That was all fixed in my head from the outset. Hylund, Dannis, Grunea, Veersalnd and The Uris. When I started work on what was to become The Apprentice Witch Trilogy I had a clear idea of this small island Kingdom and the neighbouring Kingdoms across the sea. So when I started to write my stories as a young child and teenager I was always thinking about the world they were set in, drawing little snippets of maps or building layouts to give the characters a real place to inhabit, a place to be, a place to live! But this was always on the grand scale – rather like Lord of the Rings. I used tea and coffee to stain them and to make them looked aged and I remember being over the moon when my nana actually shoved one in the oven to make it look really distressed (but don’t try that at home though folks!) I also loved drawing and making my own maps as a child, often treasure ones inspired by The Goonies, I loved drawing rivers and hills and forests and again my imagination would burst with the stories that perhaps unfurled in these imagined places. That was always much more exciting and fun than delving into the books for me – and that should have been a clue really! Imagining my own stories and people that might live in those places. What I loved about those books was the beautiful maps inside of them, all in black and red ink, they folded out to three times larger than the book themselves and I loved to poor over the map and imagine the places named on it, Mordor, Khand and Near Harad.
I loved those Lord of the Rings books so much, even though I hadn’t (and still haven’t!) read any of them.
When I was a child we had a set of The Lord of The Rings in our house, they were kept on the very important bookshelf alongside a very old bible (we weren’t an especially religious household) some photo albums and some other “leather” bound classics I think my mum and stepdad had bought from a door to door salesman! Maps, maps, maps! Who doesn’t love a good map? The Magic Of Maps – author James Nicol talks about the importance of maps in The Apprentice Witch trilogy
0 kommentar(er)
