World Building: The Country of Vawdrey

As I continue to write stories and posts about Tiaera, I find that world-creating is a fun pastime in itself. At first, it was tedious and boring. There we were, Jack and I, trying to get our Realmwalkers chapters done and all had to stop because we found out that it was potentially dangerous to use someone else's world to write about for commercial purposes as authors. It wasn't harmless fan fiction that was written purely for personal enjoyment. Jack and I meant business. We wanted to write a book together and offer it up to the world and earn something from it. Thank you to all who made that dream come true! We really appreciate your support and encouragement.

Anyway, I knew nothing about mapping or cartography and to this day I still don't know much, but I do know how to draw and so with Jack's help in figuring out aspects about earth's geology and atmosphere, he helped decide what Tiaera's size and countries should be. No, it's probably not accurate info. In fact, we decided Tiaera should be smaller than Earth. But that's fine! Tiaera is not Earth even if some of its inhabitants are human and live lives like those of Earth's medieval-renaissance periods. After all, this is a sci fi/fantasy story. The images had to be quick and simple so we could move on and get back to our story. Using MSPublisher, I managed to make several global and sectional maps.  Some fantasy world builders tend to use special programs like Autorealm, ProFantasy Software, and DnDjinni. I didn't want to use anything that was difficult or expensive, so I used what I have: MSPublisher and Photoshop. Realmwalkers contains some of those maps.

This image and info is next to the title page in Realmwalkers.

Here are a couple of graphics I made using these programs and a regular mouse to draw with. I hadn't gotten my wonderful Wacom table w/stylus when I did the artwork for Realmwalkers. I hope these drawings will inspire you if you are in the process of writing a book that might be enhanced with a map or two. Maps are very useful tools when you write a story that involves more than one city or town. Jack and I referred to these maps often while our characters traveled from country to country. I highly recommend creating or using maps to make your story more accurate and realistic. Maps help me keep from becoming confused as to what town is where and what race or races live there. Yes, if you can't draw or afford any of the programs currently available, you can make charts or lists to help out. I could have done that also, but since I can draw, I did what I enjoy.

Since I am currently writing a story about Audrey, I have decided to re-create and update the country of Vawdrey where this storyline takes place. Vawdrey is not a big country at approximately 687.5 miles from east to west.  We figured that Tiaera is about the size of Mars, not Earth.

This is the simple and quick drawing I used for the book. This graphic also shows the NW section of the country of Lythopia

And here is the newest and updated version of Vawdrey showing Chardonvale, and the druidic monastery and cloister where Carlyn and Audrey live and train.  All graphics are copyright protected.

Again, I hope these images will inspire you if you are writing a novel. You don't have to be an artist and you might discover, as I did, that world-creating can be fun!

Pinterest

I am now at Pinterest and uploading parts of my Tiaera blog there. I hope to gain more readers with my graphics and stories. Pinterest is a good place for sharing images much like Photobucket and Facebook. Here is the link to my profile there. Check it out!

EV Medina at Pinterest