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Taxes for Writers Part 2

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Taxes add more stress to your writing!
Taxes add more stress to your writing!

In my last bit on taxes, I went into what I’ve learned as far as tax deductions.  Now comes the less fun parts.

Writers, God(s) help us, are considered self employed.  This has a number of effects upon the money we earn and the taxes we have to pay.  As far as the US tax system and the IRS, being self employed puts most of the burden upon the writer.

There’s three types of tax that all US Citizens pay.  There’s Social Security, Medicare, and then income tax.  Normally, you only have to pay a net 7.65 percent of your income to social security and medicare.  The problem is, your employer is paying the other 7.65 percent.  As a writer, your employer is you (regardless of whether you publish with a big company or not, they push the onus of paying that to you), so you have to pay all 15.3% as the self employment tax.  Now then there is income tax on top of this.  What’s nice about being a writer is that your deductions come from both areas, because your income is what is left over from your earnings after your expenses.  In case you didn’t notice, right off the bat you’re in around a 30% tax bracket.  This is pretty painful if you’re writing with no other income.  It is especially painful when you are supposed to pay your taxes quarterly, or face fines from the IRS, and you may not receive your royalties until months after the quarter (trust me, it’s happening to me now, it hurts, I’m paying taxes on income I still haven’t received, which comes from my savings…)  Bringing those taxes down a bit you have the things I listed in the previous tax article, which is why keeping track of all that is essential to making sure you keep a little bit of that hard earned money.

Your royalties from book sales are income, much like a contractor.  That’s how you should report it and that’s how you should take deductions.  You report your income from 1099-MISC’s, which acts much like your W2 from a normal job.  The exception, as stated above, is that you have to pay the full self-employment tax rate.

One caution: most publishers and publishing platforms don’t do automatic withholding.  So you’ll need to balance your income between your normal job and writing.  The last thing you want at the end of the year is to file your taxes and learn that you owe more money to the IRS.  (It sucks).  On the other hand, you want to avoid paying too much early on, so monitoring your sales and adjusting your payment to the IRS throughout the year is the best tactic.

This is important because if you are a professional author, this is your income.  You’ve probably spent tens or even hundreds of thousands of hours writing, honing, and perfecting your craft.  You’ve earned that income, you can’t avoid paying the taxes on it, but you can make sure that you only pay as much as necessary.

To make things more complicated, if you are buying covers or other services (Audiobook narration or editing, for instance) of over $500/year to a single person you have to file a 1099-MISC for that person’s income… and they have to pay taxes on it.  Filing a 1099-MISC isn’t hard, you can get the form from the IRS and do it yourself or you can use Turbo-Tax’s 1099-MISC form.  To make matters slightly more complicated, you only do a 1099-MISC when paying in cash or check.  When you do a payment through a bank or a platform like PayPal, you have to do a 1099-K, because the bank tracks and reports the payment to the IRS.   The annoying part is that you need the person’s Social Security Number in order to report it.

The good news is that since these payments are business expenditures, you get to deduct them from your income.  If you aren’t otherwise tracking your earnings and budget throughout the year, you can quickly see if some things are paying for themselves.  If, for instance, you spent $3000 for audiobook narration, $500 on a cover, and another $1000 on professional editing but only earned out $2000 from your book sales, you might want to reevaluate your expenditures.

One other thing.  Because writing is a business, I highly recommend setting up a separate “writing” checking (and possibly savings) account for this.  Not only does it show to the IRS your intent of making this work, but it also makes it far easier to track your payments and income as well as your expenses.  Not only should you keep your receipts and document your expenses, but you should also monitor your income from book sales, track how your books trend up (or down).  These things will help you as a professional, especially as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

As a disclaimer, I am not a tax professional, I’m heavily reliant upon the things I’ve learned from writing conferences (where they have tax panels) as well as using programs like TurboTax and even going to some tax professionals.  Also, this is just an overview, more to get you thinking in the right direction than anything else.

Here’s some other links you may find helpful

Taxes for Writers

Tax Advice for Writers

Writing

Taxes for Writers Part 1

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Taxes add more stress to your writing!
Taxes add more stress to your writing!

It’s that time of year again: Tax Season!  In honor of this (in)asuspicious occasion, I’m bringing up some tax advice that I have picked up from various conventions and doing my own taxes as a writer for five years now.

In writing, as in many things, there is no getting away from the absolutes: Death and Taxes. The good news, such as it is, is that writing can have a number of perks, chief among them is making you a bit of money.  The bad news, of course, is that you’ll have to pay taxes on that money.

Even if you’re not earning money on writing just yet, your writing can save you a bit come tax season.  Writing, so long as you are making a sincere effort at publishing or getting published, is a business.  As a business, you can take deductions from expenses common both to general writing and genre fiction.  Those deductions can really start to add up and can be a real benefit when you go to file your taxes, hoping to get a little bit more money back.

If, like me, you’ve earned money writing, those deductions can help you to keep a little bit more.  As a business, you need to keep track of receipts, invoices, and other expenses.  That part can be the most frustrating, particularly when you return from a convention tired, travel-lagged, and of course with a case of the con crud.  Still attention to detail here can save you a lot of money when it is time to file those taxes.

The big thing is to know is what you can and can’t deduct.  Remember, this is the fun part because deductions are expenses that drop your earnings so you pay fewer taxes.  There are a lot of viable areas for business expenses that you can deduct.  Attending conventions, both writing and genre is a networking and educational event.  The convention fees, hotel room charges, and even your meals are tax deductible.  If you’re attending conventions, you also probably have business cards or some other means of marketing, these too are tax deductible.

There’s more than that, though,  Your travel to and from the convention is deductible, both in whatever mileage you drive (keep a record of miles you drive in your car for such events), as well as airline, train, or bus tickets.  That new computer you had to buy, that’s deductible, though you may have to depreciate it because it’s something that should last more than a year.  If you’ve bought Microsoft Office, that’s a tax deduction too, as you need it to do your writing.  Most meals for business are only 50% deductible, however, that’s still 50% that comes out of your taxable income.

If you’re meeting with an editor or artist over lunch to do your cover design or illustrations, not only is the travel to the location a deduction, so is the meal.  So, in fact, is the expense of the editing and the artwork for the cover.  Any kind of entertainment meals are 100% deductible, so keep a log of what is just a business dinner and what is entertainment.  Any time you conduct business during the meal or the discussion is going to take place immediately before or after, you can consider it an ‘entertainment’ expense and you get the 100% deduction.

There’s also deductions you can take towards research that you do as a writer.  If crucial scenes in your book are set in a specific location, travel to that location as well as any expenses towards researching it are deductible, within reason, of course.

All these deductions can add up and that’s important because, as we’ll see later, as an author, you are self-employed and you’ll have to pay more taxes, the Self Employment Tax, on top of what you would normally pay.

So, save those receipts and try to save as much of that hard-earned writing money as you can!  In Part 2, we’ll look at how you are categorized in your taxes as a writer.

Writing

Author Toolbag: Inspiration

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what-inspires-you-v2Anyone who has ever tried to write a story or poem knows the most terrifying thing in the world is a blank page.  You can spend hours, days, weeks, months, even years paging through books, reading online, checking facebook… all to avoid that dreaded first page.

For those of you who have written that first page, there are many more obstacles.  There’s the dreaded middle, where you know where you need to end up but there is all this “stuff” in the way that has to be done first.  For me, there’s the hundred page blues, where I hit one hundred pages and I just start wondering, is any of this good?  There are points where you feel like you’re writing the best story ever and then suddenly you are stuck, everything has gone horribly wrong and you don’t know what to do.

The good news is: the answer is simple.  Sit your butt down in front of the computer (or typewriter or pen and paper, etc) and write.  If you’re stuck on your current story, write something else.  Put words to page.

Sounds easy, right?   Well, if you’re like me, finding that time to sit in front of the computer is the hard part.  So how can you best prepare yourself so that you ensure the time isn’t wasted?

Seek inspiration.  I commute to my day job, which eats up around two hours a day (even after having moved closer, traffic in Denver is absurd).  I spend a good portion of that time thinking and I try to spend it thinking about plot, characters, and writing structure for works-in-progress and upcoming stories.  I also listen to music, which helps getting the creative juices flowing.

Getting outside is another source of inspiration for me.  Seeing the sun is always good.  Walking/hiking in a scenic setting is great for wrapping my head around a fantasy setting, especially with the mountains here in Colorado.  Going for a run and doing a morning workout is also good for me, since I generally get so bored running that I have to think about something.  Exercise is also cathartic, it helps you to relieve stress and releases all kinds of good chemicals in your body and brain.  What that means in layman speak is if you do some physical exercise, you might be a little less stressed out when you sit down to write.  If you have a busy life, it can clear your head so that you focus on what you want to do.

On the other hand, sleeping on it is a viable technique.  If I can get a short nap in before I write, I generally find I write better.  (It is a rare occasion with a very active toddler in the house.  Waking up to being hit in the head with a metal tractor is not a good way to start writing your novel).  A nap can act as a sort of reset, letting you get into things after letting your subconscious sort things out and quiet itself a bit.

These are all techniques I use, but everyone is different.  Writing is a personal experience, what inspires you to write is also going to be personal.  I know a writer who can only write in absolutely quiet conditions, distant music, a conversation in another room, these all make it so she can’t put words to page.  I know another writer who cranks up loud music and still another one who prefers to write while listening to the TV.  These are all viable tactics, I suppose, though some are easier than others to achieve.  In short: find what works for you and do it!

Gaming, Writing

Author’s Toolbag: Gaming Part Three

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Some games are more realistic than others...
Some games are more realistic than others…

In Part One I talked about a general overview of what gaming provides a writer, while in Part Two I went into a bit more detail about how roleplaying games can help a writer develop his plots, characters, and worlds.

Here in Part Three, I’ll talk a bit about how wargaming can help you craft and design more realistic scenes for your books.  Obviously this advice holds a bit more true to those of you writing military or combat themes in science fiction or fantasy, although if you have even a small fight scene in what you write, it may behoove you to pay attention.

So, what does wargaming offer?  Well, it gives you some basic understanding of tactics and planning.  This, in and of itself, can show in your writing as your characters refer to flanking an enemy or massing fires.  Knowing even just the basics of how a fight would play out can really help when you go to write up that fight scene.

It can also help you to visualize where characters are and what kinds of odds they face.  Knowing that Throk the barbarian has to face a hundred orcs is one thing, putting a hundred markers out to show just how insane that would look is something else entirely.  Where this plays out is that it allows you to keep your fight scenes somewhat grounded.  It makes no sense for one person to hold out against hundreds without some huge advantages… unless you’re writing manga or some kung-fu movie type scenes.

Also, wargaming gives you a sense of the scale of a fight.  If your characters are taking part in a huge battlefront where tens of thousands of warriors are clashing, seeing that scale can help you to write scenes that feel more epic and with high stakes to increase the tension.  Whereas if you have a small skirmish deep underground or with a handful of people in a forest, that close, intimate description can set the tone and the immediate consequences for characters can set the tone.

Where do you get started then?  Well, there are a variety of games and a variety of methods, but the easiest is to probably go to your local gaming store on a Friday night and just ask around.  Most gamers are pretty welcoming and would love to talk about what they play.  If you tell them you’re an author and you’re researching for a novel, you’ll probably have several eager gamers willing to talk about the basics.

In general, games like Warmachine and Hordes are small skirmish games with a handful of fighters per side (squad and platoon size), games like Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy are larger, small armies (company size or larger), while games like Flames of War are for larger scale battles (company and battalion).  There are a variety of ship-combat games, ranging from fighter level to capital ships (X Wing, Star Wars Armada, Battlefleet Gothic, and more).  Game rules range from very complex to absurdly simple and most give you at least a decent approximation of how a fight might play out.

One thing to remember as you go about converting what you learn with what you’re writing: don’t get too caught up in the technical details.  Writing is about characters, so spending a long time discussing the technology, tactics, and advantages of one side or the other is a good way to put your reader to sleep.  Slip that kind of thing in here or there, but focus on the characters, the stakes, and anything else to drive up tension.  A fight scene (whether between hundreds of capital ships in a distant galaxy or just two characters locked in a grapple with knives), is there to show conflict, increase tension, and to make the reader excited.  Dry, technical dialogue is a good way to ruin an otherwise perfectly good scene.  Don’t take pages to get to the point, do it quickly, establish the stakes, show the danger, and complete the scene in a manner to accomplish your plot goals.

Another point: the main character doesn’t always need to win.  In fact, oftentimes it is far better for the story if they don’t.  They might be defeated ingloriously and either left for dead or taken prisoner.  They might be forced to withdraw in the face of overwhelming odds.  There are lots of options for you, as a writer, to use conflict to batter your character, to force them to grow and into introduce themes and plots that you couldn’t explore otherwise.

That’s all for now.  Thanks for reading!

Gaming, Writing

Author’s Toolbag: Gaming Part Two

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Sometimes your characters are gamers too...
Sometimes your characters are gamers too…

In Part One, I talked about some general ways in which gaming can help a writer.  Here in Part Two, I’ll go into more specifics of how running (or playing) a roleplaying game can help you, the author, in developing your world, improving your characters, and building your plot.

Roleplaying Games (RPGs) are a variety of games, ranging from complex (Rifts/Palladium) to very simple (Hero).  What they all have in common is that they give you a framework for acting out the story of a character as he experiences adventure.

This is, at its root, the basis of storytelling.  A game master or dungeon master puts together a story and the players, through their characters, experience that story.  It is much like the pattern a writer takes to tell a story to his or her readers.

That’s not to say that I recommend writing a story based upon your RPG sessions.   Most RPG sessions, however hilarious and exciting to the players, will come off as a boring blow-by-blow to readers.  This is an incidence of a difference in audience, for one thing.  A RPG session is focused on individuals who already have a stake in their characters (they’re playing them, after all).  Readers won’t have that buy-in, so they won’t care as much about the incidentals.  They also don’t have the perspective of being there and knowing the other players, after all, reading isn’t a group event.

So how does playing or running an RPG help you as a writer?  Well, there’s different areas that it helps.  For a developing writer, I highly recommend playing as a character.  Spending a few hours developing a backstory, building in quirks, perks, and flaws into a character gives you some perspective on character design that is very valuable (even if you don’t use that character ever again, you learn a lot in the experience).  Even more valuable than that is the ability to role-play that character in a group.  A common flaw among new writers is that all of their characters sound, act, and feel the same.  Playing a variety of player characters over a variety of games gives someone a chance to develop those character voices, to make them separate and distinct.

For a more experienced writer, I’d recommend taking this to the next level and running an RPG.  Doing so in a world you write in not only challenges you to flesh out your world, but also to expand your cast of characters and to flesh out your plotting.  There’s nothing quite as hard to control as a group of gamers as they rampage through your world.  As long as you are doing your job as a game master, they’ll always be wanting to see what is beyond the next corner or over the next hill.  You’ll quickly find yourself having to develop organizations, secret societies, and fleshing out details like what places look like and where all the ships sail after they leave the port.  These things by themselves won’t make you a better writer, but the consideration that your characters live in a greater world does come through your writing.

Plus, trying out some prospective plots or themes within a gaming session is a fantastic way to experiment.  If you think you’ve come up with a really clever idea, there’s nothing like having a bunch of players trample over or around it, either seeing right through it or being completely oblivious.  That kind of thing can really help you to develop your abilities as far as foreshadowing, plotting, and generally developing your ability to tell a complex plot.

Now remember, all this doesn’t require a boxes of odd-shaped dice and reams of character sheets.  Roleplaying  to test some ideas could be as simple as you getting a couple friends together talking through a scene from your book, gauging responses and impressions, and then getting back to writing.

Now, a pitfall I’ve seen as far as using your gaming experience as a writer is becoming too oriented on the mechanics.  Readers don’t want to see how you built your characters or how your character blocked an attack.  They probably don’t want to read a blow-by-blow of a fight.  You can put such things in, but they should never take over the story.  Readers want to see the characters progress along their story arcs.

That’s all for now, next week I’ll talk about war-gaming and what it adds to your abilities as a writer.

Gaming, Writing

Author’s Toolbag: Gaming Part One

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Sometimes your characters are gamers too...
Sometimes your characters are gamers too…

As an author, particularly a Science Fiction and Fantasy Author, there’s not a lot of ways to draw directly from real-world experience to determine what is “real” in my writing.

There are a number of methods to deal with that, to fill out a world, to get a feel for how things work.  World-building, of course, is a massive part and I’ve written a series of blog posts on that which you can read elsewhere (History/Society, Magic and Science, Geography and Climate).  Another great method is to base things off of real-world events and experience (since history oft repeats itself, such restructured events and outcomes will feel ‘real’).

What I’m going to talk about today, however, is gaming.  Now, even as I say that I can mentally picture a number of people cringing.  The potential critics thoughts range from someone who pictures a group of LARPers out beating each other with foam weapons to the guy with the full scale replica of the battle of Gettysburg to the computer nerd who has set up a simulation of the Romulans fighting the Borg (Romulans lose, sorry).

The truth is, though, that gaming at a variety of different levels is what you do anyway as you work through your plot and story. You think about what you want to happen and how you want it to happen and then what needs to happen for that to work out in the end.  What I propose is to formalize that a bit to give you a more realistic idea of outcomes.

There’s a variety of different types of gaming that you can apply, all aimed at different goals.  These goals can range from helping you to more fully develop your world to figuring out what it would take to win a desperate battle to finding out how difficult a puzzle or scenario would be for your characters to figure out.

That said, there’s a variety of games for you to apply and happily, most of them are fun too (see Science Fiction and Fantasy Gaming Overview for a breakdown of games).  Roleplaying games provide a lot of positives for a writer.  First off, being the DM or GM of a game gives you a lot of experience in coming up with ideas and storylines on the fly.  Second, it forces you to really think about the worlds your players are exploring.  Tabletop wargaming, whether on the skirmish level or all the way out to massive armies, can help you to visualize where characters are and just how stacked the odds are against them.

That’s all for now.  Next week I’ll go into the process of applying gaming to your world-building, writing, and plotting.  (Part Two here)

Writing

Writing Toolbag: Character Notes

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If there’s one thing guaranteed to annoy most readers, it’s when they discover some dramatic discrepancy with a beloved character.  Note here, I didn’t say “main” character, I said beloved character.  And as a writer, oftentimes you don’t have any control whatsoever over what characters your readers might take a liking to (in fact, I’ve several readers who have polar opposite likes and dislikes in my series) .

I still remember my first draft of my first novel, where I’d mentioned the name of a character’s cat near the beginning and (horror of horrors) used a different name for the cat near the end.  I’ve noticed errors with other authors (even mainstream ones) where character’s eye color and hair color have changed, height has dramatically changed, and parents/family details have changed.  These aren’t game-ending, but those kinds of errors are annoying to readers, they show a lack of consistency, which can come off as laziness or ineptitude… both of which are impressions you don’t want to give your readers.

So how does a writer maintain consistency with one’s characters, especially over multiple books?  A few authors I’ve talked with keep the details in their heads.  If you’ve a eidetic memory, I suppose that works, but for the rest of us mere mortals, notes are not just a good idea, but a necessity.

What goes into character notes?  It doesn’t have to be much, really.  A short physical description, family details (if important), birthday, and then any details about them that you plan to use in your writing.  Some authors I’ve met use 3″ x 5″ notecards, some have Excel spreadsheets, and others use word and just have typed notes.  The intent is to write it down somewhere so that you don’t have to remember it, you can just look it up.  As you write more, you can add more details to your notes as they become pertinent.

Such a simple thing is not only good for maintaining consistency, but also for speeding your writing flow.  When you get to a passage where you mention the character’s great aunt showing up, you don’t have to stop writing to go back and look her name up, sifting through your earlier works.  You can put a marker there and keep writing, secure in the knowledge that you’ve got the detail in the notes.

The downside of notes, of course, is that you have to take the time to keep them accurate and up to date.  A couple people I know use their smart phones for this, creating their notes on their phones so they can update their notes anywhere: waiting in line, riding a bus, whenever and wherever they have time.  The same can be said for the 3 x 5 index cards.  Whatever method you use, having character notes that you haven’t updated or filled out is of little use.

That’s all for now.  Thanks for reading!

Writing

Writing Tools: Lore and History

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Lore and History are part and parcel of world-building as a writer.  Knowing what happened (and why) allows a writer to project what will happen (and why).  History gives your characters roots… all the more so when the details are debatable.  Was one man a hero or a villian… well it depends on who you ask.

What are these things for a writer?  In many cases, History and Lore are never published.  They are notes or sometimes just ideas that the author has and are something that they base their world upon.  History is easy enough: this is the major events that have happened in this world.  I’ve personally used everything from a chronological timeline to a hundred-plus page document.  This is the stuff that you know has already gone before.  This is the cold hard facts.  Births, deaths, wars, all the framework for what has gone before.

Lore, on the other hand, is what the characters and readers know and feel.  This is the story about the valiant rebel who stood up to the bloody-handed tyrant or the murderous brigand who accosted the king’s lawmen.  Where history is what the author knows is the truth, lore gives the feeling of real-life.  Lore is made up of the urban myths, the rumors, the stories, and the legends.  As the author, you may know that the great hero who overthrew the King was actually an ambitious poser, who wanted to take the throne for himself… but your characters might still respect or venerate him because they don’t know that.

History is dry, dusty, and often boring… but Lore, that’s where you can get some interesting character conflicts.  Longstanding feuds, cases of mistaken identity, and tensions between clans or nations are all great fodder for writing some interesting character conflict.  Exploring how a character deals with such prejudices and overcomes them (or not) can make for interesting reading and fun writing.  Granted, this is secondary to making the characters themselves interesting, but it does give you excellent levers on character motivation.

So how do you go about designing history and lore?  Well, much of that comes back to what kind of story you want to tell.  If you want a story about betrayal, revenge, and star-crossed lovers, then a history of murders and assassinations, with a lore of each family blaming the other, makes for a great setting.   Your characters will have a history of violence to draw upon, where such solutions are expected by both sides.

That said, it is easy to go overboard in world-building a history.  You don’t necessarily need to know everything.  I know fellow authors who do seem to know everything.  They have page after page of notes.  They know why one group hates another group, why the first group likes the third group, who married who, who killed who… but they haven’t got beyond page ten of their actual manuscript.

The other area to go wrong is the (in)famous infodump.  This is where the plot stops and the reader is confronted by a wall of text about why this all matters.  Some readers love this, others… not so much.  The history and lore you’ve spent so much time on should be there in the background as a framework and as character motivation, but it shouldn’t step up front and stop the action of your story.  There’s a balance to strike between the reader having some idea of what is going on versus destroying dramatic tension and pacing by throwing hurdles of text at your reader.

Of course, the other end of the spectrum is where an author has no idea or at best a vague understanding of what has come before.  When the reader doesn’t know what has happened and the author doesn’t bother explain why this all matter in the greater scheme of things.  An author can pull this off if they have a strong, character-driven story… but it’s a lot easier to have that framework to build upon.  If the author doesn’t have a strong story or characters and they have a history/lore that is basically nonexistant… well, then you get a sort of generic story that is at best, not memorable and at worst… pretty much unreadable.

There is a tremendous advantage in being an author of fantasy or science fiction in the ability to craft the lore and history of your world to fit the story you want to tell.  A few hours and some jotted notes can give you a universe for your characters to explore and a framework for you to write a more vibrant and alive setting.

 

Writing

Kal’s January 2016 Forecast

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January is here and with it, a whole new year!  It’s hard to believe that 2015 is gone, but here’s to bigger and better things this next year, right?  December seemed to take forever to finally leave, though much of that was due to moving, on my end.

As far as my writing. I’m digging into Renegades: Out of the Cold and hope to have it done soon.  I’m getting Fate of the Tyrant ready for my beta readers and I’m hoping to have it out to them by the end of the month.  My writing process has been slowed a bit what with moving and all, but I’m starting to get back into the swing of things.  Still, I’ve a long way to go to finish five novels for the year.

In other news, I’ve decided to try out Kindle Scout for my young adult novel, Valor’s Child.  I’ll have more news about that later this month, but ideally I’ll have it up in February on Kindle Scout.  For those of you unfamiliar with the program, authors can post their works there for review by anyone with an Amazon account.  If they like what they read, they can “up” vote it.  Books with lots of votes may be selected by Kindle for publishing in their program, where they “guarantee” a good turnout and offer an advance, as well as promoting the book.  I’ll write more about the process (probably at least a couple blog posts) later on once I’ve officially submitted my manuscript.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

 

Fantasy, Science Fiction, Writing

Author’s Toolbag: Maps and Drawings

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The number one job of an author is to tell a story.  In this sense, illustrations such as maps and drawings can be excellent tools for an author, particularly when they are used to immerse the reader more fully into the world.

I’m the type of reader who spends hours, sometimes days pouring over the maps, imagining myself in those worlds and feeling a bit of a thrill as I follow the characters along their journeys.  While I also enjoy the occasional drawing of a character, location, or item, seldom do these things resonate with me as well as a good map.

I’m also the type of author who is into world-building: creating a living, breathing world… and maps are a key part of that for me.  I’ve had the world layout for Eoriel mapped out for almost twenty years, tweaking details, changing names of cities and mountain ranges, altering coastlines slightly, but always with the same general layout.  The same can be said for the Shadow Space Chronicles, I’ve had the general layout of the universe in mind for years, and I’ve spent countless hours drawing out star systems, planet orbits, and the typical routes that ships travel.  I do this because I want to know what path the characters will take and why.  I want to know what language the locals will speak when the characters stop into a bar or tavern.

What does this have to do with the story?  A bit of nothing and a bit of everything.  It doesn’t matter in the slightest what language they speak in the bar… but the fact that they have a culture and language adds a level of richness, of reality to your writing.  So to, does having a map, of knowing that the characters can take the dangerous mountain pass in the dead of winter or divert two hundred miles to a  fortress held by enemies which is the only other way through.   Knowing that the characters will need three weeks (or three months) to travel to the next star system not only gives you a way to pace your story, but adds all kinds of fun plot developments and character arcs.  What do they do to pass that time?  How do they get along together on a tiny ship?  Which character(s) snap under the pressure?

Drawings, in the same way, not only help the reader to visualize the world, but it helps you as an author too.  Even a crude sketch can help you to develop what a character looks like in order to better describe them, or whether that city in the mountains is nestled in a valley or sprawls across a hilltop.  For a reader, a nice drawing can be an added bit, a way to fill in some of the details or even to add to the layer of mystery around something in your story.  As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

How do I approach both of these?  Well, to be honest, with a map, I want there to be reasons for conflict.  Natural boundaries are frequently the dividing lines for nations… but sometimes those nations may disagree on which dividing line they are prepared to accept.  A nation that lives and thrives in the jungles may come into conflict with another nation which clearcuts the jungle to establish farmland.  Mountain tribes might raid lowlands where the growing season is longer and food is more plentiful… or lowlanders might send conquest parties to seize mineral rich valleys for mining.

Rivers, coastlines, bays, and lakes all serve as methods of transportation and as boundaries.  Mountains serve as boundaries and have profound effects upon rainfall and local climate.  Forests and jungle can act as barriers or havens, while swamps and marshes serve as foreboding locations and obstacles for characters or refuges for those who need to hide.  Deserts too, can serve as both obstacle and refuge, depending on the cultures of the people involved.

Drawings can hint at cultural themes, with stylistic emphasis in order to accentuate descriptions in your writing.   A well drawn illustration at the start of the book can set the mood or establish a theme for the reader, putting them in the right mindset.

Maps and drawings are both tools.  Learning to use them right is an excellent way to develop your novel and take it to the next level.