“The Last Mapmaker.” Most of it takes place on the sea on a ship, and I have always loved stories that are like that. One of my favorites as a kid was “The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle”. That is just was one of my forever favorite books. I just felt like Charlotte was my best friend. I was Charlotte Doyle and, you know, I think there’s something about it that is just so great for exploring the inner turmoils of the heart because you’re on this ship, it’s close quarters with these people going to, you know, who can you trust? Who do you want to be with? Who are you aligned with? There’s always alliances breaking and mutinies, but then you can’t escape. There’s nowhere to go, and the ocean is out there and it is going to expose you for who you really are. Your true self cannot hide on the ocean, which I just think is, it’s a great setting for drama, for intense drama.
So yeah, the world building for it. It’s funny because I wrote this, rewrote this book a lot, and this was the second novel I ever tried to write. And at first I said it in a world that was Dickinson England. Because as I’ve talked about, it’s very hard to break away from those implicit messages that we get soon about, okay, where should a story take place if you’re setting a story on a sailing ship? What has to be a British sailing ship? So that was the first iteration of “The Last Mapmaker”. So completely rewrote the whole thing, stripped it down to just its very barest themes and ideas. Rewrote the main character and the main character became girl. Lots of different reasons for that. So when she became a girl, there were all of these moments there … It was just like I had to reexamine everything.
Who … the gender equity of this world. I had to go back in and look at it and just kind of decided, well, why does the captain of the ship have to be a man? Why isn’t the captain a woman and why isn’t the ruler of the kingdom? … why do … she should be a queen? And maybe this is a world where that’s not even questioned. So that was really fun to write where it’s never a question of like, oh, is she good enough to be the captain? It’s just like you know right away she is the most coolest, wickedest awesomest captain that there ever was, and that was really fun to do. But still, that doesn’t absolve just because we switch it to being women in roles of power that doesn’t absolve them of mistakes that they’re making. Those mistakes are human mistakes. So that was fun to write too.
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