I started writing a ‘Travel Guide’. It’s not really a travel guide, I just couldn’t think of a better name for a journal of in depth descriptions of the locations in the stories. So far, it just has an overview of Horizon 1, but I’m going to start doing more granular profiles of the districts within, and then the major places within that. I’ll probably need to come up with some sort of coding system for depth, so Horizon 1 as top level, D1 district as second level, KT’s home in D1 as third level. I can’t imagine many places will have more than three levels of depth, but most should have three. Even ‘Hastings > Ore > Ore Railway Station’ is three. Granted Ore Railway Station isn’t actually in Ore, but it’s close enough. People who live near it just like to make that fact clear.
It feels like too early days to say if it’s helped in writing HOF today, but it did work as a nice warm up. I’m hoping it’ll serve as more than a simple warm-up activity in the long term as it does need to be more than that, but it did have one decent unintended consequence: when you add up all my edits, and the roughly 640 words of the guide so far, my average word count for the month hits 1,100 words. It’s barely, but it’s an important statement of intent I guess. I stand by what I said before, that’s a nice to have, not a requirement, but it’s a nice to have nice to have. And target before 5pm so I get more of my evening, even if I have about 2 hours of commitments after work, well that also is quite nice to have.
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