Oh, what an adventure learning cartography for a fantasy world was.

At first, I just knew I wanted the land in my world to be formed in the basic shape of a semicolon to honor those semicolon tattoos that mean the bearer is a survivor of self-harm/anxiety/depression or things of that sort. This was kind of my symbolism for pushing through, not giving up, and valuing perseverance.

Aside from that, I had no clue what to do. So I just started googling fantasy maps and how to make them. I somehow stumbled my way upon freefantasymaps.com where there were these mapmaking competition entries. I fell in love with the style of this one map entry I saw there, called The Land of Mórthyr, created by Warren Godone-Maresca. But yeah…when I tried to emulate his technique, let’s just say it didn’t work out so well. But I fiddled around with one version for four hours before thinking I’d just settle for that, even though I wasn’t completely satisfied with it.

The dissatisfaction followed me, and bugged me, and kept picking at me until I asked my wonderful artist niece to draw me up something, which she did. I added Alaina’s version here too because honestly, I love it!

But I was still obsessed with wanting to get this done myself, so I kept searching for online help or software or something to make my version look halfway decent. Eventually, I found these five videos on YouTube by author Jessica Khoury, and they changed my life, or at least the mapmaking portion of my life. Not only did she explain step-by-step how to make a map on Photoshop, but she explained the flow of mountains and placement of towns and islands, so much so that my notes took up two pages, front and back! Which means…the style of my final map came from a mixture of Alaina’s version and Jessica’s tutorial, even though I know I broke a couple of Jessica’s rules. Whoops. Cringe! Sorry about that.

Making my map also made me change some things in my story, like the names of a few places. Some just didn’t look pretty on the map or their long names didn’t fit into the space I had to write them, so I altered stuff until I liked how it looked on the map, which honestly made it sound better in the story too.

Plus, I only planned on having seven kingdoms, because seven is my number, but there ended up being eight realms to fill space on the map, which I was totally okay with because my mama had eight babies, and the book is dedicated to her. She always said seven was her number as well; she had seven siblings, seven buttons on her wedding dress, a couple other seven things that I now can’t remember, and seven kids…until I came along. It really seems fitting to end up with a surprise eighth kingdom, since I was her surprise eighth baby. And now—oh my goodness—the map suddenly seems like a representation of my mother, the hardest-working person I ever knew. Like the semicolon symbol, she never gave up either; she fought to live to the very end. Great, now I’m crying.

Anyway, all in all, I’m aware that the map’s quality didn’t turn out as good as it probably should have for as many hours, days, and weeks as I put into creating it, but I don’t care. I’m damn proud of it, and I’m glad I didn’t give up after the first fail.

I’ve discovered that I get into those fantasy stories where one person knows who his or her soul mate is upon meeting them, or even before that, as what happened in the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas, A Kinda Fairy Tale series by Cassandra Gannon, and many of the shifter books by Eve Langlais that I have loved so much. So that’s where I came up with the Love Mark idea.

The lashes to Urban’s back were my nod to Outlander. Thank you again, Ashley Gibbons, for suggesting I watch that series. As of writing this, I haven’t gotten to Season Three yet, but wowzers, that first one totally got me hooked. I crushed hard on Jamie Fraser.

All the resurrections as well as Nicolette’s way of saving the day were in honor of the Supernatural TV series. Urban didn’t come back to life nearly as much as Sam or Dean have, but he gave it a valiant effort!

I hope you can tell I binge-watched Game of Thrones, too! Much of that series inspired the making of One True Love.

I have this strange quirk of wanting to have at least one hero and heroine named for every letter of the alphabet. And I didn’t have a heroine whose name started with a V yet, so that’s how Vienne came about. I chose Vienne above every other V-name out there because of the heroine in the book The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (that heroine was named Vianne). The Nightingale was the first book my family chose for the book reading group we started together, so that has special meaning to me.

As for Urban…you got it. I also needed a hero whose name started with the letter U, which worked its way to Urban because my oldest school friend that I met on the first day of kindergarten was named Ashley Born, and she married her high school sweetheart whose last name is Urban, so now she’s Ashley Urban. Therefore, in honor of her and her family, that is where the name Urban Bjorn came from. I guess I threw the extra J into Born because Ashley’s hubby’s name starts with J. Oh, and I also had to name some towns in my map after her two sons to give them a little shout-out as well! Hi, guys!

Elliott the Dragon – I’m not sure if I was even planning on actually naming the dragon until I was telling Ashley Gibbons about him, and she mentioned Elliott off the Disney film, Pete’s Dragon. So, that’s how Elliott 2.0 came about!

Grumpackers, the Fruit – I had them named grewberries for the longest time. But that just never felt right to me, plus it struck me that they weren’t even really berries since they were more pear-sized, right. So I went back to my thinking tree. I kind of wanted to mix some fruit names, like pear and apple to make it papple. But I didn’t love the word papple, so I added my original idea to it, making it “grew-papple.” I sort of liked that better, and Lydia approved, but it was just missing something that made me LOVE it, until I realized it sounded a lot like my maiden name, Crumpacker. Since the story was dedicated to my mom, that made the word feel even more meaningful. And Crumpacker actually originated from the name Grumbacher, so I mixed the two until it was grumpacker, and yes! It finally felt as if my made-up fantasy fruit had a name. Joy!

Making High Cliff a kingdom where they started people’s names with vowels was my tricky way of setting it up so that I can fill in more of my alphabetical goals in later books if I turn the story into a series, which I probably will, and hopefully get some more heroes and heroines’ names checked off my list.

“Bend the knee,” was used specifically to honor Game of Thrones. “Mark Me,” came from Outlander. “Keep your head on a swivel,” came about after I heard someone say it in a movie I was watching, and I was like whaaaaat? So my husband had to explain its meaning. Just a few days later, I heard the exact same phrase used again on another show I was watching. I figured it was a sign I needed to put it in my story! I also felt the need to give a little shout-out to some pop culture icons. For the “Cash me outside” girl, I put in a “How about that?” Then there was a “Look what you made me do,” because of Taylor Swift. And I’m sure there are others, but I can’t think of them at the moment.

And those are a couple insider details about the making of One True Love. Thank you for reading it!