I have been using pen and paper, along with digital tools such as Photoshop, Affinity and Artstudio Pro, for many years now to create my maps — these are great tools and bring worlds to life quite quickly. However, I’d often wondered how I could create Ordnance Survey-style maps with lots of detail, but zoomable like Google Maps. This made me think of GIS tools, but I’d assumed they were very expensive. I’d completely forgotten about QGIS, an open-source GIS system. So off I went and downloaded it. I’m donating £5 per month, as that seems only fair.

I meant to put this update on The Cellar Dweller a few weeks ago. Somehow it is now November, so a summer catch-up has become an autumn one as well.

I am not beginning a new life after sixty. That does not feel right to me. It sounds too neat, too dramatic, as if a person reaches a round-number birthday and is somehow issued with a fresh self, a clean desk, and a better filing system.

I turn sixty today. That still sounds slightly improbable, as if sixty is something that happens to other people and not to the person sitting here wondering whether the kettle has boiled yet. But apparently it does happen. Even to me.

Today I am back at Northern Black, adding the finishing touches to my left arm and, if there is time, perhaps adding something new.

One of the things I have been thinking about, now that Beyond Winter’s Silence is out, is what the characters in the Foundations of Edrass books are really there to do.

Book Two is live! That still feels worth saying plainly, because for a long time I was not sure Book One would ever exist outside my own folders, notes and half-finished drafts.

Religion is one of the easiest parts of worldbuilding to make too tidy. A few gods, a few temples, a creation myth, a priesthood, perhaps a festival or two, and it can look finished on paper. There is a pantheon. There are rituals. There are symbols. There are names for things.

Beyond Winter’s Silence has now been uploaded to KDP and is going through the approval process.

I am not an artist by any sensible definition. I can draw well enough to explain an idea to myself, but not well enough to pretend the result is finished art. And yet I have still built beautiful worlds.

I have been creating worlds for as long as I can remember. That sounds rather grand, but it began simply enough. Like many private habits, it was not originally meant to become anything public. It was something done because it was interesting.

Beyond Winter's Silence is nearly finished. The first draft is complete, the retcon pass is underway, and publication is due in May. That is a practical fact. But it is also a moment worth pausing on, because the book that is almost ready did not begin with a plot. It began, as everything in this project begins, with a question about how a place actually works.