Hello Cartographers! I am actually not a cartographer or anything close to it, I'm a college student getting all geared up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, to those that know it), and in my preparations for the upcoming month of writing madness, I'm hoping I can somehow make a city map that will help me in the developmental stages of my novel.

I'm familiar with and have GIMP and SAI (I also own a tablet), and I do own Photoshop, however it's an outdated version and I'm a bit unfamiliar with the way Photoshop works, so I'd like to stick to either GIMP or SAI, but I'm willing to download another free drawing software so long as it's not too confusing for me. I did browse the tutorials section, and they were pretty incredible, but they were mostly fantasy maps, which is great, but I'm not doing a fantasy map (Perhaps next year's NaNo!). Mine is a fictional city map set in the 1940's called Calico City.

If there's a way to make a relatively simple, yet clean-looking map through GIMP (or even by hand, I'm willing to put in the time so long as I can at least get some semblance of an idea of where to even begin), please let me know! 29 Days until NaNo begins! I'd like to have a nice looking map by November 1st!

Thanks for taking the time to listen, I need someone to point in my the right direction, either to a tutorial, a youtube video or just anything that will tell me how to get started and what tools to use.

Thank You,
Calico.