I mentioned in my last post that I’m in the midst of editing Planes Shifter. This is planned to be the second-to-last edit, because I’m aiming to submit to at least one agent by July 1st. Following this draft, a beta read session and then final tweaks from that feedback, it’ll be off. It’s been read by 4 people in previous drafts, and they got to the end of the book feeling it was okay – so I’m not too worried about “being ready”.
So I was trundling through the second scene, feeling the “it must be perfect” block, when I discovered a minor issue in my city layout. One of the minor character’s houses has been described as being in one part of town. Then in a later scene, it’s near the western gate. And then in book 2, it’s constantly near a particular inn; complete with underground access tunnel; which is vaguely alluded to in book 1.
It turns out that only works if my city is about 25 metres square… (Which I may have indulged the idea of doing, just to make life easy). Deciding it’s best to just shuffle things a little, I put aside my frustrations at the edits, and got drawing.
And after a lot of rubbing out, I finally have a close-up map of my province; complete with the main story base, trade routes, rivers, contour lines for height and vegetation symbols. I may also have scrabbled through the skyrim and oblivion image archives for some idea of how they set up ports.
Once more, I’m reminded that I love all the plotting, planning and discovering of a new story. It’s nice to have some of that still in a story that’s two years old, but also frustrating in its own right. It was a tiny problem – but it was a block that I couldn’t just ignore. Sometimes things need to straightened out even before they become a problem.
And with my new map, I also addressed some of the distance queries I said I “must remember to double check” – so hopefully I can spot any issues as I go along; just by looking at it.