Kabos, Bigger and Better — Monstervore Tales

One of the reasons she tells so many stories is because she’s a thinker, and a planner. She likes to understand things, and one of the ways she does that is by tying what she knows together into a narrative.

The monstervores were born of this same instinct, trying to understand the unexplainable by tying them together into a coherent fiction. It was psychologically useful for her—and for her world-building dad, a way to train her in my craft. So we ran with it, and with her fear of monsters far behind her, for months we’ve just been exploring Kabos and telling each other stories as a fun pastime.

But last week while we were on our Thanksgiving trip, I was reminded that to her, the fun is still a tool. On a day when her mom had to go to work, I declared that we would go off on an adventure. Over breakfast I revealed that we were going to go see a waterfall, one much bigger than the decorative waterworks she saw outside suburban housing developments.

At first she seemed excited by the idea, but by the end of the meal she asked if we could do our errand first, a trip to Target to buy the socks I had forgotten to pack. By the time we were leaving Target, she said she didn’t want to go to the waterfall at all. We got into the car and talked as we drove a bit.

It turns out she was having trouble understanding how big the waterfall might be—and what we might do when we got there. How big was it? Was it just water, or would there be lava too? Would she get wet if we went through it? Her imagination was unbound by the ‘reasonable preconceptions’ adults bring to a situation, and it had run far enough that she was getting anxious.

I told her that it was a big waterfall (of just water), but that we wouldn’t be able to go near it, let alone behind it. And it was just a short walk from where we would park the car.

She still seemed nervous. I remembered how she had told me about ‘questing maps’ monstervores would make before an adventure, where they planned where to go and what to take. We didn’t have time to actually make one, but…

“Would it help to have a questing map, like the monstervores, so you can remember our plan?” I asked. She nodded, and I handed her a napkin. That talisman for her imagination was enough, and she clutched it as we got closer. “Here we are,” I said as we pulled in.

“Time for our quest adventure!” she said.

We were lucky enough to get close parking, and she held the napkin as we walked up the sidewalk and a short flight of steps to see Snoqualamie Falls. “OOOOooooooo….” she said. The map had helped her conquer her anxieties, and our quest was complete.

I had brought my laptop along on the trip, as well as the pipe dream that I might get some Monstervore writing done in our hotel room. While that didn’t happen, our adventure with the map inspired me to do something else instead, something I’d been meaning to do for a long time.

Months ago when she was heavy into drawing I had brought out my own colored pencils and worked on a map of Kabos based on notes I had taken of our conversations. I’d always meant to get back and finish it up, but these days by the time I took the map down off the wall and broke out the pencils her short attention span would veer off in another direction. I was also both frustrated that it had the permanence of physical artwork when I knew I might want a digital version eventually (that could have better lettering, for one thing), and terrified that it might be destroyed by an accidental milk spill after I’d put so much work into it.

So the map hung on the wall unfinished for six months.

But I realized on the trip that I did have both a photograph of that map and the art program Procreate on my iPad. So sitting in the hotel room after she went to sleep that night, I loaded up the original map and went to work.

The photo of the partially-completed paper map I used as the basis for the digital version.

Procreate had a steep learning curve, in particular for learning where various features were buried in its touch-centered interface. But work went well, and I had a ton of fun.

In fact, I had so much fun that I worked on the map on the way back (while looking out the window at the terrain below and realizing how much of a caricature of a world my map really was) and then kept plowing ahead for almost two more days when I had vowed to get back to writing as soon as I was back at my desk.

Closeups of a segment of the original map (top) and the same area in the new version (bottom).

As a final touch I added the moons, just for fun. Then, after showing it to her, she insisted that we add a compass rose to the map, thanks to a recent lesson at school about directions. I also took the opportunity to have her write a nice label for the map. After cleaning those up…it’s done.

There’s no doubt that it’s a classic Patchwork Map, with kitchen sink jammed next to kitchen sink, but seeing it all put down in sloppy full color, I love how it captures the last year of our collaborative creativity, and lays the groundwork for a lot more adventures to come.

Now that I’ve been in the groove I think I could keep tinkering forever—the ocean seems a bit dark, f’rexample—but it’s time to put my Pencil down and get back to the word-making. I’m pretty pleased with where its ended up. Someday I might recruit one of the talented artists or cartographers I know to take a stab at it, but for now it’s a nice visual notebook of our explorations of Kabos—and it’s a lot easier to keep updated than the physical version was. (I can also do those updates sitting in bed, which is a nice plus.)

One of the excellent features of Procreate is that it records every brush or pencil stroke you make while working on a project and then compiles them into a video, one stroke per frame, 30 strokes per second. Procreate says I worked on this map for 20 hours and 46 minutes, making 14824 strokes—and generated the video below where you can watch me work, mistakes and all, building toward the end result.

If you’re the kind that really wants to pixel-peep into the details of the map, here’s a giant version you can check out.

But as for me, I’m pretty inspired to write about some of these places I’ve been drawing. Time to get to it.