Shiny. Want one.

In the various virtual realms I’ve frequented from time to time, the game developers have (mostly) been kind enough to provide me with in-game maps of various kinds that fulfil the same purpose. Now, however, as I begin to create a world of my own in which to play out the various events of Dragondream, I find myself at a loss: I suddenly realised that I’m getting to the point where knowing where things are, and how far apart they are, i.e. the whole mapping bit, is becoming important. So far, I’ve written away, mainly trying to get words out and onto the (virtual) page. But as I write more and more, I find that my general cluelessness as to the whereabouts of everything is getting in my way.

“Very well,” I say to myself, and roll up my metaphorical shirtsleeves. “I will produce a map, for my edification and, possibly, as an addendum to the book.”

Boy is that hard! Creating a world from scratch is definitely not one a “done and dusted in seven days” endeavour, I quickly came to realise. Not if the whole thing is to be in any way believable. Various tools exist to help the aspiring world creator, of course. Personally, I’ve settled on Fractal Mapper which, although a bit dated now, seems to offer a good blend of features and usability for the $34.95 NBOS is asking for it. It is also a lot more user-friendly than Campaign Cartographer, which I tried out and discarded because I just couldn’t be bothered to get past the baroque intricacies of its user interface.

However, a piece of software is only part of it. Yes, it helped me generate the basic geography of the world, but once that’s done, there is so much left to do: placing miscellaneous geographical chrome (rivers, forests, lakes) with respect to the terrain; deriving from that where people would actually be likely to settle; deciding which of those settlements would evolve to become major, and which would remain hamlets; where natural borders fall and thus find out where various nations or territories begin and end; the list goes on.

Why do I need all that detail? Surely only a small part of that would end up even being mentioned in the story at all? True enough, but I think that having a good map is great for reference. And also, it lets me avoid having my characters, for instance, travel north to a place that’s in the south, or describe a climate that’s simply impossible in the region concerned.

I did find a good resource with lots of tips and tricks: the Cartographer’s Guild, but I wonder, if there are any among you who have attempted this sort of endeavour before, what your own experiences have been, and what else you could tell me that might ease this rather laborious process?

Related articles

• So what gives?

Since 2011-12-18, I’ve:

• Emigrated from Switzerland to Sweden; one of the best decisions I ever took in my whole life. Switzerland was slowly killing me (almost literally). Perhaps I’ll do another post sometime comparing the two places …
• Finally managed to sort out various family issues (the details of which I won’t go into here) that were weighing on all parties concerned.
• Found work at West Art Communication AB, a great place to work, with an awesome bunch of developers and designers. Can’t remember the last time I had so much fun going to work, and my memory (despite claims to the contrary) is actually pretty long
• Started looking for a house with my girlfriend—I still can’t get over the price of real estate here, compared to Switzerland: look at any property in Switzerland, and just replace the CHF with SEK. The Swedish Krona currently stands at 8-odd to the Swiss Franc, so yes, houses are 8 times cheaper here.
• Fished out my current writing project from the virtual box it was sitting in, and started working on it again. It wasn’t for lack of inspiration that I shelved it, but what with moving abroad, job-hunting and general getting-settled-in, I didn’t really have the time or energy.

So now what? Well, I’ve updated my Scrivener, installed Aeon Timeline (beta of a completely brilliant timeline application for writers—sorry, Mac-only), got ahold of Fractal Mapper (excellent mapping application—sorry, Windows-only) and basically started cleaning up the manuscript, blowing off the digital cobwebs, and getting this thing back on the road.

Since talking about work is probably boring, I’ll stay on the topic of my novel. Its working title is Dragondream (because of an earlier version—the final thing will probably end up called something else), and that’s how I’ll refer to it for now. Or “DD” for short. In a nutshell, it’s a blend of sci-fi and fantasy, and currently stands at around 38’000 words (i.e. about 1/3 done, unless the arcs change in a major way).

As I said earlier, I am planning on releasing it for free in electronic format, under a Creative Commons license, and will make sure hard copies are available, either from somewhere like Lulu or maybe I’ll even find a Real Publisher™ that’ll take it—who knows?

So far, a few people have read the first draft (as far as it goes) and have asked me to get on with the rest, they want to know what happens. A good sign, and a great motivator. My first impetus in writing this is to get the story out; if I later find a way to put a cherry on my cake with it, that’ll be, well, the cherry on the cake.

When it’s finished, I’ll be trying to find a publisher, as well as releasing it on-line for free in a variety of formats.

Anyway, I probably don’t have more than 2 readers, but I thought it fair to them, at least, to keep them updated a little…

I’ve been using Scrivener since version 1.2 (At least, I think it was 1.2, it may have been earlier) for all sorts of writing projects. If you don’t know about Scrivener, but are serious about writing, then you should definitely look into it: it’s a complete writer’s workshop, with pretty much every feature you could imagine:

• Manuscript/Draft organisation: you can structure your writing as granularly as you like, e.g. Book/Part/Chapter/Scene, since any element can be a container for other elements.
• Research: the Research folder lets you import all sorts of supporting materials (web pages, pictures, audio and video, pretty much anything, in fact) so that you always have all the relevant materials to hand from within Scrivener.
• Outliner and Corkboard: each object in Scrivener can have its own textual synopsis. These can then be arranged visually, making reordering of scenes a cinch.
• Comprehensive metadata: you can assign labels and status to everything, and even create your own metadata, such as point of view, location, or anything else you can imagine.
• Collections: these act like Smart Folders for elements of your writing, so you can, for instance, focus on everything happening in a particular location, or involving a certain character.
• Full-screen editing: you can switch off all the clutter when you want to get down to pure writing. However, as opposed to other dedicated writing tools such as OmmWriter (which is also superb for just that one task), Scrivener lets you float relevant information off to the sides of the main editing window, so that you have access to notes etc. while you write.
• Much, much more. In fact, I strongly suggest heading over to the Literature and Latte website for a full list of features, tutorial videos, etc.

I’ve also tried out StoryMill, by Mariner Software, but found it wasn’t nearly as easy to use, while also not offering as many features. Actually, the sheer number of features available in Scrivener can seem daunting at first, but the trick to working with it is simple: it lets you use only what you want to, and offers several ways of achieving that (for instance, you can save layouts that show or hide various interface features, thus reducing clutter and also simplifying what’s on the screen).

I’m currently writing another novel, and using Scrivener and the iPad for that. Oh yes, Scrivener 2 lets you sync text files with, for instance, your Dropbox, so you can pick up the text on the iPad, edit it on the move, and then sync back. So I’ll probably be writing some more about my experiences with this tool, but now it’s back to the manuscript…

Oh, I almost forgot, Scrivener is, at heart, a Mac application, but there is a Windows version out in Beta at the moment.

Lately, there has been a crop of new Apps coming out that seem to fit very well with how I think (and therefore write), and I would like to talk a little about them here.

Every writer has their own way of going about things, that is a given. For me, there are a few tools on the iPad I now find indispensable:

• TextExpander – text-entry shortcuts
• Notebooks – note-taking and organising
• iA Writer – pure writing
• Pages – word processing/publishing

Together, these four apps cover almost every part of my flow of writing. I’ll talk about apps for writing research in another post.

So what are they?

TextExpander

TextExpander, like its sibling on OS X, lets you define abbreviations for commonly-used phrases, blocks of code, indeed any kind of text content, including some nifty placeholders for things like today’s date and so on. Then, in any app that has support for TextExpander, typing the abbreviation will automagically replace it with the full snippet: writing “tyvm” in an e-mail would thus replace it with “Thank you very much!” for instance.

Writing fiction, I find myself creating character and place names, some of which don’t exactly flow easily from my muscle-memory typing reflexes, so being able to just it a few letters instead is great, and makes for consistent spelling.

If you’re a developer, you could have snippets for code block templates, and of course inserting dates, addresses and so on becomes a snap.

Due to current limitations in iOS, TextExpander support has to be coded into every app that wants to make use of it, which is a shame. On OS X, it’s system-wide. Still, there is an ever-growing list of these apps, making this little utility one of my must-haves.

Notebooks

Next up is my favourite notebook app, appropriately-enough called simply “Notebooks”. This app lets you write plain text files, like many others, but also create “books” of notes; these are essentially folders by any other name, and can be nested inside each other. So, for work on the manuscript of My Great Novel, I have a Book called just that, with sub-books (I know, that sounds silly, but bear with me) for Research, To-do, Character Notes, etc.

Notebooks can sync its files through a variety of channels: iTunes’ own clunky solution; WebDAV; Dropbox; WiFi and SyncDocs. Each of these options is configurable and can be deactivated it not needed.

A very useful feature is being able to add Contexts to notes-this works like it does in many to-do apps, so you could associate notes with “@Home”, “@Office”, “@My Novel” or whatever you want, and then filter your view so that you only see the notes you want. Also, this feature integrates with Appigo’s Todo app, a very good to-do manager on iPad-indeed, you can send any note directly to Todo as a new item. If you don’t have Todo installed, you can still convert a note into a Task List inside Notebooks, and notes can have their own due dates, providing some simple management right inside the app.

In fact, I feel I’ve hardly begun to scratch the surface of what Notebooks can do: among other things, you can store PDFs and images right inside Notebooks, so you could have relevant research a couple of taps away while you’re compiling your manuscript, without having to switch in and out of various readers and browsers all the time. I think that, even with the advent of iOS 4.2 any day now, this will remain a very useful feature.

For a full review of Notebooks, with screenshots and all, head on over to MacGasm.

iA Writer

For the actual act of writing, I prefer something uncluttered and as simple as possible that gets out of my way, letting me focus on the words themselves. For this, my favourite is by far iA Writer: the app is about as minimalist as can be (almost too much so, in fact: I find I miss one or two features, see below), giving you a soothing light grey background and a simply beautiful and extremely readable font that was specifically designed for the app.

You can write either in portrait or landscape mode—personally, I find that the iPad’s portrait keyboard isn’t usable for more than entering a search term or two in Google, so I use Writer in landscape mode. Writer adds an extra row of keys at the top of the keyboard, with common punctuation marks, and also cursor movement left and right, either by character or by word—very useful.

The makers of Writer go on about “focus mode”—a special mode where all but three lines are greyed-out, forcing you to concentrate on what you’re writing right now. I haven’t really used it yet, it feels too constricting to me. Having most of the screen (and therefore text) disappear when using landscape mode seems to me to be enough, however everyone’s mileage varies, of course.

Writer can send its files to Dropbox (no other syncing is available as yet), but it feels more like an afterthought: you can’t easily manage files, and the sync has to be done manually. However, it will sync both ways, storing all its files in a folder appropriately-enough called “Writer” in your Dropbox account.

At this point, I’d like to mention that it would be nice if the various app writers would let you configure the Dropbox folder you want to put things in: each one creates its own, but it would be really convenient to be able to open a file in Writer, work on it, then immediately open it in Notebooks for further handling such as tagging, integrating into another sub-book and so on. So for now, I use copy/paste, and also the free Dropbox app for iPad that lets you move and copy files around between folders.

Writer doesn’t support sub-folders as of this writing, though that’s planned for a future version.

Back to Writer—apart from its lackluster Dropbox implementation, the other thing I miss is TextExpander support, which Notebooks has. I’m not advocating creeping featurism for what should remain a simple, minimalist app, but TextExpander support would be a “transparent” feature that could greatly speed up the process of writing, and would certainly not break the immersion of being in “the Zone”.

Pages

Much ink—and even more electrons—has already flowed about this app, and I encourage you to read some of the in-depth reviews elsewhere. I felt the need to mention it here because it’s the final step to assembling your writing: once all is done in Writer, then Notebooks, I import the text to Pages, from where I can lay it out somewhat better, style headings and things, and finally export it as any number of formats, including ePub and PDF, making the finished product instantly readable on just about any existing e-reader.

Finally, some links:

• TextExpander: website, iTunes, list of compatible apps ($4.99)
• Notebooks: website, iTunes ($8.99)
• iA Writer: website, iTunes ($4.99)
• Pages: website, iTunes ($9.99)

The Tratz Blog: “Minecraft is a game developed by Mojang Specifications. To be blunt Minecraft is a game of extreme spelunking and Lego on steroids. The game is mostly developed, programmed and designed by one man by the name of Markus Persson or “Notch.” Persson has been been producing Minecraft since 2009 and the game is still currently in the alpha stage.

There are a couple of ways you can play Minecraft. If you’re the freeware sort of person you can play the game for free at the website. If you create an account and buy the game, all the work that you do in your own little world will persist on a server hosted by Mojang Specifications. You also gain access to a local client (which is great for full screen play), multiplayer capabilities and the “In Dev” (in development) version of the game.”

So head on over to his site for the full review.

In the meantime, here’s a kitten: