Two-thirds of the action is set on an orbital shipyard. I knew that it was in geostationary orbit above the planet Cathal, and I knew that it had three, differently-sized rings, attached to a central cylinder. And that it looked like an outsized, multi-levelled snowflake. But that was almost all. Not much to go on.
Looking back now, I wonder how my characters ever found their way around the shipyard. All I had as an aide-memoire was a list of functions, organisations, and companies who occupied the spaces. When I came to re-write the novel I realised that it suffered from my usual problem. There wasn't enough description, not enough detail of the setting. And I've realised that one reason why I didn't describe things was because I didn't know what my characters were seeing.
I've got better though. In my novel Genehunter the characters are travelling from east to west across the continent. They pass through tropical and temperate biomes, and I needed to know when one ended and the next began. That allowed me to add touches like Aris waking up cold and needing her heavier jacket because she was out of the tropical biome.
Now when I invent a planet I work out the details of its surface before I begin to write. But with another old novel, Auroradawn, that plan was only an ink outline of the land masses. The trouble with that is that I don't know when alpine meadows segue into temperate grassland, and where the snow line is on cold Berenger continent. So now I've made a more detailed, coloured-in map. I colour in the various types of vegetation in different shades of green and golds. I show mountains as dark brown masses. Blue rivers snake through the forests and savannahs, dictating where the settlements should go.
I now make my maps with watercolour pencils, the colours wetted to blend together in a watercolour portrait of my world's surface. And now I know exactly where the boundaries between biomes are, and I have no excuse for under-describing my setting.
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