Over the last few weeks, I’ve been gifted with a couple of new toys for authors!
The first was World Anvil, a wiki-like website that allows you to build out your world. I can now while away the hours transferring my writer’s notes to an online home where they can live and grow and, perhaps, help readers to enjoy my world even more! You can find
The second new toy was the “wonder”ful cartography program Wonderdraft. This fantastic new toy lets me map out my environs and is way more advanced than my random margin doodles and scribble lines. I spent the entire weekend making first draft maps of Fanterra that I then uploaded to my World Anvil site.
At some point, I need to finish editing my next novel and shove it out the door to fly free!
So what do I think of my new toys? I think a writer needs to be careful not to get too distracted from the main business of storytelling. All the toys and maps and wikis that we make are meant to support the story that we are telling. If you are spending more time trying to describe the taste of a drink that is mentioned in one paragraph or taking hours to draw the pirate-infested coastline you\’re about to include in your story, then you\’re not writing!
