Introduction; A Novice Writer

[-K2-]

Good day Forum Members;

Thank you for an arena to seek help and advice for my cartography questions. I'm an unpublished, novice writer, already deep into a three-novel near-future/dystopian/science fiction series. To support the series, I've generated a number of 'to-scale' maps and a new grid reference system (for supporting story purposes). Since the series is based in the U.S., available resources such as the USGS, google maps, Surging Seas sea rise mapping, and online AutoCAD dxf>kml conversion tools have made their development much easier.

I would like to get you learned folks advice and suggestions as to what I could do to improve the various maps.

I'm unsure whether I'm allowed as a new member to post images. Though have finished maps ready for critique. Another option is these maps are posted at Artstation as I also sought advice there, and links could be provided to save on forum bandwidth.

Thanks for the available open membership and any advice as how to proceed would be welcome.

Thanks for your help!

K2

[Redrobes]

Welcome K2, yeah post your maps up and lets see what you got. The USGS resources are pretty cool and you can do a lot with the LIDAR/height maps that they offer for free. A great tool to manipulate them is QGis and though it takes a bit of learning, if your into AutoCAD & similar apps then your part way there.

[-K2-]

Thanks Redrobes for the nice welcome.

K2

[-K2-]

@Redrobes ; In retrospect, I suppose I jumped the gun and should have asked 'which sub-forum I should have posted these in, and whether you meant via attachments or links to save your bandwidth?' If you'd like to delete the above post, please do, and if you'd let me know where/how, I'll re-post elsewhere.

Thank you for your help.

K2

[DrWho42]

hi k2! welcome aboard!

[-K2-]

hi k2! welcome aboard!

Thank you for the welcome!

K2

[Redrobes]

You can post into Town/City or Modern/Sci-Fi for best effect. The members intro forum does get a lot of activity which can push your posts down and make them less visible. But any moderator/admin can take a thread and split it off and move it for you so its no big worry.

Also, because we have some generous members buying sponsor/supporter titles you can see from the main forum page that the guild makes its target fundraising each month and that buys us a server in a data center which is not shared with anybody else. So we have a lot of space and bandwidth for everybody's maps. The guild used to run really slow when we shared our space in the usual ISP hosting where by one server hosts thousands of peoples web sites. So if your the kind of person who wants to share a lot of images (which are maps and relevant to the guild...) then the sponsorship/supporter is actually a really cheap deal and you can make an album on here and post about it and use the guild like a CDN.

[-K2-]

Thanks @Redrobes for the tip and explanation; I'll re-post in the appropriate sub-forum as suggested.

K2