Hello! Geography was always something I was good at (I was three lessons ahead at one point in school, and the teacher had run out of teaching material for me), and with this came an interest maps. For me, it is the charting of the natural world, rather than civilisation (trained in forestry with a penchant for geology and geophysics). I am currently in the process of developing a science fiction novel, but I am a stickler for detail. The planet my story is based on is being built from the ground up (looking back, that was a bad unintentional pun, sorry). I started with a general size, the gravity I wanted, which gave me the mass and density, the length of day, and in order to create something that looks slightly like a scaled Earth, the chemical composition of the planet (the eight most common elements in mass, with a remainder for trace elements, along with the proportionate masses of the crust, mantle and cores which I'm working on). From this, I can begin developing the atmosphere, the tectonic activity and, as such, the natural features and lay of the land (and oceans) with the air and water currents and how this will affect the land.

The world (whose name is a secret at the moment) is a lost scientific research outpost, so much of the planet is uninhabited by humans beyond a few stations. The atmosphere is breathable, so people venture outside and roads are created, but as human habitation is less than half a century old, wilderness (and the seemingly inert native life, first multicellular life found off Earth) rules the roost. I don't actually know what my story is, yet, I'm just using that as an excuse to design a world, conjur maps and as a vehicle for self-teaching the subjects I mentioned at the start. I hope to be of help and not just offloading or using the guild as a sounding board.