With the previous reflective post out of the way, here's what I originally wanted to write.
The upcoming chapter of We Can't Fall et cetera* is finally, finally beginning to look like it can be finished. Background: I need to introduce Boba into the story at this point. Specifically, I need to break up the string of Kil-centric chapters to focus on some of my other characters, and for Reasons it needs to be Boba. The trouble was, Boba's introductory chapter categorically refused to come to me in anything but very tiny pieces. It threw three characters I had not intended to include at me, and refused to reveal what the encounter with the one I
did intend to include was like before the other three got their say.
They finally have, and the other meeting and the environment have finally begun to take shape.
Despite the difficulties, I really, really like the shape the chapter is taking now; I think it is much better for having revealed its form on its own terms instead of being forced into it. And so will the story be. The chapter needs to carry a lot of weight on its shoulders, what with Kil unexpectedly having gotten a lot more space than originally planned, and I think it did find a very good way to do that. I'll still be chiselling away at it so I cannot promise any posting date because Real Life is Real Life. But soonish.
Am really enjoying finding the right words to say things, too, which is a joy I had lost somewhere in the messiness of the past couple of years.
* 2020 Marmota, why did you give the story such a clumsy name? Probably because you did not realise it would grow EVEN MORE and become A THING.
* * *
Also, with more time to reflect on things again, I realised one of my significant stumbling blocks with Narnian fanfiction, both the Choruk'la'kajir universe and (especially) The Peridan Chronicles has been the inability to sandbox my worldbuilding and plots on a map and imagine realistic travel times et cetera. So I googled around, and found
this post with a composite map, which I think is an excellent starting point for my own experiments. Pleasant surprise to be told the maps actually are to scale and do more or less match up with travel times mentioned in the books (except for the sea and islands). I had a hard time picturing it, and kept thinking it did not line up, probably because I did not have a clear-to-read map of the whole world at hand.
It's still not quite enough for my needs. I will have to make my own version of the map and place my own inventions on it, like Stormness Fast, to see how exactly they relate to the places we know and where exactly they fit on the map. There are areas where I need more detail than the symbolic features of a fantasy map - especially around Stormness, obviously.
Computers are helpful and open source / community-built free programs are one's best friends for this sort of thing. The author created that map by smushing the existing ones together in GIMP. I think I can easily continue by putting that map in Inkscape, adding a grid, and figuring out the scale of things in specific places, without ever having to go to the trouble of drawing and undoubtedly erasing things by hand. Do something about the questionable location of the islands as mentioned in the post. Probably create a sort of gridded flat blank without the fancy fantasy map details that I can print out and play with further by hand-doodling. I will share it for anyone else's worldbuilding purposes when I do, of course. :-)
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