Hello hello!

Been a little while since I updated, since I didn’t have solid material to post. But now I do!

Checking my Writing Goals 2023 post, I’ve already cleared two of the three goals: publishing Book 6, and (circa April) finishing the parallel draft of my new series Book 2, The Fading Saint. I’ve spent the past month since then on doing some worldbuilding, since I found gaps in the world background while I was writing that draft and wanted to fill them in before I took the plunge into Book 3.

And worldbuilding, as always (for me anyway), involves….MAPS!

First though, since I renamed the continent that is the setting for everything, here’s the redone header image:

The continent was previously known as Temharat, but that was a name I slapped on at random over a decade ago, before I had delved far into the world or knew much about the cultures. I decided to derive a new (if somewhat similar) one from Quechua, in my typical fashion of piecing together a phrase and then smooshing it into a gibberish-y place-name. What I ended up with was ‘tiqsi mama aya wat’a’, roughly ‘creation-mother corpse island’, which when smooshed up became Tzimayat and Grandmother Corpse Island. Cheerful!

Look, it’s mythological. The folk of Tzimayat know that the land they walk upon is their Grandmother, who swallowed up the Elder People and all the old gods when they were threatened by the wicked sun at the end of the last age, in an attempt to protect them. However, the Elder People and the gods died in Grandmother’s stomach, and Grandmother died as well. Only the Fire Twins survived, burning in Grandmother’s heart, and eventually made their way to the surface to raise the land again.

I have shown some Tzimayat maps already, but I’ll pop one up here just for reference:

One of the things I did this month was add Utility Maps to my collection, for my own reference when describing terrain and figuring out who owns what. For instance, there are a variety of cultures on Grandmother Corpse Island, due to there being a handful of creator deities, each with their own plans and interests.

There has also been a history of warfare, migration, immigration, disaster, and other dramatic changes that have affected the movements and density of populations — some of which I detailed this month in my big ol’ spreadsheet of Tzimayat and World History. I didn’t get into a lot of granular detail on that (though I have in my To Do notes that I ought to do dynasties and such, since I’ve read other series that drop dynastic tidbits in regularly and it does make the world’s history feel more full). Mostly what I have is 200-500 year ‘eras’ of human and supernatural activity over the past 5000 years of world history.

And mostly for Tzimayat, since the Motherlands is meant to remain largely unknown and entirely unvisited.

That being said, I did find the need to make a rough Motherlands map for myself, because I’d started scrambling up what was where and who was whose neighbor. These things can’t be held entirely in one’s head, because the imagination is a very bad 2D or 3D modeler — it likes to place multiple things in the same spot and tell itself that everything’s fine.

Mocking it up also showed me that I was sending the First Invaders in from the wrong direction relative to both continents, so I tweaked that in the text. This is one of the reasons I’ve been determined to get at least all three books’ base drafts written before I try to pitch anything. While I’ve technically had the world around since 2007 or so, I’ve only been really developing it for the past two years. Before that, it was just a rough sketch.

Here’s a quick gallery of the other maps I produced this month:

In addition to map and history work, I also finalized the respective calendar systems of both continents. Since they grew up in isolation from each other for all but the last ~150 years (250 if you count a few archipelago sea-traders), they both have robust systems tied into their religious and cultural activities, and neither one is about to give way to the other. I have another spreadsheet filled out so I can see what date it is (day, month) in each system, including holy days and festivals. What year per system, I haven’t yet sorted out, since I’m still deciding what year on the history spreadsheet each continent currently considers its Year Zero. Regardless, I’ve finally pinned the two current books into the calendar timeline, so I know what day each event is happening on. This is useful for me to paint some festive background into the story as applicable.

I also did some work on the sun cycles. Since there are two suns — the Sentinel and the Malevolent Twin — I decided I needed to make a visual aid for myself to figure out where the Malevolent Twin is in the sky throughout the story. Tzimayat’s world revolves around the Sentinel Sun, with the Malevolent Twin at a distance — both suns orbiting a common point but not often close to each other. Therefore, while the Sentinel Sun stays in mostly the same place throughout the year (from a planetary view), the Twin moves from one side of the sky to the other — sometimes very near the Sentinel and sometimes on the ‘night’ side of the sky.

Anyway, images!

Again, dramatically abusing spreadsheets to give myself a good visual representation of rising and setting times throughout the year. On the Winter Solstice, the Malevolent Twin is entirely blocked from view by the Sentinel Sun. Meanwhile, on the Summer Solstice, the Malevolent Twin is on the opposite side of the sky, creating a constant day-state. Thus, great times for big rituals and festivals: a winter fasting and replenishing of wards (since the world is temporarily safe from the Twin), and a summer revelry of defiance (big Fuck You energy)!

If I wanted more veracity in orbital mechanics, this would all be less regular, but I decided to be nice to myself and make it a dead basic binary system on the same orbital plane.

I’ll end here with some Rinmaru paperdolls I made a while back of the Book 1 characters but never posted. I have more for the Book 2 characters (and Book 2 versions of these folk) but they’re Big Spoiler territory.

I really need to rearrange this blog to make space for this second world. Hopefully I’ll find time for that soon.

Thanks for reading! 😀