Sometimes a Journey Begins with a Poorly Drawn Map...

A common question I hear is, "Where did you get the idea for your book?" I think most authors would agree that this question is a lot more easily asked than answered. Most readers don't want to hear that "it just came to me," though quite often that is essentially the answer. What readers are really asking, however, is, "How did it come to you?" And this question has a more complicated answer than most people realize. For me, though, in short, the idea for Start of the Storm came from a poorly drawn map.

We have to go back in time a ways in order to find that poorly drawn map. For anyone who doesn't know, I have three brothers: one older and two who are eight and ten years younger. I played a lot of games with my younger brothers growing up and quite often these were games I had made up for us. One year when they were both teens, in late February, I was looking for a game we could play together while the weather was bad. Both of my brothers enjoyed World of Warcraft, but I was looking for something we could sit around a table and play together. One of my brothers played Dungeons & Dragons with a group of his friends, but that required a little too much paper and pencil than I wanted. To me, the ideal table game would combine the best elements of both.

So I decided to design just such a game.

I'm not going to describe the game I was designing here (quite frankly I don't want any of you to steal my ideas because, who knows, maybe I will get the opportunity to release it as a game set in Transcendence someday...), but in the course of designing it I sketched a quick and poorly drawn map and Transcendence was born.

It was not the Transcendence we know and love, but rather it was Transcendence 1,000 years in the future. Like is the case in many fantasy worlds (see Tolkien, Paolini, Sullivan, etc.), the one I was shaping was a world in which humans were the late-comers to a land filled with magic and mythical races. The map I drew showed a fully developed city of Stormhaven, the progressive, melting-pot city of Erætor, and a sylvan city of the elves within the bounds of Mystwood. And these cities were all interconnected with roads demonstrating the fact that the races engaged in free movement and free trade. It was a perfect world in which to develop a character for oneself and set off for exploration and adventure.

As I began to write out some backstory, however, I began to think through some of this world's history. The ideas that came to me were rich with detail and seemed to have the foundations of a narrative that was truly epic in scope. Perhaps this was a story I would write someday, I told myself... The problem was, the ideas would not stop coming and it became harder and harder to focus on creating the game. I tried for about a week, but finally I had to admit to myself that my long-ago promise "to write a book someday" had come calling.

So, I put away all the supplies I was using for the game, pulled out a blank piece of paper, laid it over top of my poorly drawn map, and traced its features minus the cities and roads. Here now was a section of barren coast land ready for the arrival of Transcendence's first humans. And from that new, empty map, what is now chapter 1 of Start of the Storm was written.

That wasn't the end of the maps, however. If you've read my book you know that I have a map at the beginning of every chapter. I love maps and my personal belief is that any fantasy book without a set of maps has not been completed. So my next step was to decide where in a wider world, a world that came to be known as Stonorial, that first section of map was located. I developed the world map then, and having that map in front of me, that set of self-inflicted boundaries, the rest of the story was born and the seeds for infinite more were sown.