Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

I don't generally research my books. I read a lot of history, fairy tales, and folklore, and then run on it.

I have recently worked on two stories where a princess is sent to the mountains to protect her. In the second of them, I really need to know something about the economics and the topography of such settlements. It's important that they are settlements in the forest, which basically engulfs them, and that in fact the herb trade is vital.

I did already know we needed rivers. Hmmm. That would mean that the way to block passage would be to block the river, not the road. . . .

But first, settlements in mountain valleys before the railroad.

So, for plot contrivance reasons, there are not good powers and evil powers, beyond the obvious things like "animating the bodies of the dead" or poisoning people, which are intrinsically evil.

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There's a series taking shape.

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The muse has started a lot of characters.  The fun side is -- there is only the most minimal connection between them.

As if, they are all in the same set of countries. 

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In the first book, two characters will discuss how to deal with evil sorcerers who fled the land.

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Typing innocently along and abruptly realizing:  there will be math.

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Playing around with some Gamelit ideas.

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I had been thinking of King Drakos's kingdom as to the west of King Maximus's. Indeed, thinking of King Maximus's as being pretty much the border. . . .

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So there's this bird that flies around the world. . . .

Well, the habitable regions of it.  Owing to the geographical set up, it is not a world in the sense of a planet, but the bird does not fly around the entire universe.  Only the parts in the middle are habitable, and where the bird flies marks the very end of where humans (or human-like beings) can survive without constant magical protection.

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