Good solid progress on consolidating the individual chapter maps into the Book Three map - 40% done. There is a non-zero chance that I will finish tomorrow.

I was thinking a bit more about how to use these maps. The tool I am using, Freemind, has HTML export capability which is a reasonable thing to do with these maps since they are just text. That will give me something I can print out and, more importantly, scribble on. There will have to be a certain amount of compare and contrast between the different maps, but ultimately the most important thing is the book one map since that is what I will be working on in order to complete something.

And that is the key point here - if these maps turn into a global gazetteer it will probably be from the book one map. There are certainly ideas from the later books which will be incorporated into book one (including a couple of killer observations on orbital mechanics) but they will be part of book one then. The world index grows out of what is used to describe the first novel.

Because you know what? I wrote these as three separate books with a year between each draft. I have made some effort to make the core ideas consistent across the three drafts, but it's like three competing versions of the same world. No mechanical process of combining the maps can do justice to that.

The only way I am going to extract the good stuff is by pulling it in selectively. So that is what I am going to do: print everything out and reread it to be sure, but book one's map becomes the master. I will have an overview of plot and character and all of the other stuff but it will be a new file or mind map somewhere else.

Anyway, pleased with getting so class to done with this particular phase, necessary as it has been.