So after some fiddling around with the website the Short Fiction page is no more, replaced instead with a Fiction section and a dedicated Sandformer page.
Speaking of the Sandformer, I’m back to working on that now that I’ve finished my first draft of Heat Stroke. Over the next couple months I’ll be mostly focusing on the Sandformer, as well as making some changes to Duskwalker and doing some brainstorming on how to fix The Last Echo.
So, as I mentioned in my last post, I thought it’d be interesting to show off some of the world building stuff from The Sandformer, so I had a hunt through my notebooks and folders and selected out a couple of things. Half of what I wanted to share had spoilers jammed all over it, so I had to be a bit more selective than I perhaps would otherwise have been, but here’s a small taste of what’s going on beneath the covers of my notebooks.
Symbols are mostly aesthetic, yes, but a good symbol can add authenticity to a country, city, organisation or institution that would otherwise be lacking. It’s far from necessary, but it does add some nice detail and background to a story. Plus I have pages upon pages of them already, so I need a reason to justify the dozens of different iterations that have gone into each one.
I find it pretty satisfying to be able to describe a city banner, or the symbol upon a chest-plate or shield, details which I would otherwise ignore if I didn’t put in the effort of making the symbols. There’s also direct references to landmarks or institutions within some of the city banners themselves, they’re not just shapes, they’re a part of the history of the world.
And speaking of history, here’s the first hundred years of my historical timeline for the world it takes place in. The story starts in the year 382, so theres a lot of history there.
The timeline is a bit out of date and isn’t quite finished yet, a couple of the cities have changed names as well, and I still have events that need to be squeezed into the past. Heres a look at the full thing as it stands at the moment:
I also wanted to show off a map of the world, but I only have two that are up to date, one of which is set in the future with a bunch of spoilers written all over it, and the other which I made (loosely) to scale, in order to more accurately measure distances between cities, so that one is basically just a grid with dots and names. So unfortunately this map of the city of Valhar will have to do instead.
The city is located in the south of the world, is famous for its gladiator-style fighting pits, and is built on top of deep canyons, with half a dozen bridges spanning the gaps between the different sections of the city.
So there’s your glimpse into some of the background work that’s going into the Sandformer, I’ve got a few things from the Strokerverse that I might share at some point as well.
My next post should come with a new short story (only around 500 words) set in one of the cities from the Sandformer, following the very beginning of a movement that takes place on the opposite side of the world to the events of the book, sort of slowly brewing in the background for most of the story. But more on that next time.