Citadel on the Wilderlands: Week Two

The citadel’s design moves on apace, but I’m still not flowing as I would like. That’s because I remain in the noodling-about phase of design. At the moment, I don’t have a strong feel for how the finished project will look, and so I’m having to lay a lot of the design groundwork as I go. Design elements such as projected word counts and page storyboarding are not exactly exciting facets of design, but they are critical, foundational stuff when it comes to successfully publishing something.

This noodling about phase is particularly terrifying for me as it inevitably involves mapping, and my mapping skills are optimistically described as “terrible”. Geography and terrain are a huge part of my initial design. The citadel lies on a tidal island—Solonor Island—and is linked to the mainland by a slippery rocky causeway. The island’s shape and layout have to look right. While I’m not going to spend tons of time worrying about the place’s ecosystem, ecology and so on (that way, madness lies), it has to be vaguely realistic.