So you have this awesome fantasy story in your mind.  Massive armies, roaring monsters, elegant palaces, ancient countries...the works.  You're so excited, you rush to tell your friends your idea."That's cool," they say.  "Is there a map?"A map.  Anytime you have a fantasy novel, or really any story that has a made-up or vast setting, a map is a necessity.One of the few things that I did right while writing The Redemption of Brian O'Connor was work on a map early on.  Now, here's the philosophical question for everyone: which came first, the story or the map? Clearly in the example above, the map was requested before the story was written.  A slight exaggeration, but it does beg the question: Can you have a fantasy story that does not have a map?  Even thinking about it makes me nervous...How would you know where things happen? So I had a few pages already down when one of my earliest proofreaders (my father) asked, "Is there a map?"  It was in that moment that I realized that there was this story, clear as day, in MY mind but no one else had access to it.  So I sketched this quick map on the back of the pages I had given him.  It has since become the FIRST iteration of the Map of Northern Caltus.BEHOLD, in all it's glory (you can still see the text on the other side):So it's ready for print, right?Not quite.  Any author will tell you, their story underwent major changes from the time of conception to completion.  As mine did so much more than that (another post for another time) the map reflected this change.Finally, I got to a part in the story where I wanted to really put a definitive distance and scale between the locations in my story.  I wanted to be able to have a polished map for my epic, so I came up with this:It's a bit of an improvement, I thought.  Of course, both of these early maps were hand-drawn.  That's not going to serve my book well (for some stories I am sure it works, but for mine it didn't) so I needed a solution.Enter Manga Studio and AffinityDesigner.  They are wonderful programs that let you do most of the cool stuff in Adobe without the monthly fee.  So I picked them up and, using the 2nd map as an underlay, plugged in my Wacom tablet and came up with this:Now this isn't the prettiest thing, but after adding all the text and border and making it pretty, the final version looks like this:Now, this is the final big map that I did.  From 2011 to 2016, I sketched and thought (probably should have flipped that) and then erased and sketched again, tinkering until I got this.  Mind you, in this process I got married, had two kids, graduated college, and moved from DC to LA.  So I'm pretty proud of what I managed to accomplish in that time.Still, there was one thing that I hadn't counted on...Margins.In all of those years, I never once considered what size I was going to print the book.  On Kindle it wouldn't matter, but for the paperback (where my heart will always lie), an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper doesn't scale down to 6 x 9 well.  It looks weird.For any self-published author, it is important that your book looks as professional as possible.  At least, we hope that they do.  So I had to figure out how to get a square peg in a round hole.Redraw it?  No.  It took too much time.  So I had to crop it.  Man, it was painful but I did it.  So the final FINAL version of the map is here:I had to make a choice, and I chose to crop the south, east, and a little of the west.  It was not what I wanted, at all, but it had to be done.So, after trial and error (and some more error) I managed to create my own map.  I never thought I would be benefiting from all that map-doodling in high school, but hey, it worked.To sum it up, it would be good to have an idea of what your map should look like before you get too far in the story.  And be flexible, as things can change in the story that will change the map.  Also, consider margins.  Course you could just hire an artist to do it, but that's between you and your book.  Thanks for subscribing to my site (if you haven't yet you can do so here) and I am thinking about doing a giveaway for a high-resolution version of the big map for my awesome subscribers.And if you don't mind, go on and share this with your friends or anyone you know that really likes and nerds out over maps.  I would appreciate it.Thanks again!  Keep reading!~N.H. Roncolato