Hi all,
I have been poking around on this site for some time and was a bit too intimidated to join for a while. I come from an interest in world-building and SF&F writing, and I've developed and taught courses to middle-schoolers and high-schoolers on world-building and cartography in which students learned about everything from the basics of cosmology & planetary formation to linguistics and ideas about culture. It was great fun.

Lately, I've been working on a world for a novel that I'm writing. If you are interested in the cautionary tale of an amateur cartography attempt going totally wrong, read on. I started out by locating the world using Celestia so that I could get a sense of constellations & night-sky and developed a calendar system. I used FM8 & GPlates to develop landmasses & mountain ranges out of tectonic plates. I went down the long road of studying climate, prevailing winds, the Koppen system, etc. and developed a latitude & longitude and climate map of my world on FM8, which was starting to feel frustratingly limited. As the master procrastinator that I am, I learned Python and wrote a program to calculate the dates and ages of all my characters at various points in the story given the planet's and moon's rotational/orbital periods. Then I started to get down to the nitty-gritty of locating where the action takes place. I knew the requirements of the story--mountains here, forests there, rough travel times, etc. It was at this sad moment that I discovered my intuitive sense of scale was an absolute disaster. I looked into the math of figuring out distances based on lat & long on a non-earth roughly spherical planet of a particular radius. I discovered that the area I was thinking of as a small village was about 600 miles across. All of my thinking about distance and scale was off by about two orders of magnitude. What to do?

So here, I am. I am actually getting to the writing of the book despite my Herculean efforts to procrastinate, but I do need a map, and I love cartography so I want it to be lovely and accurate. I am leaning toward throwing much of the specific work on the planet into the bin and creating a more aptly sized continent from whole cloth, as it were, and then just plopping it onto the planet I'd already created at a latitude that gives me the climate I'd like, and counting weeks of research and work on plate tectonics a loss other than the knowledge gained. I have access to Photoshop (we have a subscription for my son), and I wonder if I should try to learn to use it to make my maps (or if that will delay things too too much). Perhaps I'll get up the courage to post some of the work as WIP to see if anyone has any ideas, but then I get lost looking at the beautiful work of other people on this site and become quite intimidated