Routes in the Empire

When I started my website, my son, Jamin, was in college studying graphic design. I wanted to create a tour of the Tarthian Empire, so I recruited him to design the planets and create scenes for them. There was a lot to do, and I wanted to help. He taught me Photoshop, and I learned enough to do much of my own work. I had a lot of ground to cover, routes to lay out, and planets to design.

The Tarth City map is my desktop wallpaper when I'm writing scenes in which characters travel in the city. It helps me keep track of the routes everyone takes as they go from place to place. You'll find the full city map on this page.

Why is west is at the top on the city map? When I first sketched the drawing, it seemed natural to put the starport there, then Top Tier (an upscale shopping district in Tarth City), then the vast park that runs thru the entire city. Below that went the business district, and other areas where action took place. I recreated the sketch in Photoshop in painstaking detail. I put in route information and used the map later when I was writing scenes.

Once complete, I decided to add a compass rose. That's when it dawned on me that the starport was on the west side of the city. That meant the map I'd spent days working on had west at the top. I couldn't easily re-orient the hundreds of distinct layers in Photoshop, and the idea of re-doing each route and layer... Well, it boggled my brain.

So I fixed the problem by saying that "Tradestandard" (the measurements which Empress Destine Pietan had required on all planets in the empire) declared that all local maps should orient with west at the top. In other words, I blamed it on one of my characters.

The map above shows my original layout for the Empire, showing trade and military routes. Click the map to open in a new window, and click again to make it full sized.