Collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie. Like botanical illustrations from dreamland.

Extreme embroidery by Angelo Filomeno. More here.

Right, back to researching yurt construction, alpine steppe flora, and various ways of hurting yourself when you fall off a cliff. I’ll probably use about 0.01% of the info I find, but it’s sort of nice to have it all available so that I can choose details to include without wondering whether they’re realistic or not.

Some things I don’t worry about, like large-scale geography. My fantasy world, such as it is, is made of overlapping mythic territories, and geography and climate are subordinate to that, but I like each individual environment to work on its own terms. And I have to decide what tradeoffs to make between ambience and practicality — e.g. in this case a horse is being ridden where a yak or Bactrian camel might be more practical, but maybe I just want horse-ambience — though if I want the mountains to be alpine desert, like the Kunlun Mountains, which was my original idea, it might have to be a yak, since I think you’d have to carry a ton of feed on pack animals to get a horse through — or let your horse go hungry. Buy feed from herders? Maybe, but why are herders living in a poxy alpine desert when there’s probably a nice grassy steppe a couple of thousand feet down? All these things can be worked out, but they take a bit of thinking. And in a short story there isn’t room to go into detail. Maybe there are mining towns; there’d be feed for the pit ponies, but I want a somewhat otherworldly ambience, and mining towns don’t really go with that.  Or maybe they do? A donkey is technically an option, but the story starts at the winter solstice and has one other sort-of-though-not-really Christian element, and a main character riding on a donkey could underline the wrong idea. (Llamas and alpacas are right out; wrong ethnic feel and not strong enough to carry an adult rider very far, it looks like — even though llamas eat lichen, which would be perfect for the alpine desert.)

Get caught up in trivia, who me?

Edit: Having just looked at Alex’s blog, I feel inspired by the donestre. Carnivores can go quite a long time between meals. What sort of carnivore? Maybe an enormous giant centipede, which I guess comes to mind because I have a friend who has done battle with two pretty big ones in real life. But that really would change the ambience… and it needs to startle at a noise enough to throw its rider, and I somehow doubt a centipede would; but since the creature is in the realm of utter fantasy, it could. But is a domesticated giant centipede way cool, or way silly…? My inner child thinks it’s cool, of course… and it could actually be very useful in the first part of the story… I don’t know if I can resist. It might just have to be. Unless it really screws up the ambience.