Creating a Map

Looking at the maps of other writers' created worlds is one of my favorite parts of digging into a new fantasy series. Lately, that has been Osten Ard (Williams) and the Realm of the Elderlings (Hobb).
I imagine having my own beautifully drawn map someday, inserted in my books and framed up and proudly displayed in my house.

Tolkien's, Flanagan's, and Martin's worlds are recognizably European, with pseudo-British Isle home bases. I love these fictional realms, but I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted the land to feel more like the land I know and love.

I was inspired by the cleft of the Mississippi River valley, especially on trips to Winona to see Shakespeare at the GRSF. I was inspired by all the windbreaks on homesteads and farms across the sweep of the Great Plains. I was inspired by the badlands and the North Shore and the deep forests up north. My land is this land...

http://www.airum.org/

So, the upper Midwest. But medieval.

When I started writing, I had very little of the created world in my mind. I knew there was a castle, and I knew that castle was built against a cliff at the convergence of two rivers. I imagined the river continuing southward to an eventual sea. I imagined a trio of mountain countries to the north of the castle. And I knew Lio and Lamb were not originally from this castle or its town.

Over the past two years, but especially this summer, the Realm of Aelland has slowly evolved into this:

Look closely and you can see the following features:

* The land is split by the massive Aco River, Mississippi-like in its flow.
* To the west of the river, "Round Villages" of the broad Aco Plains spread out to the coast.
* The northwest is my Badlands, and the northeast is my Northwoods.
* I've included mountains in the north as a sort of boundary and along the east side of the Aco River as a break before the desert. I have no plot in mind for the desert, but I didn't want the plains to continue eastward, and the mountains would affect climate. A desert seemed proper, in any case.
* There is an enormous lake-like bay on the southwest coast.
* A massive curved, paved road crosses the realm from coast to coast, touching nearly all climates and landscapes.

I am happy with most of it, though it seems a little too lumpish.

One of my favorite places is the sacred Isles of Mourning on the southwest tip. I'm not even planning to go there. It's just a part of the country that presented itself to me, the same way characters sometimes present their quirks and personalities to me as I write. I didn't so much invent the place as discover it.

It turns out that there are plenty of artists who specialize in map-making, and for a fair fee they would turn my rough sketch into a lovely map. But I'm not ready yet. As my characters travel, more place names are added. And I have no idea how the world will evolve in the third, entirely unimagined book in the series. I'm pretty sure the characters travel north, into the mountainous Bardlands. But I won't know what they will find there until they hit the road.