I Am Wolf – the Map!
Last week I came home to find my author copies of I Am Wolf waiting for me, and I was VERY EXCITED. Most exciting of all was getting to see … the map.
Everyone loves a good map, don’t they? There’s something magical about them. And this is the first book of mine to have one, so I thought I’d talk a bit about how it came to be.
It was Zöe, my editor at Nosy Crow, who suggested we could have one. I Am Wolf takes place across a world named Unity, and our heroes travel a bit, so it made sense. My first challenge was to work out where everything was – which wasn’t easy! I realised I’d been a bit vague about some of my directions. Did I say we were twenty kilometres from the forest? Maybe I meant forty. Hang on, how far can a giant mechanical wolf travel in a day? How big is a small forest? Oh, and did I say east? I probably meant west…
So there was a bit of tweaking and moving around, both in my head and in the text. And I had to think about what would happen in books Two and Three, and where – and how exactly would the heroes get there? But at last I had this:
Fortunately, I didn’t do the final version!
Instead, Nosy Crow suggested Jensine Eckwall. Jensine is an artist who works in many different forms, and has illustrated maps before – like this one for Tom Huddlestone’s Floodworld:
Jensine worked with Nosy Crow designer Ray Tierney to create the first version of the map for I Am Wolf:
As soon as I saw it, I was in love. I hadn’t really thought much about how it might look, but this was wonderful – a mix of old and new, a sci-fi map in woodcut. Gorgeous!
And it really worked, too. In I Am Wolf, territories are controlled by huge mechanical creatures – Wolf, Raven, Boar, Hyena, and more – and Jensine had added them to the map in a way that made perfect sense.
We tweaked a few more bits of the map – made some places smaller or bigger, changed some landmarks and placenames – and then, last week, I got to see it my book:
…and it is gorgeous.
I Am Wolf comes out on 9th May 2024, and I cannot wait to share it, and Jensine’s map, with you all. Click here to find out more, and to pre-order today!