Today is the release of Wake of Vultures, by Lila Brown. A novel set in alternate Earth, 1800's wildwest Texas (called Durango County in this world). Amazon says tomorrow, but the release date is today.

I got to read the book before working on the map, to see if I could come up with any ideas. As I read the book, which I also really enjoyed. I thought, I'd love this map to be an actual artifact from the world.

The main character is a mixed race girl bronco buster, who goes on a vision quest, and joins up with some local rangers, who hunt monsters in the area, keeping people safe, and ignorant of the monsters.

I came up with the idea to make the map appear as if it was torn from an Atlas, where one of the rangers had noted the location of where the monsters could be found, and then noted Nellie (the main characters), route of her vision quest.

I was able to put in a couple inside jokes, like my name and the name of the art director at Orbit books. There's going to be a corresponding blog post on Orbit's site about the making of the map.

The map will be black and white in the book, but these days, I do my maps in color, so they can show them like that online, and get more impact.