Designing A New Era Of The Droughtlands
As a prelude to this, I need you to know where I’m currently at as I write this. It’s the 2nd of May, 2025. I’ve got the third and final book in The Flux Catastrophe with my trusted editor, who has the arduous task of being the first one exposed to the radioactive trails of logic that I’ve left through that manuscript. The Hytharo Origin was my most recent release, about seven or eight months ago, and was a complicated book to write, owing to the numerous layers of history from The Droughtlands that I had to draft to execute the plot.
Now, while I wait for Flux #3 to go through its edits, I’m in the opening stages of writing my next book. I’m not going into the next Hytharo book, it needs time to brew, and instead I’m starting a new series, and it’s presenting a problem that I haven’t had to face for more than a decade.
Where the hell do I start?
The working title of the series is “The Cartographers of Ruin.” It’s set 500 years before the events of The Flux Catastrophe and the present events of The First Hytharo and will, of course, include a good deal of map making. I’m doing this because I want to present a new vision of The Droughtlands, to carve out some stories that can focus on the world itself rather than the break-neck plot pacing that I’m always drawn to.
After a few false starts of writing the book itself, I’ve gone back to the world building and focusing my energy on that, and I’m finding that to be a really interesting exercise in problem solving.
Being 500 years before the events of the previously written books means it’s also 500 years AFTER the fall of The Hytharo Empire, which is what I’ve picked as a starting point. That in charting the effects of The Hytharo disappearance I’ve been able to flesh out how The Droughtlands has actually evolved.
So, if you’ve already read The Hytharo Redux, you’ll know what The disappearance of the Hytharo people meant. For those that haven’t, this is the event that resulted in all the water being sealed into the air itself. Sure, people wouldn’t die from thirst, but new problems suddenly came from it.
For one, magic all but disappeared with it. An intended effect, but it meant that many agricultural practices that relied on magic are no longer possible. The crops may’ve been able to grow but there was no way to harvest them, process them or distribute them. Entire populations would’ve been in total upheaval as they searched for food.
The disappearance of The Hytharo Empire also means a colossal power vacuum. Again, it’s a slight spoiler for those who haven’t read it yet (so go do it!) but the Empire really was the dominating force on The Droughtlands. Without them, there simply wasn’t a power ready or fit to govern the vast tracts of land and relevant population in the same way, and this led to a great splintering of power and population again.
There are so many other aftershocks that I’m charting out, and it’s all serving to make this really rich world to set this new story in. It’s this evolution of cultures that will lead to the “present day” for these Cartographer books, and I can give you a sneak peak at the focus of it now.
With the above taken into account, a great deal of the way of life in The Droughtlands is nomadic. What were once numerous and scattered tribes has now —through alliances, cooperation agreements and various clashes— formed into five major tribes of people, each with their own cultures, beliefs, splinter factions and grudges.
The one common belief among them is that to die properly, you must die forgotten. They see the ruins left by those-of-glass and the magic trapped within them as grim warnings of lives that have not truly ended. It’s why these tribes hold fast by their nomadic lifestyles.
Why they abhor the work done by the Cult of Cartographers.
I’ll leave it at that for now, but I will say I’m excited to embark on this kind of journey once again. There’s so much of The Droughtlands still to be charted, and that’s exactly what I want to do with this series.