Worldbuilding Month Day 9: Building Worlds

[aldersprig]

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it! (I need more questions, guys)
🌏
This ninth one is from medicmsh3141: What’s your favorite part of mapmaking?

Oh, no, favorites!


…All of it?

Okay, so when I was working on my first-ever Nanowrimo novel, The Deep Inks, one of the flaws in that book is that I spent like… 3 chapters describing an entirely-useless-to-plot town that the antagonists had built… I don’t even remember why.

But I LOVED that town.

Forget killing my darling lines, when I worldbuild-->write, I have to kill my darling TOWNS.

Okay so.

Map-making.

First, I’m rubbish at visualization, so when I make a map, I can start to actually SEE a place come together.

Second, it’s arts-and-crafts, and I really, REALLY like arts-and-crafts. I get to pull out the lentils/split peas/other pulses and play like I’m finger painting, I get to draw shapes that aren’t going to look “wrong” because, let’s face it, it’s an imaginary world. I get to get out the watercolors and PAINT.

…there’s more than one reason I do all my mapmaking on actual paper with pencil. :-)

Okay, so there’s the haptic side of it, there’s the visualization side. There’s getting to play with logistics, too: where would they put cities? Roads? Fords/bridges?

I’m gonna put floor-plan making in here too, ‘cause it fills many of the same urges. “How would they cram as many people as possible into this space, to both fill basic needs for shelter AND to encourage them to spread out and build proper houses?”

(That one’s Colonize Earth, which I never did get too far with).

Maps and diagrams are all about questions. How would they do that that is different from how I would do it?

I’m still not one hundred percent sure why Cya built Cloverleaf in a series of circles - but I love it. Might’ve been for the tower in the middle, everything pointing like arrows at the giant thing that, after all, is not actually the school.

Anke prompted me with “treehouse” the other day and I’m still playing with all the details of a post-apocalyptic scrounger’s tree house…

…I considered going into architecture, you know. Sometimes I really regret that I didn’t.

Comments

[inventrix]

Don't. Drafting other people's designs sucks. :D

[inventrix]

Weren't the Deep Inks antagonists doomsday preppers who decided to bring about their own doomsday?

[kelkyag]

That's more or less how I remember them. The town was twitch-inducing.

[clare_dragonfly]

Yay arts and crafts! :D

[sauergeek]

Before figuring out the actual layout of Cloverleaf, I incorrectly guessed that it was built at a highway cloverleaf. They could take advantage of the existing bridge(s) for some of the building structure, and use the (remnants of the) roads for commerce and information.

[aldersprig]

‘Rilla did that!

She turned a small woods and hotel off a highway overpass into a LARGE woods with a hotel inside it.

‘Rilla is, ah, Cya’s daughter-in-law and *cough* half-niece.

[sauergeek]

Long lives can make for complicated trees. So can tracking back a long way. Consider, for example, that Prince-Consort Philip is related to Queen Elizabeth in at least two ways -- he's both a third cousin and a second cousin once removed -- and is deep in line for the throne in his own right.