I’ll be honest with you: I am currently losing a fight with an iPad.
I’m teaching myself Procreate so I can hand-draw a map of Cay Rico — the real, full island, coastline and all, the kind of map you’d find folded into the back of an adventure book. I’ve watched enough YouTube tutorials at this point that the algorithm thinks I am a digital illustrator. I am not. Yet.
Here’s the thing about drawing a place that only exists in your head: you have to decide things you never had to decide when you were just writing about it. Where exactly is the lighthouse? How far is the ravine from town? Is the fort ruin on the windward side or the leeward side, and does that even matter for the story — and it turns out, yes, it kind of does.
So for now, it’s me, a stylus, a lot of undo taps, and a slowly emerging coastline. I’ll share the map here the moment it stops looking like a potato.
Thanks for following along with the messy middle of making this book — the parts that don’t usually make it onto the “about the book” page.