~ Treasure Hunts and Maps

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For the last couple of weeks now, I have been faithfully working to finish the rewrite of Grandmother’s Letters and get myself sufficiently reacquainted with the story to finish it. The book is only about half way done. I thought I was a little closer to the ending than I really am.

Part of the story focuses around a treasure hunt. Right now I have at least three people on the search, two of which are working together. Unlike most treasure hunts though, there isn’t really anywhere to start. The two girls who have begun to search, keep trying to chase down leads, mostly to no avail. They know who the treasure belonged to, they know what it is supposed to consist of, they simply aren’t sure why it disappeared or where it went!

As Louise and Priscilla search around the town of Halcer, I suddenly realized that though I have several books set in the same area, featuring the same town, I really haven’t explored much of it.  I mean I “know” what Halcer looks like; but I’m not really acquainted with it enough to keep myself from making terrible mistakes. Like where I put two different families on the same side of town and then mentioned, more than once, how long the drive between them was. That was a problem. So, I started mapping. I mapped out nearly the entire town of Evergreen for 24 Days Before Christmas, but since Halcer is much bigger than Evergreen, I’m only doing sections of it. At least at this point. Most of my characters don’t actually live in Halcer in this book, they’re just visiting a lot and mostly in one section of town.

My maps are nothing fancy at all. In fact, they probably look kind of silly, but they are helping me to keep things straight and I’m really enjoying the experience of drawing them out! Naming streets is perhaps the most difficult… well naming anything is pretty difficult for me, unless it’s a characters first name. I do like the names I’ve managed to come up with! The “houses” look completely fake and the patch of palm trees is just a section of circles, but at least I have a better idea of the area now!

Now, if I could just figure out the street names for Arborville, I would actually know exactly where the rest of my characters live! Oh! and many thanks to Aubrey and Mrs. Havig for inspiring me by their posts, to get to know the “world” around my characters better! :)

To the KING be all the glory!