Worldbuilding Month Day 9: Building Worlds

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)
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This ninth one is from [twitter.com profile] medicmsh3141: Whatā€™s your favorite part of mapmaking?

Oh, no, favorites!

ā€¦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 likeā€¦ 3 chapters describing an entirely-useless-to-plot town that the antagonists had builtā€¦ I donā€™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, Iā€™m rubbish at visualization, so when I make a map, I can start to actually SEE a place come together.

Second, itā€™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 Iā€™m finger painting, I get to draw shapes that arenā€™t going to look ā€œwrongā€ because, letā€™s face it, itā€™s an imaginary world. I get to get out the watercolors and PAINT.

ā€¦thereā€™s more than one reason I do all my mapmaking on actual paper with pencil. šŸ™‚

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

Iā€™m gonna put floor-plan making in here too, ā€˜cause it fills many of the same urges. ā€œHow 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?ā€

(That oneā€™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?

Iā€™m still not one hundred percent sure why Cya built Cloverleaf in a series of circles – but I love it. Mightā€™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 ā€œtreehouseā€ the other day and Iā€™m still playing with all the details of a post-apocalyptic scroungerā€™s tree houseā€¦

ā€¦I considered going into architecture, you know. Sometimes I really regret that I didnā€™t.

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