Hola!
Hi all,
I'm XqC, and I'm obviously new here.
A little bit about me:
I'm 20, female and a college student. I love reading (never was much in to fantasy novels, though I respect them a lot more than other genres), writing, and all sorts of art. I was in to drawing for a while, then I tried (and failed) at painting, then I was a sculptor and potter for a good chunk, and now I work in embroidery and fabric. I'm familiar with GIMP, as I use it to make embroidery patterns. I may or may not have been using a bootlegged copy of Photoshop before discovering gimp and I may or may not have gotten tired of feeding the program bogus registration numbers every time I wanted to draft a pattern.
I'm here for a few reasons:
First and foremost, I'm a bit of a map nerd. I have this bad habit of adopting maps from thrift stores and roadside gas stations wherever I go, just to look at them. My walls are pretty much covered in maps. I spend a lot of time on Google Maps/Earth for no reason other than to look. I'm more familiar with road maps than topo maps, though I am trying to learn!
The big reason I'm here is because I've been attempting to write a book for a good 4 years about a small town clustered around a river. As I've evolved from 'eh, throw a few characters in the spotlight and ignore the rest' to 'you know, i really should flesh out the town a bit' to 'what year did the mailman's daughter divorce the shopkeeper and who kept their springer spaniel? which cross street does the local handyman live on? where are the sewer lines? where's the gas and electric office?', I've found that a map could keep me a bit more focused. Unfortunately, every map I've tried to draw looks more like a Petri dish than a town and I always notice something subtly /off/ about it. It's probably just my perfectionism.
My goals here are to get enough resources that I can make a map of this town and feel good about the way it looks, functions and feels. I think looking at a map can give one a sense of the soul, so to speak, of a town and that is what I want. If it looks pretty, that's all the more perfect.
Looking forward to learning,
XqC
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