The Cartographers Are Dead. Long Live The Cartographers.

As the title suggests, I’ve had a dramatic shake up in the way I’m doing things.

If you’ve been following along on my Instagram, you might’ve seen a humbly boastful post a few months ago that I’d finished the first draft of what I’ve come to call the Cartographers project. I was proud of it, the prose was what I felt was some of the best that I’d done, and the journey across the Droughtlands it took was a beautiful sampler of everything the setting had to offer. Best of all, it was short, clocking in a zippy 65,000 words.

It was my fourth attempt at this story, but as it turned out in the edits, it would not be my final one. There came a problem with the structure of the plot itself. It was vague and twisty, changing course in ways I could not correct in the edits without rewriting significant portions of it, and it was only in the undertaking of those re-writes that I realised I wouldn’t be able to hide all the Frankenstein-like stitches without significantly altering things again.

All these years, I’d always thought writing the last book of a series would be hardest. Corrupted Flux was a challenge in its own right, but this project has been just as difficult. Turns out starting something new, staring at a blank canvas for days and days on end, is a rough go of it.

I came into this story wanting to write about the Droughtlands as a setting as if I were starting fresh, taking everything I’d learnt about it in the past ten years and everything I’d learnt about writing to write something close to, but not entirely, a definitive story in the Droughtlands. While I do always thing of The Hytharo Redux as just that, because the tale of the Hytharo is so important to what the Droughtlands is, it still doesn’t look at it from the perspective of someone in the setting outside of those extraordinary times.

I wanted to look at how life formed around the ruins, how people interacted with paralicts and those who tried to retrieve them, the dangers and long term consequences of it all. Most importantly, I wanted to show how the legacy of those-of-glass is interpreted by those who are only transient to it, rather than deeply enmeshed like Spiric and Ryza end up being.

It led me to a character that was aloof and removed from society, but I found the fatal flaw for them, why their version of the story had to be discarded, was they simply didn’t act in a way that was of consequence to how aloof and removed they were.

A Cartographer, a dying trade in the stage of the Droughtlands I’m writing in here, some two-hundred years before the time of Ryza or Spiric, is a person that sees themselves as a watchman, a guardian between the world of those-of-glass and that of the current Droughtlands. Someone who decides how the two interacts, sanctioning themselves with that judgement as their body rots from all the time they spend traversing between these worlds.

I realised this character was less of a scholar or a monk as I’d previously written them, and more like a road warrior, drawn from the image of the titular Mad Max of his second movie. A force of nature that shows up, a mythical legend who you only come across, that does not arrive explicitly to aid you at first, but only looking to survive.

The road warrior as an architype only looks out for themselves and their mission. Max is a broken man who duels on the blacktop with roving bandits only for supplies or guzzoline, only getting entangled with local plights when he finds himself stranded there, eventually being drawn in to their greater mission of survival beyond tomorrow.

In this rewrite, this is the type of character I want to shape the Cartographer around. A figure that is revered and feared, that is stepped aside from and followed, but only at a hesitant distance. They are seen as tainted people, that lingering too near one with pass on whatever affliction they’ve picked up from the ruins, but so necessary, because they are the ones that find the paths through said ruins and sanction them to be pilfered.

So it is this fifth attempt, as of writing this post. I’m nearly 25,000 words into it having started it a little under two weeks ago, that I think I’ve finally nailed what this story is about. How it flows and what it hints at. Long time readers of my books (and it hasn’t been that long, really, has it?) will have plenty of easter eggs and other contextual hints to detect, and new readers will have no trouble navigating this fresh look into the Droughtlands.

To give you one last teaser, here’s the last line of the first chapter:

‘It came from… from beyond the sky.’