Today I thought I would whip through my maps, but not so.
As I was drawing the kingdom for my story, I realized how little I knew about the relative placement of cities, rivers, and roads. When I wrote my timeline, I had an idea of how many days it would take characters to travel from one place to another, but now, I’m realizing that doesn’t necessarily make sense unless I have some very unusual terrain. For example, I had a part where my characters are trying to make their way through a river delta swamp on a homemade raft, while being pursued by enemies in canoes. That was to take three days, but following that, I had the pursuit continuing overland for just one day and covering about three times as much ground. Unless I have a massive swamp covering about half the kingdom and compress the rest of the land, that doesn’t make any sense.
I also had a battle occurring at a particular terrain feature, but can’t figure out how to place that feature into the map, since it requires geography that is not consistent with the surrounding area.
I know my readers are probably going to be more forgiving about this whole map thing than I am, and that nobody is going to subject it to a test of geological accuracy, but it’s still something I wanted to get straight in my head to be able to have it make sense.
I’ll get there soon, I think, but for now, it’s rather surprisingly slow going.