Visualising my brave new worlds

I've just finished reading an SF book by a best selling author whose work I love.  And it confused the hell out of me.  This writer specialises in creating tangled political situations which are often interstellar and multi-species. And often I fail to grasp all the nuances of the situations she creates.

I've always thought that failure to understand everything that was going on was mine, but now I'm not so sure I am at fault.  Because in the book I've just finished she fails to physically describe her settings clearly enough too.

Part of the story is about spacers training in pod-simulators.  From her early descriptions of them I didn't get any clear idea of whether the pods were in zero-g, in vacuum, or whether they were free-floating or somehow tethered.  Later she talks of pods drifting up to the access, which seems to suggest they're floating in zero-g.  Later still she reveals that they're bolted to some kind of track.  And by this time I was really confused.

I'm a little naive in this respect.  I do want a new world sufficiently described to me.  After all, I can only see what the author tells me.  And if they don't describe something enough I get confused. And they run the risk that I get fed up with their book and abandon it.

I've recently realised that one of my faults is that I don't properly describe places.  I'd have such a clear picture of them in my head that I'd just write a passing reference to the scene and move on to the action.  But, of course, the reader has no idea what's in my head.  I need to put it on the page.

This week I've started rewriting my twenty year old novel Snowbird.  Half of the novel is set on an orbital shipyard.  I knew it had three rings, Central, Middle, and Deep Space, and that they were all fixed to a central cylinder.  I'd also made some lists of who and what occupied each ring.  But when I came to rewrite I found that wasn't enough.  Each ring has five levels, and I needed to know what was on each level.  So I made a plan for each level. And now I can describe the place properly.

For planet-bound stories I draw maps of the land.  And I colour in the different habitats with watercolour pencils.  That makes it easier to know if my characters are going north or south, along the base of the mountains, or are close to a river.  And my description has improved a great deal with these in front of me.  Now I'm off to draw diagrams of the starship Chilai herself.