Email from an Heir Chronicles fan awaiting publication of the Seven Realms: I just know there's going to be a MAP in the front of the book.
Like that's a bad thing. I must admit, maps are the hallmark of high fantasy. I mean, I could put a map of Ohio in the front of my Heir Chronicles books for all the left and right coast people who don't know where it is.
But generally it's assumed that interested people can find a map of Ohio if they need to.
When I began writing The Seven Realms, I started plotting places on a crude hand-drawn map so I could remember where I put things. I am not making this up. If you mess up on these things, you will get emails.
Full disclosure: cartography is not in my genetic blueprint. I've always had trouble with spatial relationships. Give me WORDS, dammit! I kept drawing it and redrawing it -- I even asked my son to redraw it in case I actually found a publisher. I figured they might change their mind if they saw my map.
Anyway, here's how my map ended up:
All the erasing makes it look like parchment, don't you think?
So when I DID find a publisher, fortunately, they hired a cartographer to redraw the map. Here is the result:
Now much of the action in the first volume of the Shattered Realms takes place at Oden's Ford and the Ardenine Empire (which by now is pretty much everything outside of the Fells.) But toward the end of the book, a character arrives from overseas--from the fabled pirate hangout of Carthis. Some of the action in later books would happen there. More mapmaking ensued! Only now there was technology:
And, eventually, of course, the final map!
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