Maps and meals

Google maps is awesome. You can use the streetview to see what's up the top of mountains. Or to go along the route between them. All the climbing, none of the sweat. Or cold. Or sleet. Or mountain rescue people.

Britain is sort of short on the middle of nowhere. Even if you're as nowhere as it gets, you can still see somewhere from there. Plus we've left roads and houses all over the place. I was thinking post apocalypse by a few hundred years things would get empty, but I've been looking around websites and some of the big stone places in the Pennines are centuries old and meant to last against raiders and basically are farmhouse shaped castles, and they have a tendency to not fall down. ( Read more... )

I don't know, part of me wants to set my epic fantasy in the far future, add zombies, maybe melt the ice caps so the sea eats Blackpool and suchlike. Then make the map in a fantasy map style and you end up with someplace that looks familiar yet foreign, but you can still use google maps to figure out where your characters go next. On the other hand, that leaves the possibility of getting things wrong. Where's the fun in writing fantasy if you can get things wrong? ( Read more... )

Using actual geography gets weird and doesn't quite fit the plot, but then again inspires bits and pieces. I know when I set things in Norwich I know exactly where the chase sequences go and where the fight scenes are, so maybe if I know a real place really well then it'll fit because the inside of my head already has that shape. I don't know as I want to go get to know places up mountains really well. ( Read more... )

If I try and describe what my characters have to eat I'd have to research medieval food. If it's post apocalypse medieval though then it'd get complicated. Medieval stir fry? Fusion food with local parts. But spices are seldom local.

I wonder if it's easier or harder to be a medieval vegetarian? Buddhist monks managed fine. And there wasn't so much big slabs of meat cooking as there is now, because they had to grow it all and look after it and make sure it survived the winter and it was a whole lot more bother to just kill a bit of it than it is now. I like chickens, they make eggs, very good to eat. And then a roast chicken when the eggs run out. I wouldn't eat that bit but I can see how it's efficient.

I can also see how fantasy stories ended up with stew. See 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland'. Everywhere you go, stew. Is good because anything could be in there and you don't have to think about it much. Is bad because your readers would get as bored of it as your characters, and a little local flavour would be nice sometimes too.

... I just wandered off to look up when baked beans were invented. ( Read more... )

Okay, hungry now. Will post and get breakfast.

Shiny!

Google maps is impressing me more the more I poke it.
High Force waterfall, Teesdale
If you zoom right in and then go where the map says 'high force' with the little yellow man, you get a whole lot of pictures of the waterfall, and there's grey dots on them you can click for more pictures, and it's kind of awesome. High Force is 21.5 metres (71 ft) tall. Some of the pictures have little people standing at the top so you get some sense of scale. Britain has impressive bits.

Now I want to relocate my city so they have their own waterfall. It doesn't seem very practical, but it would look pretty cool.

Also Wiki reckons one storey is usually 10ft tall, so you could get 7 storeys built in that cliff, in dungeon construction logic. That could be a bit cool.

Wiki says Hardraw Force is taller. Also that you can only get there by going through a Green Dragon... pub.
Britain.

It was in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.
Also it has a regular brass band competition in the natural amphitheatre.
*blinks*


... aaaaand then I discovered Panoramio, which is like google maps only with all pictures people took pinned to the map, and there are quite a lot of Norwich but not of the bits of Norwich I would take pictures of because none of them are looking at the floor, and quite a lot of time happened. Also, I may have a new hobby. I wonder if I could get a phone that can just take pictures and remember where it took them? Last time I shopped for a phone I wanted it to send messages and maybe call people, which is terribly old fashioned now.

Okay, I should do studying again for a bunch of hours.



ETA: people put videos on YouTube of EVERYthing. Every place I've been looking up lately has multiple YouTube things. Pretty waterfalls and dangerous rivers and all sorts. And most of them don't even involve people trying to do something daft there or anything, they just stare at the pretty for a while.
There's a whole bunch of stuff it never occured to me to use the net for, and lo, people have already used it a lot. All the information. Shiny.