Today, finally, I get to do some more stuff for the book Dark Soldier. This time, we’re talking about world building. This is going to be super hard for me because I’m not really good at map-making. Okay, technically I’ve never made a map. Technically, I’m still not going to make the map. That’s the illustrator’s job. But here’s one thing I do have to do: I have to make it make sense. So, I’ve been on a journey to make it make sense. I’ve been thinking, “what will this world look like in real life?” and “how do I make the geography work?”
I came to realize that the country that most of this takes place and looks most like Italy. It’s a semi–large peninsula, But not big enough to be a continent by any means. So, what does that mean for the geography of this world? Would that make me have to remove mountains and replace them with very large hills? How would the climate be? Would it be mainly low areas? Could there be forests?
I suppose it makes sense. Obviously, there’s still going to be mountains in the wonderful country that I will probably not be giving you the name for until very late in the series. But it forced me to think, and that means some things are about to change.
There will indeed now be areas of rolling hills. There will likely be lakes in that country now. There will be plains and mountains. There will be forests and dunes. There will be hot summers and mediocre winters (compared to Canada, at least). There will probably be islands, but as all the action takes place on the mainland for the first book, you won’t be seeing them in the first map. Heck, I might even throw in a volcano. Basically, I’m just ready to start moving.
And that also means that even “white” people are probably going to be at least tanned. This is, after all, a peninsula.
I’m pretty freakin’ psyched if you can’t tell. Hopefully, my illustrator is just as psyched. Knowing her, she probably is, even though it means a bit more work. She’s cool like that.
Gabriel to Earth 