{"id":1647,"date":"2012-02-27T11:29:33","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T16:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=1647"},"modified":"2012-02-27T11:29:33","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T16:29:33","slug":"the-last-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/promised-2\/the-last-map\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Map"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I put the final touches on the map for Promised<\/em> last week.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny, because on paper it doesn\u2019t look like I did much, but the thought process and the designing were actually rather involved. \u00a0I began with the original, oversized map from Birthmarked<\/em> and took a trip down to Staples to make 11×18\u201d copies of it in pieces to tape together.\u00a0 The taping part reminded me of grade school, when I first delighted in matching up edges so lines across ripped pages looked continuous, healed.<\/p>\n

Then I went to the attic to find the big paper I knew was up there somewhere, a process that involved culling out a couple old games and rearranging a bookshelf while I was up there.\u00a0 Naturally, I had to face my mortality through my dread of properly cleaning my attic before I die (decades from now) so that my children won\u2019t be saddled with my nonsense and secrets.\u00a0 Attics are never simple.<\/p>\n

At last, seated at the dining room table with freshly sharpened pencils, I realized I\u2019d been thinking about this map for months.\u00a0 I had already envisioned the terrain where Gaia walked, and where a refugee community would pitch its tents.\u00a0 As I began drawing, snaking off a path line of the original Birthmarked<\/em> map, I realized I was doing something Gaia could do if she drew a map from memory, for planning purposes.\u00a0 I could feel the double-shadow of her fictional hand clasping the same pencil I did.<\/p>\n

The paths expanded and wove together.\u00a0 I named locations, added labels, and made a note to myself to include a change to Promised<\/em> when it comes back to me in first pass pages.\u00a0 I slept on my ideas, took another look at my draft, and revised.\u00a0 I made mistakes, used a white-out pen, and when my lines became too garbled, I substituted in another one of the 11×18\u201d copies I\u2019d made and started a section over.<\/p>\n

The final map, as I\u2019ve said, might not look like I changed much from the one in Birthmarked<\/em>.\u00a0 Yet this map is exactly what is needed for Promised<\/em>, no more and no less.\u00a0 I\u2019ve sent it off to Macmillan, and now it\u2019s up to Anne Diebel, the art director, to find a way to put my pencil scratches into the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I put the final touches on the map for Promised last week.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny, because on paper it doesn\u2019t look like I did much, but the thought process and the designing were actually rather involved. \u00a0I began with the original, oversized map from Birthmarked and took a trip down to Staples to make 11×18\u201d copies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[19,109],"class_list":["post-1647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-promised-2","tag-map","tag-promised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1647"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1660,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647\/revisions\/1660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}