How to Make a Map
Start with where you are now. Draw an arrow declaring: “I am here”.
The temptation is to survey your surroundings, measuring and marking them out. Do not do this. There is no point describing the world as it is, since the world itself already does that.
Mark your destination. Mark all your destinations. Just remember you can change your mind at any time.
Mark every place you love and every place that you are loved. You should add that house where you hesitated too long at the door. Reality doesn’t matter: make it a palace.
Most maps have only one north. You should feel sorry for them, gridded and constrained by straight lines. Pick all the norths you need – or one, or none. All that matters is that it is your choice.
Scale is less important than you think. Your best day might have been gentle and you’ve never stopped to realise how good it was.
Background
The piece above is from one of my zines, Weird Tales of the South Downs Way, published in January 2022. It was the 4th in the series - which I’m still working on, but very slowly1.
I spent a week of June out on the South Downs Way. I wrote some stories. I realised that I didn’t like solo hiking as much as I thought. I got to meet up with friends, old and new2. I went to a wedding. All other things aside, I needed a holiday. And I’m slowly getting back up to speed once more.
Recommendations
Charlie Stross blurbed an incredible tag-line for Gideon the Ninth: ‘Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!’. The book mixes the gothic grimdark of Warhammer 40K with millennial sarcasm. Gideon never misses an opportunity to interrupt a serious moment with a sexual pun.
The book is sprawling and intense - keeping track of a couple of dozen major characters is hard work, and Tamsyn Muir trusts the reader to keep up. The book suited being read while I was hiking, away from the distractions of laptops and video games. Even with that, I found myself a little overwhelmed by the end of Muir’s second book, Harrow the Ninth. The scheming and lore all became a little too hard to follow. A few times I resorted to LLMs to recap the story for me.
Despite that, I’m eager to read the third book in the Locked Tomb series, Nona the Ninth. Muir might be writing space opera, but there’s a powerful literary intensity - undercut with regular interruptions of silliness. There are biblical and classical references, alongside references to obscure memes. In an interview, Muir explained: “I am just a very referential writer. And the truth is that I’ve got a very Catholic taste… I think of John 3:16 the same way I think about none pizza with left beef.”
You can probably figure out whether you like Gideon the Ninth within a few pages, so it’s well worth trying out the kindle sample. It’s definitely like nothing else I’ve read. It’s the sort of book that made me wish book clubs were still a thing.
A lot of new South Downs Way stories have appeared on this list. I need to start collating and collecting them, and I’m having to build a website to track the characters and their interactions. I will share this soon.
Hi, Martin!