maps of medieval things, not medieval maps.

On previous map-making efforts, I have attempted to present a close to final, or at least a polished, product on the initial draft, but that is as foolish as thinking that the first draft of a story should read as well as a published, final draft.  This time, what I am sharing is a sketch, a practice map to help structure and inform a reading of the story, rather than a piece of art that is part of the storytelling.  When I get around to that version, perhaps we’ll have a deeper discussion about just what the role of maps is in fantasy novels.