the_gneech (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_gneech) wrote2002-02-08 01:33 pm
the_gneech) wrote2002-02-08 01:33 pm
Somebody, Make Ethangea Leave Me Alone for 24 Hours!
Sometimes, a project just grabs ahold of me and won't let me think about anything else ... and even just the action of trying to think about something else causes something akin to a spiritual pain. Some writers love it when that happens ... they feel "taken over by the muse" or lifted out of themselves or some such. Personally, I hate it; it feels remarkably like an addiction, and I hate feeling like I'm not in control of my own behavior.
Ethangea has done that to me in the past week; NeverNever and The Suburban Jungle have both been forcibly shoved to the wayside by this overwhelming desire to do this RIGHT NOW! -- and little things like schedules and commitments be damned. Le sigh. I have been happily puttering around on this setting off and on for over 15 years now ... why it has to suddenly flare up and take over my attention span right now, is beyond me. (I'm betting the Lord of the Rings movie had something to do with it -- damn those great-movie-making bastards!)
FWIW, NN and SJ have both done this to me in the past, as well, so they don't really have much room to complain, but I do feel bad about letting down the readers, and more importantly, letting down Vince, who is kinda depending on me to hold up my end of the crossover. I'll fix it somehow, as soon as I am back in the creative driver's seat, so to speak.
Anyway, I spent pretty much all of yesterday and the latter half of Wednesday working on the prehistory of the world, and I finally got to the point where humans show up. Whoof. One demigod in particular is behaving in contradictory ways, repeatedly forcing me to either rethink his motivation, personality, or behavior in order to resolve it.
My offhand comment from Wednesday about "because the gods decreed it" is coming back to haunt me in ways I didn't expect ... the powers that be have been creating races like crazy, bringing up and tearing down whole civilizations more or less to use as pawns in their various semidivine power struggles. I'll be glad when I get to the cataclysm that starts the "modern," relatively-low-magic age, so that Ethangea's history will start to settle down a bit!
Also, some comments other LJ users made about my map more or less reinforced something that had been preying on my mind about the scale and layout of the map, and obsessive-compulsive that I am, I couldn't just let it go. "Little things" have been bugging me about Ethangea for years ... if I'm going to really and completely fix it, then I might as well fix this too, or it'll still be nagging at me in 2020. So that's what I've been doing all morning.
Basically, on the map as I had it, everything was too far south. The latitudes that create the most fertile lands were, on my map, either barren stretches of desert, or under water, while the "pleasant, green land" I had intended to be on the northwest coast of the inner sea, or around the western claw-shaped bay, was further south than some of the hottest places in the world.
I played around with various solutions to this problem, and finally came upon a solution which I think will work, which was basically to scrunch the landmasses closer together, closing up some of those vast stretches of sea. This also changed some things that were basically small seas, into channels instead ... which will no doubt have quite an effect on the economic and political climate as history unfolds. It also makes the lands to the far west even more remote than they already were, because the northwestern channel no doubt freezes for most of the year.
Before:
After:
And superimposed over Europe for comparison:
I think I'm still going to have to tweak the climate ... my weather patterns may not hold up with the new arrangement. It seems to me there needs to be more dry, arid land in the middle, but until I figure out where the rains come from and where they go, I can't really tell.
Meanwhile, SJ hasn't gone up today yet. Gah! Maybe I can guilt myself into drawing it.
Waaaah!
-The Gneech
Ethangea has done that to me in the past week; NeverNever and The Suburban Jungle have both been forcibly shoved to the wayside by this overwhelming desire to do this RIGHT NOW! -- and little things like schedules and commitments be damned. Le sigh. I have been happily puttering around on this setting off and on for over 15 years now ... why it has to suddenly flare up and take over my attention span right now, is beyond me. (I'm betting the Lord of the Rings movie had something to do with it -- damn those great-movie-making bastards!)
FWIW, NN and SJ have both done this to me in the past, as well, so they don't really have much room to complain, but I do feel bad about letting down the readers, and more importantly, letting down Vince, who is kinda depending on me to hold up my end of the crossover. I'll fix it somehow, as soon as I am back in the creative driver's seat, so to speak.
Anyway, I spent pretty much all of yesterday and the latter half of Wednesday working on the prehistory of the world, and I finally got to the point where humans show up. Whoof. One demigod in particular is behaving in contradictory ways, repeatedly forcing me to either rethink his motivation, personality, or behavior in order to resolve it.
My offhand comment from Wednesday about "because the gods decreed it" is coming back to haunt me in ways I didn't expect ... the powers that be have been creating races like crazy, bringing up and tearing down whole civilizations more or less to use as pawns in their various semidivine power struggles. I'll be glad when I get to the cataclysm that starts the "modern," relatively-low-magic age, so that Ethangea's history will start to settle down a bit!
Also, some comments other LJ users made about my map more or less reinforced something that had been preying on my mind about the scale and layout of the map, and obsessive-compulsive that I am, I couldn't just let it go. "Little things" have been bugging me about Ethangea for years ... if I'm going to really and completely fix it, then I might as well fix this too, or it'll still be nagging at me in 2020. So that's what I've been doing all morning.
Basically, on the map as I had it, everything was too far south. The latitudes that create the most fertile lands were, on my map, either barren stretches of desert, or under water, while the "pleasant, green land" I had intended to be on the northwest coast of the inner sea, or around the western claw-shaped bay, was further south than some of the hottest places in the world.
I played around with various solutions to this problem, and finally came upon a solution which I think will work, which was basically to scrunch the landmasses closer together, closing up some of those vast stretches of sea. This also changed some things that were basically small seas, into channels instead ... which will no doubt have quite an effect on the economic and political climate as history unfolds. It also makes the lands to the far west even more remote than they already were, because the northwestern channel no doubt freezes for most of the year.
Before:
After:
And superimposed over Europe for comparison:
I think I'm still going to have to tweak the climate ... my weather patterns may not hold up with the new arrangement. It seems to me there needs to be more dry, arid land in the middle, but until I figure out where the rains come from and where they go, I can't really tell.
Meanwhile, SJ hasn't gone up today yet. Gah! Maybe I can guilt myself into drawing it.
C'mon, ya slacker! Everyone's waiting on you!
Waaaah!
-The Gneech
no subject
Welcome to my insanity!
That's VERY much what it's been like writing Identity Crisis for the last year and a half!
Don't sweat the SJ. Send me the strip whenever you get done with it and I'll get you the colored version back ASAP.
BTW: Point about mountains. You have 2 types. Foothills (humps) and mountains (pointy mountain looking things) but you have no indicator as to height. Some mountrainges should be ENORMOUSLY tall while others are kinda wimpy.
And considering that there was a cataclism, how about a huge trench, or wall caused by a shearing of the land mass? Now that's the stuff of Epics.
Just trying to mudy the waters. :)
Cheers
Hikaru
no subject
Well, at this scale, only the largest mountain ranges even show up on the map. The pointy mountain things are the equivalent to the Rockies or the Andes or something. The bumps indicate more just a general hilliness and low mountain ranges than anything else.
The trench is actually more like a crater, and it's sitting under the large, inverted-triangle shaped sea in the northeast. The mountains on the northeast section of the northern landmass sorta indicate the border of where the plate broke off and sank. Some of the continent is still above the surface, a marshy plain northeast of the mountains in almost the dead center of the map.
As I've been thinking about the details of the cataclysm, I have decided that not all of the continent went at once. There was the big major boom, right in the middle, which sent out a big shockwave, and the middle of the continent sank like a fallen sufflé. The outer areas took longer, probably days, to slowly collapse, giving some of the continents' inhabitants the chance to escape. The explosion was still large enough, and the sinking still fast enough, that it wreaked all sorts of apocalyptic goodness on the planet, in the form of tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, rains of fire, years of darkness, and so forth.
Anyway, the northeastern shores could certainly be a huge cliff face, or have been once. Time and erosion will have beaten that down somewhat. -TG