Hey Cartographer's Guild !

It's been awhile since I came here (probably several month) but I've been very busy with university and writing my novel and had little time for worldbuilding aside from taking an absurd amount of notes. Anyway, late July I've left for a five weeks backpack travel through Turkey, the balkans and Easter Europe all the way to Kiev. It was a great deal of fun, inspiration and ideas. Now, I have been thinking about it for awhile and travelling just made me want to do it more.

I've been worldbuilding on this universe for a long time (around 12 to 14 years I'd say). The thing was that I was very young when I started it and always stayed with it. But as it was **** at the start, everytime I'd grow a little (every 2 years I'd say), my newly found maturity and knowledge would make me realize how bad was my world. So I'd keep the essential of it, what was salvageable and then rework it all. Every time, I was very happy with it and the new result was immensily better tahn the previous. Now, I've been on this "version" of my world for a good while, four to five years I'd say. I did change a lot of little things, tweaks, developped cultures, languages, economy, resources. But...

Here's the problem. As I've done all those change over time. Whether changes from 10, 8, 6 years old or all new tweaks I've made recently; I've got different "aspects" of my world that are very coherent in themselves. My cultures and sub-cultures are well defined, coherent among themselves, migration patterns, etc. The same with economy, geography (although I do not care much for realism), linguistics, etc.

But AMONG themselves, the systems are not all that coherent. They are to some extent. But I've felt the need for a while to just take step back and checking the bigger picture and like to link these aspects, culture, economy, geography, more tightly together. But it is very hard. Normally I was just attacking one of the aspects and doing an overhaul. But now that I would have to manage several domains at the same time, it seems hard to do. To me it looks like a big 500 pieces puzzle that needs to all drop at once and fit and not something that you can built slowly piece by piece.

I've got my names, races, big rivers, migration patterns and everything. And now I will be changing geography a bit to make things more interesting (and following inspiration from my travel) and I think this is the right opportunity to overhaul things and make them fit. But as I am not building my world from bottom to top; how to you make these pieces fit when you got all top and want them to fit at the bottom ? I don't know if I am being clear.

Thank you for your help !
Lezales