Seth Dickinson’s debut fantasy novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant (which by the way is an amazing book that I recommend wholeheartedly) contains a map unlike your typical fantasy map: it includes annotations by the protagonist that conceal as much as they reveal, and reveal more about the protagonist than they do the geography. In a post on Omnivoracious last October, Dickinson explained how that map came into being.

In Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series (which has been recommended to me), the scope of the maps broadens book by book as the protagonist’s horizons expands. Today she talked about working with the map (now in digital form) as she writes book five of the series.

Fran Wilde’s debut novel Updraft (which I’ve heard great things about and should read soon) came out last September. Yesterday, in a blog post called “A Map Year,” she ruminated on the many ways an author encounters maps, in fiction and in real life, and as a metaphor for growth and creativity.