Listen to the Voice

Motherhood must have addled my brain a bit (some might argue that it's more than a bit, but that's another post). Either that, or the percocet episodes of strange dreams must have made me stop trusting that little voice in my head--my muse. And, really, if the last voice you remember hearing is Nathan Fillion as Captain Malcolm Reynolds of Serenity telling you to get up at 3:30 AM (the one time Andrew wasn't awake that night, no less) and pump breastmilk, would you trust the next voice you heard? (Prescribed narcotics can be rather entertaining, no?)

So when I finished one chapter in Strings of Discord recently, I ignored the voice that was all geared up to write a chapter in Airen's--one of my MCs--POV and went with the logical, anal retentive, scientist in me and decided to write a chapter in one of my villain's--Corla's--POV as that was the proper chapter in the sequence I had established for all of one round of chapters. I had a vague idea for Corla's chapter, but something niggled at me and prevented me from writing it, so I did a bunch of note-transferring and worldbuilding details instead. Stuff that needed to be done, but no actual first draft creation. After a week, I had done enough of the notes and stuff to get me itching to write draft material but was confronted with a chapter it seemed I didn't want to write. Then I finally asked myself, is the Corla's chapter really the one that comes next logically?

Turns out, it wasn't. I figured this out by doing one last little worldbuilding thing: making a scale for my world map. I had the sneaking suspicion that Corla's chapter, a scene set in a desert oasis that reveals some of what they have in store for my other MC, couldn't happen next in line as it would be physically impossible for the villains to get to that desert oasis before the events of Airen's next scene had to occur (waking up after causing elemental havoc in a fayrie grove). I could easily fudge two days of unconciousness for Airen, but not the four or five it would take for the villains to get from the port town of Evarener to the oasis. So, the little voice of my muse was right to get excited about writing an Airen scene as that's the scene that must come next for the logic of the story.

All this would've been clear if I had created a scale for the map way back when I actually drew up the map (over a year ago). But the concept of distance on a fictional world threw me. I had a hard time wrapping my brain around that idea. I mean, I had no clue as to how much a horse could conceivably travel in a day, and that was the only real starting point my mind gave me. If I wanted my group to take x number of days getting from point A to B for plot purposes, then that was the one fact I needed to make an appropriate scale. Yesterday I got sick of spinning my wheels on the issue and looked up a fantasy book that I knew had a map with a scale and an easily remembered scene where the length of time traveled is clearly mentioned: Holly Lisle's Talyn. That gave me enough to provide my own scale.

I'm sure there's some standard way to do this or something, but I never found it in my internet hunting, and I never got wise enough to actually, duh, ask somebody. It's a moot point now, anyway, as I have a functioning scale for my map of Velorin. However, I don't think I'll include it on the map that will accompany this book if when it gets published, as I'm not confident enough in the preciseness of the scale for it to hold up to intense reader scrutiny.