A big Thank You to Carolyn Arnold for featuring This Corner of the Universe on her Celebrating Authors site today. It’s another great site helping to connect readers and authors. You can check out the genre cloud on the right side of CA’s site to browse the books she’s featured in the past as well.
The (non-canon) image below is the first map I made of the “starting universe” for the This Corner of the Universe series. I had, essentially, just started creating the setting my series would take place in and all of my concepts were in their infancy. I don’t believe Heskan even had a first name yet. The map was last modified 11/8/2011, so it’s coming up on two years old. As you can no doubt see, it’s very crude with next to no detail. In fact, this map actually calls the Brevic Republic, the “Brev” Republic and the Hollaran Commonwealth a republic. This was changed later due to the evolving concepts I had about the Brevic and Hollaran governments to help draw some distinctions between Bree and Hollara. Yes, politics aren’t a major factor in the first book but they have a larger role in the coming books (as the story expands).
The map also displays the preliminary borders of humanity with the Chetellx “Kingdom” (later changed to Empire). My original notions of that race made it somewhat a monarchy. However, that has changed as well. The borders between the two races shrank somewhat too.
However, the basic shapes of all of the political entities generally persist when compared to the official versions. The maps posted on the stellar maps page are inviolate and won’t be changed (although that’s not to say they won’t grow in detail or expand in the terra incognita portions). One maxim I strongly subscribe to is that facts and information laid out in the early books of a series should not be changed to accommodate plots/stories in later books.
At any rate, I just wanted to show one of my earliest efforts in the creation process of the TCOTU universe. From this simple little map, several ideas arose. Hopefully, those ideas will provide as much enjoyment to the readers discovering them as it provided me while conceptualizing them.
Early map of the TCOTU galaxy
Generally my intent on this blog is to post about my writing status, interesting side stories about the origins of things in the books, and an occasional thank you to people and organizations that have been especially nice in helping me promote the results of my new hobby (i.e., the books). Today I want to give a heads up to the readers who have supported me on the Nook platform.
I think the Nook is great and competition in the e-book delivery business is good. That said, less than 1% of my book’s downloads have been from Barnes and Noble. I appreciate those readers as much as the Amazon ones, and I want to pledge to those readers today that every new book I put out will go up on the Barnes and Noble website so you can continue to enjoy the series.
For This Corner of the Universe, we are going to take it down later tonight from B&N so we can run an experiment with Amazon’s KDP Select program. The Select program requires sales exclusivity for any book enrolled, in exchange for some potential benefits to help reach more readers. The minimum term to sign up for is 90 days, after which if the experiment doesn’t show much benefit we’ll reinstate the first book on B&N.
Again, I want to be as loyal to my readers on the Nook platform as they have been supportive, trying out a no-name indie author and giving my books a chance. Every new book I write will be released for Nook, and left up on B&N for plenty of time for my followers with Nooks to find the next book in the series. (We may never put future books in KDP Select, it all depends on the results of the experiment.)
This Corner of the Universe 