So this is a slightly blurred version of the mind map I used for Book I:

At some point the colours were meant to mean something, but I lost track of the purpose and I just tried to be semi-consistent in my palette. (There’s actually a second map for book one that is just a timeline of events from before when the book is largely set, but I’ve decided to leave you in the dark on that one for the moment.)

Of course those minor colour inconsistencies meant that when I started to draft Book II I was faced with a similarly messy attempt to colour-code ideas and locations and stuff.

As you can probably discern Book II is bigger than Book I. It’s worth keeping in mind that this is the map used for the first full draft – there’s every chance that there will be substantial changes to this before the book is complete, but I don’t imagine that it will get much bigger… At least I hope it won’t. I’m already struggling to remember where to find things on here and even the smallest edit involves some hunting around.

The editing process.

I include this merely so that you can witness my sweet two-monitor setup. This is in no way the quickest method, but I have grown used to it and there’s something nice about being able to set up anywhere in the house because I’m not tied to the big desktop machine in the office.